Page 14 of Bought

You want him.

As soon as the thought occurred to me, I found myself struggling in his grip, every part of me tense with denial.

He released me instantly, watching with that same cold focus as I stumbled back a few steps, my heart pounding, my breath coming in hard, fast gasps.

What are you doing? You let fear win and now you’ve fucked it up completely. He’s never going to want to take you home now.

A rush of shame swept over me. I hadn’t broken like that since I was a kid. How fucking humiliating. And he really wouldn’t take me home, unless he was one of those sick assholes who liked naked and terrified women. Then again, he’d certainly let me go fast enough when I struggled.

That was reassuring yet it only hammered home how badly I’d miscalculated. I’d screwed up and now I was so badly rattled I couldn’t even think of a good lie to cover the moment.

I turned away, unable to face him and hating myself for my weakness. I reached for the cloak I’d dropped onto the floor so at least I could cover my nakedness, but he got in first.

Smoothly, he bent to pick up the pool of red fabric, shaking it out, and without comment, he proceeded to put it around my shoulders, fastening it deftly at my throat.

I was still trembling as he twitched the fabric into place, his expression remote, the sharp intensity of his gaze easing. “You will not be running the auction again,” he said, calm and cool and certain. “You will accept me as the buyer of your virginity.” He paused a moment, studying me. “And then, you will come home with me tonight.”

6

Tennyson

It hadn’t been the clumsy seduction attempts that had made me change my mind, but the terror I’d seen in her eyes when I’d restrained her.

She hadn’t liked that one bit.

Curious. Especially after being so sexually confident, approaching me, laying a hand on me, asking me to fuck her. She’d only spooked when I’d put her hands behind her back and held them there.

I’d done that on purpose, hoping to frighten her off, yet the moment I’d seen her panic I’d started turning the smooth surface of her fear over in my head, trying to find a way in.

It might have been a reflex. She was young, like Isabel, and she’d made a bad choice, and I was here to protect her from the consequences of that choice. Just like all the other young women I’d protected by intervening with my checkbook. And not only with virginity auctions but with the various charities I’d set up and funneled money into. Charities for families, for children, for women in danger. Medical charities for those who couldn’t afford the healthcare they needed.

It was part of the contract I’d made with myself after Sir George had gone, a balancing of the scales. His money would help me make more and then I’d give most of it back to people who needed it.

It wasn’t enough. Nothing ever would be. But it was something.

Taking her home was something. Likely it was a mistake, but I couldn’t allow her to stay here and run her auction again, not when she’d been so terrified and certainly not with an unrestricted contract.

She’d said she wanted to come home with me because she wanted me, but she’d been lying about that too, or at least, mostly lying. Because just before I’d taken her wrists and the terror had hit her, I’d seen arousal flare in her gaze.

Whether she knew it or not, she was attracted to me.

That didn’t concern me. What did was my response to her. She’d been all bare, silky skin, with that little scattering of stars on her arm. Pretty, pink nipples and pale curls between her thighs. Smelling of candy floss and something musky and feminine…delicious.

It hadn’t mattered that she was Isabel’s age. That she was more complicated than she looked and nothing at all that I wanted to deal with right now, not when my entire life was complicated enough as it was. No, my cock was undiscerning. It thought she was beautiful and wanted her, and when she’d touched me without permission, I’d had to act.

She shouldn’t have gotten to me the way she had. I wasn’t a teenage boy at the mercy of his desires, and she wasn’t my beautiful red-headed Juliana. I was a forty-two-year-old man, and she was a woman my daughter’s age, whose name I didn’t even know, and shouldn’t have even been remotely interested. Yet I was.

Then again, physical control was something I’d perfected over the years, and while she could tell me all she liked that she wanted me, I still wasn’t going to do anything about it.

She didn’t protest, staying silent as I pulled the door of the small room open to find Andre waiting on the other side of it.

“We agreed,” I said shortly. “We’ll sign the papers now.”

Five minutes later, the papers signed and the money on its way to Red Riding Hood’s bank account, I walked with her down Arcadia’s sweeping staircase to the front door.

She didn’t say anything as we went out into the night, her cloak flowing dramatically behind her as she went down the steps outside. The car I’d ordered five minutes earlier was idling at the curb, and I held the door open for her myself.

She didn’t look at me as she demurely folded her cloak around herself and got in, her expression betraying nothing.