But I didn’t. I knew she wasn’t here. Because if she was, she would’ve heard about me or seen me at the auction.
Something wasn’t adding up aboutanyof this. About Lorelei and her PicWave trail, about Roman and his billionaire friends, even about Wes himself. It was like I was only seeing half the game board, a lowly pawn amid cunning kings and queens.
I was trapped in a maze, running from predators I couldn’t see.
The moment I crossed the golden rope, strong hands gripped my body and shoved me against a wall. A hand protected theback of my head from impact, and dark, stormy eyes locked on mine.
Wes.
24
NOVA
Wes’s nostrils flared, his pupils wide as he scanned the length of me.“Are you okay?”
I blinked rapidly, disoriented for two long seconds as I was enveloped by his familiar woodsy scent and intensity. I should’ve been frightened by his anger, his manhandling, but I wasn’t. If anything, something inside me relaxed.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said finally. “I’m fine,” I repeated, as if reinforcing the statement to myself. I’d survived Roman Graves, at least for tonight.
Wes was visibly calming himself, his chest rising and falling. “Why thefuckwould you do that to me?”
I choked on a shocked laugh. “Toyou?What the hell did it have to do withyou?”
Wes didn’t move an inch, still encasing me with his tall, muscled frame. “You promised me you would be careful. You?—”
“I saw you,” I blurted, cutting him off. “With the woman you were looking for.”
A crease formed in Wes’s forehead. He had the nerve to look confused.
“You had your mission, right? And I had mine. I needed to get into the VIP section to find my friend before she gets knocked up by an oil oligarch.”
“Did you find her?” he asked.
I glared past him at the opposite wall. “No.”
Wes reached for my face, his gentle touch a sharp contrast to his barely-contained wrath. He gently tilted my chin up to look at him. “The woman I was speaking to was my ex’s friend. I hadn’t seen her in many years, and—” His eyes melted into something wounded,haunted. “I didn’t expect to see her here. It was like seeing a ghost.”
My previous fire slowly extinguished. None of my assumptions stood in the face of Wes’s obvious anguish. I remembered the way he’d hung his head, and the woman had placed a hand on his shoulder. I exhaled.
“Did anyone hurt you?” he asked, a different variation of his initial question, as if fulfilling a compulsive need for absolute certainty.
“No,” I said. “No one touched me.”
I didn’t need to say that last part, but I did.
Wes exhaled slowly with a nod. “I promised you I would explain my past, and I will. This week. Okay?”
I said the word before my mind even had time to catch up. “Okay.”
I was confused, overwhelmed, and more fucking aroused than I’d ever been in my life, all at once. What had happened in that bedroom with Roman was still ripe in my body, an urgent need in desperate search of relief.
Wes stared at my lips. His hand skated down to my throat. “I don’t want to hurt you.” His thumb brushed over my pulse, and I shuddered.
I studied every inch of his face—the tense muscles of his jaw, the hazel tones of his irises. My body tingled, my nerves aching for touch.
“Then don’t,” I whispered, almost a plea.
“I can’t stop,” he said. His forehead brushed against mine. “I’ve been trying since the day we met, and I can’t fucking stop.”
