Page 112 of The Scandal You Started
Her brows pinched. “You read my messages?”
He was shocked by her audacity to be displeased with him when she was the one in the wrong.
Sitting forward, he dropped the phone on the cushion and placed the bowl on the table. “Is that all that concerns you? Not that I have caught you agreeing to meet Jake again?”
Her mouth went firm. “I wasn’t exactly planning to hide it.”
That sent him shooting up in fury. “When exactly were you intending to tell me, then? The day before, as you did last time?”
“Don’t fucking yell at me, Dominic. And if you’d just—”
“Just what?” His words came out rough as he forced himself to lower his voice. “Can you truly claim to be surprised by my reaction when you have betrayed me—again?”
She scrunched her face as she threw it to the side. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, I haven’t betrayed you. Maybe if you stopped jumping to conclusions, I could explain—”
“What is there to explain exactly? It is quite clear you are intent on breaking my heart by secretly meeting the man you were previously involved with.”
“Breaking your heart?” she echoed. “Can you hear yourself? Not that you actually have any reason to be upset because—”
“I have every reason to be upset.You are mine!”
Silence rang around them as Rayna’s mouth hung open.
She pressed her lips together, rage flashing in her eyes, and squared up to him. “I am not an object you can claim, you fucking bastard.”
Dominic wasn’t having this conversation with her again.
She didn’t have to accept it just yet if she didn’t want to, but she was his. Irrevocably. In every sense of the word. He’d be damned if he let Jake try to take her from him.Again.
He bent over her and spoke low and slow. “You will not see Jake on Monday. I forbid it. And you will obey me on this, or else I’ll—”
“Or else what?” she challenged. “What will you do, huh? Because Iwillbe seeing him whether you like it or not!”
The echoing snap of his sanity reverberated through his muscles. And he lost it.
He did the unthinkable. Something wholly ungentlemanly. Something he knew Rayna wouldn’t like, that wouldn’t earn him her love. But the acid in his veins had eroded such reasoning.
Dominic bent at the knees, looped a tight arm around the back of her thighs, and hoisted her over his shoulder as he straightened.
She gasped and gripped his T-shirt across his back, her derriere shaking as he jostled her. Then he was out into the corridor and up the stairs.
It wasn’t until the third notoriously squeaky step that her flummoxed spluttering turned into all-out kicking, thumping, and screeching.
“Put me down! Put me down now.Dominic!Put me down, you stupid fucking asshole.”
He carried her into their bedroom, switched the light on, and knocked the door shut. He continued ignoring her threats as he headed for the bed.
“Dominic, I swear if you don’t put me down right now, I’ll—”
She let out a little shriek when he dropped her in the middle of the blanket. Her bare limbs went sprawling as she bounced on the mattress. Wasting no time pushing herself up on her hands, she shook her rosewood hair off her reddened face and glared ferociously.
“Don’teverdo that again,” she snarled.
He stood over her as an unmoving wall that felt no emotion, but inside, he was rattling and pulling at chains. “Then do not challenge me again.”
She shot poison-laced daggers at him. “I will kill you if you don’t move, Dominic.”
He spread his arms in invitation. “Then by all means, kill me, my love, for I will not move. And neither will you if you do not give up this insistence to see Jake.”
