Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Rieck’s POV

I stood under the water and tried to put my own house back together.

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The casserole was still on the table downstairs, half eaten. Marta was gone. My wife was in a black dress that was barely a dress, sitting on a chair too close to mine with her thigh against my thigh.

I had walked away from the table. I had walked past her into the bedroom. I had said I needed a shower, a truth and a lie at the same time, because the truth was I had needed two minutes alone before I did something I couldn’t undo.

“She is acting strange,” I suddenly whispered to myself. “But why?”

She had given Marta the day off. She had cooked. She had served. She had tilted her knee against mine on purpose. She had pulled her dress lower at the shoulder and looked at me like I was an answer to a question.

None of these things were Aurelia. The Aurelia I knew bit her lip and twisted her wedding band and waited for me to set the rules. But tonight the rules had her name on them.

“Is she trying to make me fall in love with her?”

I was Rieck Valerius. I was the cold son of a colder father. I had slept with women whose names I hadn’t bothered to learn. I had buried two beta cousins and three rival wolves in the east territory and I had done it without one full night of lost sleep. I did not fall and I did not loosen my hand on a leash I had built myself.

Suddenly the bathroom door opened and I didn’t need to turn my head to know it was.

But before I could say anything, she stepped into the shower behind me and she was naked.

“Aurelia.”

“Rieck.”

“Get out,”

“No.”

When I turned, she was standing two feet from me with her hair loose around her shoulders and her chin up and her hand resting flat against her own collarbone the way a woman does when she is making herself stay.

I had never seen her like this. Not in the elevator the first night, not against the glass yesterday, not in any of the rooms in between. She had always been turned away. Or covered up. Or shaking.

But she wasn’t shaking now.

“I shower alone,” I said. “Always.”

“Tonight is a different order.”

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17:00 Fri, Jul 31

Chapter 16

She used my own line on me.

I tried to step around her, but her hand caught my wrist. Small fingers. Wet. Surprisingly strong.

“Stay. Please.”

“Aurelia, what the hell are you doing?”

“Being your wife.”

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She quickly moved closer and the whole length of her bare skin pressed against the whole length of mine and I felt every alarm I had ever installed in my body go off.

Then her hand slowly closed around me as she looked up at my face the way she had looked at me when she had walked out of Kowalski Tower yesterday morning. Small. Private. A little astonished at herself. And in front of her, on her knees, was the only place she could possibly be going.

“Aurelia. Stand up.”

But she didn’t stand up. Instead she took me into her mouth.

I didn’t know how a man’s hand makes tile crack, but mine did, a small fine line shooting up the wet white square beside her head, and I felt my whole spine lock and a sound came out of my throat that I had never made before, low and broken and not at all human.

“Aurelia,” I whispered.

Her small hand was at the base, her small mouth was working, and her wet hair was stuck to the side of my thigh. Her eyes met mine for a moment, dark and brimming.

I put my hand in her hair to make her stop, but I didn’t make her stop. Instead I gripped her hair and held her there and the heat of her mouth and the soft drag of her tongue and the small sound she made low in her throat tipped me over an edge I had not even seen coming.

I tried to pull her off. I told myself to pull her off. But my hand did not pull her off. My hand pressed her closer and I went, with no warning, and I tried to say her name and what came out was no word at all.

She didn’t move. She didn’t shrink back. She swallowed, her eyes wet, lashes stuck together with steam.

And I stood with my hand in her hair and my chest heaving and a small wild thing jumping inside me that I hadn’t let out of its cage in a long, long time.

“Stand up,” I ordered, and my voice was a stranger’s voice.

The moment she stood, I caught a fistful of her wet hair at the back of her skull and turned her. I pressed her up against the tile beside the cracked square. The water was still running. The room was full of steam and the smell of her.

“You started this,” I said.

“I know.”

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17:00 Fri, Jul 31

Chapter 16

“I am going to finish it.”

“Please.”

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I dropped to one knee and lifted one of her thighs over my shoulder. Then I put my mouth where my mouth wanted to be.

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I didn’t let go of her in the shower.

I shut off the water with one hand and wrapped her in a towel with the other. I half carried her across the bathroom, across the bedroom, and dropped her on the white duvet that was still made because I hadn’t let her sleep in this bed properly in twenty-four hours.

She tried to sit up, but I put my palm on her sternum and pressed her flat.

“Stay there.”

“Rieck”

“Quiet.”

I crawled up the bed between her thighs and put my mouth on her again. She bent her back, her fingers tangling in my hair, and I let her this time because she was not going for my face. She was going for what was hers. And it was hers tonight.

She came against my tongue with my name in her teeth. Her hips lifted off the bed and I pinned her hips down with one forearm across her belly and kept going until her legs were shaking and her breath was a sob and her hand had gone limp in my hair.

Only then did I move.

I came up over her and slowly slid two fingers into her. She was wet and open and her eyes were closed and her mouth was bitten and she was still pulsing around me in soft little aftershocks.

Then I pulled my fingers out and slid into her in one stroke.

“Rieck.”

“I know.”

She was so close already. She was still coming down from the last one. She was a string pulled all the way and I was the hand that had pulled it. I held still inside her for one heartbeat and just stared at her face.

Her hands were on my back. On my shoulders. Holding on. Her eyes were on mine, open, wet, undone.

I started to move but I didn’t last long. I didn’t pretend to.

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