“Why didn’t you tell me about the phone calls, Cami?”
She stilled. The breath seemed to stop in her chest.
Her tongue swiped over her lips in what she knew was a terrible mistake. It was a sign of nervousness, and they both knew it.
His gaze tracked it, his eyes narrowing on the movement before returning to hers.
“What phone calls?” She fought to come up with an explanation, a glib response, or some way to throw him off.
It was obvious he had to have talked to Jack. Only Jack and his wife knew about the phone calls.
Rafe’s brow arched, slowly, with mocking emphasis, as his expression tightened with brooding irritation.
“Don’t play games with me, Cami,” he warned her, his voice dangerously soft. “And don’t lie to me, kitten. I would be very, very displeased if I caught you lying to me.”
“And that displeasure should affect me?” She only barely managed to keep her voice from squeaking.
She might not be frightened of him, but she had a very healthy respect for the fact that there definitely were ways he could make her regret anything she did to piss him off and still maintain the emotional abyss she was slipping into.
His arm lifted from where it had lain along his side as he stared at her, his head propped on his hand, his long, lean body spooned against her side.
His fingertips stroked down her bare arms, raising goose bumps and reminding her, forcibly, that he thought perhaps she should be concerned with his displeasure.
The pleasure was impossibly erotic. A touch that simple yet combined with the look in those sapphire eyes sent her senses reeling.
Against her hip, the heavy proof of his erection was cushioned between their flesh only by the thin silk of her short gown. Heated and heavy, the feel of it sent the blood thundering through her veins as she drew in a hard, deep breath.
“I want to know about those phone calls,” he warned her. “And now is a very good time to tell me, Cami. Before I become frustrated with your attempts to distract me. And that frustration could lead to all kinds of punishments.”
And did he truly believe such an erotic dare would go unanswered?
Oh, she knew she would have to tell him about the phone calls. He was already aware of them, likely already knew the full story; he only wanted her to tell him. He wanted to know why she hadn’t told him. He wanted to delve into all the reasons why, on a totally deeper level, she hadn’t come to him.
And ultimately, he wanted to ensure he had created a tie between them that she couldn’t break.
The fact that she hadn’t told him about those calls assured him that the tie he wanted in place wasn’t as tight as he would have liked.
And he thought that was going to come easy?
She almost smiled at the thought.
She wasn’t easy, even for him. Especially for him, the emotional ties he was determined to build were not going to be given without an assurance of ties in return. And there was no assurance. Not yet. And neither was there a confidence that she could handle the man he had become.
It wasn’t, she had realized over the past days, a fear, shame, or embarrassment of the town. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to face fighting everyone around her for what she wanted. It was the fear that fighting everyone else would prove fruitless when he walked away.
“Cami, you’re not making much effort to help me out here,” he drawled, his tone velvet rough as it rumbled from his chest.
As he spoke, the blanket that covered her to beneath her arms was slowly pulled away from her, leaving her beneath his gaze clad only in the short, silky plum-colored nightgown she had donned after her shower.
“Am I supposed to be helping you out?” she asked him. “It seems you’re only asking rhetorical questions, Rafe. You already know the answers.”
“Let’s say I know of the subject at hand, but the details have eluded me. And you will give me those details.”
Would she?
She had no intentions of allowing him to order her to do anything. Just as she had absolutely no intention of bowing down to the dominance that gleamed in his eyes.
Submissive she truly wasn’t. She would call no man master, nor would she ever give in to that dominance without a very sensual struggle.
“There were no details to give, Rafe,” she assured him quietly as he pushed the comforter to her knees as she felt her womb flex and her pussy pulse erotically. The soft slide of her juices from the intimate recess of her body had her fighting not to arch her hips and bring attention to the needy flesh between her thighs.
She ached for him. There was no denying the fact that she wanted him more than she had ever wanted anything or anyone in her life. Just as there was no denying the sensual and emotional abyss that opened within her each time she had to deal with the conflicting pleasure and hungers that attacked her with each touch he gave her.
What the hell was she supposed to do with all this need? With the hunger for his touch, for his kiss, mixing with the overwhelming, overriding desire to challenge his arousal and his hunger.
It was like playing tug-of-war with herself.
His fingertips stroked against her knee before caressing above it, then back. Delicate velvet-soft touches before they went higher, petting and stroking as he stared down at her until the caresses were at her thighs and she was fighting to keep from parting her thighs.
“Did you recognize anything about the voice?” he asked her.
She cleared her throat. “It sounded very mechanical.”
It was all she could do to concentrate on the fact that when he spoke it wasn’t anything sexy. Still, though, the dark rumble of his voice had her entire body sensitizing when combined with the dark dominance that filled Rafe.
“No. Nothing. It just sounded like a robot.” Her hips did arch this time as his fingers delved beneath her gown.
Her thighs parted, her senses becoming entangled in the insidious pleasure stroking closer to the swollen bud of her clitoris and the weeping center of her body.
Her nipples, though excruciatingly tender, ached with more than the pain of the callous treatment that had been inflicted on them by her attacker. They were hardened, throbbing with both arousal as well as the tenderness. It was an interesting, confusing pleasure-pain that she fought to make sense of.
Rafe’s gaze moved from his fingers playing at her thighs, moving ever closer to the aching flesh there as his gaze centered on the hard buds of her nipples beneath the silk of the gown.
“Let me take your gown off.”
Her breathing seemed to constrict in her chest.
She’d seen the bruises after her shower, and they were horrendous. Long, thick finger marks marred the flesh in shades of black, blue, and abraded red. Her nipples were swollen and a cherry red, rather than the pink they had once been.
“I don’t want—”
He laid his fingers to her lips, stopping the flow of words.
“Do I make you feel good when I touch you, Cami?”
She could feel her breathing accelerate at the very thought of the pleasure he could give her. Instantly heat flooded her body, like flames burning out of control.