Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 70097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 234(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 234(@300wpm)
But oh well…
Pretty Boy didn’t ask. He simply moved into my orbit as I continued dancing, his arm sliding around my waist with the easy entitlement of someone who believed the dance floor meant he had access to my body. His hand settled at the small of my back, palm flat and warm through the thin fabric.
He tugged me closer.
I could have stepped away.
I could have turned my shoulder, created distance, maintained the careful perimeter I usually kept around my body in rooms full of strangers. I had done it a thousand times…the polite extraction, the closed smile, the subtle shift of weight that screamed they were not welcome near me without ever saying it aloud.
Instead… I leaned into him.
I felt his surprise—a slight tightening of his arm, the quickening of his breath against my temple.
So freaking cute.
I pressed my body against his. Intentional. Slow. Intimate.
My hips moved against his in slow, rolling circles, my heaving breasts pressed to his chest, my mouth close enough to his neck that he could feel the heat of my breath. I let my hand drift up his arm, over the ridge of his shoulder and into the hair at the nape of his neck. My fingers curled around the strands, holding him, anchoring him to my body.
Heat spread through me and my spine tingled again.
Not because of the man dancing with me.
I felt the change in his gaze, almost like it was a physical thing, a hand that wasn’t touching me. Yet, I felt it on my skin. Sliding over me. Warm. Possessive. Lethal.
Pretty Boy whispered something in my ear. German, I thought, or maybe English—the music swallowed the consonants. It didn’t matter.
I smiled against his neck.
My hand slid down from his hair to the back of his shirt, fingers splaying across his muscles over the fabric of his shirt.
The song built toward its crescendo and the way our bodies moved against each other was almost obscene. I was making love to this stranger on a dance floor in Berlin, and every move was deliberate for one man only—the man who had followed me across a continent without ever closing the distance.
When the song ended, I stepped back. My dance partner’s hand lingered at my waist, his eyes dark and wanting. I gave him a smile, one that promised him nothing. A cold, empty smile.
I turned and walked away, leaving him alone on the dance floor. It was becoming a habit of mine. Leaving clueless men behind, confused with bruised egos and unanswered questions.
The corridor was dim. It was a narrow passage between the main floor and the bathrooms, lit by a single amber bulb that cast more shadow than light. The music was muffled here, reduced to a thrumming bass that vibrated in my teeth. My heels clicked against the concrete floor, and the sound was small and precise in the narrow space.
I had only taken four steps when I felt it.
His presence materialized behind me, foreboding.
There was no sound, not a single footstep. No warning. He moved so quietly, the silent confidence of a predator that I almost missed it. I would have if I hadn’t been expecting him.
The musky air of the club shifted.
My heart slowed.
Thud.
A hand clamped over my mouth, muffling my startled scream before the other wrapped around my throat. His fingers tightened, just once. A small, deliberate squeeze.
I hit the wall, not hard, not violently. Just a forceful push to remind me that the man holding me was a lot stronger than I was.
His body caged around me, broad shoulders and solid muscles pressing against my back until there wasn’t an inch of space left between us.
His mouth found my ear. God, he was so close. So impossibly close the familiar scent of him filled my senses, his heat spreading through my body, covering me like a second layer of cloth.
His warm, controlled breath feathered against the shell of my ear, his lips barely touching my skin.
“Hello, wife.”
CHAPTER ONE
SERAFINA
Three months ago
The air was thick, acrid, burning my lungs with each panicked breath.
I opened my mouth to scream, but only a choked sound came out. My gaze darted around the room, searching frantically, but I couldn’t see anything past the smoke, past the flame.
Fire.
It was everywhere.
It cloaked everything.
It suffocated. It burned. It raged.
I tried to breathe… but I couldn’t.
The flame licked at my upper thigh, right where the flesh was the most tender. The air crackled around me, growing hotter and hotter with every passing second. The heat pulsed, searing through my flesh, burying itself underneath like a poison that ravaged from inside.
I coughed, but it was more like retching that sounded like a slowly dying animal.
I thought I screamed.
I did.
I must have.
My mother always told me good girls didn’t scream, didn’t make a scene.
We were polite. Poised and demure.