Page 64 of Tamed
“So?” My heart had begun to beat faster, harder, inexplicable pain gathering inside me. That night had been revelatory for me in so many ways, and I hated that he regretted it. That he wished he hadn’t touched me. “I wanted you.”
“Because you didn’t know any better.”
I pushed myself from the couch, my hands in fists, angry now. “Don’t treat me like a fucking kid.”
“You are a fucking kid. I was the only man in your life for fifteen years and you imprinted on me.”
“Imprinted on you? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I’m not a lamb or a damn gosling, Caleb. And don’t patronize me. Don’t tell me I didn’t know any better. I knew exactly what I wanted.”
He’d turned around completely to face me, his tall, broad figure looming over me. I could see the anger in his eyes and sure, he was directing some of that at me, but I knew him. He was also directing it at himself.
“You can’t tell me that if you’d had a normal childhood, you wouldn’t have found some nice asshole at high school and be dating him. Or some clean-cut college boy.”
“I might,” I shot back, refusing to back down. “But I guess we’ll never know, will we? Because I didn’t have a normal childhood and I don’t want a clean-cut college boy. I don’t want a boy at all. I want a man. And the man I want is you.”
That muscle leapt in the side of his jaw, tension pouring off him. “How do you know? When Ten never gave you the option of dating? When he wouldn’t even let you go to your high school dance? The only man you know is me.”
I felt shaky, as if the foundations of my world had shifted. A reminder that the solid ground I’d taken for granted all my life wasn’t quite so solid after all. And not because I was doubting my desire for Caleb, no, that was still inside me, still burning strong. It was him. His doubt was shaking me. He’d always been so sure, so certain. The sun around which I orbited. And maybe I should have seen that of course he was going to doubt what we’d done together, because he wasn’t a monster, no matter what anyone else thought of him.
But I hadn’t seen it. And now I didn’t know what to do.
“So, what?” I tried to keep the tremor out of my voice. “Your regrets don’t change anything. It still happened. I still had the childhood I had, and I still want you. And I don’t regret what we did together on Friday night. I don’t regret it at all.”
That’s when I saw the flicker in his eyes, the glance at my shoulder where my sweatshirt had slipped. And it came to me in a blinding flash of light, a road to Damascus moment, where all of this wasactuallycoming from.
He wanted me. It was in that glance, in the anger glittering in his eyes. In the tension rolling of him. It had been there when I’d stormed into his office earlier, when we’d looked at each other across his desk, my father not two feet away, the air full of that crackling, hissing electricity.
He wanted me and he didn’t want to. It was making him angry. It was shaking him. Yet he wanted me all the same.
I didn’t plan on taking a step toward him, but I did anyway. I’m sure he didn’t mean to step back, but he did all the same, and I could see the realization of what he’d done and what it gave away flicker across his face.
His gaze hardened, sharp and serrated like a shard of obsidian. “Isabel.”
He used my name as a warning, but I’d never been very good at listening to his warnings. I’d never been very good at doing what he said. In that moment, what I wanted and what he wanted were the same thing, and I didn’t see why we shouldn’t have it.
Caleb, for all his talk of being a criminal, had scruples, but I didn’t. Not when it came to him.
I took another step, then another and another. He didn’t move, only stood there like an immovable object to my unstoppable force, his gaze on mine.
“Isabel,” he said again, though it didn’t have the same edge of warning in it this time.
“What?” I was close to him now, the heat of his body making me want to press against him, and I could smell his scent, spicy and warm and so achingly familiar. The scent of safety and of comfort, and since Friday night, the scent of intense physical pleasure too. “You don’t like wanting me.” I looked up into his shadowed eyes. “I know you don’t. But you want me all the same and that’s why you’re angry, isn’t it?”
He said nothing, but he didn’t have to. I could see the truth in his gaze.
“We can’t change the past, Caleb,” I went on. “You know that as well as I do. But I’m not a fucking animal who can’t make their own choices about what they want and I’m not a child either. I’m an adult woman with a mind of her own. And maybe my childhood influenced those choices, I don’t know, but what I do know is that I want you. I’ve wanted you for years. No one forced me to take my dress off and spread my legs for you. I wanted to do that. And if you were really all about my choice, you’d accept this one.”
He didn’t move, his gaze holding me pinned. His hands were still in his pockets, but there was nothing casual about the way he held himself. “I know what you are, little girl. I know all about you. But you don’t know me. You don’t know a single fucking thing. That’s why you need to forget Friday night ever happened. Because it won’t be happening again.”
The words were an arrow in my chest. “Why not? It’s just sex, Caleb.”
His hard black gaze didn’t waver. “Was it just sex for you on Friday night, Isabel?”
I flushed, hating the question and how it resonated inside me, setting something in me vibrating. I might have been a virgin, but even I was aware that what had happened between us on Friday hadn’t been just sex. It hadn’t been easy or casual, and I knew deep in my bones that it hadn’t been something I could walk away from.
“No,” he went on, watching me, reading me as if I was an open book. “I didn’t think so.”
“I don’t care.” A strange tight feeling gathered inside me. “I want another night. Just one.”