Claire: The Forced Virgin Of The Billionaire

He picked me up about 2.5 hours later. His eyes were sparkling and he seemed like he was in a good mood, “The rest of the day is ours,” he told me.

He took me by the hand into the adjoining room and told the guys, who were sitting there playing cards with poker playing on the TV, “Free time, boys. I’m going to show my girl Sin City. Just have your cells on. I’ll have an errand for you in a few hours so I’ll text about it.”

They both looked elated. I guess they were both itching for a real card game and some time out of their hotel room.

Azriel’s POV

When I picked her up she was timid with me. I couldn’t exactly blame her for that after the way I’d been that morning but right now I didn’t want timid, I wanted to show her some fun and erase what’d happened that morning.

It’d been a few hours since we left the room. We got lunch at an outdoor café and then I asked her what she wanted to do and she wanted to walk. So we let the Bentley that the hotel had given us go and we walked, and walked. I took her to a jewelry store and told her to pick out a new pair of earrings. She didn’t want to. I insisted. She chose a simple pair of princess cut diamond studs. They looked beautiful on her. I suggested we look at wedding bands, too. The jeweler suggested an eternity band that would complement her engagement ring nicely and she liked it so I bought it and told Claire to pick something for me. She was really wary about it, so much so that it made me feel like she was having second thoughts. I guess I was probably doing this to make her forget about the way I’d acted this morning as well as to move forward with the wedding plans, too.

After a long time she chose for me. She made a really nice choice, actually. It was a twisted gold and black band, the two colors woven together in a Celtic knot pattern. It made me think of her and I. Light and dark, wrapped around one another.

“I love it,” I whispered in her ear, “It’s perfect. It makes me think of us.” She nuzzled into me and smiled shyly, her expression showing me that she and I had similar opinions about the design.

I arranged for the rings to be sent home but Claire put the earrings on before we left the store. She was still quiet and a little bit timid and it was getting to me. I needed to snap her out of it.

Claire’s POV

I guessed he was trying to make up for that morning. I wasn’t trying to

not

let him off the hook or anything but I just felt, I don’t know, sad. I didn’t know if he was being honest about the lipstick on his collar and I didn’t know what else was on his mind that’d made him so awful earlier. I didn’t know how to fake it. And he told me he didn’t want me to be fake when it was just him and I, anyways. But him buying me jewelry and acting the way he was acting felt fake

to me

. I wished we were back at the hay loft.

Azriel Clarke was light and dark, like the colors in the wedding band I’d picked for him. He thought the light and dark represented us but to me, it represented him. Woven together the light and dark was who

he

was. I wondered if I’d be able to take the dark, though; I wanted the light to win out over it. But it looked like it’d be both I’d have to live with. Unless I found a way out.

I needed a restroom. As we were walking through a mall-like area in between two hotels I told him so and he said he did as well and once we found bathrooms he said he would meet me right outside the door afterwards.

Outside the door afterwards, he wasn’t there. It felt weird as I’d found myself totally alone and with no eyes on me, no security guards around, I suddenly felt the urge to run. I wanted to take off and disappear into the crowd.

If I did take off, what would happen? My father clearly hadn’t been honest with me and so did that mean they wouldn’t have killed him if I hadn’t cooperated? I knew, for a fact, that they didn’t hesitate to kill their enemies so Dad probably would be in danger. But did he even deserve my consideration after selling me out when I

had

escaped from Azriel? I didn’t know. But where would I go? What would I do?

No. I wasn’t going to do it. I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. He’d promised to be faithful, he’d said he was sorry about this morning, and he was trying to make his miserable mood up to me. I’d been weighing the good and the bad and right now the scales were still tipping in his favor. And if he was starting to trust me to be alone, without security, maybe it meant that it’d evolve to where I’d have enough freedom that if I ever

did

need to run, I could do it then. I didn’t want to run. I just wanted him to always be who he’d been in many of the moments when he’d been sweet to me. I could handle the hotness in the games we played, too, I liked the hotness, but this morning? Not hotness.

I didn’t know what was keeping him. It’d been at least 10-15 minutes. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and texted him with:

“Did you fall in? LOL”