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I let out a shaky breath, his words hammering into me.
He called me beautiful. He called me sexy.
I whisper the realization in my mind, trying to convince myself it’s real.
And at the same time, a part of me would like nothing more than for it to fade away into unreality because the last freaking thing I should be doing is staring into this man’s eyes with bare inches separating us.
“Tell me to let go,” he snarls, moving even closer, his breath whispering over my lips and cheeks. “Tell me you want me to stop. Go on, Jade. Lie to me.”
I open my mouth with no idea what I’m going to say.
I know what I should say.
“Mr. Jensen, this is very inappropriate. I was under the impression I was here for a self-defense class, and now you’ve put me in an extremely awkward situation. Will you please let me go immediately before I scream?”
But of course, that would be a downright lie.
I don’t want him to let me go.
Ever.
“Is this a joke?” I whisper, my voice sounding far away and ghostly.
“A joke?” he growls. “What do you mean?”
I slide sideways, not sure if I’m relieved or disappointed when he lets me pace over to the boxing ring. I grip the bottom rope and let out a shaky sigh, letting my gaze move over the stacked dumbbells on the other side of the room, and then over to the small square window that shows a snowy snapshot of the city.
I sense Jamie moving up behind me, but I don’t hear him. He moves astoundingly quietly for a man who’s at least six and a half feet, probably closer to six and three quarters.
“Look at me, Jade,” he growls, his voice that of a warrior who’s conquered the village and is now ready to claim his prize.
I turn shakily, heart pounding up into my throat, all through my body.
My mind plays a hyper-fast reel of all the moments Yasmin and I have shared over the years, first when she was my writing mentor, and then later when we lived together.
I feel her arms wrapped around me as I cried myself into a wreck after Dad’s accident.
I feel her hand on mine, giving me a supportive squeeze when I received yet another rejection letter from yet another publisher.
It’s like it’s all superimposed onto this moment as I turn to face him, this man who shouldn’t be looking at me like that, with a spark of feral ownership in his eyes.
“What?” I whisper.
His jaw goes somehow tighter. His body looks as though it could go full on werewolf any second, his pectorals heaving in his tight gym T-shirt, and his manhood …
My sex gives a flurry every time I glance at it, which I’ve tried not to do since I first noticed just how freaking huge he is.
Because thinking about how big he is sends my body into a panicked overdrive, my heart beating so heavily it’s like a giant is slamming his fist against my body.
“I’d never trick you,” he growls. “I’d never even dream of it. I don’t know how to explain this—”
A heavy knock interrupts us, three distinctive thuds that seem to reverberate far too loudly around the room.
For a few crazed seconds, I’m convinced that it’s Yasmin, that somehow she knows what we’ve been doing in here and now she’s going to march in and punish us for daring to cross that line. I imagine her with her camera raised, ready to broadcast our betrayal to her hundreds of thousands of followers.
“Yes?” Jamie snarls, voice trembling at the interruption.
“I’m sorry, sir,” a deep-voiced man says. “There’s been an incident.”
“Come in, Graham, dammit,” Jamie sighs, taking a step back and leaving me to mentally finish his declaration in a thousand different ways.
I don’t know how to explain this urge I have to be inside of you, right now, to take you until you shake and shiver for me.
Fine, it could be that.
But couldn’t it also be that he doesn’t know how to explain why he just told me a bunch of bullshit, why he just got carried away and now he’d like for me to forget that we ever had any sort of intimacy, however brief, however surreal?
The door opens and an older man comes in, probably around sixty, with horn rimmed glasses. He glances over at me, shifting from foot to foot, and then turns back to Jamie with a look that roars, We can’t talk about this in front of her.
“It’s fine,” Jamie says, reading the look. “Jade can be trusted.”
I almost gasp, the declaration is so sudden. And then I feel the warmth rising from deep within me, as though my womb is whispering that it’s good, it’s right, that this man trusts me. The thought is so ridiculous, and yet it persists, a warm whisper that won’t go away.
