Get your phone—no, get to the door!
The stairs behind me stormed with the thudding of heavy boots. He was following me, and the only advantage I had was that I knew my home in the dark better than he did. Or did I? Had he been waiting in here for me? Had he wandered my home for hours?
Had he seen me getting naked minutes ago?
The idea made me want to throw up. I felt violated, and that made me bristle with rage. Who the hell was this person to break into my home?
Don’t do anything stupid! I cautioned, taking the corner of the stairs so hard I bounced off the kitchen wall. Get to the door, just—
Fingers dug into my hair, yanking at me. Somehow I slid away, creating a distance between us that I wished was a mile wide. Vertigo conquered my world as I spun; I stumbled against something cold. My sink.
The attacker hadn’t said a word, but his heavy, rasping breath filled the nearby blackness. He didn’t know my home as well as I did. He didn’t need to.
He just had to be faster.
Lifting my eyes, I saw the shiny faucet. My face looked back, the figure moving over my shoulder. He was coming for me, and whatever he had planned, it was going to happen. If I did nothing else . . . this would be it.
The only item in the sink looked back at me with the familiarity of a prized possession.
In the metal, I saw him waver closer. He was on top of me. This was it.
When had I stopped screaming?
Whirling around, I lifted the horse-shaped coffee mug high. It connected with a satisfying crunch against my attacker’s skull. He flew back, cradling his face and yelling louder than I even had. “You bitch!” he shouted. I didn’t stay to listen to what he would say next. The mug fell, shattering; the noise was soft in my blood-throbbing ears. Every noise had become a faint buzz, my focus on running for my front door. My other senses were shutting down.
Fumbling with the knob, I exploded out into the night. “Help!” I choked, falling onto my elbows in the street. “Please, help me! Call the police!” I had the awful premonition that no one would step up. I lived in a bad area, people heard gunshots the way other neighborhoods heard the laughter of children.
Tires screeched, headlights blinding me. “Sammy!” a familiar voice yelled, his firm hands lifting me to my feet.
In disbelief, I gazed on the man I’d never wanted to see again. “Kain?”
Impossible. Why was he here?
His warm eyes fixed on me, imploring—concerned. “Are you okay?”
Realization hit me in the stomach. Shoving forward, I climbed onto the back of his motorcycle. “Go, drive! I need to get out of here!”
Kain didn’t ask me to explain. I liked him so much more for that.
He kicked the bike forward, my fingers digging into his perfect stomach. We tore down the street, my head twisting so I could stare through my wind-whipped hair at my apartment.
No one was looking back.
My savior—fuck, he was, wasn’t he?—drove until I gave him a hard tap on the shoulder. We were miles from my house. That, plus the well-lit and busy city streets, made me feel better.
He pulled up beside a convenience store, parking the bike but not shutting it off. “What happened back there? Are you okay?”
“Give me your phone. I need to call the cops.”
“The cops?” His gorgeous face turned ugly. “Sammy, what happened?”
Throwing my arms up, I became aware of my situation. I was in my pajamas, no phone, no wallet, sitting astride the growling metal bike belonging to an apparently dangerous man. Who was I? This stuff had never happened to me before!
Taking my face, he spoke with a precise calmness that soothed the terror in my heart. “Sammy. Tell me what happened.”
I swallowed loudly. “Someone broke into my house and attacked me.”
Releasing me, he bent over his bike and revved it. “We’re going back there.”
“What? No!” I grabbed at him, shaking his arm. “Kain! The last thing I want is to go back there, it’s dangerous!”
“Not with me it isn’t.”
“I want to call the cops!”
“Someone attacked you!” Fury unlike anything I’d faced burned in front of me. Kain could be a jerk, but he’d never actually scared me. Sitting inches from him, our legs brushing, I warred between being flattered . . . and being afraid.
He must have seen it, because his eyes melted. “Sammy, if someone hurt you, I’d never forgive myself.”
The thudding in my chest became unbearable. “Come on. It’s not like it’s your fault.” His silence stirred the embers of terror that had hardly started to die in my gut. “Kain. Tell me that this had nothing to do with you.”
“I can’t say.” Wincing, he faced away from me. “But just in case, we can’t call the cops. And if you don’t want me to go back there—”
“I don’t.”
“Then we have one other option.” He turned enough for me to see how serious he was. “I need to take you back to my estate. It’s the only place you’ll be safe for sure until we can figure this out.”
“We? I’m not a detective!”
“‘We’ as in my family. If someone went after you because of us, we need to know. Sammy, my family can keep you safer than any cop ever could.” He faced me fully, his leather jacket the only source of any sound. It whispered like a boat on the sea, daring me to break the tranquility . . . the confidence . . . that emanated from him.
If it had just been some act of dominance, I could have rolled my eyes and told him to take a hike. If he wouldn’t call the police, I’d walk barefoot into the gas station and ask them to do it instead.
But Kain wasn’t acting tough. He didn’t posture. The low boil of his stare was helping me forget that I was sitting, unsheltered, on top of a motorcycle in my pajamas. I’d even stopped shaking with fear over the realization that I’d been attacked just minutes ago.
My home wasn’t safe.
Being with Kain felt like it was.
What other conclusion could I come to than to stay with him?
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go with you.”
Kain tilted his head up so imperceptibly higher I would have missed it if I wasn’t already close enough to count his eyelashes. “Thank fucking goodness.”
“But,” I added quickly, “if things feel fishy, I am going to talk to the police.”
Peeling his jacket off, he draped it on me, not giving me a chance to turn his kind offer down. Gripping the collar of it, he tugged it into place, staring straight into my face. “Let me do it my way, then you can call the cops.”
Does he always need to get his way? If I spent any more time with this guy, I’d have to teach him that every interaction didn’t have to be about someone “winning.” Snuggling into the warm jacket that smelled exactly like him, I breathed deep—then choked.
Wait.
Did I really just consider spending MORE time with Kain?
The guy who treated police stations like hotel lobbies? The son of a family that Detective Stapler had warned me about?