Page 45 of Santa Daddy
Instead, he caught my wrist.
His fingers wrapped around me with surprising care, turning my hand palm-up. Blood had smeared over my knuckles, streaked down the heel of my hand onto the marble.
“This needs cleaning,” he said simply.
Don’t be gentle. Don’t be careful. I can’t handle gentle from you.
“I can take care of myself.” I tried to yank back. His grip didn’t tighten, but it didn’t give either. “I’ve been doing it for years without anyone’s help.”
“Not anymore,” he said.
Two words. They landed harder than any blow.
Not anymore.
Independence revoked by decree.
He led me toward the kitchen, and I let him, because my options were limited and my hand throbbed in time with my pulse.
He turned on the tap, warm water streaming into the sink. Held my hand under it, his thumb bracing just below the cut. The heat stung at first, then eased, pink swirling down the drain.
The cut wasn’t deep. It would heal.
The metaphor for my life right now, less so.
His hands were steady. Warm. Too careful.
Like he was handling something fragile, not the girl who’d tried to turn his decor into shrapnel.
“You need to stop fighting this,” he said, reaching into a drawer and pulling out a first-aid kit that would make an ER nurse nod in appreciation. Of course he kept battlefield triage supplies next to his top-of-the-line espresso machine.
“The engagement has to look real,” he went on as he patted my hand dry and swabbed around the cut. “My enemies need to believe you’d bleed for me.”
I snorted. “Well, congratulations. I’ve officially bled in your penthouse. Does that make me believable enough for your psychotic fan club?”
His hands stilled for a moment on the gauze.
When he lifted his gaze to mine, his eyes were darker than I’d ever seen them. Less storm cloud, more midnight over black ice.
“You want to know what would make it real?” he asked, voice dropping to that low register that did terrible, traitorous things to the space between my thighs.
“No,” I lied.
“If you stopped acting like touching me would kill you.”
It might. Not physically. In every other way that mattered.
“Maybe,” I said, the words coming out before my filter woke up, “because touching you feels like the first step toward losing myself completely.”
Something shifted in his expression.
Amusement evaporated. Hunger took its place. Something hungrier than sex. Something that smelled like obsession.
“And what would be so wrong with that?” he asked softly.
Everything. Nothing. I didn’t know anymore.
He finished wrapping my hand and stepped back.
