When he stood in front of her, chest heaving, face a mess of what looked like utter indecision.The way someone would look if they were trying to build themselves up to a stabbing, she thought. And then he reached out with this same mix of aggression and uncertainty, and just did it.
Hegrabbedher fuckinghand.
The one she still had out. The one he hadn’t been able to shake. The one that seemed to electrify, themoment he made contact. Every nerve, every inch of skin, every point where he touched her—suddenly it was all alight. It was all wildly hot. She could feel him to the roots of her fucking hair, in a way that made not one lick of sense.
He was barely doing anything.
His palm didn’t even lie fully flat to hers. His grip wasn’t even that firm. He didn’t squeeze, he didn’t fully envelop her, he didn’t linger. He was gone in the space between two breaths. Yet somehow it just didn’t matter. She could still feel him, even after he pulled away. The heat of his body, the softness of his palm, the gentleness of it in spite of its size, the ferocity of the contact.
She had to look down at her shaking hand in the aftermath, just to check he wasn’t somehow still there. A shadow touch, left behind in a way that seemed so ridiculous. It shouldn’t have been, it shouldn’t have been.
Yet she knew why it was.
Why it had had more impact than actual sex, with any of a dozen other men.
Because they gave it all away like it was nothing. Just another Saturday night, with someone they barely thought anything of. But he could never think of it that way. It was never that to him. He guarded his every touch like a dragon over a hoard of impossibly rare gold.
And now one small piece of it was hers.
Twelve
It felt like it had to have been just a dream. And even more so when she went to knock on the bathroom door in the morning, just to say she was desperate to pee, and it swung open so abruptly it made her make a little sound. Then there he was, looking like his usual annoyed-at-everything self. Hair an angry tangle, clothes furiously rumpled.
Face like fucking thunder.
There was just no way this man had touched her. She was hard-pressed to even believe that he had said some of the stuff he had, or seemed so disturbed by her friendly front. And those things had actually definitely happened. He had really almost confessed he wanted a family, in that gut-wrenchingly desperate sort of tone.
That was enough on its own.
Anything more was too much. Impossible. A hallucination brought on by close contact with someone she hated, and who hated her. Or so it seemed, until they started toward the exit of the hotel. Him grumbling about the coffee he had just snagged, her thinking of a good way to poke fun at him for it.
In fact, she almost had it.
They were so close to being completely back to normal.
But the thing was, she was so intent on this goal that she wasn’t really paying attention. And that meant the door out of the place almost slapped right into her, before she even realized what was happening. She came so close to getting a bloody nose that she flinched. She put her hands up. Then when it somehow stopped about a millimeter from her face, she automatically looked up, searching for what had jammed it.
But the only thing she saw washim.
His arm over her head, ramrod straight and so firm she could see the cords standing out on his wrist just below the cuff. The muscle above, testing the seams. And that enormous hand, splayed, white-knuckled—such obvious evidence he was angry that she didn’t even need to hear him vocalize it.
She knew before he snapped out a word.
She just assumed the word would be for her.
Watch what you’re doing, she imagined.
But it wasn’t.
“Hey,” he barked at someone just beyond her. The guy who had let the door close in her face. The one who jerked at the sound of that word—and extremely understandably so.Shejerked, and it wasn’t even aimed at her. And not just because it was really fucking loud, and obviously coming out of a big guy.
It was like nothing she had ever heard before.
Almost a bellow, full of outrage and sort of broken in the middle. The way a beast might respond at getting a sudden spear in its side, it seemed to her. But she hadno clue how that went with what had happened, and what he had done. Nobody had done anything to him. Nobody had even done anything to her, really.
A stranger had just been slightly rude.
And sure, Miller hated people being slightly rude. It was the kind of thing she had seen him do before. Telling people not to cut a line, dropping tips on tables none had been left on, demanding apologies from people who had wronged someone. In fact, it was one of the things she had been drawn to. A guy had interrupted a girl talking in class, and he had told him to pipe down.
