Page 25

The scent fades and I'm back in a concrete box with military-grade locks and a man I've slept with twice who won't tell me what he does for a living.

I wipe the flour on the borrowed T-shirt hanging to my thighs and shove the ache down where it can't reach my face. My bakery is dark and I’m letting my regulars down by not being there for them. They have to be wondering where I am, at least I hope. My ovens are cold. And I'm here because a woman I once called family paid to erase me for good.

Cooking steadies my hands when the rest of me is falling apart. I open the fridge and every shelf confirms what I've been piecing together since the night we met. Organic eggs, imported butter, high-end cheeses with names I can't pronounce. The produce is fresh, colorful, beautiful. The man doesn't cook, but his fridge is stocked like a Michelin kitchen because Thane Cross doesn't budget, apparently. Like everything else I’ve seen, his life is top-shelf, best-of-the-best, without pausing to calculate the cost. It’s all good. I get it. I grew up in a household like that. Only after I moved out and refused my father’s money did I really discover the price of groceries.

I grab the eggs and a bowl and start cracking.

Every room in this safehouse gets smaller the second he walks into it.

I crack two eggs into the bowl on the counter while I pretend I don't track every step he takes behind me. The kitchen is too small for someone his size plus me. Every time he reaches past me for his coffee, spicy sandalwood and something sharp and clean flood my lungs, and my stomach drops straight to my knees.

"You're staring," I say without turning around.

"I'm assessing."

Assessing what? My ass? How big of a coffin he needs to bury me in? How deep to dig the hole? I can't tell. His voice is low, flat, delivered without a single inflection that tells me whether he's amused or deadly serious, so my brain runs with all the possibilities. That voice could talk a woman out of her clothes or read a death sentence, and the tone wouldn't change for either.

The whisk goes harder than necessary because my hands need something to do besides remembering what his fingers did to me in his apartment. One reckless night. No names, no history, just the roughest, most consuming sex of my life, and now I'm trapped in a concrete box with the same man, pretending my body doesn't ignite every time he gets close enough for me to feel his heat.

His mug hits the counter beside me. Close. Too close. The sleeve of his shirt brushes my bare arm and every nerve ending I own fires at once.

"Neve."

The whisk stops. My pulse doesn't. My name in that controlled rumble makes the muscles low in my belly clench so hard my knees almost buckle.

"What?"

"Turn around."

I don't even try to resist his husky command. Apparently I am a woman with zero survival instincts and a death wish for tall, scarred men with dark whiskey eyes and hands that could snap my neck or make me come. Thinking deeper on that, I'm starting to think he doesn't know the difference either.

His gaze drops to my mouth then lower, slow and deliberate. Like a man who either wants to fuck me or off me. Those dark, unreadable eyes slide over the curves of my breasts and then lower to where the hem of his shirt barely covers me from sight. For one second I catch the crack underneath his tough exterior and I see the hunger he keeps locked behind all that discipline. The same starving look he wore the night he pinned me against a wall, called me sweet girl, and made me forget my own name.

My back presses into the counter's edge. "You keep looking at me like that and we're going to have a problem, Thane Cross."

"We already have a problem, my sweetness."

Oh, fuck me already, my inner voice screams. When his voice drops into pure gravel like that my thighs press together on instinct.

"Thane."

Did that sound like I was begging? Heat flushes my entire body. Do I care? No!

"Neve, my sweet girl." He threads his fingers through my hair and tilts my mouth up with a thumb under my chin.

"Tell me to walk away."

He takes a step closer. The air between us thins to nothing. "Say it and I'll go."

Every lesson my father ever taught me about reading dangerous men screams to open my mouth and tell this man to leave and never come back. The set of his jaw, the stillness before death walks into the room, the scars mapped across his knuckles. Run, baby girl. Run from the man who keeps weapons under every surface in this safehouse.

My inner good girl knows I'm in a very dangerous situation, but the girl who wants to do very bad things with Thane Cross is stronger.

In my defense, my father never taught me what to do when the dangerous man smells like safety, too.

I drag the edge of my lower lip between my teeth a second before saying, "I'm not going to say it."

Rough fingers trace the line of my jaw, tip my chin higher still until there's nowhere to look but his dark whiskey eyes. His thumb drags across my bottom lip, pressing the center, and the sound I make is embarrassingly hungry for all the promises I see written all over his handsome expression. Dark promises. Filthy ones that will leave me marked and ruined by this man.