Annoyed, I raked my nails down his back, and he caught his breath, eyes flaring red. “You want to hurt me?” he asked. “Go ahead. I seem to have developed a taste for it.”
I had a flash of him tied to the chair, moaning in ecstasy when the Strega had cut him. Pain would only send him farther away from me. To get him back, I was going to have to appeal to the gentle side he’d once shown. I had to make him remember the love.
Because, despite everything he’d said and done, a friendship forged in the fires of our childhoods, a love found amid so little love, meant something. It had to.
“What will give me satisfaction, Elizabeth”—he licked the side of my neck, pausing to nibble at my ear, before whispering—”is making you beg, then making you come.”
He seemed to have the whole sex-slave gig backward. If I was the slave, shouldn’t I be making him come? I decided not to point that out just in case he had a strategy for changing my entire personality from aggressive to passive in one easy lesson.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on the feel of his body against mine, the scent of him. Those things hadn’t changed.
His skin was soft at the hip, his long artist’s fingers still clever, the hair on his thighs tickled mine. His feet were knobby and large. He loved it when I ran my big toe along his arch. The back of his neck, beneath the fall of his hair, was still tense. When I touched him there, he sighed and rested his forehead against mine.
If I wasn’t looking at him, if I couldn’t witness the strange flashes of red at the center of his eyes, if he didn’t speak and call me by the wrong name, if he didn’t talk like a porn star in a bondage flick, I could remember how it had been between us. I could remember how very much I’d loved him.
I lifted my mouth and brushed my lips along his. For an instant he responded, kissing me the way he always had. Then he jumped as if he’d been poked with a stick and pulled away. The movement ground our lower bodies together, and I winced.
“Open your eyes.” I hesitated. “Do it, Elizabeth.”
I bit my tongue to stifle a nearly irresistible urge to knee him in the groin. I doubted that would even hurt him anymore.
“You won’t like what happens when you disobey me.”
“I’m not going to like what happens when I obey you either,” I muttered.
“Oh, no. You will like it. I promise.”
He was probably right.
His face was so close I could see only myself in his eyes. We’d been just like this so many times, all I could do was remember. Couldn’t he?
“Jimmy,” I whispered, and touched his face.
For an instant I thought I’d reached him, wherever he was. He smiled softly and started to kiss me.
Then his damned eyes flared red, and he lifted his body, plunging into me with a single furious stroke.
I arched off the bed, which only made his thrust deeper. I cried out, the sound not one of pain but surprise and breathless wonder. His laugh wasn’t his own— deeper, crueler, not a laugh of joy or amusement, but of dominance. He’d won and he knew it.
Even though what he was doing felt exquisite, I struggled to escape. But there was nowhere to go. I was trapped between him and the bed.
“Hold on.” He slowed his thrusts, making me gasp, making me want. “Not yet.”
My hands, which had clutched his shoulders when he attacked, no doubt leaving half-moon fingernail marks in his skin, now slid lower of their own accord, clasping his buttocks, urging him on. I had no will of my own, and I both hated and loved it.
I fought the tide of eroticism. With us so close physically, now was the time to try and reach him emotionally.
Think! my mind shouted. Remember!
I closed my eyes again and reached for our past.
The first time we’d kissed, the first time we’d touched, the first time I’d known that I loved him. I let those old feelings flow over me.
My hands no longer clutched but caressed. I rubbed the small of his back, holding him still within me. My other hand twined in his hair, stroking, soothing. Turning my head, I kissed his cheek, his eyelids, his forehead.
“We were so good together,” I murmured. “Remember how it felt to be in love?”
He sighed, his breath cool against my burning skin. He kissed me and for a single instant I tasted the memories— grass, heat, sex, love.
I wrapped my arms around him, my legs too. “Jimmy,” I whispered against his lips. “Jimmy.”
Then he was gone.
Not physically. No. We were still twined together, his body deep within mine. But mentally, emotionally, he disappeared between one breath and the next. Everything went cold, including me as he lifted his head.
“Remember,” he growled, in a voice that wasn’t his, “the hate. I went from your bed to hers. You saw her, Elizabeth. How could I resist?”