"Sit down." His voice drops low, barely above a murmur, but it carries the weight of a threat. Quiet. Controlled. The kind of calm that comes before a storm.
"No." My hand closes around the door handle, the metal cool against my clammy palm.
"You are not taking our child out of my sight." His voice hardens into steel, all pretense of civility stripped away. "Nor yourself. You're not going anywhere that puts you in danger."
"My father?—"
"Your father can deal with me if he has the balls to stand in my presence and look me in the eye."
I turn slowly on the tips of my stilettos, fury burning through my veins hot enough to scorch.
I slice a hand through the air between us. "No. I am tired of egotistical men controlling me. I'll find another way out from under my father." My chin lifts in defiance. "Getting under another one isn't smart."
His smile turns razor-sharp, his dark eyes glittering with something dangerous. "But didn't you already?"
The words land like a slap. Worse than a slap. He's throwing our night together in my face, weaponizing the most vulnerable moment of my life, using my own body against me.
Red colors the edges of my vision.
"Do not sully what we shared." The words tear out of me, and I'm shaking now, truly shaking, but not from fear. My chin lifts. My chest heaves with ragged breaths. Tears burn at the backs of my eyes, but I refuse to let them fall. I will not give him that. My nails bite crescents into my palms hard enough to leave marks. "Don't you dare do that. Do you really want to shame me for sleeping with you? Are you that low?"
Shadows pass over his handsome face, flickering through those dark eyes like storm clouds racing across a midnight sky. Regret, maybe. Or guilt. Or something darker still that I can't name. I don't know him well enough to read what lurks behind that controlled mask, what secrets he keeps buried beneath all that dangerous charm.
The shadows pass. His expression smooths.
I turn the door handle, my heart pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat.
"Delete them," I demand without looking at him.
"Why would I?" His voice carries a smile I refuse to witness. "They're beautiful. And that baby is mine."
"Delete them, or I walk out this door and you never see me again." I’m leaving anyway, but he doesn’t need to know that.
"You walk out that door, and those pictures find their way to your father." His tone doesn't change. Calm. Certain. Devastating. "And I'll make sure he knows they're from me."
I spin on my heel, disbelief and fury warring for dominance in my chest. "You wouldn't."
"I very much would." He rises from his chair with fluid grace and rounds the desk, pointing to the seat I abandoned. "Close the door and sit down. We need to talk."
The command in his voice. The absolute certainty that I'll obey. The arrogance dripping from every syllable.
I don't sit down.
Red floods my vision. My feet move before my brain catches up. One stride. Two. Three. My arm swings wide, palm flat, fingers tight, and I pour every ounce of rage and humiliation and betrayal into the blow. The impact jolts up my wrist, through my arm, into my shoulder. The crack of my palm against his cheek echoes off the walls like a gunshot. Satisfaction burns through my veins.
His head snaps to the side. When he turns back, blood beads on his lower lip where my ring caught the skin, a crimson droplet against that infuriatingly kissable mouth.
But he's smiling. Actually smiling, the bastard, his dark eyes lit with something that looks terrifyingly like approval.
"That's the kind of woman it will take to raise a Valentina baby." He wipes the blood with his thumb, examining it like it's a gift rather than a wound. "Don't lose your spunk, Ilona. This is just the beginning, my sweet jungle flower. You're going to need every ounce you can find."
The endearment turns my stomach to acid. Jungle flower. He whispered those two words against my skin while he made me come apart in his arms.
It was sexy then. Now it drives my blood pressure to heart attack levels.
"You don't get to call me that again." I'm shaking with fury, my palm stinging from the impact, my chest heaving with ragged breaths. "Ever." I jab a finger into his hard chest and immediately regret it but I swallow the jolt of pain.
"Then you're really going to hate what I have in store for you."