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The closer he gets, the more I see that he is beyond handsome. It’s not just his appearance. It’s his vibe. Pure confidence. Kids these days would call it swagger. Not that he’d be listening, because he doesn’t seem to see or hear anything besides me. There are a hundred other scantily clad young women in this room. A lot of them are younger than me. Some of them are prettier. But his gaze doesn’t so much as flicker toward them. It is locked on me, and it remains that way as he prowls across the floor.
I turn around and look behind myself just to make sure there’s not some supermodel behind me. Nope. Just the wall. It is me he’s looking at. Me he’s made a beeline for.
I’m suddenly too nervous to know what to do with myself. All my poise evaporates as he comes around the table, reaches for my chin with one hand, grips it lightly with a touch that exudes confidence and control. There’s no escaping him, or the gaze that blazes into my uncertain eyes.
“Come with me,” he says in a husky male growl. “I’m going to fuck you.”
Chapter Two
Twelve hours earlier…
Daniel
“You forgot this, Daniel.”
Briarlee holds the length of ornately carved oak out toward me, her slim fingers wrapped around my greatest source of shame.
I love her.
She’ll never know that. I’ll never tell her. Partially because of the way she looks at me. She pities me. As I take the cane, the illusion of easy equality we built up while sitting down dissipates. Her eyes soften at the corners, her mouth turns down. She’s the most beautiful woman in the world, but when she looks at me she starts melting with sadness.
She is stunning. She has golden blonde hair tinged naturally with red around her scalp. It tends to ringlets, even though she fights to keep it straight. Her eyes are blue. The kind of blue you see on a summer’s day, when the sky is utterly clear. She has an adorably rounded face, lips that never pout but are deliciously full, and her figure is perfectly curvy, though she tries to fight that too. She ordered the salad again today. And then ate all my fries.
I’ve known her a very long time. We dated briefly back in high school. Now we’re friends. Great friends. Best friends. Friends with a past that makes that sadness cloud her pretty gaze every time she is reminded of my condition.
Fifteen years rush back every time I see that expression. We were together in my car the night we crashed. She came out of the collision almost unscathed. Even drunk out of her skull, she was smart enough to wear her seatbelt, and stupid me was just a fraction too slow to turn all the way out of danger’s path as a drunk driver crossed the center line and turned my father’s car to a crumpled wreck.
It was a long way back from the edge of oblivion. A lot of surgery. A lot of pain. But I made it. Briarlee isn’t my girlfriend, but she’ll always be my friend—which might actually be worse than having lost touch with her altogether in some ways.
I get to see her once a week for lunch. I make noises about how my research is going. She listens with that sweet smile and then inevitably tells me about whatever asshole she’s dating at the moment. She always picks the bad boys. The ones who treat her like dirt.
I’d judge her more for that, if I hadn’t been in her house when she was a teenager, and if I didn’t know precisely why she craves male protection. If I was stronger, I’d protect her. But she thinks of me as the little brother she needs to look after. Because the only thing that bonds us more than experience is her guilt.
She says I saved her that night in the car. But I can’t save her from the string of assholes who see a delicate, beautiful thing and want to claim it, then destroy it.
Friend-zoned, they call it. But I’m not the sort of man who thinks of things that way. I’m lucky to have her in my life, and one of these days, I hope she meets someone who treats her the way she deserves to be treated.
“You want help to the car?”
It’s been years since I’ve needed help but she still sees me as that broken teenage boy struggling to recover from something I shouldn’t have survived.
“Thanks, Briar. I’m good.”
I smile because I appreciate her kindness, and try to hold back any expression that would show the contempt I have for this cane—and for the weakness that forces me to use it.
“Okay, well, good luck with the review board!” She flashes me one of her dazzling smiles and waves. I watch her leave with the same smile I always have on my face when she is near. There’s just something about the way she moves, a gazelle-like sway. Whenever we have lunch, I make sure I’m here early and I make sure I leave last. I don’t want her to see my pained gait. It brings shame and guilt to us both, even after all this time.
