She did not take his suggestion.
“I’ve picked up men and fucked them, though not often. Before I met you, however, not rare. And they got the ride of their lives when that horny girl they thought was going to give them a sloppy, slutty good time tied their asses to their beds and used their cocks for her own purposes. Though they got off on that shit. Every.” She got closer to his face. “Last.” She got in his face. “One.”
Stellan decided to stay silent and let her get it out.
She moved away but only as far as his hold would let her go.
“It wasn’t until Aryas read it in me and explained it to me that I knew what it was. I always thought I was a freak.”
He couldn’t let that pass without comment.
“You’re not a freak.”
“Did Aryas tell you about me?” she asked.
He felt his brows draw together. “Tell me what about you?”
“That when I subbed for him in training, I subbed for him. Was it him who told Dillinger who told you?”
“No, darling,’ he said calmingly. “Dillinger shared Aryas trained you. I guessed that part.”
She seemed to deflate, like thinking Aryas had betrayed her had blown her up to the point her skin was a fragile membrane that couldn’t hold the pain and was about to explode.
“He didn’t betray your confidence,” Stellan further assured. “I see how you are with him, and I know you trained under him. There’s a slight deference you give to him that you don’t give anyone else. It’s independent of the feelings you have for him. It’s indicative of you having history of submitting to him, and not just because you did that in training. Even so, it was still a guess.”
She turned her head to look away.
“I know you’re damaged, Simone,” he said gently, carefully. “And if you think that’s a turnoff, I can assure you it isn’t.”
She looked back to him and announced, “I’m not damaged, Stellan. I’m a mess.”
“I believe those are not mutually exclusive,” he murmured.
“You’re wrong. Because damage can be fixed. A mess is just a mess.”
“A mess can be sorted out.”
“Not my kind of mess.”
“You’re very wrong.”
“God, Stellan!” she shouted suddenly, shocking him with her outburst to the point his body went solid all around her and his hold on her increased. “Don’t you see I’m trying to protect you?”
“From what?” he asked, his voice lowering, his patience bleeding, and he was trying, but failing, to stem the flow.
“Me, you big idiot,” she snapped.
“And shall I return the favor?” he asked.
The frustration ebbed out quickly as her expression grew confused. “What?”
“Shall I protect you from me?”
“What is there to protect me from?”
“Well, I don’t know, darling. Perhaps the fact I live in terror that some hint of my father will slither from somewhere deep inside me, and I’ll find out that the vast effort I’ve expended since I could form a coherent thought not to be one thing like him would all be for naught? Or perhaps I should share the delightful memory of walking into the garage to find my sister in my running car, looking asleep but being very dead.”
Her hands lifted to hold either side of his face, she dropped her forehead to his and she whispered urgently, “Stop, baby. Just stop.”
He didn’t.
“Or should I share how I felt about the fact the wife before the last one that my father married was of an age to be my bride? Or how the last one was too young even for me? The woman was four years out of high school, for fuck’s sake.”
“I think I know how you felt. I saw you in D.C. Meeting with them. Giving him the direct cut,” she admitted, still whispering. “And since I did, I have a good feeling how you felt.”
His head jerked while she spoke, and he felt his brow snap low and heavy.
“Sorry?”
She slid her hands to his neck and lifted her forehead away. “I was in D.C., for a … um, job. I was at that restaurant. I saw you. That’s when I, well … after that happened, I looked into you.”
“You were there?”
She nodded.
Stellan could not believe this.
“Why the fuck didn’t you say anything?” he demanded.
“We weren’t exactly super-close when I got back, and it’s not something you slide across a booth at the Honey to say to somebody. I mean how would that go? ‘Hey. How’s it going? Just, you know, wanted you to know that I saw you tell your father to go fuck himself in D.C. Well done with that.’”
She was being amusing.
He did not laugh.
“Not now. Then. In D.C. Why didn’t you come to me?”
“I was going to get your attention, but you looked pretty ticked.”
“After repeated communications to him never to get in touch with me for any reason, as usual, when he heard I was in D.C. for business, and he was there for the same, my father ignored that and called me to meet him for lunch so that he could introduce me to his fiancée and ask me to be his best man, again. Something I’d refused two times before. Of course I was ticked.”
“Obviously, I figured that out when I looked into you,” she muttered.
“Jesus Christ, Simone. You knew how to get in touch with me. All you needed to do was call Aryas or Leigh, and they would have given you my number. We could have met in D.C. Fucked. And now been together for over a year.”
She stared at him, for the most part, if you could stare at someone and do it repeatedly blinking.
“You find something in what I said surprising?” he asked drily.
“Been together for over a year?” she asked back incredulously.
“Darling, the first time I was inside you, when we were done, you wept. We were meant to connect. We’re just meant to be.”
She poised to take flight.
He took her to her back and covered her with his body.
“Oh no, honey,” he whispered menacingly. “There’s no escape from that, and you know it. You’re in the mood to be real? You’re ready to ride through our issues?”
“Not so much anymore,” she answered.
But he wasn’t asking a question.
So he spoke over her.
“You’re thirty-three years old, never had a date, never had a man who means something take your mouth, never had a man make love to you, and that’s what we did the first time, sweetheart, in the way people like us do it, and it drove you to tears. You’re big, bad Sixx who could put a man on his ass and survive multiple gunshot wounds, but you submit to me in everything. You’ve moved in with me. You won’t come unless I allow it. You endured a life filled with shit and you forged your way through it for the express purpose to be right where you are right now. I can have any woman I want. But the only one I want is the one that was made for me.”
“I honest to God don’t want you to get angry, baby, but I need you to see how that’s difficult for me to believe,” she stated earnestly.
“You’re missing the fact I already see it, Simone. Why do you think your ass is right here and your clothes are in my closet? I’m not missing even a second at having the chance of shoving the answer to that right in your face. I vowed to you I would make that clear. And I’m going to do it. I’ve had you thirty-two hours, and you’re already splitting wide open for me. Can you still doubt where this is going? Can you still doubt me?”
She pressed her lips together, and her eyes explored her own eyebrows.
Bloody hell, only she could be that fucking adorable when things were this extreme between them.
“Simone,” he growled.
Her gaze snapped to him.
“Okay, jeez,” she mumbled, then spoke clearly. “The sex is spectacular and you’re awesome and I’m hot and you think I’m pretty and we’re both royally fucked up so we belong together because apparently, if there’s an all-powerful being, he or she means for me to sit like a fat cat in a Phoenician mansion and be spoiled by a hot guy. I give up. You think I’m worth it, it won’t be me anymore trying to talk you out of it.”
“Stop being amusing,” he ordered.