Because You Are Mine Part VIII: Because I Am Yours (3 page)

The conflict warring inside him was too much. He removed the vibrator and tossed it onto the bed.

“Stand,” he said, arousal making him sound harsher than he intended. The color in her cheeks had deepened when he spun her toward him. A sheen of perspiration shone on her brow and upper lip. She was beyond beautiful. He burrowed the ridge of his forefinger into the drenched crevice between her labia. She gasped, but he kept his hand motionless.

“If you want to come, show me,” he demanded.

She looked up at him, her eyes glazed with intense arousal, but he saw her confusion.

“You may come against my hand, but you have to show me you want it. I’m not moving.”

She bit at a trembling lower lip, and he almost gave in. Almost.

“Go on,” he prompted.

She shut her eyes, as if to protect herself from his gaze, and began to thrust her hips against his finger. A moan fell past her lips. He watched, enthralled, keeping his hand, finger, and arm firm, but not stroking her, making her work for it.

“That’s right. Show me that you have no shame. Show me that you can submit to desire,” he rasped. She bobbed her hips more stringently, hopping up and down against his hand . . . so desperate for her pleasure. When a small, frustrated cry popped from her throat, he almost relented.

Almost.

“Open your eyes, Francesca. Look at me,” he demanded, his voice breaking through her wild quest for relief.

She opened her eyelids sluggishly as she continued to ride his stationary hand. He saw her desperation, her utter helplessness, her fear that her need was greater than even her pride.

“Don’t be afraid,” he murmured. “You’re more beautiful to me right now than you’ve ever been. Now come against my hand.”

He flexed his biceps, applying pressure, giving her the relief she so desperately needed and deserved. He shut his eyes briefly at the delicious sensation of her warm juices anointing his fingers as she climaxed.

A moment later, he spun her and managed to get out a couple words from his lust-dazed brain, telling her to bend over and brace herself against the footboard again. When he finally drove his cock into her clinging liquid heat, his eyes sprang wide. It was like entering a woman his first time—no, immeasurably better—a whole new arena of life, a fresh, intimidatingly powerful experience.

He lost himself in her, everything seeming to go black for a period of time as pleasure and need swamped him, pummeling at his consciousness. He bucked against her like a wild man, his lungs burning, cock aching, muscles clenching . . . soul tearing.

“Francesca,” he grated out, sounding angry, even though he wasn’t anymore. He opened his hands around her delicate ribcage and pulled her up so that she stood before him, her upper body slightly bent forward. He continued to fuck her, feeling her heart beating rapidly in his hands, the shudders quaking her flesh as she climaxed, the muscular walls of her pussy clamping and convulsing around his pillaging cock.

Without thinking, he pushed her upper body down again, his hands falling to her hips, fucking her with short, hard thrusts, his teeth bared in a rictus of blinding pleasure. He jerked her against him, his muscles clenching so tight he lifted her feet off the floor.

Orgasm ripped through him with the power of a lightning strike. He groaned in agonized bliss as he began to come at Francesca’s farthest reaches. A sharp, primal need overwhelmed him, even in the midst of his crisis—a need to mark her, to utterly posses her . . . make her his.

He jerked his steaming, glistening cock out of the heaven of her pussy and pumped, ejaculating on her ass and her back, until his essence pooled on her skin.

He just stood there for a full minute after the cyclonic storm had passed, his cock gripped tight in his hand, gasping for air, and staring down at the powerful image of her nude body dripping with his semen. He thought of how ruthlessly he’d punished her, of how he’d forced her to swallow her pride and bring herself off on his hand, of how he’d fucked her like a madman.

Regret flickered into his awareness. Then it roared.

He helped her to stand, then went to the bathroom to retrieve a towel. He gently dried her, then unbuttoned his dress shirt and draped it over her nakedness. It’d been wrong of him to expose her so greatly.

He met her solemn stare with supreme effort as he buttoned up the shirt, covering soft skin that he wanted to linger over . . . to cherish. He opened his mouth to speak, but what could he say? His actions had been harsh and selfish and probably unforgivable.

He’d intended to prove her foolishness for believing she’d fallen in love, but now that he’d likely succeeded, he felt nothing but a bone-deep regret.

Unable to stand her dark-eyed gaze a moment longer, he turned and walked out of the bedroom.

* * *

Ten days later, Davie stood in her closet wearing a tuxedo and whisking hangers along the rack while Francesca looked on listlessly from where she sat at the edge of her bed.

“What about this?” Davie asked, coming out of the closet holding a dress.

She blinked when she saw that he held the boho dress she’d so foolishly worn to her celebratory dinner at Fusion several months ago—the night she’d first met Ian. It seemed impossible that her life had changed so drastically in such a short span of time. It seemed unlikely that she’d fallen so profoundly in love, and then lost at it with Francesca-like expertise. But then when she considered everything, it made depressing sense.

Davie noticed her less-than-enthusiastic appraisal of the dress. He held it up and examined it. “What? It’s cute.”

“I’m not going, Davie,” she said, her voice sounding hoarse from not being used.

“Yes, you are,” Davie said, giving her an uncharacteristic fierce glance. “You’re not going to hole up in your room for your entire Thanksgiving vacation.”

“Why not? It’s my vacation,” she said dully, picking up a decorative pillow and picking at the tassel. “I haven’t bailed on anything I was supposed to do. Don’t I get a chance to veg out in my room, if I want to?”

“So . . . the truth finally comes out. Francesca Arno is the very type of girl that she used to despise, who sulked and refused to eat after breaking up with a guy.”

“Ian and I didn’t break up. We just haven’t spoken in a week a half.”
And we’re likely never going to speak again
. She thought of the way he’d looked before he’d left her standing in the plane’s bedroom suite—his regret, his bewilderment . . . his hopelessness. She believed he had something to offer her beyond sex, but
he
didn’t. And wasn’t it a two-way venture? What did it matter if she had all the faith in the world, yet he doubted? “Besides,” she continued, “breaking up implies that we were together to begin with, and we weren’t. Not in any traditional sense of the word.”

“Have you even tried to contact him?” Davie said, hanging the dress in her bathroom.

“No. I can still feel his fury. It’s like it’s emanating all the way from the Chicago River to our house.”

“It’s not fury,” she thought she heard her friend mutter under his breath.

“
What
?” she asked, puzzled.

“It’s your
imagination
, ’Ces. Why don’t you call him?”

“No. It wouldn’t matter.”

Davie sighed. “Both of you are so stubborn. You can’t engage in a standoff forever.”

“I’m not in a standoff.”

“Oh, I see. You’ve given up entirely, then.”

For the first time in days, anger flickered into her hopelessness at Davie’s words. She shot him an irritated glance and he grinned, holding out his hand.

“Come on. Justin and Caden are waiting. Plus, we have a surprise for you.”

She exhaled in frustration, but stood. “I don’t want to be cheered up. And even if I did want to be, why would you guys drag me to a stupid singles meet-up—a black-tie event, no less—in order to do it? You knew I didn’t have anything good to wear. I hate these events. You used to, as well.”

“I’ve changed my mind. This is for a good cause,” he said as she passed him on the way to the bathroom.

“What, saving my ravaged heart?”

“I’d settle for getting you out of this house,” Davie replied, unaffected by her dripping sarcasm.

* * *

The singles black-tie event was at a new, trendy club on North Wabash, downtown. Caden and Justin were in rare form in the car on the way to it, Friday-night buoyant and brashly handsome in their newly purchased tuxes. Francesca, on the other hand, was already ready to leave, and they hadn’t even gotten there yet. Horrible, wonderful memories had started to barrage her when she put on the boho dress and recalled in vivid detail the last time she’d worn it.

The woman wears the clothes, Francesca. Not the other way around. That’s the first lesson I’ll teach you.

She shivered at the memory of Ian’s rough, quiet voice. How she missed him. It was like an open wound deep inside her, a place she couldn’t reach in order to soothe.

Davie was having trouble finding parking near their destination, and they’d been circling around for a while now. She looked out of the car window as they crossed the Chicago River and saw the Noble Enterprises building towering a few blocks away.

Was she really the same naive young woman who had attended her celebratory cocktail party there, she who’d been so brittle, so uncertain . . . so defiant lest anyone would notice? And was it really she who had first entered Ian’s penthouse, her enthrallment associated more with the enigmatic man who stood beside her than the sight of his magnificent penthouse and display of art . . . the stunning view.

“They’re alive, the buildings . . . some more than others. I mean they seem like it. I’ve always thought so. Each one of them has a soul. At night, especially . . . I can feel it.”

“I know you can. That’s why I chose your painting.”

“Not because of perfectly straight lines and precise reproductions?”

“No. Not because of that.”

Her eyes burned at the potent memory. He had seen her so well, even then, seen things in her she hadn’t. He’d cherished those things, cultivated her strengths until . . .

. . . no. The answer was no. She was no longer that same young woman.

Davie parked in a paid garage on Wacker Drive, south of the river, farther east than their desired destination. Francesca shivered uncontrollably when the river wind sliced straight through her thin wool coat as they crossed the bridge. Davie noticed and took her under his arm. Justin got into the spirit and put his arm around her from the other side, hunkering around her, their bodies helping to protect. Caden, too, had to join in on the gallantry, much to her amusement, hooking arms with Justin to help block her from the brutal, east lake wind. They’d bundled her so close between them that as they guided her down the sidewalk once they cleared the river and bridge, Francesca stumbled.

“You guys, I can’t see!”

“But you’re warm, aren’t you?” Justin asked jovially.

“Yes, but . . .”

Suddenly Justin and Caden were pushing her into a revolving glass door. Her eyes sprang wide when she realized where they’d maneuvered her. She balked, but Justin was pushing from behind her and she had no choice but to go forward into the Noble Enterprises lobby.

She stared around, aghast to find herself in Ian’s territory so suddenly . . . so
undesirably.

Several dozen faces looked around at her ungraceful arrival. She saw Lin’s familiar, smiling face, and Lucien’s and Zoe’s . . . and—she gasped—Anne and James Noble beamed at her from a distance. That elegant man with the salt-and-pepper hair that held up his champagne glass to her in a silent salute, wasn’t that Monsieur Garrond, the curator of the Musee de St. Germain whom Ian had introduced her to in Paris? No. It couldn’t be.

Her eyes widened in sheer disbelief when she recognized her parents standing awkwardly next to a fern, her father tight-lipped, but her mother doing her best to attempt a warm smile.

“Why is everyone looking at me?” she whispered to Justin when he stepped up next to her. A panic rose in her chest at the surreal scene before her. Justin kissed her warmly on the cheek.

“It’s a surprise
. Look
, Francesca. It’s all for you. Congratulations.” She gaped at where he pointed, the once-empty swath of wall that dominated the lobby. Her painting had been framed and mounted. It looked awesome . . . perfect . . .

Justin gently tilted her jaw when she couldn’t stop gawping at the centerpiece, urging her to see what else was in the room. The entire lobby had been filled with her paintings, each displayed on easels, all of them professionally mounted and framed. People were strolling around in black-tie attire, sipping champagne, and seemingly admiring her work. A small string quartet played Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2.

She glanced from Justin to Davie, slain. Davie gave her a reassuring smile. “Ian planned it,” he said quietly. “Some of the most affluent collectors, renowned art experts and critics, museum curators and gallery owners from around the globe are here tonight. This party is in your honor, Francesca . . . a chance for the world to see just how talented you really are.”

She cringed inwardly.
Oh my God
.
All those people looking at my work? But no one appeared to be laughing or snidely incredulous, at least
, she thought as she checked several faces anxiously.

“I don’t understand. Did Ian plan this before London?” she asked.

“No. He contacted me a day or two after your return from London and asked me to help him arrange things. I had all of the paintings mounted and framed. We’ve even managed to acquire four more of your paintings to add to the collection. Ian can’t wait to show them to you.”

A sudden prescience struck her, and she looked into the crowd.

Ian stood next to his grandparents, looking somber, regal, and devastatingly gorgeous in a classic black tux with bow tie. His gaze was alight as it pinned her . . . soulful. Only Francesca, who had grown to know him so well, saw the shadow of anxiety ghosting features that would have looked cold and impassive to other eyes.