I FELT LIKE A stranger had taken up residence in my body. He was doing things, saying things, making choices I would never make. I wanted to chalk it up to being tired, to the stress of almost losing my brother, to the frustration of figuring out too late who Roark was and exactly why he waging war on my city. But the truth of it was that I had grown up on these streets, had fought my own fight to survive and become the man I was, so there was just as much dirt and grime under my fingernails as the next guy’s. The rough parts of who I was and how I had become him had always been buried deep down inside of me, covered by my sense of honor or my drive to make the world around me a better place for the innocent and unprotected. The layers that covered up the darkness and brutality were getting thinner and thinner, and what was starting to get exposed was the heart of the man I really was.
The soul of that man had no qualms about getting in as deep and as far as he could with Reeve. She made the edges that poked at him less sharp. Those navy-blue eyes brought the calm, and that mouth, the things she did with it, made the buzzing from every bad thing that followed me home go quiet for a few minutes. She was like belladonna. So pretty and soft on the outside, so delicate to the touch. But once she was on the inside, once you had any part of her, you knew she was strong enough and deadly enough to kill you. She was just as dangerous on the inside as I was, and I was pretty sure after that round of purely animalistic sex in the living room, I no longer cared. I didn’t have any desire to search out reasons and logic to stay away. I liked being with her. I liked that she wanted to make sure that I was okay. I liked that she looked at me like I was everything and then in the next blink dared me to give her all that I had. I was done trying to make myself feel bad for the attraction that pulled me toward her. I wanted to feast on it instead.
I was always careful during sex and not just with protection. I knew I had a tendency to get intense, to forget that my partner didn’t need the escape, need the oblivion in the same way I did. More than once, sex had ended badly when I let the leash slip and the act turned into more than the girl could take. Reeve didn’t care. She didn’t just tempt the beast that lurked inside of me, she poked the needy bastard with a stick and demanded he come out and play. She called to the parts of me I often forgot existed. She demanded more and more.
It was that same beast on the inside that demanded that I show Roark exactly what he was missing. I wanted her, and I had known that I was so exposed, so unsteady with emotion after Bax had finally woken up, that any kind of sympathy or kindness on her lovely face was going to have me climbing all over her. It was an added bonus that I got to cram that fact right down Roark’s throat. It was crude. It was classless and she and I both deserved better than that, but the second she told me everything was going to be okay, I lost it. I may have taken it too far, lost my mind with hunger and need, but the end result would’ve been the same. I would have taken her. I was bound to lose myself in her whether Roark was watching or not. It was an added bonus that the stab of revenge felt good. I just hoped she wouldn’t hold it against me. I planned on explaining it all to her and clarifying my moment of insanity and lust once I got a few hours of sleep and my brain didn’t feel like it was made of cotton candy.
I got out of the shower, rubbed a towel over my head, and wrapped another one around my waist. The bed that lived on the massive elevated platform looked like heaven and I could hardly keep my eyes open as I stumbled toward it. I was so tired I didn’t even notice that Reeve was sitting on the end of the mattress until I flopped down and almost kicked her. She had changed into a pair of skintight black pants and an oversize sweater that fell off of her shoulder and bared way too much creamy skin for my liking. Her hair was pulled up into a ponytail on the top of her head and for all the world she looked like any normal, hot chick on her way to work at some trendy salon for the day. Nothing about this woman was normal and all the things that made her so complicated were the things that made her so tempting.
“Where do you think you’re going?” My voice sounded sluggish and heavy to my own ears.
“I need to run an errand. I’m going to have Booker take me. I need to get out of here for a few hours.”