Then he’s on me, pushing me down against the desk, his body hovering dangerously over mine. His legs invade between my parted thighs, and I scrape in a breath, anticipating the rough feel of his hand up my skirt?—
He presses a gloved finger to my mouth, silencing a desperate sound as it escapes my lips.
“You’re the danger,” he says, his voice lowered to a guttural pitch. “You have no idea what you’re tempting to the surface.” His jaw works, the blue-green of his eyes lit with a furious flame, his body prying my thighs apart. “Sign the fucking resignation or not, but you’re leaving, Collins. I’m giving you one chance to run as far as you can.”
His eyes burn into me, the leather trapping my breath.
Slowly, he drops his finger from my mouth, trailing down my throat, down the center of my chest. Those fiery embers smolder as his eyes track the progression, then his gaze flicks up to trap mine.
Voice lost, all I can do is nod a shaky response.
A shadow falls across his features as he presses something cool into my hand before he draws upward. “Checkmate.”
He lifts his chin, his eyes cast down to stay locked with mine as he takes a purposeful step backward. “Forgot my jacket,” he mutters as he snags it from the hook and turns, striding through the door.
I wait until I hear the soft click of the latch before I allow myself to drag in a shuddering breath. The aching pressure in my chest releases with a whimper. “Shit.Shit shit shit.”
I roll onto my side and slam my laptop shut, anger welling. With trembling fingers, I touch the aching valley between my breasts, searching out the uneven rhythm of my heart before I uncurl my other hand from around the chess piece.
My thumb rubs over the smooth marble of the knight.
As I push myself off the desk, I feel the slick heat slip along my inner thighs, and I should be mortified, ashamed—but those emotions abandoned me long ago.
A surge of fury rises so quickly, I hurl the chess piece across the room. It cracks sharp against the door before hitting the floor.
Fuck.Him.
Orion Night doesn’t get to frighten me off.
I reach into my pocket for my pill case, and my fingers brush the brass object there, triggering images of his last crime scene. I may have overlooked something critical in his profile, a sexual deviance I couldn’t have uncovered until I got this close. A grave miscalculation on my part. But that just means I have to adjust my strategy.
I’ve opened a door I can’t close.
When it comes to the mind, there is no region untouched by shadows—only varying depths of darkness.
For the sexual sadist, some regions definitely run too deep to tread.
And yet, to overcome what we fear most, we have to be willing to wade into the muck of those dark waters.
The Fibonacci Sequence turns out to be the key to understanding how nature designs... and is... a part of the same ubiquitous music of the spheres that builds harmony into atoms, molecules, crystals, shells, suns and galaxies and makes the Universe sing.
—GUY MURCHIE,THE SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE
11
Frozen Stars
Music can give you a different way of seeing the universe. It’s like finding a pathway into the brain. The notes are made of the stuff of the universe.
—BRIAN MAY, QUEEN GUITARIST & ASTROPHYSICIST
ORION
When our reality is challenged, it creates a deep, unsettling feeling.
On a fundamental level, we understand that touch is merely the perception of vibration. That at the quantum scale, we never actually touch an object—only interact with the electromagnetic fields at its surface.
And yet, because the sensation feels so intensely real, we can never truly grasp that it’s an illusion. It’s too disturbing, too unsettling, to challenge our concept of reality. So our mind retreats to what feelssafe.
