Page 33 of Captivated By You
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
CLAUDIA
Every time Liam brushed his hands along any part of my body, he pulled a string, unraveling me from the inside out. He was always so perfect in his intent and desire along with his control. We hadn’t done anything overtly sexual up until now but he still proved the kind of lover he would be.
Focused. Determined. Patient yet unyielding.
I desired nothing more than to turn around and place my palms on his cheeks, to tug him down toward me and feel our lips brush against each other.
But was it real? Or was it because I was the only woman around?
We shared a lot over the last couple weeks. He acted like he cared. He held my hand when we walked along the beach. He opened doors and waited until I was seated when we ate dinner on the patio until he took his own seat. This was a man who was raised with manners and morals that eclipsed even possibly mine. Yet he was also a performer. He knew how to work a crowd until every woman, man, and sometimes child in attendance was hypnotized by not only his body and his moves but his voice, the way he pulled his lyrics from deep in his gut as if he believed, wholeheartedly, through his soul every single one of them.
He worked a crowd like a king, and he had drawn me into his web.
Standing in front of him now, my breath rioting inside my chest, I played all the scenarios in my head, the visuals I’d thought of late at night when my hands drifted beneath the waistband of my underwear.
I was having a difficult time coming up with reasons inside myself to deny him.
“Liam,” I said, more like a moan being tugged from my throat than a word. I shook my head and it fell forward, baring my neck to him where he did mind-numbingly beautiful things with his lips and his tongue.
“You have these two, tiny little moles, right here,” he murmured, his lips pressing around the marks I knew were there. “They’re enticing. The only part of your beautiful body that isn’t so perfectly pure.”
“I have more,” I gasped as his teeth joined his tongue and he teased the tendons on the side of my neck.
“God, don’t tell me that. I want to find them. Taste them. Suck them.”
Oh Lord. My nipples were painful, hardened peaks beneath my bikini and tank top. They ached to be massaged. Pressure was building everywhere inside me, fanning outward. I arched against him, craving him without realizing I’d done so until I felt his arousal at the small of my back.
“Fuck, sweetheart. You’re killing me.”
I was wearing down. Aroused. More turned on than I could remember being. I’d dated boys. Kissed them and fooled around. My virginity was what I clung to, to push them away, because none of them, not a single boy or college man I’d been with had driven me achingly mad like the man currently behind me.
The man who wasn’treallymine.
The thought chilled me and I shivered.
I wanted Liam Allistor. I wanted his laughs and his touches and his kisses.
I wanted his heart. I wanted whatever we were building to bereal.
Unexpectedly, I’d begun seeing past the facade and the rock star persona I assumed he carried with him at all times. In the last two weeks, we’d laughed about his sister. His demon-spawned nephew as Liam called him, though his real name was Kevin Junior after his father. He talked about his niece, Ella Belle, who wanted nothing more than at the age of six to be in a library with the Beast from her favorite movie.
He told me about life growing up outside Kansas City where homes were sprawled on acres and they caused hell in cornfields with bonfires and kegs in the summers.
His life wasn’t so different than mine, just without the loaded expectation to beperfect.
Now, he was simply a man. A beautiful, breath-stopping magnificent man who made it clear he wanted me. At least my body.
But every time I came close to giving in, to allowing him to do all the wonderful things he promised, I remembered that this wasn’t real.
I was a warm, attractive body at his disposal and regardless of how many times I tried, I couldn’t move past the idea that if I gave my body to him, I was no better than a street-walking prostitute, selling my body to pay the bills, even if I had told him that was one of my intentions in begging Karen to take me on as an Infidelity in the first place.
My morals were too strong to be tossed away for a caseload of Benjamin Franklins. Imagine that, my father who did anything for a sick and depraved man in order to earn those Franklins, raised a daughter who still had the ability not to be led around by them.
“Liam, please. Stop.”
