Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 71

Chapter 71

Chapter 71

Aurelia’s POV

“How… how are you here?” I breathed.

。6

55 vouchers

His hand stayed locked around my arm, and behind the mask his eyes held mine, and the noise of the whole bright hall fell away to nothing.

“Time to go,” Rieck said. “You have had enough for one night.”

“I am not finished.”

“You are.” He didn’t raise his voice. He never had to. “Walk.”

He turned me towards the wide doors, one hand at the small of my back, moving me through the crowd as though we were only another couple leaving early.

I went, because a scene was the one thing I didn’t need. But I went very slowly. As slowly as I dared.

Beside me I felt him go tight, the patience running out of him by the inch.

“Aurelia.”

“I’m admiring the art.”

I didn’t get to admire anything else.

He bent, and the breath went out of me as the world turned upside down. He had thrown me over his shoulder like a sack of grain, one arm clamped across the backs of my knees, and he just kept walking.

“Rieck.” I shoved at his back. “Put me down. People are looking.”

“Let them look.”

“This is humiliating.”

“You should have walked.”

A black car was waiting at the curb, parked where the cameras didn’t reach.

Ronan stood by the back door, and his blank face cracked clean down the middle. He had never seen the Alpha carry anyone. The cold lord of the north didn’t touch what he didn’t have to.

The drive home was very quiet. I stared out at the city and refused to look at him, and he let me, which only made it worse.

When the car rolled into the bay beneath the tower, I didn’t move.

1/4

16:19 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 71

55

គ

55 vouchers

Ronan opened my door, but I stayed where I was, arms folded, chin set, every bit the spoiled child I couldn’t stop being.

“I am not getting out,” I said.

“Aurelia.”

“I can hear perfectly well. I am choosing to stay in the car.”

I should have known better, but I didn’t care.

He let out the long slow breath of a man whose patience had left hours before, and then he was around to my door, and his hands closed on me, and the world turned over for the second time that night.

Over the shoulder again, up out of the car and into the elevator, while I told the broad of his back exactly what I thought of him.

The doors opened on the penthouse. Marta was crossing the hall with a stack of towels, and she looked up, and the towels very nearly hit the floor. There was little in nine years she had not seen. And she had not seen

this.

“Marta,” Rieck said, level as a stone, as though he were not carrying his wife upside down past the good china. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, sir,” she managed, and was gone.

“Put me down,” I said, breathless now from hanging head first. “Rieck. I mean it.”

“I will.”

He carried me down the hallway, shouldered the bedroom door wide, and set me down on the covers with that same strange care.

Then he pulled the mask from his face and looked down at me, and that look stopped every clever thing I had been about to say.

His eyes had gone pale and bright at the edges. He braced a hand on the bed beside my head and leaned over me, the heat of him rolling down through the cool air between us.

“You walked into a room full of my enemies,” he said, low. “Alone. In a mask. And you believe the worst thing. that happened to you tonight is being carried to your own bed.”

“I had it handled.”

“You always think that.” His hand moved to my jaw, tilting my face up to his, his thumb dragging across my lower lip. “It is going to get you killed one day. And I find, lately, that I can’t allow that.”

My breath caught. “Why?”

“Stop talking,” he said, and kissed me.

2/4

16:19 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 71

នគ

5$

55 vouchers

He kissed me the way a man kisses when he has spent a whole night afraid and will not say the word about it, hard and deep and claiming.

And I should have stayed angry, but instead I came apart under it, my hands fisting in his shirt to drag him closer rather than push him away.

He followed me down, the weight of him settling over me. His hand moved down the line of my throat, over the silk at my breast, down to the long slit of the gown, and pushed it open along my thigh.

“Tell me to stop,” he said against my mouth, rough, giving me room to even as his palm spread hot over my bare hip. “Say it, and I will.”

I didn’t say it.

I pulled his mouth back to mine instead, and that was all the answer he needed.

His hands knew me by now, every part, and they took their time even as the want of him pressed hard against

He drew the gown from my body, then covered me again with the heat of his own skin, his mouth at my throat, my collarbone, the rise of my breast, until I was arching off the covers with his name on my lips.

When he finally settled between my thighs and pushed into me, slow and deep and whole, the sound that left me was nothing I had wanted to give. He caught it with his mouth and held still for a moment, his forehead dropped to mine, both of us breathing hard, and then he started to move.

It wasn’t lovely and it wasn’t cruel. It was him, all of him, the control he wore everywhere else stripped down to nothing but heat and hunger and the low rough words he pressed into my skin. Mine. My wife. Mine.

I wrapped my legs around him and rose to meet him and lost the thread of every angry thought I had carried into that hall.

Afterward we lay tangled in the dark, his heartbeat slowing under my hand, and neither of us moved away.

I woke up to grey light and an empty stretch of bed where the sheets had already gone cold.

I found him in the living room, dressed, a cup of black coffee untouched at his elbow, his phone in his hand, his jaw set hard. The easy quiet of the night before had gone out of him.

“Good morning,” I said.

He turned the phone so I could read the screen.

Headlines, one after another.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify