Seriously, it happened to me once before. They just opened the door and heaved me out. I didn’t know how long I rolled, but I had road rash for two weeks.
“Let me see.” His gentle voice broke into my inner dialogue, and I looked up, breath catching when I saw how close he was. His upper body leaned over the center console as he cupped my chin in his palm.
My heart fluttered when he pulled my face around so he could look at the bandage covering my stitches.
Untangling our hands, he reached up to smooth the corner of the bandage. “Is it hurting?”
I nodded dumbly, attention clinging to him in the neediest of ways. I liked his voice like this. Soft and rich with empathy. Like he really cared.
He made a quiet sound and curled his fingers around the back of my head to lean even closer and brush his lips near my temple. “Easy now, baby doll,” he whispered against my hair. Tingles raced across my scalp and down the back of my neck. “Easy.”
My lashes fluttered closed, and I leaned into his lips, whimpering when he brushed them over me once again.
“We can talk about this later,” he murmured, gently guiding me back into the seat.
Later? There is no later.I didn’t say it out loud, though, because I wasn’t about to disrupt the comfort he’d impressed upon me. My skin still tingled where he kissed me.
Before pulling away completely, he brushed the pad of his thumb along the underside of my lower lip. The tingles I’d been experiencing morphed into full-blown want. The kind of want I’d never felt before, the kind that felt almost like a need.
“Precious doll,” he whispered and then moved back into his seat to pull out onto the road.
My eyes stayed on him, his actions an elixir that made me drunk. No. Made me an addict who wasn’t even through his first high and already wanted another.
I devoured every inch of him in that moment. His strong profile, the lines of his jaw, and the arch of his Adam’s apple. His ear was perfectly shaped, and his beard was meticulously trimmed.
“You’re staring,” he said, not taking his eyes off the road.
I was, and I continued to do so, watching the streetlights cast shadows across his skin.
“If I hadn’t gotten to the hospital when I had, you’d probably be running the streets right now in a hospital gown,” he mumbled as if the thought bothered him.
A short while later, the SUV slowed and pulled into a parking garage. Kieran stopped the car long enough to be buzzed in and then drove through the narrow space lit with orange-colored lights. After reversing into a parking spot, he turned off the ignition and unlatched his seatbelt.
“Your name. What is it?” he asked for the second time tonight.
“Hazier. But I prefer Haz,” I told him, my voice sounding foreign to my own ears. It felt weird to introduce myself to someone I already knew.
But you don’t.
I couldn’t explain it just then—maybe not ever—but at some point during this car ride, Kieran stopped being someone I’d just met and became familiar.
The corner of his lips quirked up, and even in the dim orange light, I saw the amusement spark in his cobalt eyes. “Haz as in hazard?”
“Haz as in Hazier,” I corrected.
“My little hazard.”
Suddenly, I didn’t hate that nickname so much.
Leaning over, he unlatched my seat belt and then directed it so it didn’t hit my stitches. “Let’s go inside.”
It dawned on me then that we were parked inside a garage that I didn’t know. “Where are we?” I asked, shaking off the spell he’d cast and glancing out the window at the row of cars. Every single one of them cost more than I would ever make. Glancing back around, I said, “This isn’t my place.”
“It’s mine.”
I lifted my fingers to chew my nails. “Y-you brought me t-to your house?”
Scowling, Kieran pulled my hand down. “Technically, it’s a condo.”
