Complete Me(52)

“I think I’m destroyed,” I say with a smile. “I don’t know that I can ever move again.”

“No? That’s too bad.” He moves down my body gently stroking my skin with his fingers, his lips. When he reaches the scars on my inner thighs, he traces a fingertip over the worst of them then lifts his head to look at me. I draw in a shuddering breath, done in by everything I see reflected in his eyes. Love, desire, respect.

“Destroyed or not,” he says, “I have to have you again.”

“Take me,” I say, reaching for him and tugging him up my body, spreading my legs and lifting my hips in invitation at the same time. He enters me slowly, filling me, and we move together in a sensual rhythm that makes me want to cry out with pleasure as he fills me.

I arch up and draw his mouth to mine, connecting myself fully to this man. “Turn over,” I beg when I break the kiss. “I want to see you under me.”

He raises a brow but complies, and I shift my hips as I straddle him, taking him even deeper as I rock slowly, then ease myself up and down to tease his steel-hard cock. My eyes are open and I’m watching his face, his beautiful face that I have seen through so many emotions—humor and ecstasy, anger and frustration, and on and on and on. Right now, though, he just looks happy, and something I think might be pride swells within me. Damien Stark is a complicated man. And yet I am what he needs.

Despite my bliss, Carmela’s words come back to me, and I cannot help but be struck by how they mirror my earlier dark thoughts. That once reality pokes its head in, things start spiraling out of control.

“What is it?” Damien asks, his eyes intent upon my face.

I do not want to bring a dark cloud between us, but I also don’t want to hide my fears from Damien. Not when I know that he is the only one capable of soothing them.

“Stupid stuff,” I say. “I was thinking about what Carmela said. About reality.”

“Carmela’s a cold bitch. And the only reality I know is you. Don’t tell me you doubt that.”

“I don’t,” I say emphatically. “But, Damien, all the noise outside of us. I don’t want to feel like we’re living in a fantasy bubble, but sometimes I think that we are, and that reality keeps trying to break through. The trial. Stalker mail and texts. The press. And now your old girlfriends.”

“Fuck them,” he says.

“Damien, I’m serious.”

“So am I,” he says, his expression as intense as I have ever seen it. “At the end of the day, it’s just you and me. We make our own reality, Nikki. And no one can take it from us.”





Chapter Nine

As we head down in the elevator the next morning with the bellman and a cart full of luggage, I keep glancing back, unable to shake the feeling that I’ve forgotten something.

“I keep that room on a permanent lease,” Damien says. “If you left something behind, the hotel will ship it to us.”

“You own the room?” I don’t know why I’m surprised; after all, he owns much of the known universe. And I was already aware that he keeps a permanent suite at the Century Plaza hotel for clients who travel to Los Angeles.

“Enough clients visit the Stark International office here to justify the expense.” He speaks casually, as if it’s no big deal that he leases one of the most expensive rooms at one of the most expensive hotels in Europe for three hundred sixty-five days out of the year. “If the maids find anything, the concierge will call our corporate liaison. Don’t worry.”