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We’re in for the night.
I could be embarrassed by the way this announces that I’ll be naked with Kace tonight, but I’m not. The way Kace said those words—they fell from his lips as if me being a part of “we” was natural. He didn’t say “I.” That’s what stands out to me.
His arm slides around me and we enter a large lobby that is stunning with brown wood floors streaked with black. Fancy leather seating areas are accented with drop lights above each. A half-moon shaped security desk is to our far left, a wide distance between it and us, but Kace waves at the tall, dark-haired man behind the counter before we cut right and enter a bank of elevators. He punches a button and the doors to the nearest car open.
It’s barely a moment, and I’m inside with him, and he’s punched a code into the panel and then pulls me close, holding his jacket around me. “I like you in my jacket.”
There’s a rough quality to his voice, a warmth beneath the rasp. “I like you in your jacket.”
“I think I’ll like us both better without it tonight.”
“Me, too,” I whisper because my voice is apparently as lost in this man as the rest of me.
His dark lashes lower, sweeping away his expression, but not before I see a hint of something I cannot name, something he does not want me to see.
Already the elevator halts, the doors opening. Kace pushes off the wall he’s using to hold us both up and tangles his fingers with my fingers. We step off the elevator, only a few feet from a double-arched red door. “The entire floor is mine,” he says, punching in a code to a panel on the wall. “Originally the elevator opened into my apartment, but I wanted an extra level of security.”
“And a red door is a symbol of protection.”
“And luck,” he says.
“But anyone with your skill doesn’t believe in luck. They believe in hard work, hours and hours of hard work, repeating over and over.”
“I believe in both.” He opens the door and reaches inside, a glow of lights illuminating the once dark space, but he doesn’t enter. He settles back into his place in that hallway with me. And when his eyes meet mine, anticipation burns between us. He’s not touching me and yet, I feel him in every part of me, in ways I didn’t know another human could affect me. “Welcome to my home, Aria Alard,” he says, his voice a silky seduction that strokes every nerve ending that I own.
He motions me forward and for reasons I don’t understand, I read his need for me to choose to enter, for me to choose to be here as if I haven’t already. Or maybe it’s not his need at all. Maybe it’s my need and this man, this virtual stranger, senses that in me. And if he does, he’s right. All my life has been about decisions others have made for me. I need to be in control of my life. I walk into the apartment, onto dark hardwood and directly into a foyer where a dozen teal teardrop lights dangle from the ceiling. A few feet ahead of me is a staircase.
The door shuts behind me and nerves explode in my belly. Kace steps behind me and removes my coat—his coat—and I turn to watch him hang it on a coatrack. The minute it’s dealt with, his attention is fully on me, his expression unreadable, but his eyes—I cannot see the blue of his eyes for the fire. With a predatory energy about him that is wholly man and sex, he closes the space between us, but he doesn’t grab me and rip my clothes, though he makes me wish he’d do just that. But that is not who this man is, at least, not in this moment. In this moment, he is control and power, two things that ooze from him as surely as does his desire.
Instead, his fingers twine with mine in what has too easily and quickly become a familiar and welcome gesture. It could be considered almost tender, though there’s nothing tender in what brews between us in the heat of this night, nor is tender what I crave. Tender is sweet. Tender is sheltered. Tender is all I have ever known and all I wish to escape. I don’t overthink why that is, though I might if I had time. I don’t have time. He leads me down the ten steel steps and straight into an open room wrapped in floor-to-ceiling windows where an eternal dark sky and ocean seem to surround us now. The living area is to the right of the space, two steps leading to the seating area with a large steel gray high-backed couch and two matching chairs, a luxurious gray rug beneath them all, a chandelier of a violin dangling above a round gray marble table. That chandelier is stunning, while the twinkling dots of color from the city lights brighten the night sky and the miles of ocean with life. What brightens me though, what calls me, is the grand piano to the right of the living area, and the violin displayed on a stand beside it.
