Except now it was tinged with sexual need.
Hating himself, because her taste was already implanted in his very cells, he wrenched himself away from her. Christos, it wasn’t working. Nothing he did to keep her at a distance was working.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Every word was gritted out through a tight jaw.
Jas tried not to flinch and failed, hurt and shame diluting the haze of desire in her blood. With shaking fingers, she touched her tingling mouth, wondering if she would ever forget the taste of him.
“I’m offering myself to you. I’m saying—” a balloon could be crushing her lungs “—take what you paid for.”
She saw his flinch in the tightening of that concrete jawline, in the slow, almost imperceptible blink of his eyes, as if he was chasing away the shock before it could unsettle him completely. As if nothing he didn’t allow himself to feel was to be borne.
He pushed away from her then, and it was that exaggerated, you-are-plague kind of movement that pricked her. “And what would that be, agapita? See, to this minute, I’m not sure what made Noah think you were worth that atrocious amount of money. What drove another man to bid for you against me?”
Crackling energy arced into life around them, but she was damned if she backed down now. “Have sex with—”
A flare of warning in his eyes arrested the word on her mouth. Coiled energy seeped from his very pores, as if his usual facade was surface-thin now. “Be careful what you say to me, Jas.”
But she couldn’t let him intimidate her now or he would do it forever, she realized. It seemed they were engaged in some kind of power play. God knew how, for she had nothing to take him on with, but no way was she going to back down. “Take my virginity. Call my debt done. God, let us walk away from this impossible situation.”
“So you’re selling yourself to pay off your—”
She slapped her hand over his mouth, a surge of fury washing through her. “Don’t say it, or this time I’ll drive the knife deeper willingly.”
His mouth was a furnace against her palm. Slowly, as if it took him a tremendous amount of willpower, he pushed it back. “Then, what is it you’re proposing, thee mou?”
She looked away, struggling to marshal her thoughts. His taste still lingered on her lips; her scalp tingled with how hard he had held her.
Had it been a knee-jerk response, then, that kiss? Did men inevitably kiss back with such heat when a woman threw herself at them? Was Dmitri no different from all the other men whose lust was so easily inspired by naked flesh grinding a pole?
The thought made her more than a little sick. But the kiss had felt so personal, as though she was getting a part of Dmitri...
It was tragic how little she knew. Although she had a feeling it wouldn’t have come in handy with someone like Dmitri. It had been a week now since he had rescued her and yet she had no measure of him. At all.
“I’ll sleep with you once. Just once to get even.” Somehow, she held his gaze without betraying herself. “I won’t be your mistress, Dmitri.”
“You’re automatically assuming that you fit the role of my mistress, thee mou. You don’t. So don’t lose sleep over it.”
She barely resisted the urge to catch a glimpse of herself in the huge flat-screen monitor as his words ballooned inside her. She knew she was unfit for a lot of things, but this... “I’m not...fit to be one?”
“You’re not my type.”
“I thought anything with a set of boobs was your type.”
His gaze dipped to her chest and stayed there, the most unholy light in it. As if he was asking her to give him a peek.
Heat claimed her face, and she folded her arms repressively. She knew what would wipe that look off his face, and for a self-indulgent second, she was so tempted to do it, but...her mouth went dry just at the thought of it.
“How would you know what I prefer, Jasmine?” Nice and pleasant and warm, as if they were discussing the weather.
“The tabloids are full of your manly exploits, as they like to call them. Orgies and parties aboard your yacht, motorbike races, boxing matches with other men who have to thump and pummel each other to prove their stick is bigger than everyone else’s—”
His sudden laughter filled the cabin and she stared hard. The man was so unfairly gorgeous...
“Your very lifestyle is providing an economy for some of these magazines.”
“And you were spending your hard-earned cash on them?”