His chest heaved against her bare breasts, the fine cotton of his shirt rasping her sensitive nipples. His hand remained tangled in her hair, fingers trembling against her scalp.
Then he released her.
The loss landed like a physical blow, cold air rushing into the space where his warmth had been. He shoved off the bed, body rigid, face a mask of controlled anguish, jaw clenched so tight muscles jumped beneath his skin.
“I’m sorry,” he choked, looking away. “I didn’t mean to…” He raked a hand through his hair and paced, chest heaving, hands balled into fists at his sides. The collar of his dress shirt was open and askew.
A man undone.
His eyes held the wild, hunted look of an animal caught between fight and flight. As if he expected her to scream. To run. To look at him the way people must have looked at him before, when the monster beneath the mask slipped free. But she’d witnessed enough of his tenderness now to somehow counter the aggressive sides he so adamantly tried to hide.
She sat up slowly, acutely aware of her nakedness and the ridiculous black socks pooling at her ankles. The fire crackled in the hearth, painting her scratches in unforgiving light, then graceful shadows.
She should cover herself. Reach for a pillow, a blanket, anything to shield her body’s response to him. She still felt him in the heat of her cheeks and the swollen tingle of her lips.
“Jack?” His name fell softly between them. A question and an offering, but he flinched as if she’d struck him, further proving something was wrong.
He struggled for composure, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. He silently muttered, as if berating himself.
“Jack, look at me.”
When he shook his head, a look of pained dismay twisting his otherwise beautiful face, understanding bloomed slow and terrible in her chest.
He was alone up here. Not down with the other hunters, prowling the grounds, taking their fill of willing flesh. He’d been watching from a distance all night. Observing. Judging. But never participating.
Why?
There was something wounded beneath his aggression. Something longing that he seemed only able to express through violence, as if tenderness were a language he’d never been taught.
Several times tonight, she caught him straining toward softness, only to retreat the moment he got too close.
“Jack,” she said again, softer this time, not knowing the full question pressing in her mind.
His breath caught. His grey eyes, storm-dark and fathomless, locked with hers across the firelit distance.
“I’m trying to understand what you want.”
“I don’t—” He stopped. Swallowed. Looked at her like a lost boy trapped in a man’s body. “I wish…I knew.”
“Try. Maybe if you talk to me…”
He stilled, every line of his body rigid with tension. Silence stretched between them, filled only by the pop and hiss of burning logs.
“I…” His voice emerged so quiet she had to strain to hear. “What if I want to touch you?”
The question hung in the air like smoke. Not a demand. Not a command. A query—almost a plea—from a man who clearly wasn’t accustomed to asking for anything.
Daisy’s heart clenched.
She thought of the scars she’d glimpsed in the bathroom mirror. The topography of destruction mapped across his back, raised ridges and silver furrows that would have taken years to amass. She thought of the way he’d flinched when she touched him, the haunted shadows that lived behind his eyes.
She should say no. Should demand he take her back to a world where damaged billionaires didn’t prey on women like her. She remembered, distantly, that the safe word was still hers to use.
Timber. She only needed to whisper it, and this would end.
She swallowed as he took a step closer, then stopped, as if her response held the power to determine everything that happened next.
“Never mind.”
