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He pulled a chair that usually sat beside the dresser forward to sit directly across from me. “What are you doing?”
“Sitting down. You’re going to answer a few questions for me.”
“I’m not going to do shit for you.”
“Swear to god, Poppy. You’re making this harder than you need to.”
“Good.”
In the shadows I watched him look up at the ceiling, a hard sigh. A throbbing heartbeat in his throat. “You called the fucking Morellis,” he said. “If you’re foolish enough to think that nothing bad was going to come of it, you’re wrong. I’m here. I’m the bad that comes of it, Poppy. You’ll be answering some questions.”
“Fine,” I said. Because he wasn’t wrong. The only place for me to sit was the bed, and that wasn’t going to happen. So, I stayed on my feet but didn’t lean against the wall. I was getting tiny little points in tiny little ways. “Ask your questions.”
“Why did you go to the Morellis?”
“To get information.”
“On Caroline?”
That made me blink. “No. Why would I want information on Caroline?”
“The senator?” He began tapping the arm of the chair with his middle finger. A small sign of impatience.
“No. I know everything I need to know about the senator.”
“The foundation?” The foundation? I felt a strange chill. What didn’t I know about the foundation?
“You,” I said, tired of the guessing. “I went to the Morellis to get information about you.”
His finger stopped tapping on the chair.
“What did you want to know about me?” he asked, his voice terrifyingly careful.
“Who you are? Where you came from? Why Caroline trusts you so much? So fast?”
“You didn’t need to go to a Morelli for that,” he said.
“Well, you weren’t telling me anything.”
“Because I’m no one,” he said.
“You keep saying that, but Caroline found you in Ireland and brought you back here for something.”
“I have skills—”
“Eden called you a junkyard dog.”
His head snapped back at that as if the words hit a nerve. “She would know, I guess.”
“Is that what you are?”
“No,” he said. “It’s what I was. Caroline found me and gave me a chance to be something else. I took it. That’s all, Poppy. That’s the story of me.”
“Who put you in the hospital when you were young?”
He stood up from the chair in one fluid rush. Stalked me across the room, and I scuttled like a crab along the wall heading for that French door.
My heartbeat pounded in my ears, and I was aware that this man had a line and with that question it was probably somewhere behind me.
He smacked his hand against the wall beside my head, and I flinched at the sound. Expecting it to be my face that he hit. I slowly opened my eyes to find him watching me. So unreadable. A million miles deep.
“How bad do you want to know?” he asked. He stepped up against me, the hand I’d held out was useless against him. He pushed it back against me with his chest. His skin was hot under his fine shirt.
“I . . . don’t,” I said. My bravery gone. I was a paper doll. Crumpled when pressed.
“Oh, what a liar you are.”
“Okay, you wanted to scare me? You wanted to warn me? Great. You did it. I’ll stay away from Eden Morelli.” I thought briefly of that favor I owed her, but I wasn’t going to tell him about that. Or Jacob.
I wasn’t going to tell him anything, anymore. I pushed against him, but he didn’t budge. It was just the heat of his body. Against my hand. Against me. The longer he stayed there, unmoving, his heart beating against my hand, I started to wonder if this was a different game.
I looked up at him, the memories of his body pushing mine against that door, an unwelcome heat in my brain. In my body.
The hand I had pressed against his chest, shifted. Stroked. Over the firm curve of his chest, I brushed the bead of his nipple with my pinky, and his body trembled. Trembled. I did it again. Harder. I used just a little, the edge of my nail, and he licked his lip.
Fuck. What was I doing? And now that I was doing it how was I going to stop?
“Ask me,” he said.
“Anything I want?”
He nodded. “But it will cost you.”
“I don’t have anything,” I breathed. I was pressing my sharp fingernails against his chest now. All of them, sinking deeper waiting for him to flinch or to stop me, but all he did was bite his lower lip and make dark noises in the back of his throat.
“You have more than you think,” he said, and then suddenly he stepped away, leaving cold blank space behind him. He sat in the chair, his legs spread in a beam of moonlight. The rest of his body in shadow. “Ask me.”
