A Stone in the Sea(40)

Dropping my head, I stepped over the threshold, almost tiptoeing across the shiny dark hardwood floors.

Find love and bring it here.

My grandmother’s words echoed through my mind. Guilt squeezed my ribs. I wasn’t foolish enough to believe this man would bring any of it into this house.

Or maybe I was just that much of a fool, wanting him so badly I was willing to take the chance, to take a memory and tuck it away, a reminder of what could be.

Of what I could feel.

Something I’ve never felt before.

And I felt it now, as he followed me in, staying close behind, his footsteps keeping time with mine.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

My pulse beat frantically, and still I couldn’t look back as we began to ascend the stairs, my hand gliding up the smooth rail. I couldn’t turn to see the expression I knew would be carved on the beautiful, bold lines that amassed his stony expression. The same he’d watched me with all night. With desire and hunger and some kind of unfathomable hate, as if he were just as terrified of me as I was of him.

I mounted the top of the stairs to the second-floor landing.

Normally I would go left and steal into Kallie’s room. I’d press gentle kisses to the softness of her cheeks, to her forehead, and brush my fingers through her hair while I watched her sleep and wished for peaceful dreams to enter her mind. Normally I’d pause at April’s door and whisper, “I’m home,” before I collapsed into bed exhausted and alone.

But tonight. Tonight was anything but normal.

Normally I didn’t bring virtual strangers home.

Baz followed me into my shadowy room. The door to the bathroom rested partially ajar and the bright overhead lights bled a faint hue of light in a wedge across the floor. It was messy—clothes strewn across the floor, tossed onto the large chair sitting under the window, the bed unmade.

I stopped in the middle of it, trying to still the thunder pounding through my veins while I listened to the soft click of my bedroom door being closed.

Slowly I turned around. The air just leaving my lungs hitched when I took him in, the captivating force of this man magnified, grey eyes turned to pitch—the most brilliant kind of black.

Savage.

Feral.

I all-out shook beneath the severity, knowing after tonight, I was never going to be the same.

He was going to mark me.

Scar me.

“You see me, Shea?” The gruff question threw me, and he lifted his chin in a challenge I wanted to meet. I knew what he was offering. One last chance to back out. A warning that came with his fierce beauty because we both knew he had the power to lay me to waste.

But where there’s beauty, there’s also pain.

And I wanted to share in his, because I felt it every time he looked at me. I wanted to immerse myself in it, in him. To be set adrift in all he kept hidden, to slip under, to see and feel and experience what he shored up tight inside.

Slowly, I lifted my own chin. But not in challenge. In surrender. “Show me.”

He watched me closely as he pulled a strip of six condoms out of his front pocket.

Correction.

Five.

One was missing.

Jealousy curled through me like a sickness, and I attempted to swallow around it, knowing this wasn’t going to end well. My heart was never going to make it.

But in this moment, I didn’t care.

Because I was falling.

Falling.

Falling.

Falling.

He tossed them onto the center of my rumpled bed. “Glove box,” he said as if he felt the need to explain.

Awareness swelled, perception that belonged only to us, lifting in an arc, barbs of energy prickling at my fevered skin.

Never releasing me from the grip of his gaze, he reached for the collar of his tee and tugged it over his head. Almost defiantly, he stood up straight and stared back at me.

That insane, confusing attraction I’d somehow managed to keep under semi-control, hidden inside, burst—a rapid slide pushing heat through my veins. Gathering fast.

My mouth went dry and I shifted on unsteady feet.

He knelt down and unlaced his boots, rose and toed them off, ticked through the buttons on his fly. Shoving his jeans down his legs, he shrugged out of them, kicked the pile of clothing aside.

Oh. God.

He stood there in nothing but a pair of tight, tight boxer briefs, his thick erection straining against the fabric, pushing at the elastic band in a play to break free.

Just like the first time he lifted his face to me, I was again confronted with more beauty than I could fathom. Again imperfect. And again, I was sure that was part of the problem, because my heart lurched in a bid to meet with his, and my stomach clenched with a flood of desire that sailed straight through me.

My eyes soaked him in.

Dragging across wide, wide shoulders. Tracing his collarbone, and exploring the coarse, rigid muscle that defined his chest. I sucked in a broken breath when I let my eyes wander down to take in how those wide shoulders and chest tapered into the flat planes of his abdomen. Hipbones jutted out from his narrow waist, a deep cut of muscles on his lower stomach that disappeared beneath the waistband of his underwear.