Page 37 of Contractually Wed

“I don’t like it when you don’t fall in with my plans, wife.”

“You don’t want a wife. You want a doll who’ll play along and be your... Oh.”

His mouth was at her nipple, licking, sucking and nipping. Jia had never lost a battle this willingly and this fast.

“No, Tornado,” he said, withdrawing his fingers, leaving her empty, lost. “I wantyou, only you, willing and happy and amenable to my plans.”

“Come inside me, Apollo,” she said, those words propping her up for now, “and I will fall in with any plans, please.”

As if all he’d needed was her assent, he lifted her leg and probed her wanton, wet flesh with the head of his cock and then he was thrusting into her from behind and Jia thought she might be the exploding sun itself.

It was a sore, tight fit with a delicious burn in this position but she didn’t want to be anywhere else. She didn’t want anything else. She felt engulfed by him and she loved it.

Hands kneading and cupping her flesh all over, keeping her still and soft for his tender assault, Apollo set a merciless rhythm, pounding into her. The slap of their flesh, the erotic tussle of their breaths, the words he whispered into her skin...pleasure suffused every inch of her. Their bodies slipped and slid together as if made for each other, racing toward a pinnacle she’d want again and again.

It was only after their climaxes nearly broke them that Jia realized she’d tried to put everything on the line for him. And he hadn’t wanted it.

CHAPTER NINE

SHECAMETOhim at dawn, dressed in a thick robe that hung off one smooth shoulder and fell to her ankles.His robe.

He hadn’t been hiding precisely. But after he had tired her out, desperate to control her, own her, bind her to him, whatever restlessness had chased her seemed to have transferred to him.

It was her offer to sign over her stock to him. Mere weeks ago, the same offer would have been a prize he’d counted as his final win. Now, with his feelings all twisted up about her and his own part in where they were, it felt like a...curse. A gut punch.

Even as he’d lain there boneless and sated, her offer had niggled and pricked.

Why had she offered that to him when it was the only thing of any value she possessed? Did she crave her freedom so much? Was it such a chore to be married to him? What was there for her back in New York except a family that would chew her up for all she was worth and spit her out given half the chance?

He had felt unsettled enough, unwanted enough that he found it unbearable to stay near her for one more second. For all she tried to buy her way out of his life, she clung to him in sleep, her legs and arms all coiled around him.

That feeling of not being enough struck some deep, primal part of him that he had forgotten existed.

It was the same thing that had haunted him after he’d found Papa unmoving, the same thing he’d tried to escape by pouring himself into climbing the corporate ladder high enough to own it.

And yet, after all that he’d done to get to this place now, that he could once again be haunted by that feeling...threw him. He wanted to run from it, hide from it, go back into bed and work himself out on Jia until they were both exhausted again and she made no foolish offers to get away.

But he was not a fool, and he knew not to outrun the same problem in the same way all over again.

So he was sitting at his desk in the large airy study, the oncoming dawn a distant pink splash in the horizon. For a moment, he considered telling her to leave him alone. But the words stalled, drowned out by his need to hold her, to have her near.

“You need your sleep,” he said, tempering his tone somehow, intensely disliking the knowledge that he could hurt her with one wrong word.

It was a dangerous power to have, because he hadn’t met a kind that he didn’t wield in the end. Not even Mama’s utter dislike of him had broken his taste for it, once he’d had it.

Hands clamped on the sash of the robe, she walked to him, instantly fitting herself in between his legs, as if she belonged there.

“You’re not happy about my offer.” She pushed her hair behind her ear, confusion writ in her gaze. Her frown cleared. “No, you’re angry about my offer. Why?”

He looked past her and the glass wall into the inky night beyond. Every memory today seemed to bring him back to the helplessness he’d struggled with after Papa’s death.Dios mio, he’d had many sleepless nights, just like this. “What’s your condition for it?”

“Are you sure that I have one?” Her expression was somber now.

He nodded.

“Finish this revenge of yours. Let them be. Let yourself be.”

He scoffed. “I should’ve known.”

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