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“The hell I don’t.” His hand remains on my stomach. The tips of his fingers curl ever so slightly, acquiescing to the contours of my abs and rib cage, to the very edge of my tit.
His touch is so warm, so confident. His shoulders shudder with tension, and his lip curls again, but this time I get the distinct sense that it’s involuntary, that he’s holding himself back from…
From what? I don’t know. But some savage, self-destructive part of me wants to find out.
Staring into those deep pools of inky darkness, I’m momentarily knocked about by a memory I’ve tried to push to the back of my mind, to another lifetime, when I confronted Brooks in an alley behind a dress shop, wearing my prom dress, and he…
And we…
The memory of his lips searing mine pummels me, loosening my grip just as Brooks goes for my knife.
He lunges at me, and I’m right back there again, yielding to him as he shoved me up against that wall and devoured me like he was a man lost in the desert, and I was his life-saving drink…
It was the week of my school prom, and Brooks made a surprise return to Haddenwood to enlist Jackson and Orion to help him catch a werewolf. Of course, I didn’t know this because he didn’t tell me a thing. All I knew was that the twins refused to go to prom with me, and the man who left me on my sixteenth birthday saw me in a shop window in my prom dress and dragged me into an alley to argue with me, and we ended up kissing.
My first kiss.
I’ve kissed other men since, most of them mistakes, but it’s Brooks’s lips I still feel on mine when I close my eyes at night. Not that I’ll ever tell him that.
Through the years, I’ve told myself over and over what I would do if I ever ran into the Bellua brothers again. It’s not like I didn’t figure it was inevitable—when I started digging into the world of monsters, I learned that their family name carries a lot of weight in the Vault.
And I was not going to give them the satisfaction of treating me like poor, innocent Lily who doesn’t have a clue. They will deal with me as an equal, or not at all.
So I rein in my battered heart, I stamp down the churning emotions, and I duck beneath Brooks’s huge arm. I twist and come up beside him, the tip of my blade pressing into his Adam’s apple.
I smirk up at Brooks like he’s a bug I’m about to squash.
“Get. Your. Hand. Off. Me.”
Even with the knife digging into his skin, it takes Brooks a good seven seconds to remove his hand from me. I’m tempted to scratch him, just to see if the great Brooks Bellua bleeds red like the rest of us.
But the way I feel now, I need to put as much distance between us as possible. So I lower the knife, and he steps back.
When he does, I recognize a third figure standing behind him, his once gangly teenage arms now ripped AF and covered with beautiful tattoos, his face only just visible behind a curtain of dark, wavy hair.
“Lily?” Orion’s rippled green eyes swim with pain.
A hard lump rises in my throat. Despite everything, it’s hardest for me to hate him. I want to tell him that I like his hair long. It suits him.
But I don’t.
“Great,” I grumble under my breath instead. “All the Merry Men are here.”
“You need to leave.” Brooks nods toward the parking lot.
I glance over and notice he’s parked his beautiful '67 Mustang GT next to my beaten-up old Mazda. The lump in my throat expands.
“This is a dangerous place. Jackson will escort you back to campus—”
“Dude, didn’t you see her before?” Jackson says. “She was trying to climb the side of the hotel.She’sthe Shadow.”
Brooks’s eyes widen, and his mouth opens and shuts a few times.
Pride surges through me that I managed to disarm him. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him surprised before.
He manages to gain control of himself. “Don’t be ridiculous. She can’t be the Shadow. She’sLily.”
But he doesn’t sound so sure. He may not have seen me trying to scale the balconies, but he did have my knife pressed against his throat. He’d have felt its magic.
