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She is bright, burning like a fucking flame, and I want to get closer. Want to see if that light scorches or if it warms.
“What’s your name?”
She pauses, her glass of wine halfway to her mouth. Hesitation flickers across her face.
“Uh… how about we don’t exchange names?” she says, voice careful. “You know. Just for the night. No contact afterwards.”
I feel the smirk pull at my lips before I can stop it.
I, the man who’s ended more nights with exactly those words than I can count, I’m on the receiving end for the first time in my life. Intriguing doesn’t even begin to cover it.
But coming from her lips, it doesn’t sound quite right. For reasons I can’t place, I want to know more about her. I don’t want this to end tonight. But I decide to play along.
I lean in, close enough that she has to tilt her head to hold my gaze.
“Deal,” I murmur. “No names.”
Chapter Three
Rosie
I can’t believe I’m doing this.
What the hell am I doing?
I’ve never had a one-night stand. Not once. The only man I’ve ever been with is Luke. Now I’m following a stranger whose name I don’t even know out of a bar, into an elevator, toward what is very obviously going to end with us naked. My heart is slamming against my ribs so hard I’m surprised he can’t hear it.
What if he’s a serial killer? The tattoos peeking out from the open collar of his shirt, dark ink curling around the base of his throat and disappearing under the fabric, suddenly look a lot more like warning signs. I should say something. I should stop this. I should—
The elevator dings. The doors slide open, and we step inside. It’s empty.
The moment they close, every single second thought I had evaporates.
He moves like lightening. One hand plants beside my head against the mirrored wall, the other finds the nape of my neck, and then I’m backed up hard against the cool metal. His mouth crashes down on mine.
I don’t know how we get from the elevator to here, everything blurs into heat and motion and the press of his body against mine, but suddenly we’re inside a suite that makes the cramped apartment I share with Mabel look like a broom closet.
Floor-to-ceiling windows frame a glittering view of the Hamptons night, dark ocean stretching out forever under a scattering of stars. Plush rugs, low modern furniture in charcoal and cream. I catch only flashes of it before he carries me straight through to the bedroom, mouth never leaving mine.
He devours me, lips on my lips, my jaw, my neck, hot, open-mouthed kisses that leave wet trails and make my skin burn. My head spins from the lack of oxygen and the sheer intensity of him.
When he finally sets me on my feet, my legs wobble like I’ve been on a boat all day. He steadies me with one big hand at my waist, thumb brushing the underside of my breast through the fabric of my dress, and I sway into him without meaning to.
I don’t get another second to take in the bedroom or the view. His mouth is already moving again, kissing a slow, deliberate path down my throat, across my collarbone, between my breasts. Lower. Lower. Until he’s sinking to his knees in front of me.
The sight steals every scrap of air from my lungs.
A man like him, built like a weapon, radiating that quiet, dangerous power, on his knees for me. It’s obscene. It’s intoxicating. I don’t know his name, I don’t know who he really is, but everything about him screams authority, the kind of man who makes other men step aside without saying a word. And right now he’s looking up at me like I’m the only thing in the world that matters.
My breath hitches hard when his hands slide up the backs of my thighs, bunching the red fabric higher. Realization crashes in: he’s about to—
Luke never would. He always said it was gross, that he didn’t like the taste, that it wasn’t his thing. I stopped asking after so many rejections. I told myself it didn’t matter.
It mattered.
The stranger’s voice cuts through the memory. “You don’t want it?”
I blink down at him, realizing my face must be showing fear or hesitation. “Uhm—no, it’s not that. It’s just… my ex never went down on me.”
