The memory hits me so hard I stop breathing. His face between my thighs, his hands gripping my hips, the sounds he made while he ate me like I was the first meal he'd had in years, and my traitorous, broken body arching into it, my hands pulling him closer, my voice making sounds I've never made before in my life. I came so hard I saw white, and then he just... left. Kissed my thighs and said goodnight and walked out of the room like he hadn't just taken me apart with his tongue and put me back together wrong.
I press my palms against my eyes until I see stars.
Okay. Okay.
I'm in his penthouse. Dominik Voronov bought me at an auction for a million dollars and then went down on me until I screamed.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and my bare feet hit the heated floor, the warmth of it travels up through my soles and into my calves and it feels so good that I just sit there for a moment, wiggling my toes against the wood like a child.
I finally stand and make my way to the door, peeking out to see if I can figure out where he is. The penthouse is still, but the smell of breakfast hits me and my stomach rumbles loudly.
Then I notice the clothes. There's a folded stack just outside the door, placed on the floor like someone slid them through the gap. A sweater, dark gray, cashmere. A flannel shirt in soft green plaid. A henley in charcoal. They're all too big for me. Men's clothes. His clothes.
I pick up the cashmere sweater and hold it to my face before I can stop myself, and the smell that hits me makes something in the bottom of my stomach clench. Skin and soap and warmth, a scent that's already been imprinted on my nervous system because I spent last night wrapped in his jacket breathing it in.
He wants me to wear his clothes. Clothes that are saturated with him.
I try to find it sinister. That way I could add it to the growing list of red flags that my survival brain is compiling with the furious efficiency of an accountant at tax time. The way he commanded me to spread my legs in the car and I did it. The way he put his mouth on me without asking and I let him. The way every single thing he does is a brick in a wall he's building around me, and I can see the wall going up and I'm not climbing over it.
I put the sweater on.
It falls to mid-thigh. The sleeves hang past my fingertips. It's the softest thing I've ever worn in my life, and it smells like him, and anger at myself flares in my gut at how much I don't hate it.
I find a pair of underwear in the closet, basic black cotton still in the packaging, and I pull those on and then I stand in the middle of the bedroom and face the door while trying to figure out what happens next.
What happens next is I have to open this door. Walk down the hallway. Enter the living space of a man who is holding me captive in the most beautiful prison I've ever seen. He'll be there. He'll look at me in his sweater and that quick hot flicker will flash over his face.
I open the door. Walk down the hallway.
He's in the kitchen.
He's standing at the stove with his back to me, and he's wearing a white t-shirt and dark sweatpants. His feet are bare. It's the most human I've seen him look. At the auction he was all sharp angles and tailored menace. In the car he was a voice and a pair of eyes in a mirror. Last night, between my legs, he was a force of nature I couldn't have stopped even if I'd wanted to.
But this. This is a man in his kitchen in the morning light, cooking eggs.
He knows I'm here. I can tell by the slight shift in his shoulders, the almost imperceptible tilt of his head. He registered my presence the moment I stepped into the hallway, and he's choosing not to turn around, and I realize with a start that he's giving me time. Time to look at him. Time to adjust. Time to walk into this room on my own terms instead of being summoned.
I stand at the edge of the kitchen island.
He turns, his eyes finding me. They drop to the sweater and a satisfaction so complete it's almost indecent crosses his face.
"Sit," he says.
I sit on one of the barstools at the island as he sets a plate in front of me. Scrambled eggs, toast, sliced fruit. A cup of coffee, black. He watches me look at it.
"I don't know how you take your coffee," he says.
It's such a mundane sentence. Such a normal, human, breakfast-table sentence that it knocks me sideways. He's asking about cream and sugar. The man who made me touch myself in the backseat of his car is asking about cream and sugar like both of those things are the same.
"Black is fine," I say, my voice rusty from sleep. I pick up the cup and take a sip. The coffee is good. Strong and hot and slightly bitter, the kind that costs more per bag than I used to spend on groceries in a week.
He doesn't feed me this time. He sets the fork beside the plate and turns back to the stove to make his own plate. He sits across the island from me, and we eat breakfast together like two people who chose to be here.
I eat everything. I don't pretend not to be hungry. The fight went out of me somewhere between the spa and the orgasm, and what's left is a girl in a cashmere sweater who is ravenous and tired and so confused by her captivity that she can't find the edges of it to push against.
This becomes the pattern.
It just happens. It follows the contours of least resistance, and the contours of this penthouse are designed to make resistance feel unnecessary.