Something passed between us. Something, which, like this stranger, I couldn’t name. Maybe didn’t even want to. Names were labels, and labels meant rules, and whatever was transpiring between the stranger and me didn’t want to be boxed any more than I did tonight.
Maybe it was fate. Maybe it was just really good chemistry and too much alcohol.
Whatever it was, it made the world stop.
My hands rose to cup his face, stroke those full lips, frame the amused expression that was laced with something that looked like pain. He was frozen, not even breathing while I administered a gentle touch.
I couldn’t have said why, but he looked like he needed it.
“Ariadne,” he murmured.
I lifted a brow in answer. He was really leaning into the whole maenad thing, even if that wasn’t technically correct. Ariadne was Dionysus’s wife, not a crazed handmaiden. But now probably wasn’t the time for a lesson on one of my favorite Greek myths.
Then again, he did find me in a club called Naxos.
Did that make him Dionysus, the god who found Ariadne and married her?
I shivered.
The stranger cleared his throat, a poor attempt to break the spell. “We should?—”
I stopped him with a yank on his lapel, pulling him down for a kiss. Suddenly, I was desperate for this moment to continue, holding onto it with everything I had. My whole life was built around the word “should.” My job, my obligations, even my previous relationship had all been about what I “should” do rather than what I wanted.
Right now, I wanted towant.
Tomorrow I would be regular Laney Fisher again. But tonight, I was a woman without a name.
Or maybe just the one he had given me.
The stranger grunted in surprise. And then he was kissing me right back.
With one hand in my hair, the other cinched around my waist, he slanted his mouth over mine to claim, to take everything I was offering and give it all back tenfold. Our tongues wound together, lips locked in a frenzy, and it was everything I could do not to spread my legs right there and let him take me on the bar top.
There was nothing refined about this kiss. The savagery lurking under that suit should have scared me, but instead, it awakened something deeper. A craving. Aneed.
He was right the first time when he called me a maenad. This kiss was the definition of revelry. Hedonism at its core.
Whistles cut through the din. Cheers from other club goers, maybe even Megan and her friends. I didn’t hear them. Nothing existed beyond this stranger’s hands and mouth in what was unequivocally and inarguably the best kiss of my life.
Minutes—or maybe hours—later, we finally broke apart, gasping for air like we were taking our first breaths. His eyes were darker now, pupils blown wide. Every curl on his head had been ruined by my grip, and his lips were swollen as he rubbed them with one hand.
My stranger looked wrecked.
He looked perfect.
I wonder if he thought the same of me.
“Well, that was…” He cleared his throat, as if there was something stuck in it. “Christ, I don't even know your name.”
My cheeks heated under that hot gaze. “I think you gave me one, didn’t you?”
He seemed to stumble, though he wasn’t even walking. “Ariadne. Right.”
Then he smiled. A real smile, not a smirk. It transformed his entire face, softening his hard edges and lighting some of the shadows to render him younger. Almost vulnerable.
Almost.
He brushed a strand of hair from my face, and my skin tingled under that rough yet tender touch. “What do you say we get out of here?”
