I looked up at him hopefully, biting my bottom lip thoughtfully. "I can leave the bedroom?"
"If you cause problems, I'll bring you back here. But so long as you're kind to Regina then I have no problem with you having freedom around the house, but for now I'd like you to stay with her. Just until you have a better sense of the island and your place on it. Is that acceptable for you?" he asked, buttoning up his shirt.
"Yes," I agreed. "I'll take anything over being locked up in here. But who is Regina?" The jealousy in my voice couldn't be missed, and I mentally scolded myself for it.
He smirked at me knowingly. "My step-mother, I suppose," he said. "My housekeeper now that my father has passed."
I nodded with flushed cheeks, scurrying for the bathroom to shower quickly while he finished dressing. It seemed ridiculous to embrace the freedom as if it was a gift when I'd still be trapped on his island.
I hated myself for the gratitude I felt, when true freedom should have been my right.
His palm came down in a firm slap against my ass as I passed him, making me turn a shocked glare at him over my shoulder briefly before I continued on my way.
Given everything that had happened, scolding him for touching me seemed irrelevant. If there was one thing I knew about Rafael Ibarra, it was that he did as he pleased.
And to hell with what anyone else thought.
“I want to talk to Chloe,” I demanded as I stepped out of the bathroom and into the bright bedroom, where Rafael sat on the same chair he’d occupied during our game of chess the day before. He lifted his hand from the sleek cell phone where he’d been reading something intently, quirking a brow up at me as if to remind me that I was in no place to make demands. “She’s supposed to go home today. Will she make it home?” I asked, dropping my eyes as my lip quivered slightly. I wanted nothing more than for my friend to have made it home safely and be out of Rafael’s reach.
Even if it meant she would tell my parents who I’d gotten involved with and about my sudden disappearance when I didn’t come home with her.
He stood slowly, pushing his cell into his slack pockets as he studied me. “Your friend made it to the embassy the night she called you. They put her on her plane two hours ago, and she is safely on her way back to Chicago, despite her best efforts to convince the authorities that you’d been taken by a mad man and needed help. The police informed her they had spoken with you, and you merely made the choice to extend your vacation indefinitely.”
I swallowed back the rapidly building saliva in my mouth as I considered the reach Rafael must have to be able to manipulate the police into such a lie. “But that’s not true!” I argued, feeling like a petulant child as I tried to consider how to communicate my frustration without stomping my foot. He’d seen me as an innocent girl who was too naive to understand what she was getting herself involved with and used that to his advantage.
He’d been right, but I wouldn’t further add to that image by throwing a tantrum. Besides, stomping my foot wouldn’t be nearly as fun unless his face was beneath it.
“In Ibiza, the truth is whatever I say it is, mi princesa,” Rafael murmured, his voice deep but smooth like a soft caress as he stepped closer to me. He reached up a hand, stroking the side of my face delicately. Despite the storm brewing in his eyes with his anger hovering just beneath the surface, the lines of his face were oddly tender in an unusual moment of sincerity. “It would have been the truth, had you only trusted your love for me and not believed the rumors a teenage girl whispered in your ear to turn you against me.”
“I don’t think they can be called rumors if they’re true,” I hissed. I bit my lip in frustration as I tried to deny the feelings I’d developed for him in our short time together before everything had come crashing down, but the words wouldn’t come. I didn’t love Rafael; I couldn’t.
But I had loved Rafe and losing him felt like tearing out yet another piece of me that I would never get back.
“If you had only chosen to stay, I could have shown you the benefits to being with a man like me. You could have known the beauty my lies afforded you through ignorance, but now I have no reason not to expose you to the reality of the man I am.”
“I was never going to choose to stay. No matter how I felt about you or what you made me believe. I would have never chosen you,” I told him, watching as his eyes darkened. “The fact that you thought otherwise shows you don't know me at all.”
“I know you better than you think, Princesa,” he said, clenching his jaw and then relaxing it as he shook off his anger at my words. “But here we are. Regardless of whatever you would have chosen, it is my bed you share every night. It is my cock that slips between your legs and sinks into this wet fucking pussy.” He dropped his hand to touch me through my sundress, his hand cupping what he could of me with my legs pressed tightly together in shame. Heat exploded through me the moment he made contact with me, proving his point that no matter what I said to him, my body told him no lies. His hand raised up to my stomach, resting his palm against the flat surface as he stared down at it. “And soon enough it will be my child that grows in
