AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Dropping the curtains, I proceeded to pace the six steps across the kitchen, then back, tempted to peek outside for the hundredth time in the past hour.
I’d be dead on my feet if I kept this up all night. Any sane person would either call the police or go to sleep. And since I wasn’t about to call the police—for reasons I wasn’t willing to scrutinize at the moment—sleep was the only reasonable alternative.
I checked the locks on the front door once more, made sure all the curtains were closed tight, then crossed the sitting room to my bedroom. The bedsheets were rumpled; it wasn’t my first attempt at sleep tonight. I slipped off my robe and slid beneath the cool satin sheets where the soft fabric brushed across my bare flesh.
I imagined the millions of touch receptors firing. Each one initiated an electrical signal, and in my mind, I followed one along nerve fibers, through the dorsal root ganglion, and up the dorsal column-medial lemniscus pathway in my spinal cord. Finally, the signal traveled to the somatosensory cortex in my brain where the conscious perception of touch is generated.
There was comfort in the fascinating intricacies of my own body, and I let it pull me under, breathing out the stress and chaos of the day.
When I next opened my eyes, it was clear by my momentary disorientation that I’d fallen asleep for some time. I blinked, then blinked again, and my dark room came into focus, along with the man dressed all in black standing over me.
I opened my mouth to scream when I saw the familiar blond hair and the amber eyes that were quite unforgettable.
“What the bloody hell are you doing here?” I screeched, though it felt raspy in my own throat.
“I figured there wasn’t much point in me knocking,” he said, smiling wryly.
“That doesn’t answer my question,” I said, scurrying up further on my bed, but I hadn’t made it far when he leaned over me, a hand braced on either side of my head.
“What do you think I’m doing here?” he asked.
“Breaking and entering?”
He smiled, but it was a dark smile, full of sin. “Not the worst of my crimes, I assure you. But you don’t know how glad I am to see that you haven’t lost all that goddamned prim and proper shit. It makes me hard,perla.Everything about you makes my cock hard.”
His words, even without volume, wound through my veins like puppet strings, and he was the puppet master, pulling me closer to him.
But it was nothing more than hormones, a chemical reaction in my brain to the man’s very potent sex appeal. Adrenaline, estrogen, and serotonin making my pupils dilate and my heart race.
Oxytocin, however, was notably absent from the mix. He’d broken his word, and I hadn’t forgotten the last words he’d said to me.
“I take it you’re in the mood for a ‘dirty little slut’?” I asked, fighting to keep my tone sharp and scathing.
He flinched as I spoke, but he appeared undeterred. “Si,I am. So, get naked right—” He’d begun to pull the bedsheets away, but he stopped talking and his eyes flared with heat when he discovered I was naked beneath the sheets.
“Christ,” he said, his hand still in midair, holding the covers away from me as his gaze swept over me from head to toe, heating every inch of me. It felt like millions of touch receptors were firing, though he hadn’t laid a finger on me.
I moved my hand to snatch the sheets back, but stopped myself, glaring at him defiantly even as my cheeks suffused with warmth. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me rattled.
“As you can plainly see, I am naked,” I said with far more bravado than I felt. “Now, take a good last look and get the hell out of my home.”
“I’m not leaving,” he said as he continued to take his time looking me over, burning me everywhere with his heated gaze.
“That’s funny.” I forced the words out past dry lips. “It seemed you couldn’t wait to leave during our last encounter.”
His gaze snapped to meet mine. “I had to do that, Heidi.”
I faked a scoff. “A compulsion to kill hardly makes you welcome in my bed.”
He shook his head. “The kill was my choice; making sure you didn’t feel like the blame landed on your shoulders, that’s something I had to do, whether you understand it or not.”
“It was an act?” The words slipped out before I could stop them.
“It was me doing what I needed to do.”
Simple. Forthright. There was a sincerity in his eyes I wasn’t sure could be faked. I think he meant it.
I didn’t think it helped.
