Page 136 of Sinful Desires
Nicholas caught me and helped me into the car as Leroy closed the door behind us.
“Fucking vultures. I hate them,” Nicholas muttered, rubbing my shoulder.
Pain bloomed. My body jolted. I winced and shoved his hand off.
The flashes had stopped.
I leaned forward just as Nicholas pulled out his phone to text Matthew. My breath caught in my throat.
The four paparazzi were on the ground. Blood streaked across their faces. Cameras were broken, lenses smashed beyond repair. One of them was still crawling.
Then the front passenger door was yanked open.
LeRoy slid in, breathing steadily, blood still wet on his knuckles. He said something in French to the driver, and the car lurched forward. His expression was colder than the wind slicing through the car as his eyes found mine.
“You okay, Miss Harper?”
My mouth parted. Something in me buckled. I nodded, though something warm and dizzy fluttered low in my stomach.
He nodded once and said nothing else.
The ride to the villa took thirty minutes. Nicholas showed me his script, talked about the film, his co-stars, all the restaurants he planned to drag me to over the next four weeks.
But all I could focus on was the man in front of me, blood drying on his knuckles.
He had punished them for hurting me.
He had seen pain and erased it at the root.
Whatever line he’d crossed for me out there?…?I knew I’d follow him over it.
And beneath the shock, beneath the bruising heat still spreading through my shoulder, something deeper stirred. Not fear. Not doubt.
But a reckless gratitude.
The kind that blooms in a girl who saw a man drenched in blood and licked it from his knuckles, just to say thank you.
Chapter
Thirty-Six
“I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”
? Sylvia Plath
Théo
My palms burned against the sand.
Muscles locked, lungs tight, arms shaking as I lowered again, chest to the ground, teeth clenched so hard I thought I’d crack a molar. I didn’t count anymore.
Numbers were for discipline. This was fucking punishment.
Salt crusted my lips. Sweat slid down my spine in thick, stinging lines. Every push felt like digging into my own grave.
The shore was too quiet. Waves broke in the distance, soft and steady, but they couldn’t drown the sound of her voice in my head. Couldn’t stop seeing her flinch, couldn’t unsee that smug fuck with his hand on her waist.
I fucking hated those paparazzi. The ones who touched her. The ones who took. The ones who saw her light and decided it was theirs to devour.
