The Dare Collection April 2019. Nicola Marsh

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       CHAPTER FOURTEEN

       Imogen

      I HEARD THE SPLASH, felt the spray over my face and the movement of the water as Ajax dived in. And my heartbeat accelerated, adrenaline coursing through me.

      Yes. My gamble had paid off.

      For the past couple of days I’d been hanging out by the pool, hoping he’d come. Hoping that seeing me in my bikini might make him do...something.

      Because ever since he’d walked out the morning after we’d slept together, he’d been avoiding me. And I hadn’t been able to get him out of my head.

      I hadn’t expected that. I’d thought that once I’d got my little piece of revenge, that would be it. I’d be satisfied. But apparently that’s not how it worked with Ajax.

      One night had done nothing to put out the fire of my curiosity.

      He hadn’t been around so I’d used the laptop he’d provided to distract me, but all I found myself doing was surfing the Net looking for anything I could find on him. There were old news stories about his father’s arrest and how they’d eventually caught Augustus due to some dodgy financial business dealings. Ajax had been involved with the takedown and I obsessively read everything about it, watched all the interviews that featured him. There weren’t many, but in each one his expression was hard, his eyes glittering. He looked dangerous and mean, and said virtually nothing.

      I couldn’t stop watching.

      The media viewed him with suspicion and, to be fair, he hadn’t done anything to change their viewpoint. But I wondered why not. Because the man the media had painted him as—the violent heir who’d somehow managed to avoid conviction—was not the man who’d cupped my face as I’d cried, who’d held me close while I’d slept. Who’d insisted that protecting his brothers and his city came before anything else, including himself.

      I wanted to know that man quite desperately. It consumed me.

      I’d had intense passions like this before—the tropical fish I’d been obsessed with once as a kid that I’d lost interest in a couple of weeks after Dad had bought me a tank. Or when I’d suddenly been desperate to learn calligraphy, fascinated by the black curves and elegant straight lines, getting lots of pens and different inks, practising for a day before putting everything aside and never picking up a pen again.

      Ajax was the adult version of my interest in tropical fish. Or my calligraphy. He was the Mandarin I’d tried to teach myself once, the astronomy I’d been obsessed with for a whole month.

      He was a puzzle that only got more complex and more interesting the closer I examined him, and I suspected that sex was merely scratching the surface of who he was.

      Whatever, I knew myself. I knew that my obsession with him wasn’t going to ease until I’d satisfied my curiosity and the only way I was going to do that was to figure out a way to get close to him.

      And obviously the best way to get close to him was through more sex.

      I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the hours I’d spent in his bed. About how free he’d made me feel and how accepting he’d been of me and my quirks. How he’d actively encouraged me to be curious about his body and how it had fit with mine.

      No one had ever made me feel as if it was okay to be myself the way he had.

      So, after the first day or so of obsessing, I’d decided that I had to do something about it. Such as convincing him to take me to bed again.

      Unfortunately, for that to work, he had to be around and he wasn’t. Which meant I had to try something different—getting him to come to me.

      I’d been thrilled when my little ploy of hanging out by the pool in my green bikini and playing loud music had worked. But then he’d been a dick, giving me all sorts of crap about how busy he was, all the while staring at me like he wanted to eat me alive and pretending he wasn’t as hard as a rock.

      So, to give him some incentive, I’d taken my bikini off. And, judging by the way he’d launched himself into the water, that was all the push he’d needed, which thrilled me down to the bone.

      Still, I wasn’t sure why he’d been denying himself what we both wanted and I’d already decided I was going to find out.

      I СКАЧАТЬ