So he made an artform out of not being seen.
And it worked.
For years, his fortune grew, and he remained oddly unseen. He preferred standing alone in the shadows. Liked that they could look right through him, as if he were nobody from nowhere.
Who is J. Thorne anyhow?
But he wanted her to see him now. God help him, he wanted her to face the scarred, hideous man behind the mask and not flinch away.
“Peter’s not like the others?—”
“Don’t say his name,” he snapped, sharp enough to make her stiffen. But he didn’t scare her into silence. Not yet.
“Why?”
The question hung between them like a guillotine ready to fall.
He should lie.
Make something up.
But the truth crawled out of him, harsh, serrated, and raw. “Another man’s name in your mouth disgusts me. Especially when you refuse to say mine.”
Her breath caught. A sharp little intake with the fallout of a bomb.
He could sense the walls crumbling around him, his carefully constructed world trembling with instability before it would fall to dust.
She looked up at him with those haunting, knowing eyes. “Jack.”
His name whispered past her lips like a prayer, and the world began to fall.
His hands framed her face, cradling her jaw, as his mouth crashed into hers. She gasped against his lips—surprise or surrender, he couldn’t tell. Didn’t care. He swallowed the sound whole. Drank it down like a drowning man sinking into ruin.
Her back hit the mattress. His body followed, covering hers, pressing her down.
He couldn’t get close enough.
His tongue swept across her lower lip, demanding entry, and when she let him in, a sound tore from his throat. Animal. Starving. The pained groan of a man who’d denied himself a lifetime of sustenance, finally granted a feast.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Conquer
His mouth crushed hers with bruising intensity, teeth catching her lower lip, tongue invading without permission. One hand fisted in her hair, angling her head where he wanted it. The other pressed flat against the mattress beside her skull, caging her beneath the weight of his body.
Daisy’s heart slammed against her ribs. He didn’t kiss like a lover. He kissed like a conqueror.
This was nothing like the kisses she’d read about, nothing like the fumbling encounters when she was a teen. This was consumption. Devastation. A man trying to climb inside her skin and claim every inch of her.
His hips ground against hers, the rough fabric of his trousers abrading her bare thighs. The hard length of his erection pressed into her belly through layers of wool and cotton, hot even through the barrier. She gasped at the contact and he swallowed the sound, his tongue sweeping deeper, stroking hers with a rhythm that promised darker things.
Too fast. Too much.
She turned her head, breaking the seal of their mouths, and his lips immediately found her throat, his teeth scraping the tender skin below her jaw, his breath escaping in ragged gusts against her pulse.
“Jack, wait.” The strangled plea was barely audible, but he stilled.
For three heartbeats, neither of them moved.
