I don’t want to.
He meets me in the middle of the ballroom.
“I have time for one more dance,” I tell him, suggestive.
“I can’t dance.”
That makes me laugh. “That isn’t what I meant.”
He doesn’t smile. His face is more severe than ever—a rejection. “I know what you meant.”
I frown, confused. “Kip?”
His face is like a stone wall. I wait for the branches to rise up, guarding their fortress. I wait for the sting of the thorns. He wants to hate me. He doesn’t want to get close.
This time the brambles don’t come.
This time he bends his head. I am too shocked to tilt my head. Too surprised to kiss him back. I stand there, passive, letting his lips press against mine, feeling his tongue slide along my lower lip. I have enough frame of mind to open, and he groans softly, taking the invitation and demanding more.
His hands curve around my hips, cupping my ass. I’m sweaty, but he doesn’t seem to mind. No, he presses me flush against him, taking each of my panting breaths into his mouth, sipping the salt from my skin.
I rub my body against him, feeling his erection thick and stone hard in his jeans. I rock my hips against it, promising relief.
All at once he releases me. He turns away. I stare at the tall, broad line of his shoulders—moving up and down with his heavy, aroused breathing.
What the hell? Why did he stop?
Hesitantly I place a hand on his arm. He pulls away.
Dread fills me. “What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing,” he says. But I can hear the lie in his voice.
“Kip?” I hate how timid I sound, how afraid. I never let my father or Byron see me like this. With them I always put up a strong front. They might hurt me and humiliate me, but they would never see me cry. But with Kip it feels inevitable. He tears down my bravery, leaving only hope.
“I’m not who you think I am.”
* * *
No. I want to rewind the past five seconds and pretend he never said that.
“I’m not just a customer,” he says, and I wish that were a lie. Maybe a random guy at a strip club isn’t good relationship material to other women. But to me he’s everything I could want. I hadn’t worked out how we might be together beyond this night or the next. But I’d hoped.
And now he’s telling me something serious, something dark, his voice so solemn I know it must be bad.
“What are you then?” I say, only because he expects me to ask. I don’t want to know.
He shakes his head, and just that—I know he’s about to tell me the truth. Maybe that’s the worst, because I can’t reciprocate.
He turns to me and fingers a lock of my hair. “Honey.”
I swallow, ashamed. “That’s not my real name. It’s a lie.”
“It’s who you are to me,” he murmurs, and in that one sentence I hear everything I am to him—someone to fuck, someone to protect. Someone to care for. His isn’t the expression of a man who wants to convince me of something. His jaw is tense, eyes dark with regret. He’d rather be telling me anything but this—anything but the truth.
I remember what Candy said to me. Dangerous. Yes, he’s dangerous. You only have to look at him to know. He’s lethal energy in leather boots. He’s a force of nature on a goddamn motorcycle. The question isn’t whether he’s dangerous. It’s whether he’s dangerous to me. “Are you going to hurt me?”
“No,” he says, absolutely sure. Sure enough that it slaps me. Sure enough that I know he’s considered doing it. “I’m going to help you through this.”
Suspicion is acid down my throat. “Help me through what?”
His expression darkens. “I know who you’re running from.”
“Excuse me?” I laugh, unsteady. I don’t want to believe him. “And anyway, it’s not one person I’m running from. It’s an army of them.”
“Even better,” he says. “I’m a soldier.”
Two klicks to the south, he said when we got here. That’s military terminology. I imagine him with his hair less scruffy, his mouth clean shaven. I imagine him without the leather jacket or the bike, but instead in a uniform. He’d look good like that.
I’m guessing he did look good like that. I feel sick. “You used to be in the military?”
“Army,” he confirms.
I remember the feeling I had that first night, that a cop was in the building. A man with military training. Exactly the kind of men my father and Byron hired as muscle.
The dangerous kind.
I take a step back. “Are you a cop?”
“No,” he says grimly. “I have other things in common with Byron, but not that.”