Page 29 of Arrow

She laughed. “You’d love that, wouldn’t you? Manhandling me in front of everyone?”

I smirked. “There’s no audience here, Harlowe. Just you and me. And I don’t need witnesses to do what needs to be done.”

She threw the nearest object in her reach, which happened to be the TV remote, at my head. I caught it easily. “Four minutes,” I said, glancing at my watch.

She threw back the covers and stood. “Fine. Turn around.”

“No.”

“I’m not giving you a peep show,” she snapped.

“Get dressed, Harlowe. You’ve tested my patience enough for one day.”

9

NINE

HARLOWE

Istared at Arrow, heat rising to my face. The fucker lounged against the wall like he owned the room—like he already owned me. The hangover pounded behind my eyes, but the rage pounding in my chest was louder.

“I don’t care about your threats.” I grabbed my clothes from the floor, clutching them against my chest. “You think I’m scared of you?”

His eyes tracked my movements with predatory focus. “I think you’re terrified of me. Not because of what I might do to you, but because of what I see in you.”

“You see nothing,” I spat, retreating to the bathroom, but he moved with impossible speed, blocking the doorway.

“You don’t get privacy after running,” he said, voice deadly calm. “Consider that your first consequence.”

My stomach lurched the moment he stepped close enough for me to catch his scent.

Don’t breathe. Don’t let him see.

But my traitorous lungs had already pulled in a breath, and with it came the intoxicating assault of him—that damn expensive cologne, something dark and woody with notes of bergamot and leather, seeping through. It was the scent of old money and older sins, refined and dangerous all at once.

I should have hated it. Probably should have recoiled from the way it wrapped around me like smoke, invasive and inescapable. Instead, my pulse kicked up, a frantic drumbeat against my ribs that I prayed he couldn’t hear. Beneath his cologne was something raw and metallic that my brain recognized even if my conscious mind wanted to deny it.

Violence.

Blood.

The scent of a predator who’d just fed. Had he really killed people last night? The rumors whispered in the powder rooms, the careful way people stepped aside when he entered a room, the darkness that lived behind those gray eyes⁠—

My breath caught, and I hated myself for it. Hated the way my body responded to the danger he represented, the way heat pooled low in my belly even as every rational thought screamed at me to run. This man was a monster. A killer. The heir to my enemy I’d been raised to despise.

I found myself leaning infinitesimally closer, drawn by some primal instinct I couldn’t name and sure as hell wasn’t going to examine. My skin felt too tight and too hot. Every nerve ending had come alive, hyperaware of his proximity, of the way the air seemed to thicken between us.

Stop it. You’re stronger than this.

I forced my chin up, meeting his gaze with all the defiance I could muster, even as my heart hammered and my knees threatened to betray me. Even as that fucking cologne made my head swim and my resolve crack at the edges.

He smiled, slow and knowing, like he could read every traitorous response my body was having. Like he knew exactly what his presence did to me, how it unraveled the careful control I’d spent years perfecting.

I wanted to slap that smile off his face.

And yet, I wanted to close the distance between us and find out if he tasted as dangerous as he smelled.

The contradiction was going to destroy me.