Page 71 of The Contract

My palm slams against the marble so hard it cracks. Fingers curl brutally tight around my shaft, muscles shaking violently beneath the punishing, icy spray….

“Pom!”

To be clear: her name didn’t claw its way out of my throat the first time I came.

Or the second.

Give me a little credit—I’m not a teenager.

But by the third, my knees buckled, my head fell back, and I came so violently hard my cock nearly punched a hole through the wall.

Because Jesus H. Christ, I’d been holding a hell of a lot in, and her name had nowhere left to go but out.

For what feels like forever, I stand shuddering beneath the icy spray, desperate to purge the filthy need, the shame, the raw fucking guilt.

But I haven’t erased her. Not by a mile.

Pom still pulses fiercely through my veins, filling me with her in every brutal heartbeat—every desperate gasp for air.

Finally drained enough for sleep, I stumble from the shower and collapse onto my bed. I’m a hooked fish tossed on deck—no fight left, helpless and resigned to whatever fate awaits.

Then I drown slowly in a surrender so bitter, so sweet, so…Riley…I welcome the merciful comfort of dark?—

Until the shrill buzz of my phone shatters my entire eight minutes of peace.

Groggy. Furious. I jerk awake. Ready to rip someone’s beating heart from their chest.

The phone screen blinks obnoxiously enough that I’m seconds from hurling it through the nearest fucking wall. Then I recognize the flashing red-and-yellow security alert blaring in my face.

Someone is in my office.

No. Not just any someone.

Riley Mullvain is in my office.

Well, well, well…looks like my bad little girl really is begging to be punished.

My pulse kicks into overdrive as I examine the feed, double-checking it’s live.

Fragments of their conversation seep through my exhaustion-fogged brain.

Dillon is ushering her out.

Good.

At least someone always has my back.

But then Pom freezes, wide eyes snagging on the wastebasket. She stares just long enough to confirm my worst suspicion.

She sees it.

The decoy I left for anyone in the world other than her to find.

Clever, reckless, infuriatingly impossible Pom.

But it’s Dillon’s smooth voice that slithers into my ears, sinking in deep and lethal like arsenic.

“Why don’t we go somewhere better suited for your…performance?” my brother purrs.

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