Jordana shook her head. “It wasn’t him. It doesn’t matter how I know. I only wish I’d understood how interchangeable I was to you before I let you touch me last night.” She blew out a jagged laugh. “Then again, I knew that today and I didn’t stop you just now.”
“What are you talking about?” Nathan demanded, his deep voice taking on a thunderous edge. “What the hell makes you say I think you’re interchangeable with anyone?”
“I know you were with one of the club’s sex workers after you left me with Elliott last night. I saw you, Nathan. That’s what I meant by torment.”
She tried to pivot from him, but he caught her, didn’t give her the chance to get away. “Are you saying you were there? When? Just what do you think you saw, Jordana?”
“I saw you with her—the brunette,” she blurted, glad she didn’t know the woman’s name for fear that she would sound even more jealous and injured. “You were in one of the private rooms with her. You paid her a lot of cash and the two of you walked out together.”
He listened, more calmly than she might have expected. He didn’t say anything, but as she spoke, the hardness began to ebb from his ruthless gaze. His square jaw was still rigid but no longer seemed on the verge of shattering. “You’re right, Jordana. I did take one of La Notte’s sex workers into the dens with me last night. As you saw, I compensated her for her service.”
Jordana stared up at him. Had she really felt relief that he hadn’t tried to spare her feelings by lying about what he’d done? Hearing him admit it all so casually seemed to chip off tiny pieces of her heart with each detail he confirmed.
“I think it’s best if you go now, Nathan. I hope you’ll respect my wishes and not come back again.”
He gave the slightest shake of his dark head. “I don’t think so.”
Jordana frowned. “I want you out of my house.”
“No, you don’t.”
His hand was still wrapped around her wrist. With one flex of his powerful arm, he drew her toward him. Their bodies contacted, his hard and unyielding, hers boneless and melting at the feel of so much hot male power pressed against her.
“You don’t want any such thing. You want me to tell you I didn’t do things with the human female at the club that you want me to do to you. You want to hear that I didn’t fuck her. That I wouldn’t have used you last night the same way I’ve used the workers at La Notte. As a meaningless, interchangeable tool for my release.”
“Let go of me, Nathan.”
“I’d like to.” He exhaled a sharp, humorless laugh. His eyes glittered, sparking with fresh embers. “Believe me, I’d like nothing more than to be able to let you go. I’d like to tell you that I’m every bit the asshole you think I am. I’m no prize, make no mistake there. I did leave here to finish what we started with someone else at the club. Touching you, feeling your tight, wet heat with my fingers made my cock so hard, all I could think about was burying it inside you. God help you, it’s all I’m thinking about right now too.”
His erection crushed into her abdomen, thick and alive with heat. It pulsed through the thin barrier of her clothing, each heavy throb making her own heartbeat pound deeper in response. Awareness made her stomach clench, turned the ache in her core into a molten yearning.
“I’m a Hunter, Jordana. I don’t wait for invitations. I don’t ask for permission. I pursue, I conquer. Then I move on and I don’t look back. That’s how it’s always been for me. That’s how I live.” Cold truth, made all the more cruel when he was stroking her cheek and neck, his thumb moving in maddening little swirls over her throbbing carotid. “I’m not a gentle man. Neither are my needs. You wouldn’t like my methods for slaking them. So when I left here last night, it was because I wanted to fuck my need for you out of my head, out of my system. I had to, do you understand?”
“Stop,” she whispered brokenly.
Despite the harshness in him, despite the fear she knew she should be feeling because of all that he said and all that he was, it was this last admission that was the hardest to accept.
It was all too easy to picture him doing just what he described. His mouth on another woman. His hands giving pleasure to someone else.
Someone else whose heart probably wasn’t as foolish as hers.
“I don’t want to hear any more, Nathan. I can’t do this with you anymore. I’m not like those other females you prefer. Those other females you … fuck.”
The word felt foreign on her tongue, not something she’d ever uttered in front of a man before. Certainly not to a man who’d had his tongue down her throat and his fingers between her legs more than once in the past twenty-four hours.
A man she wanted inside her with a yearning that bordered on sheer, reckless lunacy.
Nathan growled then, low and deep and lethal.
“No, you’re not like them, Jordana.” When she tried to look away, to hide her need from him, he brought her face back up, forcing her to meet his gaze. “I wanted to prove that to myself last night. I wanted to convince myself that you meant nothing to me and that my craving for you could be satisfied by someone else. Anyone else. I wanted to … but I didn’t.”
Jordana gaped at him, afraid to believe. Afraid to hope. “But I saw you with that woman. You said yourself you paid her for servicing you.”
“Yes,” he admitted evenly. “She offered me her vein and her body, for a price. But once I took the woman into the dens, I realized she didn’t have anything I wanted. I paid her because the problem wasn’t with her, it was with me.”
Was he serious? The human female hadn’t been with him at all—not even to serve as his blood Host?
Jordana could hardly contain the surge of relief that flooded through her.