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“What do you think you’re doing?” he demands.
For that single moment, we study each other. Our eyes meet in the quiet lull, each of us anticipating what is about to happen. I could come clean right now. I could walk up to him, crawl to him, throw myself at his feet and beg for his forgiveness. That’s what a good girl would do.
But there is something in the air between us, something charged and electric. A wanting, the way the wolf wants a rabbit. The same intensity I felt in that nightclub when we first met.
There’s an intoxicating masochism in staring down something dangerous and wild, knowing how badly it wants me.
Salvatore takes a single step forward.
I bolt.
He prowls after me—not even dignifying me with running as I bound away from him.
“Contessa!” He calls, like a shot ringing out.
I turn a sharp corner and find myself in a long sunroom. A pool and a spacious backyard stretch out far beyond the glass walls. I throw myself against the door, fingers fumbling on the lock. Salvatore’s footsteps approach, closing in. I fling the door open with such force, the glass cracks like a gunshot as I make a break for the outside.
I run for the gardens as fast as my feet can carry me, into rows of tall hedges and climbing vines. My heart pounds in my throat, every other beat switching between fear and thrill, fear and thrill. Salvatore’s shadow blocks out the light spilling through the latticework fencing, meeting me step for step.
“What’s the plan, Contessa?” he calls out. “It doesn’t matter what you do. Where you go. It doesn’t even matter if you make it over the wall. You think I won’t come after you? That I won’t find you?”
We weave around each other, circling. I can’t stop, always keeping his voice ever at the same distance as I stumble around the twisting paths.
“Where can you go that’s so far away, that I can’t reach you? Run, drive, fly—whatever you want. I’ll still come after you.”
He doesn’t sound as angry as he does insane, utterly sure of every word he speaks. His conviction is as strong as his anger. He hunts me through the paths, along the gardens, following the soft crunch of my footsteps as we lose ourselves in the makeshift labyrinth.
“Your sister is kind of an asshole,” I call back to him. The betrayal still stings.
“We finally have something we can agree on. Why don’t you come out here, and we’ll commiserate about it.”
As if.
“You left me alone in there. In that room,” I accuse him, my feet never stopping, always on the move. Our paths begin to circle in on themselves. I’m retracing my steps already, the gardens not that large, our conversation a back and forth play of Marco Polo as I hold my distance.
I hear his footsteps, too close suddenly and scamper away.
“Afraid I’d forgotten about you?”
My shamed silence answers him.
“I’m right here now. Come to me and let me make it up to you.”
I hate that there’s a part of me—in a particularly southern direction—that quickly warms to the idea. I’m a little better than my instincts. I don’t trust it. I turn, creeping steadily around the outside edge of the garden. I have no idea of what I will do even if I manage to throw him off my trail.
I never meant to make it this far out. It all went so wrong so fast.
One more corner. That’s all I get before I am face to face with Salvatore, cutting me off in an ambush like a seasoned hunter. His cryptic expression is utterly unsurprised, our eyes meeting in one tense moment. Gravel kicks up as I throw my momentum back, pivoting into the opposite direction. Salvatore is right on my heels. For a few endless seconds, I know what it is to be a prey animal. To be something soft and clawless, bounding through the forest for its very life.
Salvatore catches me effortlessly.
I yelp as we tumble onto the hard ground. His body pins me on my back, and I give in beneath him, limp and defenseless, flinching away from him on sheer instinct. He takes me by the jaw, making me look up at his face.
I’m shaking and aroused and terrified all at once, when Salvatore starts swallowing my shallow breaths, kissing me greedily as he pins me there in the dirt. My heart soars under his attention as he acts on that same desperate charged tension that I feel, the static heat in my belly.
My hands cup his face as he kisses me, like he has to reclaim me all over and make me his again. And for the first time—maybe out of sheer elation that he isn’t furious—I kiss back.
He breaks only long enough to growl a furious and satisfied, “You missed me.”
