Page 44 of Essence of Fear

“Scares you a bit,” he returned, his grin deepening a bit. “I know; I can tell.”

“You like that, I think.”

Pav arched a brow. “I like that you fight it for what you want. You want more than you fear, and that gets me off.”

Jesus Christ.

She swallowed the knot in her throat, because he wasn’t wrong. She was all too willing to fight the constant war of her fear for the chance at feeling something—a taste of the kind of freedom only sex could provide.

Far more than willing.

“If you tell me no, or it feels like too much; if you need to stop, then you say so, and it’s done.”

“Not all of my cues are verbal.”

Pav nodded. “I can tell.”

“Can you?”

“Better than you know, Viktoria.”

That was the thing, wasn’t it?

She needed to trust him.

Yeah, terrifying.

And yet, she still wanted to try. She wanted to let him learn all those things he told her, and more. So much fucking more.

Pav lifted a brow high. “And if you tell me yes—”

“Yes,” she breathed instantly.

That was all he needed.

In a blink, he was up from that chair, and closing the space between them. She heard the chair legs scrape loudly against the tile, which was enough to make her jump in her own seat. Her attention quickly went back to the man looming over her. Yet another thing that made her tense and hesitate.

But he saw that.

The flash in her eyes.

The draw back when he leaned down.

He saw it all.

Viktoria watched the recognition in his eyes when he cupped her jaw in his hands and lowered down in front of her chair so that he wasn’t above her like that. So that he didn’t loom over her like that. He didn’t ask for a kiss, but she didn’t mind. Instead, he pulled her in for one that she swore lit up fireworks inside her stomach.

His lips worked hard against hers, and she answered him back with the same. At first, she just wanted to feel the kiss, but then, she wanted to taste him, too. It was her tongue that struck out against the seam of his lips first—her that asked for more without saying a thing. She was quite aware of that, and she didn’t miss how he let her do it, too.

The second his mouth opened for her, and their tongues met, a dance began. That kiss turned into something far hotter, a lot like the way her body felt in those seconds. She knew that she needed air—needed to breathe, but she didn’t care.

In his eyes, she found anticipation.

Lust.

Appreciation.

She worried she might find something else, something that looked like her greatest fears staring back at her. But she didn’t find that at all. She realized, too, that she’d never wanted a man—or rather, this man—to look at her more.