“Brinley, please. Fucking stop.”
I fumbled, and one second later, I felt him like a landslide. His presence was nothing but domination.
Taking hold of the air that shivered with his potency.
White-hot lightning licked across my flesh, and every hair on my body lifted in awareness.
I inhaled a fractured breath, drawing him into the aching well of my chest.
Sweet, liquored cherry always muddling my mind.
I shouldn’t have looked back, but I couldn’t have stopped myself even if I knew the sight of him would prove lethal.
Not with the way he had a hook in my heart.
I guess it was.
Because a little piece of me died as I stared at him standing beneath the cover of a massive oak.
At one with the shadows that writhed around him like they’d become partner to that untamed volatility.
Swirls of darkness twined and twisted.
His cheeks and jaw carved of steel.
Towering and massive and robbing me of my faculties.
Too ferociously beautiful to be real.
“I warned you that you’d do well to hate me.” Every word cleaved from his mouth like splinters of broken glass.
My entire body squeezed in refusal. “I can’t.”
His big hands fisted at his sides, and those eyes burrowed right through to the secret places that I’d never allowed anyone to go before.
Not even before my belief and confidence had been demolished. Not with any boyfriend or man that had come before him.
It was only Silas. The last man I should want and the first one I’d ever needed.
He took one step closer, and the ground rolled beneath his feet.
His strong features were written in conflict.
“You want this? You really want this?” His words cut through the dense, suffocating air.
Severing through the despair and touching down on that place within me that he had exposed.
“I want it. I want you.”
I said it without reservation.
Torment pierced his expression, and he kept moving, a shadowy eclipse that slipped forward until he was standing right in front of me.
Covering me in a blanket of his ferocity.
“You shouldn’t.” It was close to a growl.
“But I do.” I whispered into the force that drew us together.
