The little shudders whenever our skin connects, the way her pupils dilate whenever I catch her observing me.
Sooner or later, she’ll give in.
I’ll make sure of it.
Nothing will stand in the way of Malory becoming mine, not even the girl herself.
Nonetheless, I want her to come to me willingly.
The hardest thing about that particular plan is taking it slow. I’m still a stranger to her even though she’s anything but to me, which means I have to be careful not to scare her away.
She may be fearful, but she can’t hide the fact that she’s also a little intrigued. And I have the full intention of exploiting that sentiment.
I’m nothing if not a patient man. It goes with my profession.
“See the group of stars over there?” I break our staring match by pointing towards the sky. “That’s the Pisces constellation.”
“My star sign?” Malory asks while looking up, exposing her slender, flawless throat to me. Making me grind my teeth together to the point of breaking to stop myself from biting into it, from marking her as mine.
“Exactly.” I lean closer, breathing in her faint vanilla scent that makes my dick instantly hard like an aphrodisiac.
“You know my sign?” She muses, completely unaware that I’m barely holding back from pouncing on her.
“I know a lot about you, little one.”
Her breath hitches as I murmur the words against her temple.
“How can you tell?” She nods up at the sky. “I could never find a pattern in all of that.”
“As a child I spend almost every night hiding out on the roof of our mansion, looking up at the stars while dreaming about another life. It seemed possible at the time.”
“Why did you stop?” Of course she noticed the past tense.
“Because it was useless. Dreams are just an illusion.” I shake my head, staring off into the distance. “I took fate into my own hands and look where it has gotten me.”
“Eventually, into prison?”
The corner of my mouth shoots up at that. She has no idea about the things I’ve done.
“It has brought me you. Who would have thought that all the suffering would be worth it.”
Malory’s gaze shifts towards me, studying my face for a long time like she’s trying to figure out my innermost thoughts.
Yeah, good luck with that one.
“I was under the impression that I’m just a pawn against my father.” She counters, tilting her head as her eyes sparkle under the moonlight.
“That’s just what I want John to think.”
I can tell she doesn’t fully believe me, and I will gladly prove her wrong.
No woman has ever captured my interest. None has come remotely close.
Not even when I was younger and still capable of some emotions. I never experienced what it felt like to have a crush like my peers did.
And I’ve come to terms with the fact that it simply wasn’t something that would ever happen to me.
Later on in life, women just became warm holes. Ready for me to fill up at my whim, acting at most as a form of stress relief that I discarded like used tissues.