“Fuck you!”She thrashes against me for all of two seconds before she spits right in my fucking face.
One of my hands flies from her wrist to her throat. But I don’t squeeze.
Idon’tsqueeze.
Idon’tsqueeze.
I don’t fuckingstrangleher, even though every nerve in my body is electrified with the desire to stranglesomething.
I simply hold her neck at the base of her chin, but she looks like she fully expects me to murder her right here and now.
“Malachi.” Her voice is reduced to a teary squeak, and she sounds like she’s eight years old again, and Ihateher for doing this to us. “Please… please… please…”
I lower my face to hover my mouth next to the shell of her ear. “And now you beg me for it.” I pull my head back to look at her face, which has drained to an unnatural pallid shade. “Typical wanton woman. Allow me to repeat myself, Duchess, because apparently you didn’t understand me on the day of our wedding. I willneverconsummate this marriage because I have no desire to put my cock anywhere near any of your filthy orifices. You will simply have to get by with writing your smut and dry humping your pillows.”
“Malachi.” The light from the window hits her eyes, and they suddenly appear glassy in a way that doesn’t just look like tears. Her dilated pupils are pointed in the general direction of my face, but she appears to be looking right through me. Her pulse under my thumb is like pummeling hoofbeats. Her wrist has gone limp in my grasp other than what feels like an involuntary tremor. “Malachi.”
I am not a monster. I’m simply the proverbial wolf with its leg caught in a trap, snapping at the source of my own debilitating pain.
I also can’t allow myself to be the threat to her because that would defeat the purpose of this arrangement entirely.
So, I let go.
“The main hall at 3:55, Duchess,” I say, releasing her and standing up to leave. “Not a second after.”
MALACHI
Eighteen Years Old
NOTHING IN THE WORLD was as intoxicating as the feel of having Isla completely wrapped around me. She was soft, and smooth, and warm; small enough to fit perfectly cocooned in my arms and against my chest. She was the only girl I’d ever been with, but I never had any desire or temptation to go looking for or trying out anyone else, because Isla waseverythingand she always had been.
Everything I always hoped for, dreamed of, wanted, and needed.
And as intoxicating as drowning in her skin and scent and hair was, it paled in comparison to when she would look at me from under half-lidded eyes while we caught our breath, and she’d murmur to me in Spanish.
“Mi amado… mi alma.”Her nails combing back my hair; thumb stroking my temple. “Mi vida. Te amo.”
“Te amo,” I echoed, and her full lips, swollen in the immediate aftermath of love-making, quirked into a restrained smile.
“When will you let me teach you Spanish,cariño?” She swept her hand over the back of my neck to guide our mouths into a deep kiss. “It would be sosexyfor you to speak in Spanish to me.”
I chuckled and kissed her chin. “I’m working on it. I enrolled in Spanish II for my Fall semester.”
A wide smile spread across her face. “We should’ve gone with Mamáand my siblings to Los Cabos this summer. Then you could’ve learned through immersion, and your class would be an easy A.”
“Well.” I laughed again and wrapped my arm around her to pull her onto my chest. “If we went with them, there would be none ofthis…” I gestured at our sheet-clad bodies. “... because there would be nowhere for us to sneak off to, and I wasn’t about to spend my summernotdoing this with you.”
Isla snickered impishly and tickled my ribs. “I could get you inso much trouble, Malachi.”
“And you would be more than worth getting in trouble for if your dad ever—”
A loudPOPsuddenly sounded from somewhere outside the Reyes manor, and I shot up in bed, ears homed in on what I couldn’t tell was a car backfiring or fucking gunshot.
Isla sucked in a gasp and tugged the sheet, clutching it way up at her chin. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered, reaching to switch off the small lamp next to her bed and then inching down the mattress to hold her close to me. “Stay quiet.”
We both shallowed our breath to listen for activity in the house. It was well after one in the morning, and Ernesto had gone to bed hours ago—which was the only way I had been able to sneak into Isla’s bedroom in the first place.
