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“Why are you yelling at me?” I shot back even as I stomped toward my first-floor office where I met with my clients. “I’ll admit I may have been stupid to chase after someone who I thought had threatened me, but I’m not the bad guy here.”
“You could have been killed with an idiotic move like that, Eden. Shit, that still might happen since you have zero control over your fight-response whenever you feel threatened. This is something your bodyguard detail needs to know if they have any chance of keeping both you and themselves alive.” Though I knew it was impossible, my back prickled with the heat I imagined coming off of him as he followed me into the office. As I turned on the office lights, I heard his sound of impatience as he came to a stop in the middle of the room. “Jesus, this whole house is all about who you are.”
It took every ounce of my strength to keep from asking him just what the hell he meant by that. “Everyone’s house is all about who they are, it’s unavoidable. I can only imagine the nightmare of what your house is like.” A monster lived there, after all.
“At least my house is more honest than this.” He flicked a hand at the Zen-calm room done in the camera-ready monochromatic palette of whites, grays and blacks. “You literally have a split personality going on here.”
“No, what I have is a first floor dedicated to being a welcoming, professional-looking space for clients who need to be their truest selves while they’re here. This is nothing more than an office space, Luke, as boring and without personality as the office spaces at PSI. I’m sorry I’m not wealthy enough to have an offsite location where you might be able to better comprehend that downstairs is merely a place of business. Silly me, I thought you were professional enough to appreciate how I’ve managed to organize and separate the personal and professional sides of my life under one roof, but obviously I thought too highly of your observational skills. Here,” I added, going to a small side table, opening a drawer and fishing out a notepad that held the name and address of the woman I’d chased through the rain months ago. “Feel free to bark up that wrong tree. It won’t get you anywhere, but it’ll sure as hell amuse me.”
His hand snaked out, but instead of taking the small notepad I held out to him, his fingers instead shackled my wrist and yanked me toward him so fast my body crashed into his.
“What the hell—”
“You. Could. Have.Died.” His enunciation of each word was pushed out through his clenched teeth, and suddenly I understood how he was able to hear the fury in my own clenched-teeth breathing. “Chasing down a vehicle after your life was threatened is the stupidest damn thing I’ve ever heard anyone doing. Your ass could’ve been lured to some godforsaken remote spot, and then that would’ve been it for you, Eden. Lights fuckingout.” He snapped his fingers with a sharp crack, making me jump. “Don’t you get that? Don’t you get how close you came to actually being fuckingerasedthat day?”
“I wasn’t in any da—”
“Shut up.” To make sure I did, he slammed his mouth down on mine.
I was instantly, gloriously lost.
Even as a little girl dreaming of what my grown-up self would be like, I never gave kissing or romance much thought. If anything, I’d always imagined myself as going it alone until the end of time. That probably would have sounded odd to others, but the road my life had taken had never been a normal one. There had never been any side trips that involved building relationships or significant others. From the time my father had become a fixture in my life, he had hammered home the belief that there was an “us” and a “them,” and never the twain shall meet. So obviously the concept of romance was for other people. Normal people.
Not me.
Or so I’d thought.
A wave of breath-stealing heat engulfed me the moment Luke’s lips claimed mine. I almost cried out in shock and delight at the life-altering sensation of suddenly being complete. And it wasn’t just his kiss, though the man knew what to do with his tongue as his lips fused to mine. It was as if every cell inside me jumped for joy at finally achieving what I’d been put on this earth to be.
A woman who was Luke’s…
What?
But I knew. Of course I knew.
Somehow I’d known from the first moment my gaze slammed into his.
I was destined to be this man’s lover.
With my heartbeat thundering in my ears, I eased back just enough to look up into the face of my personal monster. The hunger churning in his heavy-lidded eyes thrilled me. “So. That just happened.”
His arms around me tightened a fraction, as if he thought I wanted to get away. Ha. “Yeah, it did.”
“You know, there’s very little chance that my stalker can see us now, since there’s only one window in this room, and that’s way over there behind my desk.” I nodded my head toward the opposite side of the room while staying in the circle of his arms. “So kissing me this time wasn’t just to put on a show for him.”
“Neither was the first time.”
“Oh?” I couldn’t hide my surprise at his honesty, and my whole body burned with a flush when I realized he’d wanted to kiss me for no reason other than that. “You jerk, I really bought that line earlier today.”
“Are you complaining?”
“I’m thinking about it. It’s not often someone successfully plays me.”
“While you’re thinking about it, you should also think about giving me your mouth again, because you’re just as hot to kiss me as I am to kiss you.”
He barely got the last word out before I rolled up on my toes and gave him exactly what he asked for, because he was right. I was so hot to kiss him it was a wonder I didn’t burst into spontaneous combustion.
My arms clenched hard around his neck, making sure he didn’t go anywhere while I dedicated myself to the task of kissing the daylights out of him. A sound of delight escaped my throat when his tongue caressed the seam of my mouth, and an answering rumble deep in his chest vibrated through me. Even as my lips opened for him to welcome the thrust of his tongue, I shivered at the intimacy of hearing his pleasure. Ifelthis deep moan as well as heard it, until it was all I could do to not melt into a hot mess right at his feet.
