Yeah, I deserved this. The blackmail. The knot. The vice-grip around my neck and the way I felt sickeningly safe in spite of it and the way he’d made me admit how shallow and pathetic I was. But I didn’t deserve to be stalked and attacked and intimidated…by anyone but Declan. He ought to believe me. He ought to protect me—from everyone but him.
The sound of my own voice brought me up short.
I’d said some of that out loud.
I’d said some of that out loud. And Declan had stopped moving, frozen in place with his cock somewhere under my sternum, it felt like, and his hand locked around my throat.
Only my hoarse gasps interrupted the silence.
“You want me to protect you?” He sounded like I’d smacked him across the face after all.
“No, of course not, fuck. I don’t know what you thought you heard.” Fuck, fuck, I was panicking, and I sounded too high and too thin. “I don’t want anything from you!”
Declan rolled us over so suddenly I was crushed into the mattress without any hope of catching myself, his full weight pinning me down.
“Good,” he said roughly. “Because I didn’t sign up for taking care of you.”
Anything I might’ve answered got lost in a moan as he started to fuck me again, hard and deep, knot tugging painfully on the rim of my hole and then reaming me open again.
I probably came again while he fucked me, but it didn’t even seem to matter. My body clenched around him again and again, every wave of pleasure-pain almost like an orgasm on its own.
By the time he finished, filling me with another burst of come, I could hardly breathe, hardly think, hardly open my eyes, hardly feel my extremities.
Declan held very still, his body rigid with tension.
His knot shrank down at least halfway, enough that when he tugged his cock out of me, it only made me wince rather than scream.
“You can control your knot?” I slurred into the bed. Damn him. Most alphas could only prevent themselves from knotting in the first place, not make it go down at will. He totally could. That explained his casual avoidance of my questions about it before. “You bastard.”
That came out without much heat, since I didn’t have a lot of heat—or any other kind of energy—left in me.
“Yeah,” he admitted. And then, to my shock, he added, “I didn’t think you’d want to be tied together again until it went down on its own.”
He was right. I wouldn’t have. In large part because of how much I did want to be, only without the hostility. I’d have given my right arm to be able to trade that sense of safety that made me hate myself, and him, for the emptiness that was swamping me with every passing moment.
Only I wanted it to be real.
Fuck. I wanted it to be real.
Stockholm Syndrome, or something adjacent? Probably. But that didn’t make the hopeless clench of longing any easier.
As Declan left the bed and headed for the shower, the sounds of rustling clothes and the tap switching on telling me what he was doing, I buried my face in the bedding and breathed deeply, the mingled scents of Declan’s body and mine, of sex and bitterness, making my head light and spinny. And I made myself a promise: I’d stop throwing myself at the brick wall and expecting it not to hurt.
No more pushing. No more questions. No more doing what I hadn’t even consciously realized I had been doing until that moment: trying to get Declan to pay attention to me as a person, desperately hoping that he’d change his mind and see me as more than the spoiled rich kid who’d insulted him and then gotten him fired all those years ago.
Maybe that was all I was, and I didn’t have anything else to offer. Or maybe I was worth something more than what he, and everyone else who’d ever looked at me, had seen when they did.
It didn’t matter either way. I was his fuck toy, and possessiveness—natural in an alpha with a lover, even a blackmailed one he despised—couldn’t be mistaken for anything more. He’d get tired of me, and that would be that. Walter might have it out for me, or he might not. Someone else might be stalking me…or not.
But I had to let it all go, or I’d drive myself as nuts as Declan seemed to believe I already was.
Fuck it. Fuck it all.
Chapter 15
Try Me
Letting it all go seemed easy at first.
