The Don's Fatal Tenderness novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Suite

Their wedding night in a Syracuse suite; she wakes to find him gone and a car waiting.

The suite was on the top floor of the best hotel in Syracuse, and I had never been inside it.

Dominic's men checked the rooms before we went in, and then they left without being told.

The door clicked shut, and I was alone with a stranger who was my husband.

I stood in the middle of the carpet in my work shoes and my cardigan with a dental clinic's logo on the pocket.

"There's a bag with clothes in the bedroom," Dominic said.

"My lawyer guessed your size from your file."

"You have a file on me."

"I had one on everyone in that building by two o'clock."

He took off his coat and hung it on the back of a chair.

Under it he wore a charcoal suit that fit him.

I should have been afraid.

What I felt instead was the hot, sick, wonderful anger I'd been holding down since the counter, and it had nowhere to go.

"Seven years," I said, and my voice cracked.

"He made me wait seven years, and he did it in front of a line of people."

"I know."

"I wanted to scream, and instead I tore up a piece of paper."

"You did it very well."

"Stop being kind to me," I said.

Dominic looked at me for a long moment.

"I'm not being kind," he said.

"I'm trying not to touch you while you're angry."

"Touch me," I said.

He did not move.

"I'm not asking you for anything real," I said.

"I just don't want to be the woman who got left today."

"I want to be the woman who walked out and got a husband."

"I want you to make me forget his name."

His jaw tightened, and the scar through his eyebrow went white.

Then he crossed the room in three steps and put his hand flat on the wall beside my head.

"Say it again," he said.

"Make me forget," I said.

He kissed me.

It was nothing like the kiss in the clerk's office.

His mouth was hard and slow, and he tasted like coffee and something dark, and I grabbed his lapels to keep my knees from folding.

He lifted me against the wall, and my work shoes dropped on the floor, one and then the other.

"Wrap your legs around me," he said.

I did.

He carried me into the bedroom with his mouth on my neck, and he put me down on the white duvet and stood over me, taking off his tie.

My cardigan went first, and then the buttons of my blouse, one at a time, under his fingers.

He was in no hurry.

That made it worse, and it made it better.

"You're shaking," he said.

"Don't stop."

"I won't."

His hand slid up my thigh and under my skirt, and he pulled my underwear down my legs and tossed it away.

I made a sound I'd never made for Dirk.

He pushed my knees apart, lowered his head, and put his mouth on me.

I cried out and arched, and his hands clamped my hips down to the bed.

His tongue worked slowly, then faster, circling my clit and then pressing in, and I tangled my fingers in his black hair and begged.

"Dominic," I said.

"Louder."

"Dominic, please, don't stop."

"I told you I wouldn't."

I came with my back off the mattress and his name in my mouth, shaking, and he did not lift his head until I'd stopped.

He rose over me wet-lipped and unsmiling and pulled his shirt off over his head.

He had a long pale scar under his ribs and another across his shoulder, and I put my palm on the shoulder one.

"Later," he said, and caught my wrist, and pinned it by my head.

I unbuckled his belt myself with my free hand.

When he pushed into me, I felt every inch of him, thick and slow, and I locked my ankles behind his back.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked.

"You're mine tonight, Pamela. All of you."

"Yes."

"Say it."

"I'm yours," I said.

He started to move, deep and steady, his weight pressing me into the duvet, and each stroke dragged a gasp out of me.

The anger was gone.

There was only his breath in my ear, his cock filling me and pulling back and filling me again, the bed knocking against the wall.

He pushed my leg up higher and drove harder, and my whole body went tight.

"There," I said.

"Right there. Fuck, Dominic, right there."

"Good girl."

I came again, clenching around him, clawing his back, and he groaned low in his chest and held me down with his full weight.

His rhythm broke, and he drove into me twice more and came with my name rough in his throat.

He stayed inside me, breathing hard, his forehead against mine.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

Then he rolled onto his back and pulled me against his side with one arm.

I fell asleep with my hand on the scar on his shoulder.

When I woke, the room was gray with early morning, and the other side of the bed was cold.

His suit was gone from the chair.

On the nightstand was a key card, a phone I did not own, and a note in a hard, slanted hand.

"Do not leave the suite. Car at six."

I went to the window and pulled the curtain back.

Two black cars idled on the street below.

Dominic's lawyer stood beside the second one with a phone held up toward my window.

The screen showed a photograph I could not make out from nine floors up.

I dressed in the clothes from the bag and was downstairs in four minutes.

The lawyer put the phone in my hand without a word.

It was my father's front door, hanging off one hinge, with the porch light still on.

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