Page 95

He slapped both palms down onto his knees, the way a man does when he has decided that the sitting part of his day is over. Then he rose.

Slowly.

There was no urgency in it anywhere and no scramble to catch me. Just a confident man unfolding himself up out of a chair one deliberate inch at a time. A huge frame that rose up and up, and up, until I swear that he had taken the light out of half of that room.

And I had forgotten the size of him.

That was the truth of it. Of course, I knew that it was the stupidest thing to forget. But two months of remembering a man in the darkness of my dreams had shrunk him down into something my head could comfortably hold onto. But now the real thing was standing in front of me, and I realized my mistake. Because the reality was just as terrifying as it had been when I first met him.

He was enormous.

He wasn’t wearing a prison jumpsuit either, which was what my brain homed in on first, because it couldn’t cope with the rest of it. Two months of remembering him in a jumpsuit and chains. And here he was in a plain, tight long-sleeved shirt and soft gray sweatpants with no cord in the waist, dressed like a man with nowhere to be on a Sunday.

It should have made him look smaller or less intimidating at the very least. But it didn’t. No, it only ended up making him look enormous, because there was nothing institutional left on him and what was left was simply the size of the man.

And he had changed.

Two months had taken something off him and put something a great deal harder in its place. He had always been huge, and now he was carved with it. The shoulders, the forearms, the long ropes of muscle running down his neck and every bit of it shifting under that shirt as he came up to his full height. Two months in a locked building with nothing at all to do but train, and it showed in every single inch of him.

Fuck me but my heart felt like it was trying to escape my chest up through my throat.

His face had gone leaner across the cheekbones so that the whole of it looked like something carved rather than grown. As for his ink, this came up out of his collar and ran along the side of his throat exactly as it always had.

But it was those eyes that really had me held prisoner.

The palest blue ringed in that dark navy, the ones I have been seeing behind my own eyelids every night since a shower block in another state, came up and found me struck frozen.

He looked raw.

That was the only word I had for it. As though the time apart had taken whatever thin skin of civility he had been wearing at Ashlock and worn it clean through. And what was standing in that treatment room with me now was the thing that had been underneath it all along.

Then he took one step toward me and finally my brain engaged along with my feet.

So, I ran.

I got my hand on the handle, and it moved perhaps half an inch. That was as far as I got, because his palm came flat against the door above my head. Which was when the whole thing stopped being a door and started being a wall.

There was nothing to slam. The door had never got far enough open for that. So, there was no bang, no shove, no violence in it anywhere. He simply put his hand where it needed to be, and the door was not an option anymore. And it was the quiet way he did it that told me more about what I was standing in front of than two months of dreaming ever had.

Then he leaned in.

Not against me. In fact, he didn’t touch me at all. He just brought his head down beside mine, close enough that I felt the heat coming off his jaw as he breathed me in. A long, slow, unhurried pull of air at the side of my throat before he hummed, emitting a deep rumble in his chest that sounded far too pleased.

“Fuck, but how I have missed that smell.” I swear that it came out of him like something he had been holding in since the day I left. And something went through me when he said it. It started at the back of my skull and went all the way down, slow and warm, and I knew it wasn’t fear.

No… I knew exactly what it was.

That was the worst part. The two months of lying awake in a rented room over a hardware store wanting exactly this. It was like an addiction I knew would kill me one day, yet I wanted it anyway. And now here he was, close enough to touch, and my body didn’t have the decency to pretend otherwise for even a second.

So, I forced it into action.

I twisted away from him and I even got an elbow up as I shoved back off that door with everything I had. Which admittedly, at five foot four against a man the size of a truck came to almost nothing at all. Which meant that even after all my effort his only response was to make a small noise against my hair.

A single tsk, like I had dropped something. But it was when I tried to reach for the door again that he gave me more of a reaction.

“Let’s leave that alone, shall we,” he said calmly before my feet were lifted clean off the floor. And he did this with one arm across my middle and three steps before he set me down again in the center of the room. And what was worse, was that there was no effort in it at all. He didn’t even change his breathing.

“How did you find me?” It came out of me as a hiss, and I was glad of it, because it was better than the alternative, which was crying.