Strong Enough (Tall, Dark, and Dangerous #1)(40)

She tips her head to one side to consider me, a sweetly pained expression on her face. I recognize it for what it is. And I hate seeing it.

Pity.

“Is that what you think? That you’re a monster?” I don’t answer her. I hold my tongue, gritting my teeth against all the uncharacteristic emotions swirling through me right now. Anger, disbelief, bitterness. Hope. Cruel desire. “Let me tell you something, Jasper,” she says, dropping the sheet and moving to straddle me.

Despite the fact that I just slaked my hunger for her, despite the fact that I hate this subject and my obvious weakness in telling her so much about myself, I feel my cock stir instantly to life, rising toward her warm moisture.

She does things to me, things no other person has ever done. She makes me feel . . . Hell, I don’t know. She just makes me feel. And that’s dangerous. For both of us. But will it stop me? No. Because I’m a cold, calculating man who puts feeling and consideration aside for what must be done. It’s who I have to be in order to be able to do what I have to do. So whether she believes it or not, I am the monster.

“You’re a foolish woman if you believe otherwise,” I bite, holding on to my anger like a kid refusing to give up his candy. After so long of never letting emotion in, letting some of my fury take hold is darkly invigorating.

“Maybe I am, but monsters don’t love, Jasper. And whether you see it that way or not, you love your mother. You love her enough to never see her again just to spare her pain and suffering.”

“My father loved her, too, but he made her more miserable than anyone on the planet. It is possible to love someone so much that it hurts them. Or love them and still hurt them.”

“I’m sure it probably is, but that’s not what you do. I can’t believe that.”

“Then you’re a fool. Just like I said.”

She is unflappable, a smile curving her lips as she leans toward me. “You’re not a monster. I couldn’t do this to a monster,” she says in a husky voice, brushing her silky lips over mine. I hold perfectly still, fighting with the anger that’s roiling within me. I want to believe her, but I know better. It’s the reality of that disparity—what I am versus what she thinks I am—that keeps some softer emotion from overtaking that anger. So I let it flow. To protect her from me, I let it flow so that she can see. So that she can know.

“You’re making a mistake, Muse. I’m not playing around.”

“I’m not either,” she continues, tracing my lower lip with the tip of her tongue. “Unless this feels like play.” She lightly scrapes her fingernails down my stomach, reaching between us to cup my tightening balls.

I’m balanced on a pinhead, teetering between violence and something I can’t identify. I give her one last chance to come to her senses before I go with what I know, with what I’m good at.

“Do you really want to know what it feels like to play with a monster?”

“Yes,” she breathes into my mouth.

“Then I’ll show you how a monster plays,” I hiss against her lips.

She gasps in surprise when I roll her over, pinning her to the mattress. “One last chance,” I tell her, restraining both wrists above her head with one of my hands, leaving her open and vulnerable beneath me. I bite down on her bottom lip, hard enough to draw a single drop of blood. I taste the coppery liquid on my tongue. It’s like high octane in the jet engine of a raging machine.

“Show me,” she pants, a miniscule trace of fear in her voice. That’s good, though. She needs to know who she’s dealing with and how disgusted she should be by him. Scaring her is the best thing I can do for her.

I lick the blood from her lip as the last of my control slips through my fingers. “I will destroy you, too,” I confess, guilt and desire and reluctance fueling me.

As if to prove my point, my sick, twisted point, I crush my mouth to hers, grinding our lips together, forcing her to open for me. When I taste the inside of her mouth, the submission there, my blood ignites. Suddenly, I can’t get enough of her, of her unconditional acceptance of the black beast that lives deep within me.

I push my knee between hers, parting her legs until I rest between them. I reach down to find her slippery core and I pinch the tiny muscle within her folds, rolling it between my fingers. She half cries, half moans against my mouth, her hips bucking against me. I look down into her wide, excited eyes and I feel moisture pour out onto my fingers as I thrust them into her.

“J-Jasper,” she begs.

I revel in her response.

“Don’t ask me for mercy. Monsters don’t know mercy.”

She gulps in air, her brilliant eyes fixed on mine as I spread her further. I wedge my hips between her legs and guide my cock to her entrance. We watch each other for three intense seconds—one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi—recognizing each other for exactly what we are, and then I slam into her body with one brutal stroke. Her head knocks against the headboard, but that doesn’t stop me. I withdraw and pound into her again, clamping my teeth down on one beaded nipple just as her body clamps down around mine.

I ride her silently, ruthlessly, aware only of her sounds of pained ecstasy and the heat that leeches from her body, from her soul into mine. I’m alive. Finally, after all this time, I’m alive.

Spiraling upward in my anger, in the simple emotion that I’ve fought for so long, I find that I can’t stop. It’s as though now that I’ve finally let feeling in, I gave up control over it. It was either or. Be dead or be alive. Not both. Never both.