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Loathing pervaded his expression. “But I’m not that man.”

My attention drifted to the scene on his abdomen.

To the tree with the apple dangling from the skeletal limb.

“I don’t want anyone else.” My confession flooded the dense air.

A shiver rolled through me when he reached out and brushed his thumb over the contour of my cheek. “You just don’t know anything else.”

Your heart will know.

Mine had known a long, long time ago.

He rolled out of bed and stood at the side, leaving me on my knees peering up at him towering over me.

So destructively beautiful my thighs quaked again. His erection strained against his sweats, and my mouth watered with the image of pulling him from them.

Taking him however he wanted me.

“You can’t look at me like that, Lena.”

It snapped my attention up to the riot in his eyes.

My heart thundered and my blood careened.

“I’ve always looked at you like this. You just refuse to see it.”

Tattooed hands curled into fists, and the skin undulated over the hulking contours of his frame.

His fingers barely brushed over my lips. “The way I see you is the entire problem, Little Apple. Because I can’t fucking have you.”

Then he turned and walked out of my room.

Leaving me panting in the middle of my bed.

TWENTY-ONE

TREVAN

FOURTEEN YEARS OLD

“You’re nothing but a worthless piece of garbage, aren’t you? Eating up all my food and living under my roof, and you don’t have a damned thing to offer.”

Trevan’s mother sneered at him from where she sat on the couch, an empty bottle of vodka toppled on its side on the peeling coffee table, the only light in the room a sliver coming through the drapes.

But it was enough to illuminate the disgust on her face.

His stomach soured. “I only had three houses to mow.”

At five dollars apiece, it wasn’t like he was raking it in, but he was trying.

Trying to do his best.

But no matter how hard he tried to make her proud of him, she always met him with this.

Disdain.

It had always been.