“But I do.” I pulled back just enough to look at him. “If we’re going to do this—whatever this is—I can’t pretend there isn’t something big standing in the middle of it.”
He went very still. His arm drew me closer—not enough to trap, only enough to remind me he was there.
“I had a boyfriend back home,” I said. “And things went bad faster than I could handle. We weren’t right for each other, and he…” I swallowed. “He didn’t like that.”
Pietro's body hardened under my hand. Not a flinch. Something slower and more deliberate than that. Like a manwho had just been handed a piece of information and was deciding, very carefully, what to do with it.
"He never really hit me," I said too quickly.
The silence lasted perhaps two seconds.
It felt much longer.
His voice, when it came, had changed. Not louder. Worse. Quieter. The kind of quiet that had nothing to do with calm.
"What do you mean by 'really?’"
I exhaled and looked away. I didn’t want to say the words. Didn’t want to drag out the little accidents Adam had always dressed up as misunderstandings, bad tempers, mistakes I was meant to forgive because they could have been worse.
“It was more mental than anything,” I said at last. “Controlling. Manipulative. And sometimes…” I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. I left. I came here, and no one back there knows where I am. I promised myself I would get this degree, keep my head down, and stay away from men.”
I glanced up at him with a weak attempt at a smile. “Which, obviously, I’m failing at rather badly.”
A quiet huff of laughter left him, but there was no real ease in it. “I’m not just any man, Emily Hart.”
I smiled a little. “What are you, then? My protector?”
I meant it as a joke. The seriousness in his face killed it instantly.
“If you want me to be,” he said. “Say the word and he’s gone.”
I forced out a breath that I tried very hard to turn into a laugh, but the look in his eyes made it impossible to treat the words lightly. There was no humor there. Only a dark fierceness that sent a chill down my spine.
A chill that felt a little too much like relief.
The difference, I told myself, was that he was offering, rather than deciding. I wasn't entirely sure that was enough of a difference. But I knew he would stop if I said stop.
“I—”
Before I could even ask what he meant, he leaned in and kissed me.
“Go for your sister’s surgery,” he murmured against my mouth. “I’ll come with you. You’ll be safe.”
If only,I thought a little wistfully. “It’s not that simple.”
He gave me a crooked smile that ought to have come with a warning label. A genuine health hazard.
“I’m pretty sure it is. Don’t let the cane fool you. I can be lethal.”
And the ridiculous thing was, I believed him. He exuded danger, but not the kind that made me want to run. The kind that made me want to sink into it. The kind that made me want to be the one person it never turned on.
“No,” I said, a little breathlessly. “Yes, I’m sure you can, but he’s not just anyone. He’s the son of the local police chief.”
I wasn’t sure what I expected then. Doubt, maybe. Caution.
Certainly not the way his smile widened.
He lifted a hand to my face, his thumb brushing slowly over my cheekbone, and the gentleness of it felt more dangerous than the look in his eyes.
