Like a promise and a threat rolled into one.
My hand rests on the small of her back because I want to mark her as mine in the most ordinary way possible, because there’s a fierce, ridiculous tenderness in the simple contact.
The other hand settles on her hip, fingers splayed, feeling the hard plane of muscle and the soft curve beneath.
She presses against me just enough to prove she knows I’m there.
I can smell her—a wild, warm scent, citrus and woman and something that’s all hers.
It makes my mouth go dry and furious at the same time.
“No one comes in,” I tell the guards as I step in front of the door.
They nod, eyes sliding away like men who know better than to watch two animals circling.
They are small courtesies in a world of broken promises.
I thank fate for them—for the empty corridor, the privacy, the pause before the colliding.
She is supposed to be part of my plan.
She is supposed to be the instrument of a debt repaid, a casualty in a war I intend to win.
I tell myself that often enough to keep my hands from shaking.
But the truth is sharper, uglier, and sweeter.
I have wanted her since the moment I first saw her, And when I walked through the Den, and she introduced herself that first time?
It was more than a formality. It was a gauntlet being thrown, and I never walk away from a challenge.
I have rehearsed the way I will look at her, the angle of my smile, the exact cadence of the sentence that would let me cross the line.
Revenge had been a justification.
But obsession is the engine.
Cecilia is—well, to be honest, she is wrong in all the best ways.
None of her should match.
The woman is infuriatingly tall, her mind is sharp, dangerous.
And she has the kind of body that refuses to apologize for itself—wide hips that contradict and confirm everything my gut thinks it wants.
Soft belly. Big tits. Thick thighs. And an ass that won’t quit.
The hints of tattoos I’ve glimpsed across her curvy shape drive me mad, but none so much as the one curling low across the hollow of her back is obscene and holy in equal measure.
Fuck. It’s more than that.
Every flash of ink and metal as she moves makes something inside me contract with need.
Her hair is a riot of corkscrew curls, a crown that defies order.
The piercings on her ears and nose glint like small, obscene beacons in the suite’s ambient light, catching me where armor can’t.
I should be cold.
