Because You Are Mine Part VIII: Because I Am Yours Read Free Page B

You’ve been on the pill long enough now. I’m going to fuck you raw and come so deep in you, I’ll be spilling out of you for days.”
    She flinched, not because of his crudeness—under different circumstances, his raunchy talk would have aroused her. But it
wasn’t
another circumstance. He’d said what he’d said to intentionally hurt her for having the temerity to see him at his weakest.
    “You wanted to gape into my private world, fine. Just remember that you might not like what you see,” he said quietly.
    “Nothing I saw today made me think less of you,” she declared hotly. “If anything, it made me understand you about a hundred times better . . . it made me love you about a thousand times more.”
    His expression flattened. The small remaining vestiges of color drained from his face. Her heart throbbed in her ears in the strained silence that followed. Why didn’t he speak? She barely noticed when the plane left the ground. She couldn’t believe she’d just blurted out the truth she’d been trying to hide from him.
    The silence stretched for an eternity, seemingly made worse by the pressure on her ears as they gained altitude.
    “You are such a child,” he finally said, tight-lipped. “I told you from the very beginning this was purely a sexual relationship.”
    “Yes, but I thought . . . over the past few weeks, it seemed as if things had been changing,” she said weakly. Her heart plummeted when he shook his head slowly, his stare never leaving her face. He unbuckled his seat belt. “I want to possess you, Francesca. Dominate you. See that stubborn streak in you submit to pleasure . . . to me. That’s what I offered you. You insisted upon interfering in my world, so now you can stop deluding yourself with a girl’s fantasies.
That’s
all
I can offer you,” he said, pointing in the direction of the bedroom. “Now go in there, take off all of your clothes, and wait for me.”
    For several seconds, she just stared at him, still reeling from the wound his words had inflicted. She was about to refuse when she thought of the stark, concentrated pain on his face when his mother had begun to randomly attack him. His wounds were so much deeper than hers. Perhaps it would help him, to feel in control after experiencing so much helplessness and pain? Didn’t people act out their anguish all the time during sex, using the intense physical act to ground themselves in the midst of chaotic emotion?
    Yes. She could be there for Ian in that way. She understood that his anger stemmed from his pain at being so exposed . . . so vulnerable.
    She unbuckled her seat belt slowly.
    “All right. But I’m only doing it because I really have fallen in love with you. And I’m not a naive little girl. I think you love me in return and are just too proud and stubborn—and hurt about what happened with your mother today—to have recognized it.”
    A spasm of pain flickered across his rugged features ever so fleetingly, and was gone. He said nothing as she stood and headed to the bedroom.

Chapter Sixteen
    Ian entered the bedroom ten minutes later. His body immediately tightened with lust when he saw her sitting nude at the corner of the bed. She’d piled her hair onto her head and fastened the rich glory of it somehow. Her pink nipples were mouthwateringly erect, and not, he suspected, from arousal, but from chill. He’d known there was no robe in the bathroom. It’d been wrong of him to make her wait while she was exposed. Nevertheless, something about her pale, naked body struck him as potently vulnerable and almost painfully arousing.
    “Stand up,” he said briskly, refusing to soften at the exquisite vision of her. Would he ever meet a more beautiful woman?
    Would he ever be
affected
by another female the way he had been by Francesca? A volcanic brew of emotion had begun boiling in him when she’d blurted out those incendiary words.
    “It made me love you about a thousand times