Page 44 of Hate To Be Mine

He chuckled and shook his head. “I know, poor little rich boy with the good looks.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“It’s just… it’s a lot.”

“Yeah,” I said softly. “It is.”

The porch felt like a little bubble, separate from the rest of the very wet world. It felt protected. Intimate.

Our knees brushed. Just barely. Just enough that we both noticed.

Neither of us moved away.

“Your father sounds like a hard man to please,” Sebastian said.

“He is. Nothing’s ever quite good enough.” I took a breath. “What about yours? What was he like?”

“Intense. Driven. He built Blackwell Couture from nothing, you know? Started as a single dressmaker and turned it into an empire. Hard to live up to that legacy.”

“I can imagine.”

Lightning flashed, bright enough to illuminate the entire resort for a split second. Thunder followed almost immediately—a crack so loud it felt like the sky was splitting open.

The lights flickered. Once. Twice.

Then went out completely.

I jumped, a startled sound escaping me before I could stop it.

Sebastian’s hand found my arm in the darkness. “Hey. You okay?”

“Yes.”

His hand stayed on my arm. I didn’t move. I didn’t even want to breathe. Like when a gorgeous, rare butterfly landed on you and you didn’t dare move a muscle.

I stayed perfectly still to keep the rare beauty from pulling away.

17

SEBASTIAN

Icouldn’t pull my hand away. It was like touching a live wire. I couldn’t drop it. I didn’t want to. It felt like every nerve ending in my body was getting hit with a jolt of juice. Heat raced through me, and I didn’t want it to stop. My body hummed with pleasure and need.

She didn’t pull away either.

That was the thing that got me. She didn’t jerk back or make some excuse to move. She just sat there in the darkness, my hand on her arm, both of us pretending it was normal. Casual. Just two colleagues having a conversation on a porch during a power outage.

With my hand on her arm.

Except it wasn’t casual. Nothing about this felt casual.

I should kiss her, I thought. Right now. In the darkness with the wild storm raging just inches away. It’s that wild, carnal kind of thing that I’m typically drawn to, which makes no sense why her buttoned-up self gets me so fucking hard.

Eventually, she slowly pulled her arm back. Not jerking it away like it bothered her or like she was trying to escape. If anything, she let it linger. Like she’d been considering the same thing I was considering and had decided against it.

Or maybe I was reading too much into everything. Maybe she was just moving her arm and I was a desperate idiot looking for signs that weren’t there. The woman had me twisted up.

I eased back in my chair, putting a few more inches of space between us, and tried to get my brain working again instead of just obsessing over the ghost of her warmth. I had flashes of images of her in various stages of undress.