A Prince's Ransom: Kidnapped by the Billionaire (36 page)

She looked up at him and giggled almost obnoxiously before standing on tiptoe to kiss him again. Sebastian returned the kiss lightly, and she squirmed out from around him to open the door and stumble out, while he pulled up his pants and refastened them. A glance over his shoulder showed that the other woman was still at the bathroom sink, and the blonde giggled again.

“H-hi, sorry about the noise!” she apologized tipsily as she turned on one of the other sinks to wash her hands and rinse off her face. When she began to very lewdly clean off the inside of her thighs, he snorted in amusement and quickly moved to intervene, grabbing her shoulders and turning her toward the door.

“Why don’t you head back to the table?” he suggested, taking her attention off the state she was in. “I think we still had some champagne left.”

“Ooh, yummy. Okay—you better come back!”

“I will, I will. Go on.” She nodded blearily and stumbled toward the door, heading back into the restaurant; Sebastian had his doubts that she’d be able to make it back to the table without his assistance, but he’d be out shortly. He turned back to the other occupant of the ladies’ restroom with a charming smile on his face.

“Sorry about—” All at once, as he looked into the mirror to see her face, he stopped. Her face was completely ashen, like she had seen a ghost, but as he met her dark blue eyes, he couldn’t really blame her for that reaction. “Tobin.”

It was bad enough when that half-drunk floozy had stumbled out of the bathroom stall after sex that was way too damn loud. It was bad enough when she had pulled her skirt back up to clean herself off from her in-public interlude. It was bad enough that this night was already a disaster as far as Tobin could tell, with barely any chance of it getting better. Then, somehow, it managed to get worse, because whoever was deciding fate in the universe had decided to crap all over her life.

She almost didn’t even see him. She had glanced out of the corner of her eye at the blonde who clearly didn’t have any morals or limits at all when it came to sex. And that glance had been enough for her, and she had started to turn away to dry herself off and leave the bathroom on her own. Except then she had heard his voice, and it had seemed… familiar. Familiar was a weird thing when none of the guys she knew were tasteless enough to have sex in a bathroom stall.

Tobin had stopped moving and looked up into the mirror. And then she had literally felt her heart stop beating, and all color drain from her face, and she had just stared at him. Stared at a face she could never, ever, ever forget, no matter how hard she tried, no matter what she did.

There was something painfully surreal about the fact that it was him, here, doing something disgusting with a woman who was clearly a skank of the highest degree. He had kissed Tobin, albeit against her will, with those lips that were now smeared with the skank’s lipstick. He had touched her with hands that had been all over that blonde’s unmentionables. He had held a gun to her head and was now having sex with some random woman and that really didn’t feel like it should be happening.

And then he was turning back to her, apologizing for his… “date,” for her behavior, only to come to the same, sudden, completely twisted realization that she had. She heard her name fall from his lips.

Without a second thought, she was bolting away from the sink, toward one of the stalls—as if the flimsy partition was any real deterrent if he wanted to do something to her, but that was her first instinct and she heeded it, slamming the door shut, her suddenly clammy fingers forcing the lock. Tobin pressed herself back, wedging herself between the side partition and the toilet even though she didn’t really fit there, her fingers twisting into her dress with enough force to rip it as tears welled in her eyes.

She could see him through the crack in the door. He hadn’t moved, beyond watching her seek sanctuary—sanctuary next to a toilet. God, was that how far she’d fallen? For a moment she shut her eyes and a few tears slid silently down her cheeks, but for the longest time, nothing else happened. Then she heard his shoes clicking on the floor as he headed toward the door, and she thought, for an instant, that he was leaving. Her eyes opened again, lips parting as she prayed that he was just going to leave her alone.

But instead, she heard the lock to the entire bathroom turn, and despite herself, a sob tore itself from her throat. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake again, she thought. He wasn’t going to let her walk away with her life this time. Not again. She wasn’t going to beg this time, though, she promised herself. She wasn’t going to beg.

He had started to walk back toward her after locking the door, but the sound she made seemed to stop him. Her heart was pounding—beating so hard that she was sure it was going to burst right from her chest as her arm pressed into the cold porcelain of the toilet. Tobin reached up, rubbing at her tears roughly for a moment before forcing herself to take a deep breath. To do something else, anything else. Did he have a gun, this time?

“Get out,” she told him and winced at how weak and fragile her voice sounded, nearly trembling. “Get out and leave me alone. You… you have done enough, and… and I don’t want any part of whatever you’re involved with.” A hundred other things ran through her head instead of this. Telling him she knew about the man he had killed at the jewelry store—telling him she’d gone to the police. Telling him any number of things that would be the stupidest things in the world to say, that wouldn’t give him less of a reason to kill her, but instead a greater one. And he… he had enough reason already, when if he left her alive again, she could tell the police she had seen him here. They could figure out who he was, through a credit card or a reservation or… or anything. A waiter who had thought to card him before giving him and his date champagne. No, saying anything at all about the police was a bad idea.

“You are still convinced I’m going to kill you.” The seductive charm he’d spoken with before was gone, replaced with that same gruff growl that she remembered only too damn well. Tobin shut her eyes tightly and tried to stop herself from crying, tried to control that much of herself when she didn’t know how much control was even left to her. “You are still convinced that that is what I think I should do, when I already let you go once.”

“Yeah, and doesn’t every criminal ever eventually realize that they shouldn’t leave witnesses alive? Witnesses who… who have seen their faces and…” She stopped talking for a second. “I just want my life to go back to normal.”

“Normal,” he barked with laughter. “And what was normal for you before I grabbed you, Tobin? A job as a vet, guys who don’t appreciate you, your father going into the hospital?” He remembered that she had said that? Why would he have remembered that?

“What, this is supposed to be better, because it’s more exciting? Getting guns pressed to my head and feeling like I’m going to be killed?” Unable to sleep, unable to go home, her entire life uprooted in a single night, and with no way for it to ever go back to the way it had been before. This was not better. “And just because you went through my wallet and know my name doesn’t mean you know anything about me at all. Just go away—just leave me alone!”

Without any warning, after she nearly shouted this at him—wishing it would do any good and that someone would hear her and come to see what was going on—he surged toward the stall door and grabbed the top. She squealed in alarm as, with very little effort at all, he yanked hard on it, and the lock popped easily from its latch and the door swung open. Honestly, those locks were really just supposed to be for keeping the door closed when it was occupied, not actually keeping someone out. He seemed to fill the entire breadth of the door, though, and her breath picked up, almost hyperventilating as she slid several inches down the side of the wall where she had squeezed herself.

“Why should I?” he asked her with a snarl. “You’re so convinced that all I’m going to do is hurt you—even when I’m not around, apparently. So why should I go anywhere? Why shouldn’t I do exactly what you expect me to do?” He took several steps into the stall with her. Tobin’s eyes grew wide as saucers, and if there had been any color returning to her face, it was gone in a moment.

“I did what you asked me to,” she whispered, all attempts at bravado long gone. “I… I stitched up your friend even though I barely knew what I was doing beyond the basics and… and I did that! What do you expect me to say? What do you expect me to do? Of course I’m afraid. You kidnapped me and threatened to kill me and you know where I live—”

“I didn’t kill you,” he snapped. “You seem to be forgetting that part.”

“And what stopped you?! I know you killed someone else! You didn’t hesitate then. What was going to make you stop with me? The fact that I begged you?”

“Yes,” he growled, low in his throat as he loomed over her. “I killed someone else. I killed a man with a gun who tried to kill me and my friend first—I suppose that was conveniently left out, right? Or how’d you think you became necessary in the first place?”

“But you don’t need me now!” Tobin cried, digging her nails into the grout of the tiles in the wall. “You don’t, I did what you asked—”

“You’re right, though, you know what I look like. You know what I look like and what I did and now you know that I come here. And now you heard me admit to killing someone, even if it was in self-defense, and why should I leave you alone a second time? You expect the worst of me, I can give you the worst.” His hands slammed into the wall on either side of her, making the partition rattle on its hinges as she turned her head away from him with a gasp of fright, shaking hard. “Maybe you’ll beg this time again—or maybe I’ll take that other useful thing from you now, since you did do what I asked before. Didn’t you? Maybe I’ll take that, instead, and maybe if you’re useful I’ll leave you alive again.”

All of this was said through clenched teeth, hissed at her, and then he grabbed her jaw and turned her head back around. Tobin cried out, and the sound was swallowed by his lips slamming down onto hers—again. Kissing her against her will, again. And this time he tasted like champagne and that slut he’d been having sex with, but there was something else, too. His hand laced into her hair and knocked aside the comb she’d put it up with. It clattered onto the floor, and he pressed her tight against the wall. Half in a preventive measure, she realized; he remembered very well what she had done last time he had kissed her, but like this she couldn’t get the leverage to knee him in the crotch again.

No, all Tobin could do was writhe against him as his lips fiercely bruised against her own, hot and hard and relentless. Ignoring how awkward the position was, he melded his taut, strong body against hers so that she could feel almost every inch of him, and she could smell a musky desire all over him. It mixed with some cheap, too-sweet perfume, but most of it was him, kissing her with reckless abandon until she realized, very suddenly, that she was kissing him back. Her fingers were tangling in his shirt, and his arm was around her waist and she was kissing him, her lips still burning from the martini she’d been drinking before she’d left the table. God, some part of her wished she hadn’t left the table.

That didn’t really matter now, of course, because she unmistakably had and he was still kissing her. Kissing her like someone who knew how to kiss, someone who had been made to kiss, until his tongue emerged and pressed at her lips, slithering against her in a way that made an absurd heat rush between her legs. She gasped into his mouth and then she could truly taste him, as his tongue surged into her lips and explored her own mouth. She wished she hadn’t had so much of the spinach dip. Faintly, she moaned, she whimpered, she melted into him, and he took every inch of it, pulling her out from where she’d wedged herself and drawing her even closer. He’d just had sex a few minutes ago, but she could feel his arousal pulsing through his pants, pressing at her waist, her hips…

But his hands weren’t moving. They weren’t searching, questing—groping her or touching her—just holding her tight, laced into her hair, kissing her for every second she let him kiss her. Tobin gasped again and pulled back, still able to taste him as she swallowed air, staring at him with wide eyes, her face streaked with tears, and then shoving him away.

He moved aside, letting her go, watching her as she stumbled out from the bathroom stall and back to the sink. She caught herself upon it, trembling, not certain why she had just done that. Not certain why she had just let him do that. She wasn’t aware of where he was until her comb was being set beside her hand, barely an inch away from her pinky, and she flinched away out of some instinct.

He was pressing against her, his lips buried into her brunette hair, and he nuzzled against her until he’d gotten to her ear; she could practically feel the smirk on his lips, when she couldn’t stand to look up and see it on his face.

“There is worse to me yet, Tobin,” he murmured against her, his heat almost seeming to consume her, despite the fact that his hands weren’t touching her anymore. Not at all. “Much worse, in fact. You’ve seen parts of it, but are you really so ready to go back to normal? When was the last time a man kissed you that way? When was the last time it was enough to make you want something more—and to mean it? Because I mean it, Tobin. I want you. If I thought you’d let me, I’d have you right here, until you were in no better state than that blonde was in. And she’s had more than a few glasses of champagne to make her especially receptive.”

Tobin swallowed hard, realizing that within his voice was almost a promise—a promise that he would, someday, do everything he was saying to her. “What do you want?”

“You. The taste of my world you think you’ve had— that’s nothing. But there isn’t a girl in it that could ever match the taste of your lips, no matter how eager they are to be taken in a fucking toilet stall. I’m not an idiot, I know all the damn reasons that I should have killed you that night. I know all the reasons I should kill you right now. But I’m not going to rape you, Tobin, and killing you would be a waste before I’ve had you.”