Chapter 170: Bad Boy
Yvonne said nothing.
She only looked at Elias.
Elias did not mind. He leaned back against the sofa as if he had never been afraid of her for a second and continued, "So things are prettier when everyone keeps them unspoken. Once you say them out loud, they lose the mood. Don’t you think so, Dr. Quinn?"
Yvonne’s eyes changed.
The scalpel-sharp stillness from a mont ago turned colder. Not cleaner, not calr, colder. The look in her eyes no longer suggested cutting skin with professional precision. It suggested opening a person from throat to stomach and studying what spilled out.
The cool distance around her shifted with it. That restrained, clinical atmosphere peeled back like a pelt.
Under it was not a harmless doctor.
It was sothing hungry.
Elias was not surprised.
Yvonne was not only twisted inside, she had hidden it so deeply that the hiding itself had beco part of the danger. Anyone who could bury that much of herself under a perfect professional mask was not safe. Elias had never believed a woman delicate enough to hold a scalpel with that kind of control could be so helpless lamb.
Still, under Yvonne’s stare, Elias kept smiling.
No panic. No nervousness. No sha after being exposed.
He looked at her the way soone looked at a tiger behind the thickest glass in the zoo.
"How did you notice?" Yvonne asked.
That was what she did not understand.
She had hidden herself well. The darker thoughts in her mind had never leaked out in any way she could asure.
There was no one close enough to her to notice. Even her parents knew nothing about the shape of her private desires.
But Elias had seen.
Elias, of all people.
A boy who had only t her a handful of tis had looked straight through her, then built a Pandora’s box just to lure her toward the edge.
Had he planned it for a long ti?
Or had it truly been coincidence?
Yvonne did not believe in the second answer.
Elias’s eyes filled with faint confusion. "What are you talking about, Dr. Quinn?"
He was playing dumb.
But this ti was different from before.
Earlier, his ignorance had been natural, bright, and harmless. Now it was deliberate. The innocence had a hook in it. He wanted her to say it herself.
Yvonne saw that too.
There was nothing unspeakable about it. If Elias could drop his mask the mont she caught him, then now that he had seen through her, she could say the truth just as plainly.
"My preferences."
Elias shook his head.
He raised both hands. His long, clean index fingers crossed slowly in front of his face, forming an X. His eyes narrowed, and that bright college-boy innocence turned syrupy and false.
"Nope."
The word ca out light, sweet, and unbearably mocking.
"Wrong word, Dr. Quinn. It isn’t a preference. Let correct that for you. It’s a kink. Or, to be more accurate..."
He paused.
Even without seeing it, Yvonne could imagine his tongue touching the back of his teeth before the next word slid out.
"A sexual kink."
Yvonne’s gaze darkened.
Elias’s face really was pure.
That was the problem.
If his personality were stripped away, his appearance alone would look almost angelic. Clean features, bright eyes, skin too fair to survive under a careless touch, the kind of beauty that made danger seem obscene for wanting him.
So hearing him say sothing so direct about sex should have felt impossible.
But Yvonne had read enough scripture to know angels were not always the sweet, shining figures people imagined. Demons were the ones that needed beautiful faces. Temptation had to be flawless, or no one would walk toward it willingly.
The thing sitting in front of her now was not an angel.
It was a demon with a harmless smile.
Elias let her look.
He was generous about it.
If disguise had levels, Yvonne might deserve a seven or an eight. She was good. Better than most. Good enough to pass through the world wearing a clean white coat while carrying a locked room inside her mind.
Elias, however, was at level one hundred.
Anything Yvonne saw was sothing he had allowed her to see. Beyond that, there was nothing for her to reach. No matter how deeply she looked, she would only keep running into the walls he had built.
"Dr. Quinn," Elias called, his eyes curving like crescent moons. Mischief flashed through them. "Have you figured anything out?"
Yvonne lowered her gaze.
She had not seen through him.
He had seen through her.
And now he was provoking her with it.
She was about to look away when Elias moved again.
His hands rose.
Yvonne’s attention followed despite herself.
His hands were not inferior to hers. Pale, long, and almost unnervingly fine-boned. The difference was that Elias’s hands were too slender, too gentle in their shape. Anyone could tell at a glance that they were not made to hold a scalpel for hours.
They were made to be held.
To be wrapped in another hand, closed inside another palm, and kept there.
Now those hands settled on his collar.
He undid the top button.
Slowly.
As if he was worried Yvonne might miss it, he made the movent deliberate. The button slipped free by degrees, the fabric loosening at his throat.
Yvonne could finally see the color of his skin beneath the marked area.
Under the scattered red traces on his neck, his skin was smooth and pale, almost warm in its whiteness. The contrast created a clear boundary. Marked and unmarked. Touched and untouched. Ruined and waiting.
The first button opened.
Then the second.
Then the third.
His hands stopped there.
Elias understood the line between invitation and overexposure perfectly.
He tugged the fabric apart, revealing a wide stretch of pale skin.
His smile did not change. It was as if he were not the one being exposed to the air.
"With clothes in the way, of course you can’t see clearly," he said softly. "So... what about now?"
It was the kind of sentence that could rot a woman’s restraint from the inside out.
Yvonne, however, seed to belong to a rarer category.
Her expression barely changed. No visible hunger. No open heat. Elias’s body, no matter how beautiful, appeared in her gaze almost like a specin waiting on a table. Sothing to be examined. Sothing to be practiced on.
At least, that was how it looked.
Even so, Yvonne sat beside him.
The instant she did, Elias moved.
He rose and crossed the tiny distance between them, then settled directly onto her lap.
His arms looped around Yvonne’s neck.
Right in front of her was the pale spread of his chest, and if she lifted her gaze just a little, the uneven red marks on his throat waited there like proof of soone else’s teeth.
Elias looked down at her with an almost gentle expression.
It was not lover’s tenderness.
It was stranger than that. Almost paternal, in so warped and condescending way, as if he were looking at a child he had decided to reward for being honest.
"Pretty?" he asked.
As he spoke, he raised one hand and stroked Yvonne’s hair.
Then he ruined it.
The neat strands, arranged so precisely before, fell into disorder under his fingers. He rubbed until the clean, controlled shape was gone, leaving her hair mussed and uneven.
Yvonne’s expression remained empty of desire or anger, as if nothing in the world could shake her.
Elias’s lips curved.
He had dealt with more than a hundred won across missions. He had worn every kind of persona there was to wear. Did Yvonne really think he would worry about not finding the version she liked?
If one face did not work, he would simply change to another.
His expression shifted at once.
The flirtation disappeared, replaced by dazed confusion, like a child who had done sothing wrong and did not know where to put his hands.
"Dr. Quinn," he whispered, voice small and wounded. "I’m sorry. I’m a bad boy..."
The words sounded helpless. Wronged. Pitiful.
Then, in the next breath, the helplessness split open.
Mockery slid through.
The little lost boy revealed the creature underneath, smug and pleased with himself for making a ss.
"Dr. Quinn," Elias murmured, leaning closer. "Are you going to punish and turn into..."
His lips brushed Yvonne’s ear.
His breath ward the skin there, and every word ca slowly.
"A good boy?"
User Comments
0 comments from readers