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He scowled. Even as every inch of him was aware of her body, her movements, her expressions. She was tall and slender and yet curvy at her breasts and hips. Vulnerable clearly but also strong. “It’s six thirty in the evening.”
She bit her lower lip. “I had other things on my mind. More important things.”
“Let me take you to dinner then,” he said, the offer bursting out of him before he thought it through. This woman was dangerous to his peace and yet, he wanted her company for just a little while longer. “Let me take care of you.”
“I don’t need another man to tell me I need looking after. I have enough of those in my life. I need...” She tugged at the strap of the cross-body bag that fell between her breasts, making them more pronounced. “I should go. Thanks for...everything.”
He should’ve let her go then. Instead he clasped his fingers over her wrist in a gentle movement, contrary to how his pulse zigzagged almost violently through him. “What do you need, Angel?”
Suddenly, she stood close, her front to his side, almost grazing him. Almost...but not quite. She was only a couple of inches shorter than him, so her breath hit him on his jaw, her gaze sliding to his mouth and then upward in a blatant gesture. “Someone who’ll listen to what I sayIneed. Someone who’ll give me what I need.” She stared into his eyes, challenge glinting there. In seconds, that naive fragility had transformed into pure temptation with a spine of steel. A scornful smile split her mouth. “It’s not you though. I can already tell you’re one of those men who doesn’t really see me. You’re someone who loves playing the knight, someone who deals in honor and duty but doesn’t really like getting his hands dirty.”
God, the woman had his number down perfect. Hadn’t Rani been just as resentful of him that he wouldn’t give her what she wanted? Hadn’t he tormented himself wondering if he should’ve just given in, even when he’d known it would end in total disaster?
Was she right that he’d refused Rani because he hadn’t the emotional energy to love her as she needed to be loved? Because he’d simply assumed that he knew better?
That this stranger could pierce him so easily, that she challenged what he’d assumed was honor grated like the scrape of nails. “You don’t know what I can do for you,” he said, his voice low and deep and far too commanding to use on a woman he’d found in distress. A stranger, at that.
There was no doubt that he was temporarily out of his mind.
And yet...she didn’t look at him as if he was losing his mind. As if he was being a creepy stranger hitting on the woman he’d found in tears. As if his sudden demand for her to let him in, to let him do something for her was anything but...utter madness.
“Ask me,” he said, his blood full of a deafening hum, his heart punching away at his rib cage as if it had just stuttered back to glorious life.
“Anything?” she said sensually, turning toward him.
Simon cast one look at the closed door of the rehearsal suite and nodded. Reaching for his hand, she laced her fingers around his. Clinging to him, certainly but also full of resolve. And then she dragged him after her—this woman, this stranger he’d met no more than twenty minutes ago—and he followed.
He knew what she wanted. It was irresponsible and scandalous and reckless and... But it was also like coming awake after decades of slumber.
It was being alive for a moment in time, knowing that the future was nothing but a long stretch of emptiness and silence. Nothing but guilt and grief ravaging him. And Simon decided he wanted this moment. After three years of struggling with Rani’s restlessness and disillusion with the life they’d built, after months of loneliness even when she was lying next to him, after the hollow powerlessness of not being able to give her what she demanded, this woman’s naked desire for him was a soothing benediction he hadn’t known he’d needed.
A stringent reminder of his own wants and needs.
A much-needed human connection.
He would indulge her and he would gorge himself by giving her whatever she wanted.
CHAPTER TWO
ITWASNOTHINGbut sheer madness.
Her brothers were behind a closed door not a few hundred feet away. Her daughter...one she couldn’t claim, one she couldn’t hold and touch and love openly, not in this lifetime, was also behind that same door. The very thought threatened to bring Anya to her knees again.
And she was dragging a stranger—a man who’d shown her only kindness—along with her into all this crazy. This reckless woman wasn’t her.
But if she didn’t do this, if she didn’t take what he offered, if she didn’t grasp this thing between them and hold on to it, it felt like she’d stay on her knees, raging at a fate she couldn’t change, forever... And Anya refused to be that woman anymore.
It was as if she was walking through one of those fantastical daydreams she still had sometimes when her anxiety became too much. The one where she just spun herself into an alternate world because in actual reality she was nothing but a coward.
Now, those realities were merging, and the possibility that she could be more than her grief and guilt and loss was the only thing that kept her standing upright. It took her a minute to find an empty suite, to turn the knob and then lock it behind them.
Silence and almost total darkness cloaked them. A sliver of light from the bathroom showed that it was another expansive suite, and they were standing in the entryway. Anya pressed herself against the door with the man facing her. The commanding bridge of his nose that seemed to slash through his face with perfect symmetry, the square jaw and the broad shoulders...the faint outline of his strong, masculine features guided her. But those eyes...wide and penetrating, full of an aching pain and naked desire that could span the width of an ocean...she couldn’t see those properly anymore. Without meeting those eyes, she could pretend this was a simple case of lust.
Simon, she said in her mind, tasting his name there first...so tall and broad that even standing at five-ten, she felt so utterly encompassed by him.
Simon with the kind eyes and the tight mouth and a fleck of gray at his temples. And a banked desire he’d been determined to not let drive him.
But despite that obvious struggle, he was here with her. Ready to give her whatever she wanted from him.
