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How could you ever tell your older brother’s best friend that you were obsessed with his hands because you wanted him to hold you down with them?

You couldn’t. She hadn’t.

The thing was, growing up the way she had, she had known that it was good to fear men. That it was good to have a healthy amount of distrust for them. Adonis had always been safe. Safe and dangerous all at once. He would never hurt her. The only way that she would ever be able to enjoy a man’s strength, really and truly, was with him.

And he was touching her like this, like he knew that. Like he knew her girlish fantasies.

They did not feel girlish right now.

She was wet and aching, dying for him to touch her. They hadn’t kissed.

The truth was, she had a hard time imagining what it would be like to kiss him. He was too intense for any sort of sweet make-out session.

But she had long suspected that she wasn’t the kind of girl who needed that anyway. After all, he had been the one who had given her her first taste of what it meant to desire someone. He might not have done it on purpose, but the effect remained all the same. Still, it would be nice to taste him. His mouth.

The very idea made her shiver.

And he was still holding on to her throat.

“Esme,” he said. “If I take you upstairs…”

“Enough. I’m tired of the sexual threats. Make good on them or let me go.”

He growled, and then took her hand, leading her through the knot of bodies out on the dance floor, taking her to a back door that had a pad next to it. He put his hand on it, and it read his palm print. Then they went inside.

It was quiet, the thundering bass from out there reduced now with the door closed firmly behind them.

He looked at her then, like he was starving. She had never seen him look like that before.

She had seen him fearsome. And she had seen him violent. Overprotective, and angry. Rarely, she had seen him happy. But this… This was something else altogether.

And when he closed the distance between them and claimed her mouth it was swift and decisive. And she knew a moment of panic.

Because it was far too sharp. Far too delectable. Far too much. How was she going to survive this? She was a virgin, and he knew that. But did he know that she was completely and totally untouched? She hadn’t thought that it would be a problem; after all, she had a store of sexual fantasies in her mind. How different could it be to do it in real life?

But right now, as his firm lips caught and held hers, as he moved his tongue against hers, she thought it was dangerously outside of her depth.

What he made her feel with just that stroke of his tongue far surpassed any desire that she had ever felt during evenings alone in her bed.

She wanted him to strip her naked, then and there, take her up against the wall, and she feared it in equal measure. Because he would dissolve her. Destroy her. Crack her at her very foundation, and whether or not she had the ability to be remade into something new was a truth that she would never get to the bottom of. At least, not without taking the risk.

She had said yes. But had she known what she was saying yes to?

You’re not a coward. You grew up on the street. The only two people who never abandoned you were Alex and Adonis.

Adonis is the right choice for this.

She had a feeling that her internal voice only wanted the experience of having the sex that she craved.

And how nice for that part of herself.

As for her sanity, it was dangling precariously.

And then he did push her back up against the wall, his hard chest pressing against her breasts. They ached. Her nipples tight. He wrenched his mouth from hers and pressed his lips to the shell of her ear, whispered things in Greek that didn’t have any meaning to her, but resonated inside of her body all the same. It was dirty; she knew that much. Because she could feel it. And that aching, wet place between her legs, and her heavy, desirous breasts.

“My apartment is upstairs,” he said, and it took her a moment to realize that he had spoken English. Took her a while to process those words.

“Oh,” she said.