Page 24 of The Queen (Masterpiece Duet 2)
Dr. Stanhope had held me, and I felt warm and tingly.
It felt good.
Damon’s hand on my back doesn’t feel good. It feels like a warning and a prayer. It feels like a thousand volts of lust. There’s no breaking this connection. I can’t imagine wanting to.
And this is only one-sided, energy flowing from him to me.
I don’t know where to touch him or whether I should. Somehow my hand lifts, all on its own. The back of my hand brushes his arm. It’s the completion of the circuit, and it sends a surge of sensation through me strong enough to be pain. There’s no time to dwell on that, because Damon uses the momentum to drag me closer. I fall into him, his body catching mine. It’s too dark to see anything but the gloss of dark eyes, the flash of white teeth. The sparks behind my eyelids as his hand cups my cheek.
His breath touches my lips, a soft exhale that might have been a word.
Then his mouth closes over mine. A kiss, but that isn’t the right word. A claiming. A question. An unbearable relief after long years of drought. He drinks me down, taking more than he has a right to, but I learn something—that I have more to give.
A moan escapes me. My whole body leans toward him, wanting more, wanting to give him more. He takes it with greedy presumption, the king accepting his right. And me eager to serve.
“Penny,” he murmurs. “Sweet Penny.”
He slides his hand behind my neck, tilting my head back. His tongue nudges my mouth open. It’s a firm demand, one that I’m helpless against. Open. Vulnerable. A stroke against my tongue, that’s my reward. Merciless intimacy so raw it makes my chest ache.
I make a sound—frightened.
It seems to wake him up from some wild slumber. He pushes back from me, making the whole bed rock. Slam as the solid wood bed frame hits the wall. “Christ,” he mutters.
The reprieve bites into me like a cold wind, whistling and desolate. “Wait.”
“Get back to your room,” he says, his voice sharp.
Sometimes strength means standing up to your enemies. Sometimes it means standing with them. “I don’t want to go.”
His hand on my wrist feels completely different than before. Not comforting. Not electric. This is something else. Menacing. He leans over me, making my heart pound in solemn warning. “I’ll fuck you if you want me to, honey. And then push you out of my bed.”
There are castles inside me, built on hopes I didn’t know I had. Not until they crumble. His words ring with truth. That’s what he’d do to me, and God, what else did I expect?
He presses close enough to brush his lips against my cheek, a perverse sweetness. “What’ll it be, Penny? Are you going to spread your legs for me?”
“You’re a bastard,” I say between clenched teeth.
He pushes me away with a rough laugh. “Guilty as charged.”
It’s not him I’m mad at when I stand on the cold wood floor in my pajamas. It’s the man who made him this way. Maybe he would have been an asshole no matter who his father was. But Jonathan Scott has left his mark on this man in more ways than one.
Even the darkness can’t completely hide the scars on Damon’s body.
“What was your dream about?” I ask softly.
His cocky amusement fades away. “I think you know.”
Jonathan Scott is a spider in the city of Tanglewood, spinning webs that can catch any one of us. It caught me once. I remember dark green tiles, black soil. Water rising. “He only had me one night.”
“One night was too fucking long.”
And how many nights did a small boy have to endure?
How many nights did a child suffer at the hands of a monster?
How many nights does Damon Scott suffer his nightmares by himself? “No one should have to go through the nightmares alone. If you want to kiss me… or if you want to hurt me… you know where to find me.”
Chapter Sixteen
Damon doesn’t come see me the rest of the night, which isn’t a surprise. The shock on his face had been gratifying, but it doesn’t change anything. He doesn’t want me.
Or he doesn’t want to want me, which almost feels worse.
Unable to sleep I go to work on the code and make a breakthrough.
My stomach sinks when I realize I’m looking at a complex polynomial curve. I feel sick, not because I can’t solve it but because it proves the message wasn’t sent by Avery. And that it was probably sent for me. The letters convert via hex code, which is simple enough, but the polynomial curve they describe is much more advanced. Graduate level math. Who would know how to make this? Who would know that I could solve it?
