Page 31

It was fine. It was going to be fine.

Just a few more seconds.

He walked closer and my heart tried to stop, afraid even the sound of a beat might give me away. It was going to be⁠—

“What. The hell. Are you doing?”

My eyes snapped open at Blaze’s furious growl. He loomed over me in nothing but a towel around his waist and fury on his face.

He was rage cloaked in beauty. An angry Adonis with smoke-sparkled eyes, a muscle-chiseled jaw and firm, feral lips drawn into an impermeable line. He breathed heavily like his chest was made of stone, each inhale having to crack it open in order to let oxygen in.

I shouldn’t have kept looking, but I couldn’t stop myself. The honeycombed ridges of his abdomen. The taper of his waist. Those grooves of muscle that trailed underneath the rim of his towel. And the way he anchored the fabric over his front, my jaw sank even wider at the outline of his⁠—

“Get up, Harper,” Blaze snarled, and my gaze snapped to his. “Now.” I flinched at the almost physical lash of the anger in his voice.

I was spared him dragging me to my feet because to do that, he’d lose the only thing covering him. But that small mercy didn’t change my sentence: I was dead. Or going to be. By murder or mortification, the next few minutes would decide.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted and scrambled to my feet, my whole body shaking so bad I thought my head threatened to rattle right off my neck. “I’m so sorry. I swear, it’s not what it looks like⁠—”

“So, you didn’t sneak into my room while I was in the shower?” he snarled and crowded up to me.

If there was any light on my face, he’d be able to see my cheeks were fire-hydrant red. “Well, no, it is that,” I stammered. “I-I did that⁠—”

“Goddammit, Harper,” he hissed, his lips curled back. “I don’t have time for fucking games. If this is some part of your fantasy teenage crush, I swear to god, you’re wasting your fucking time. I’m not interested and I’m not going to fuck you, so you can forget whatever kind of honeytrap⁠—”

My hand cracked across his perfect face like a strike of lightning—unexpected and unannounced. I gasped with equal parts shock and indignation. How could he have said that? How could I have done that? His words struck a match of pain inside my chest, and then anger doused it in gasoline. No wonder my hand had exploded.

“Daddy?” Paisley whimpered from her room, and Blaze’s jaw flexed once. Twice.

“Be right there, pumpkin,” he called, hiding every trace from his voice of the catastrophe that was happening in here. No wonder he was such a good actor. When he slowly lifted his head back to me, there was no hiding the look on his face. The anger in his eyes. The frustration.

Well, the feeling was mutual.

“You’re an asshole,” I said thickly, the choice between humiliation and further debasement an easy one to make. “I didn’t sneak in here to make some kind of move on you. I would never do that. Not to you. Not around Paisley.”

I lifted my left hand and, in an instant, his grip imprisoned it—reflex, clearly, because he thought I was going to slap him again. An idea that was quickly disabused when he saw the bright yellow lemon in my grip.

“I snuck in because I forgot to move this earlier and wanted to get it out before you found it.”

Instead of understanding, his scowl only deepened. “That’s what you want me to believe?” He scoffed roughly. “That you came in here for a fake lemon left in the nightstand drawer?”

So, he had already found it, and he had no idea what it was. The irony was…painful.

“Yes,” I hissed, jutting my chin out. “A toy.” I pressed my thumb to the discreet power button, and the toy started vibrating.

The dawn of understanding on his face was as sharp and swift as the final nail in my coffin.

“I came to get my vibrator, Blaze, not to seduce you,” I charged, my embarrassment crystallizing into glittering bitterness the way the blackest carbon transforms into a glowing diamond. “But you’re right, I do want to fuck you.” I straightened my spine though he still towered over me. “Fuck. You.” I clipped out the words I rarely uttered and then yanked my hand from his hold. “There. Now I’m satisfied.”

His nostrils flared, and if there was regret on his face, I refused to see it—refused to hear it.

“Harper—”

“Good night.” I stalked around him, making it through the door just as Paisley called again.

“Daddy?”

This time, little choked sobs followed the word, and though I hated to know she was upset—the only comfort it brought me was knowing that as I quickly fled back downstairs, Blaze wasn’t going to follow me.