I drop my gaze from his with a quiet sob, and he tips my head back and forces me to look into his face, which is fierce with conviction, as fierce as his hot, penetrating gaze. “Your saucy ‘I got this’ persona? I like her. I know her, but I see the glimpses of you, Melanie. The real you. The one who’s frightened. The one who doesn’t like being alone. The one who’s vulnerable and makes me want to say I got you. Come here, I fucking got you, princess.”
“You know all this about me and I don’t even know you!” I cry.
“Yeah you do,” he counters, and he cups my head and crushes my mouth with his, and the hunger in the kiss sizzles through my nerve endings, lights me on fire.
Hot lips. Taste. He’s not the only one hungry for the taste. I want it too, badly.
Please, please, be smart, Melanie!
Leave, Melanie!
“God,” he growls when my mouth seems to part of its own will and I somehow find my fingers digging into his biceps. “I’ve been taught to con and blackmail, lie, cheat, anything it takes to get what I want.”
The hot suckling motion of his mouth makes my toes curl, my body burn and arch closer to him as he wraps his arms around my waist.
“And I want you. These sweet little teacup breasts. I want my mouth on them again.” He cups my ass with one hand, and one tit with the other. “I love when your nipples bead for me. They bead at my voice. At a glance from me. I love your ass. I love your fucking mouth.” He seems to be going crazy, doing everything at once. Massaging my ass. Massaging my tit. Gobbling my mouth. Then he kisses my neck, flicking his tongue out to taste me. A shudder rockets through me. God. It’s ecstasy. Agony. Both.
“?‘Zero’—do you know what he does, princess?” he dares me, taking a hot, sensual bite out of my lower lip before easing back to look at me with hooded eyes. “He looks for a weakness and pounces on it, wrecks the prey, and makes it pay.”
I shudder over the sensual tone of his voice and whisper, “I’m sorry for them.”
“Hmm. You should be.” He heads to my ear, his breath hot as he grinds his erection against me. “I think I know your weakness, Melanie. I know your weakness. Your weakness . . . is me.”
“Stop.”
“I’d stop it if you meant it. Mean it,” he commands, then cups my face and looks at me, waiting for me to mean what I say, his eyes electric. “Right now. Mean it,” he whispers seductively, his breath hot on my face. “Tears?” He edges back, his eyes sober and yet relentless. “Tears . . . why? I haven’t made you come yet.”
I want to pull free.
But I’m shaking and craving and wanting. It’s true that I want his body, every hot, delicious inch, but more than anything I want to know who he is—who the man who has this effect on me is.
He. Is not. Real, MELANIE!
He is a liar, a player, a fucking scoundrel and a rogue. You don’t need him! You don’t want him!
“Tell me who you are!” Suddenly my voice rises with my bewilderment.
He looks at me, dark shadows crossing over his eyes, then he surprises me when he leaves me and sits on the bed. Setting his elbows on his knees, he leans over, looking at me, every inch of him tormented. He runs his hand through his hair and, slowly, I watch as each copper-streaked strand falls into place one by one. Silence drags on, the tension palpable until he breaks the silence, a low, hard bitterness spilling into his voice.
“I was raised by my mother, Lana King. She left my dad when she got pregnant, to protect me. One day when I was thirteen I came home and she was tied up in a chair, gagged, among a group of men—among them my father. He offered . . .” He trails off, then smirks coldly. “He told me if I killed one of his men, she’d be untied and set free. I didn’t know he had a deal with her, that she’d told him I wasn’t a killer like him—that he’d promised to let me go if that was true. I didn’t know about that fucking deal when I took the gun he offered, aimed it, fired it, and killed him. And I never saw her again.”
His voice turns empty and cold, like an echo of an old tomb.
I’m not sure if it’s the tone he uses, the words he tells me, or the lack of sparkle in his usually brilliant, beautiful eyes. “My uncle Eric told me my father had made a deal with my mother. He would take me if I proved to be his son. My mother promised him that I was nothing like him. And then I shot a man. I didn’t hesitate. I shot him.”
A war of emotions rages in me, my feelings toward him becoming confusing and as painful as anything in my life has ever been.
“I doomed myself to a life of this.” He signals around him. “Maybe I should’ve shot my father. It could’ve been over, right then and there. But blood is a curious thing.” He looks at me, a slight confusion in his hawklike eyes. “It ties you. Even when you loathe your kind, something here . . .” He puts his fists to his chest. “Somewhere here you’re still loyal. I spent eight years with him, believing he’d let me see her. Until I realized he wasn’t ever letting me see her so long as he knew I didn’t really give a shit about him. So I went rogue, dropped him, and tried to find her, doing little jobs in between. I followed every trail I could find. Nothing. She vanished without a trace.”
His bearing is stiff and proud, but I can finally see the chaos in his eyes. I imagine him, a young teenager, torn in two. Using his smarts to survive, while still trying to find and protect his mother.
His every disquieting word races through my mind, his childhood so different from mine that I don’t understand it, almost.
“He’s summoned me back now that he’s dying. He’s got leukemia and he wants me to take the reins of the Underground.” He laughs sadly. “A man like him, I can’t even imagine him sick. But he needs to pass on his torch. Wyatt—I know he’s been more of a son to him than I have. But he wants the alpha.” He pulls out a piece of paper. “When I saw you on this list, you were supposed to be something I worked out of my system. That blonde in my dreams. Then there you were. There you were in the fucking bar with that fucking asshole trying to take you home—and then there you were, a fucking devil of an angel in the rain.”