Page 68 of Contention

Calais throws her onto the guest bed, pinning her there with his body, giving her not a moment to collect herself. Wrangling her onto her back so he can look down at her expression, Calais forces himself between her legs. The moonlight is spilling over them through the open window.

Kara is panting, the rise and fall of her chest matched only by his own. They are mirrors of each other, dangerous arousal in their gazes. She wants him so much it hurts, her center aching to be filled by him. Aching for him to split her open and clear her mind of everything else.

“You want a fight…and I like to feel like a monster.” His voice is low, breathy. Malicious. Aroused. Pleased with how this has been going. “So, tell me ‘no’ and mean it, sweetpea.”

And somehow, that makes it all better. He's still calling her sweetpea and her stomach burns with need. Even though he’s the sort that enjoys a fight, she’s the same, and he hasn’t harmed her, not even when he has the physical upper hand.

He’s rough and his mouth is filth, and Kara isn’t sure she would have it any other way.

Calais says the words in a low whisper, something Kara can feel reverberate in his chest and stomach. He’s staring down at her with those empty shark eyes and she thinks this game is dark enough, even for her.

It’s the closest to violence as she will ever get.

It’s close to the real thing, close to the anger she always saw in her father’s gaze, how she was never quite good enough. But here and now, she’s the very thing this man wants and needs and somehow that’s what she craves.

Chapter 17

The way he holds her down is like being held under unyielding stone, suffocating and somehow boldly personal.

…Say no and mean it…

Perhaps…perhaps she can pour all the pain and twisted sick that’s sitting inside of her into him. He can take that weight on; he can feel like she does every minute of every day. This perfect, falsely charming man with all his upper-class breeding and money. He’s never lived a moment in shoes like hers, certainly not with an abusive father and a mother always on the brink of ending it all.

He’s certainly never felt the constant ridicule of his peers the way she always had, the way everyone looked down on her because of her circumstance, because so many didn’t like her father, knew what he was underneath the pleasant veneer he wore in public.

The bruises on his wife and daughter always told a blunt tale.

No, Nicholas Havenwood-Calais may make faces in public when people mention he may or may not have a controlling mother, but that means nothing in the face of years of lonesome, empty emotional agony.

Her jaw tightens painfully as she stares up at him. He’s waiting forsomething.

Kara imagines him as a younger man, dissects him in her mind as her palms creep up his shoulders with the intent to dig into his flesh. The debutantes must have loved him; a big influential name that dripped gold and a face carved from stone. A false playboy smile. The girls would have been easy, naturally. Anything to be ‘the one’. Anything for the money and the infamy of being on the arm of a Havenwood-Calais.

She also imagines that no-one ever knew him,reallyknew him. That’s something even she can’t claim, though she knows something a bit more than they probably ever did. All their easiness created this bored man, this man who wanted more, who wantedthe hunt, not justthe prize.

With care, her fingers curl into his shoulders, holding, not much else. Just feeling the strength hidden there. Is this what she wants? How far has she fallen, she muses, staring at his throat now, to willingly fall to her demise under a man who doesn’t wish her well?

Just like daddy, right? Is he a good substitute, Kara, you sick girl?Her own thoughts sound crass and cruel.

She’s always been like this though. Her mother had the gist of it. Kara never wanted the men she took to her bed to love her; she wanted them to make her feel small inside. The illusion shattered when they became sappy. The moment they became weak was the moment she couldn’t pretend any longer.

Kara takes a moment to envision that fuzzy night that she can barely piece together, of how Calais took advantage and discarded her. How she had meant nothing, just another nameless face. She allows anger and disgust boil in her chest, letting her signature viciousness flare in her chocolate gaze.

Placing a sneer on her lips, Kara uses her hands to push at him, at his broad-shouldered frame. Enunciating every word clearly, with hatred dripping from her words like sin, she demands, “Get off of me, you disgusting pig.”

Then, to throw gasoline on the fire, she hauls back her right hand and slaps him across the face as hard as she can. The sharp sound of her palm colliding with his cheekbone and nose crashes like glass in the otherwise silent room.

His face snaps to the side and for a moment, he actually pauses, staring in the direction the momentum of her hand moved him in. Then, his jaw works and he slowly cranes his face back towards hers.

Just like that, his lovely blue irises disappear into the yawning black of his pupils. The dilation is nearly immediate, cause and effect. His nostrils flare and then she feels all those muscles hidden under his shirt flex beneath her left hand. Calais presses her hard into the bed sheets with one large palm, his other yanking her naked legs wider.

Kara is suddenly torn between arousal and a distant fear, a cry of surprise escaping her lips.

She’s exposed and vulnerable. He’s still clothed.

Her emotions are a maelstrom, not one single feeling discernable as greater than the others. Fear, wrath, desire; they meld into one as she instinctively yanks her knees to her chest and kicks him away with her feet.

He grunts at the impact. Kara tries to lunge off the bed, but her own momentum is awkward and panicked, so she ends up falling off the edge in a wild sprawl, hitting her head against the wall after a hard land on her back. She groans.

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