A promise.
A shiver rolled through every inch of my body, and a trembling breath left my lungs. I gulped around the knot of desire that climbed my throat, nerves of uncertainty only amplifying the sensation, fear and need and a desperation unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.
I tried not to fidget as I forced the words from my tongue. “I’ve only been with two men in my life. I’m not sure I know what I’m doing.”
I felt so far out of my element.
Gone to who I was.
A prisoner to this man who was commanding all of me.
A harsh gush of surprised air left him, and I felt the tension fill that beautiful, powerful body, the pants he released at my neck rippling with restraint and hesitation and questions.
Ian ran a hand down my left arm, his touch searching as he hit my left finger, as if he were looking for the proof of a rusted ring.
“There’s so much you don’t know about me,” I whispered.
Slowly, he spun me away so I was facing him, which didn’t help matters at all. Because all that energy spiked, a thrum in the space between us.
He backed me deeper into his condo, his presence so profound as he edged closer and closer. “There’s plenty that you don’t know about me, either.”
He’d taken on a predator’s stance. Lust a gleam in those crazy-colored eyes. Maybe there was a bit of demon to him, after all.
“Two?” he continued. The grit grinding from his tongue made it sound like a challenge.
My belly tightened, and I could barely nod as I was taking a fumbling step back, then another, until I’d backed myself into a wall.
He watched me from the middle of the room. So gorgeous I couldn’t see straight.
“You want to leave?” he asked, so low I felt his voice scrape across my skin. “Because I’m about to make it three.”
“No,” I managed.
Not even close.
I wanted to run to him. Let him hold me and keep me and pray that he wouldn’t break me.
But I knew that he would.
Knew it so deep with the way he was watching me, with the way a storm of mayhem and chaos and menace whipped around him as if he were commanding the night.
I think we both knew that’s exactly what it was.
He’d taken control. He had me, and he was going to annihilate me.
“Good,” he almost growled as he kicked off his shoes and socks. “Think I might die if I don’t get to show you. If I don’t get to feel you. If I don’t get to touch you. I don’t think I’ve ever needed to be inside a woman the way I need to be inside of you. Is that what you want? To feel me inside you, Grace?”
His words hung in the dense, thick air, his chin lifted as if he were daring me to deny it.
To deny him.
Impossible.
He stayed in that same spot as he worked his tie the rest of the way from his neck.
Purposed, he ticked through the buttons of his vest, peeled it off his massive shoulders, and dropped it to the floor.
Then he started to do the same to his shirt.
I leaned against the wall, my knees weak with want, pressing my thighs together as if it might relieve the flames that lapped higher.
He shrugged his shirt off his shoulders.
I nearly came undone right there.
“Is this what you want?” he challenged, those words he fired from his mouth nothing but seduction.
The man was an overwhelming surge of severity that washed over me.
Oh God. Was this really happening? Or was I just having another one of those hallucinations, my mind conjuring the most dangerous sort of perfection?
My lips parted on a needy gasp, and my mouth went dry at the sight in front of me, my back hitched to the wall as if I were hanging from it.
“Yes,” I managed.
From where I was pressed to the wall, my eyes raced over him, trying to take in every inch where the man stood there like a fortress.
A predator sent to protect or destroy, I still wasn’t sure.
The only thing I knew was he was nothing but packed, solid muscle.
Carved, chiseled stone.
Chest and shoulders so wide. Abdomen flat and defined, muscles shaking with his own need.
It left me feeling half deranged, half a second from dropping to my knees and licking across the deeply cut grooves.
Bowing at his feet.
“You should see what you look like right now, Grace. Like art hanging on my wall. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a girl as beautiful as you.”
“Ian.”
He took a step forward, and I was slammed with another blast of his potency.
My eyes moved everywhere, from that gorgeous face and down that striking body. The waistband of his pants hung on his narrow hips and barely concealed the v that dipped down beneath the fabric.
But it was the marks written all over him that had my own chest pressing full.
Heart beating manic as my gaze traced over the designs etched and marred across his skin.
Scarred like brands of anguish.
A trademark of torment.
More of those demons screamed across his flesh. It appeared as if they were howling as they flew into his world that had been dimmed in the blackest night.
Roman numerals were stamped across his collarbones, and his abdomen and sides were covered in barren trees and devastated landscape and a watch that seemed to have run out of time.
Everything was a little warped, a dark fantasy, as if it all was being viewed through a veiled, distorted mirror.
But it was the words printed on his side as if they had been scribbled onto his skin by a small child with a crayon that had my spirit screaming.
Forever and Ever.
There was something so heartbreaking about it that I felt mine reaching for him, every inch of him something I wanted to touch and soothe and ease.
Because all of that ink was covering scars.
As if he’d been whipped and burned. Battered and bruised.
It seemed impossible that he had grown to stand the most powerful, influential kind of man.
I was overcome with the need to know him. To climb inside. To search and hold and stay.
Did any of my worries matter, anyway? Because something about this felt so fleeting while there was a huge part of me that wanted to reach out and hang on for forever.
See him, know him, understand him the way I wanted him to understand me.
He started to edge toward me, barefoot, wearing only his suit pants.
Menacing and persuasive.
Sexy and sure and brimming with that arrogance.
Tension held fast to the atmosphere, the man more intense than I’d ever felt him before.
“Don’t ever fucking feel pity for me. I know what you’re thinking. Don’t fucking go there. Just know that every one of those scars made me who I am today.”
I wanted to shout it back. Beg him to let me in. To show me what that meant. Tell him that my scars made me who I was, too. Though mine were invisible. Written deep. My children a gift given in between.
But my tongue was locked up, held in a blast of that energy that surged, higher and higher with each step that he took in my direction. My empty lungs filled up with the scent of cinnamon and orange, an insinuation of sex that dripped from his skin.
The man a bottle named Bliss.
He planted his hands on the wall over my head.
Towering.
Obliterating.
Casting me in shadows.
I didn’t know whether to hide or run toward the mayhem.
To dive into his disturbance or crawl for safety.
But I was stuck, helpless but to fall for him.
He trailed his fingertips from the cap of my exposed shoulder, dipping it down across my collarbone.
A shiver rolled, trembles shaking me all the way to the core.
“Cold?” he murmured, his voice a blast of heat across my skin.
“No,” I barely managed to choke out.
Ian ran his nose up my jaw, and he inhaled as he went.
All the while I struggled to breathe, emotions flying at me from everywhere. Questions and concerns and worry, my judgment cast into the surety of his hands.
His chest expanded, his heart racing just as fast as mine.
As if the two were catching time.
Was it possible that he felt this, too? As if he were standing at the precipice of something great? That one second more, and we would never be the same?
Because I knew in another breath, I would forever become a part of him.