So yeah, I was weak, I wanted to soak up a little slice of it, pretend it was real, store it away for later.
Duke, of course, wasn’t about to let that happen.
His arms tightened around me and didn’t let me go. “Mornin’, baby,” he murmured, voice thick with sleep.
I froze.
Baby?
He didn’t seem perturbed that I wasn’t replying, nor did he let me go. He continued to squeeze, to hold me in this embrace even though there was no reason to now.
Last night, it was to keep me in bed due to a misplaced form of chivalry.
Today?
He moved lazily and didn’t seem to remember that he was meant to strongly dislike me and this whole “couple” thing was just an act.
The covers moved from the both of us and I jerked with the movement, trying to hide myself—another uncharacteristic gesture. I was proud of my body. I damn near starved myself in order for it to look the way it did, killed myself with workouts, spent a small fortune on a personal trainer. Beyond that, the entire world had seen most of it. Darker corners of the Internet had seen all of it. There was no reason for any sort of false modesty.
But I felt it, nonetheless, with Duke’s eyes running over my scantily clad body. Though his eyes weren’t on my body, or the three-hundred-dollar silk slip I was wearing.
No, he was focused further south, on my leg, to be exact. The swollen one, I now realized was throbbing faintly and felt uncomfortably hot.
Only waking up with someone like Duke would make me forget that I was nursing a rattlesnake bite.
His large hand cradled my leg, gently, like he’d carried me in the house last night. I tried to jerk my leg away but then he grasped it—the uninjured part—not so gently.
“Doesn’t look too bad,” he said. “Think you’re gonna heal up just fine.” His eyes flickered up. “Lucky.”
“Yeah, I’m real lucky,” I scoffed.
His brows furrowed, but then he looked back to my leg. Then he did something utterly and totally insane, the thing that caused me to stare at the same page of a book for an entire hour later that day.
He leaned down and very purposefully and slowly laid his lips just above the swollen, hot area of my leg.
And I let him. Because not in my adult life, had anyone ever touched me so gently and kissed me like that.
Then he got up. And I got distracted with his body—for a long time. Especially since he showered with the door open and I wasn’t noble enough not to perve.
Because I’d been caught up in all of that, I’d also been there when he’d left the shower wearing only a towel. He’d obviously been intending on walking toward his open suitcase to get dressed.
But he stopped.
In the middle of the room. Eyes on me.
His gaze went dark.
Hungry.
No, ravenous.
A man hadn’t looked at me like that before either. Duke was giving me a morning of firsts without even realizing it, cutting up parts of me that I’d been so sure were calcified over. Much more dangerous than any snake bite. They didn’t heal the same. Or at all.
My body responded to the look immediately, almost violently. My heart thundered through my ribcage. My nipples pressed against the silk fabric of my nightie. His sharp intake of breath told me he saw that.
“Fuck, baby,” he growled, holding himself still. His eyes moved from my nipples to my eyes. “You need to stop lookin’ at me like that or I’ll forget you need to rest.”
I didn’t move. “What happens when you forget I need to rest?” I asked, stupidly.
His eyes gave me no respite. “I’ll fuck you so hard you forget about that snake bite, you forget your fucking name, even though the whole world knows it.”
The words were spoken in a rasp. They were injected with pure sex and they hit me in every nerve ending dedicated to pleasure. And pain. Yes, this man would give me pleasure, at a price.
And I’d take it. Whatever he had to give me.
I moved ever so slightly on the bed, positioning my body as an invitation. Sure, Duke might be changing a lot of things for me, but he wasn’t going to turn me shy, nor make me timid.
I made sure that I tempted him, that he saw exactly what he was going to get from me. If there was anything I knew how to do, that was sell sex. I was great at it.
Then I got up.
Duke’s entire body tensed and it totally pissed me off that his eyes flickered to my leg and the slight limp that I started off on. I corrected this quickly, of course. I was used to working through pain. This was pain.
Agony.
He was a man made of stone when I made it to him. The restraint was making him damn near shake.
It infuriated me, because I could see his resolve. I knew that there would be no seducing this man. Not when he saw me as his wounded damsel. His warped sense of morals stopped him from fucking me, but he had no problem treating me like shit the previous night.
“So you think you can just walk around wrapped in a towel, making those statements and pretending you give a fuck about me?” I asked, voice soft, sultry. I didn’t let him speak. Instead I leaned farther into him, never breaking my gaze. “Maybe that alpha macho-asshole works on the other women, but I’m like no one else you’ve ever known. I’m Anastasia fucking Edwards. No one will make me forget that. Not even you, cowboy.”
On that, I stepped back, grasped the towel around his waist, pulled it free. It took everything I had not to look down, instead to drink in the anger, surprise and want in his eyes.
Then, I walked to the bathroom, making sure to close the door behind me.
He had been gone when I’d gotten out of the shower, mostly because I took my time and was very vocal about what I was doing in there. No way was he going to think he was the only one that could satisfy me. So far, the only person truly capable of satisfying me was myself.
And I definitely had some pent-up frustration that needed to be released. The fact it pissed Duke off—the slam of the door about halfway through told me that—was a nice bonus.
I would’ve actively gone against his wishes of resting, but even I wasn’t strong enough to go against both Harriet and Anna, who all but pushed me back into the bedroom after feeding me breakfast and “shooting the shit” as Harriet called it.
Nothing was mentioned about Duke and the photo yesterday. Then again, the drama of the snake bite took over it.
Duke was helping with some cattle and that was something I would’ve loved to see, but my leg really was throbbing. And I didn’t want to be in his presence. I was pissed at him. I was also afraid, terrified, to be precise. I’d been here for two days and everything was changing. Shifting, like tectonic plates getting ready to destroy everything that had been there before.
So I had been up here, reading—pretending to—and thinking all about Duke and interestingly not at all about my life in LA or the trial or the murder I’d witnessed.
Which brought me to Harriet bursting into the room, demanding I pack my bags.
I obviously hadn’t moved fast enough for her, since she’d thrust open the closet before I had time to close my book and get up.
“Okay, even though you knew you were coming to a ranch in Montana, I really dig this dress,” she said, pulling out a custom McQueen.
Unpacking that had made me smile. For the most part, Andre had done pretty well with casual, durable—yet fabulous—things for the trip here. Well, the footwear wasn’t great but it turned out Anna and I wore the same size and she had some kick-ass cowboy boots.