She was trapped and they both knew it. “I want to hear about these standards of yours. I want to hear what screening process the most self-indulgent, pleasure-seeking playboy in the world has for the women he—”
“I like my women wanton, willing and experienced. I like them stylish and sophisticated and full of confidence in and out of bed.” So basically, everything she was not, she realized. “I like them to want me in bed as if I was air.”
Oxygen seemed to be fading fast as he enunciated each word, his gaze full of molten hunger. Her skin tingled; her body ached.
“I like to not wonder if I would find a knife in my back while I’m kissing her or to be wished to hell while I’m moving inside her.”
“I would never knife you from the back,” she mumbled, her mouth drying at the erotic picture he painted.
His mouth curved into one of those rarely genuine smiles. “That is true. Should I continue?”
“No.”
“You’re prickly, infuriatingly naive,” he said it as if it was the most boring list in the world. “You have a lust/hate thing going on with me and...your virginity means you’ll be high maintenance in bed.”
“I do not have a lust/hate thing going on for you... What the hell do you mean, high maintenance?”
Damn it, she needed to find a way to stop his words from finding purchase inside her. Or a way to stop her body from wanting him so much...
Because no amount of twisting the truth was going to help her.
She wanted Dmitri with a hunger that knew no reason or rhyme. She wanted him to look at her as if she was the only woman on earth; she wanted him to worship her, look at her as if he couldn’t breathe if he didn’t have her.
For years, she had lived, cloaking herself in shame, unable to look at any man and not hate herself. It was the only way, clutching that self-disgust, that she had been able to go on.
The only way she had been able to slip into the skin of Jazmin, the pole dancer, and still face herself in the mirror come morning.
Now it was as though that shame was beginning to slide off her skin. Now it was as if she could breathe and face herself in the mirror again. For the first time, she could be a woman.
It was as if her sexuality, denied and deprived for so long, was on wings.
“Yes. I’ll have to teach you what to do, be gentle so that you’re not hurt, and then after the whole thing,” he drawled, as if it was the hardest thing to sleep with her, “I’ll have to hold you and mop your tears and lie that it was the most beautiful thing ever. Deflowering virgins is highly overrated, Jasmine.
“I like my sex fast, rough and without any accompanying drama, whereas you’re an emotional cannon waiting to go off. And as you seem to know very well, I’m incapable of anything but the most insubstantial of emotions.”
“I’m not an emotional cannon.”
He undid his cuffs and rolled back the sleeves. Plump veins ran over the muscular arm, the sight of coarse hair on that olive skin giving her a warm flush. “In the past week, you have knifed me, sobbed all over me, tried to kiss me and wanted to cuddle as though I was your favorite—”
“Only an utterly ruthless bastard would count those against me in such a way.”
“If you think I’m anything else, then you’re more foolish than I thought, Jas. Find another way to pay me back.”
“So that until then you will tug me along with you as if I was a pet you decided to keep while passing judgment on the choices I have had to make to survive.”
“Yes, that’s the one upside to this whole thing. I can tell you, repeatedly, what a naive, stubbornly annoying...” He looked away as if his fury couldn’t be contained by words.
“You almost sound as if you care.”
“And you sound far too desperate to hear that I care. I don’t care, Jas. My only interest is in keeping you alive. I don’t like even a pinprick of guilt, marring my lifestyle. So me looking after you is for purely selfish reasons.”
Could he not leave her even a fragment of her pride? But for once, Jasmine had a feeling it wasn’t about her, her shame, her nonexistent self-esteem.
Why was he always making sure she didn’t form an attachment to him? Why did he insist on reiterating what he didn’t feel for her?
What if it wasn’t about her?
She looked around the plane, thought of the bike, the hotel he had taken her to. His yacht, his expensive toys, his women... If Dmitri was the playboy he played so well, he wouldn’t have come for her like that.