For 100 Days(17)

When I don’t answer, he reaches over to cup my jaw. The shock of his touch startles me. More than that, it inflames me. He bends toward me as if he might kiss me right in the middle of the gallery. But he smoothly bypasses my parted lips, bringing his mouth to the side of my face, maddeningly close to my ear.

“Art is meant to provoke emotions, Avery. Its sole purpose is to arouse our senses, even if it disturbs. Even if it’s ugly. Even if it fucking scares the living shit out of you.”

A gray-haired lady directly in front of me swivels an uncomfortable look at the both of us before shuffling away. It isn’t long before the other remaining patron drifts away, too, and then it’s only Nick and me in front of Beauty.

His voice is a velvet caress against my cheek. “Are your senses aroused now, Avery?”

I close my eyes in an attempt to deny what I feel. But I can’t deny it. I can’t deny him, even though everything cautious and rational inside me warns that I am venturing into dangerous territory with this man.

“Yes,” I whisper, unable to stop the confession from slipping off my tongue.

“So are mine,” he says. “I’m aroused by you. I have been since I saw you the other night.” He shifts closer to me, until his lips brush the shell of my ear. “I wanted you even then. Does that scare you?”

I shake my head slightly, but that doesn’t seem good enough for him. Drawing back from me with my face held in his hands, he looks at me with searching, turbulent eyes. “I want you in my bed, Avery. When I see something I want, I reach for it.”

No man has ever been this bold with me before, not in all of my adult life. Then again, I’ve never met anyone like Nick Baine. Dark. Magnetic. Arrogant. Hotter than hell.

Hadn’t I sensed this power about him that night at the elevator?

He had tripped all of my self-preservation instincts from the second I saw him. He’d terrified me, and I would have stayed away.

But now he’s here, looking at me possessively, as if no one else in the room exists. His intensity is a force I’m not prepared for, but I’m not terrified like I should be. I’m wildly, undeniably, turned on.

Desire is etched in his handsome face and the hard line of his rigid, square jaw. His eyes blaze into mine, searing all of the flimsy reservations crowding my thoughts.

“If you really want to leave—if you think this will be something you’ll regret—then go now.”

Yes. I should go.

I should pivot on my heel and get as far away from this unsettling man as I possibly can. I should damn well run.

But that’s not what I want right now.

It’s not what I do.

Without a care for the fact that we’re not alone—never mind that we’ve only known each other for not even a full hour—I turn my face into the cradle of his hand. My lips touch the warm center of his palm and he utters a rough groan.

He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t need to. His eyes are dark with erotic promise.

I shudder with the ferocity of it. And I can’t wait for him to make good on everything I see churning in his consuming gaze.

Without a word of coaxing or command, he leads me away.





Chapter 8



I meant it when I told him I wasn’t reckless. But those words feel like more lies added to the others I’ve told tonight, as I fetch my coat and leave the gallery party with a man I’ve only just met.

My pulse is racing with something far more potent than anxiety or doubt.

I’m excited. I’m so turned on, I can hardly breathe.

He leads me discreetly out the back of Dominion. Outside, a narrow alleyway runs between the tall buildings behind the gallery. We no sooner step out to the privacy of the darkness than he stops abruptly and turns to me. Without asking or warning, he pulls me into a kiss.

The instant our lips meet, all of the desire that had been kindling back inside the gallery erupts into something urgent and molten. His fingers slide into my hair as he draws me closer to him, his mouth firm and hot and possessive against mine. I’m unsteady on my feet, though less from the effects of the champagne now than the spiral of need that’s twisting through me as I melt into the heat of his kiss.

I breathe him in greedily, reveling in the spicy, clean scent of him as he commands my lips with dizzying skill. I shudder under that force, my nipples tightening inside my bra, my clit pulsing with every frantic beat of my heart. There’s no stopping the small moan that escapes me as his tongue sweeps across the seam of my lips, then pushes inside without hesitation.

Nick Baine is not a man who asks permission. He is not a man who needs to ask. I recognized this about him immediately. Now, I’m feeling the carnal truth of that understanding and it exhilarates me beyond all sense or reason.