Page 16 of Merciless Wager
“W-why are you doing this to me?” she finally asked softly.
I looked over her shoulder at the two men. “Would you both leave us be?”
“Sure thing, Boss,” both Conor and Liam said in unison, and I waited for them to step outside before I turned back to the blonde.
She was nervously pulling at the long, straight strands of blonde framing her face as her striking blue eyes glistened with unshed tears. Her luscious fucking lips still held a slight quiver to them, and I felt the overwhelming desire to lean in and press my mouth to hers.
I didn’t even enjoy kissing all that often. That was something I hardly ever did, but I wanted to now. This girl had the potential to fuck my life up in ways I hadn’t even considered when agreeing to secure her for Kingston and Cillian. Aurora was unlike any of the women I often fucked. She was even more breakable, but never looked it more than she did now. And that was a turn on I was finding very hard to resist.
“Why?” she asked me once more.
“Let me tell you a story, Bellezza. Once?—”
“What does that mean?” she asked me.
I shook my head. “That’s unimportant right now. Back to my story. Now, where was I? Oh, yes. Once upon a time, let’s just use last night, for example, a weak coward with a gambling addiction sat down opposite me. He already owed a considerable sum of money to my family, then proceeded to try to beat me, even agreeing to use his unsuspecting girlfriend as a chip in the game. Lo and behold, he lost the hand, his money, and the girl.”
She started to shake her head profusely. “He wouldn’t.”
“But he did, and since I’m a man with very little patience, I wanted my prize right away. A few text messages from the man to his girl, and she stepped into a parking garage and into my car. Now, she is all mine just as he’d promised she would be.”
“I’m not yours,” she said to me, and I shrugged nonchalantly.
“Maybe not in the ways I want just yet, but we have some time.”
“Asshole,” she said while shooting daggers at me.
“Back to our story time. Said girl is now delusional as she believes her prince will ride in to save her, all the while he went to a strip club where the usual girls took what little money he had left as they fucked the small dick fucker.”
“You’re wrong.”
“About which part? His small dick, or the fact that while you were being handed over to me to do with you whatever I wanted, he was getting off with other women. I do have videos I can show you of that if you?—”
“Noooo,” she cried out as she dropped her face into her hands.
This time, she did start to cry, and I turned away as she began to openly sob into those hands. Her voice was etched with pain, and the kind I lived to derive from others. For some damn reason, I wasn’t gaining any pleasure from it at this moment because her bad morning was about to become even worse.
“And that’s not all,” I finally said to her after I’d walked to the kitchen and retrieved a bottle of water from the refrigerator for her. I had also gotten myself one, and after handing Aurora hers, I downed mine in a few large sips before turning my focus back on her.
She was eyeing the bottle suspiciously and I cursed. “For fuck’s sake. I didn’t poison the fucking thing. Drink because you’re as white as a damn sheet. I need you alive for what comes next.”
She slowly removed the cap from the bottle. “What comes next?” she asked as she took a small swallow of hers.
“You’ll be handed off to the man you’ll marry.”
She sputtered at that, and the small amount of water was spit out. “What?”
“Don’t be so surprised. It’s a common thing in our world.”
“Our world? This isn’t the seventeenth century.”
“Ahh, you still believe you’re just the daughter of Noel and Samantha Winslow.”
“I am,” she told me. “They adopted me when I was just a few days old.”
“I’m aware of that, Bellezza. As I said last night, I know more about you than you know about yourself. Let me continue.”
She shifted on the couch, but kept her icy cold eyes on me. She wanted to freeze me out and maybe even cut with their icy shards, but instead, her determination to merely crack but not break was making me hotter and more aroused by the minute.
