Page 34 of A Game So Reckless

“Of course you did,” I scoff. “You sank your claws into my flesh and youbeggedme. Begged me with those fucking eyes.”

Those fucking eyes that I feel like I could drown in. Burn in.

Choke on.

She shakes her head, her mouth pursed peevishly. But she doesn’t have a retort for me, because she knows I’m right. Whatever she remembers of that evening on the roof, she knows that she grabbed me first, not the other way around.

But why am I the one moving towards her now? I’m closer to her than I was just a moment ago. Her next shaky inhale makes her breasts brush my front. Hot tension knots in my groin.

“Mateo is a friend of the family,” she finally mutters. “You don’t have to do anything about him. He was our chaperone tonight. That’s it.” Her eyes search my face. I wonder what the hell she’s looking for.

Wonder what the hell she sees.

“You know my Papà,” she adds, voice rising. “You have to know that I’m not dating Mateo, let alone sleeping with him! God, I was engaged, and I’ve never evenkissedsomeone!”

“That’s not true, now, is it?” I remind her viciously, loathing myself for apparently caring that she doesn’t remember. “You’ve kissed me.”

Technically, I kissed her, but her resulting shock is the same either way. It feels good, in a self-destructive sort of way, to watch her recoil from me in disbelief and maybe even disgust. But even as she backs away, there’s nowhere for her to go. Her back is fused to the wall.

“No,” she whispers. “I thought that was…”

“What?”

Her eyes are huge in her heart-shaped face.

“A dream.”

The world slants sideways. I steady it, steady myself, by burying my fingers in her wet hair.

“You’ve dreamed of kissing me, pet?”

“Nightmares,” she hisses. Rage and fear collide in her gaze.

Then, her cheeks hollow, her mouth puckers.

And she spits in my fucking face.

The warm fluid hits my left cheek and rapidly cools.

Valentina goes very still and stares at my cheek, as if only now realizing what she’s done. Her pulse is hummingbird-quick at the base of her throat.

With a precise sort of slowness solely meant to torture her, I raise my hand to my face and smear the saliva with the pad of my middle finger.

“Open your mouth.”

Her eyes dart around, seeking out escape. But I’m too big and there’s nowhere to go.

“No way,” she pants. “I don’t know where that hand has been.”

I let out a cruel bark of a laugh.

“Where my hand has been? What, you think your filthy Titone mouth is the cleanest place on that list?” I tighten my other hand’s grip in her hair. “Open your mouth or I will open it for you.”

Any other person on this earth would lose their tongue and then their life for what she just did. And she has the goddamn audacity to give me those mutinous, hate-fuck eyes as she finally opens her mouth in recompense.

But open it, she does. I slide my finger inside.

She maintains fierce eye contact with me as I swipe the pad of my finger across the molten silk surface of her tongue, too proud or too angry or both to look away.

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