I want to resist, but I’m weak.
In my head, he’s there, in my room.
In my head, he’s pulling back the sheets. He’s pulling his clothes off, and I’m seeing again what I saw that first day in his office — that sinful body carved from marble. The way his tattoos and his muscles ripple.
Other parts of him that I’ve pretended I’ve forgotten about, but I know that I haven’t.
And I left something out tonight. I didn’t tell the whole story. I told about Joseph, and about being engaged, and then it being over. I admitted to never having had a one-night stand with a stranger.
I left out the part where I’ve never done it at all.
I left out the part where I’m a virgin.
The thought of him knowing that only makes the fire inside grow hotter. There’s something filthy about him knowing, some sort of carnal knowledge that’d be dangerous in his hands.
The best kind of dangerous.
In my head, he’s slipping under the covers with me, his hands moving over my body.
Hands slip beneath cotton, fingers find my skin.
My eyes close and my lips part in sweet, sweet agony as they move lower and lower — pushing at my panties, slipping under the edge, teasing so close.
With a gasp, somehow, I break the spell.
Somehow, I yank myself back from the edge of damnation and sin. I quickly sit up in my bed, panting, my chest heaving with the danger of how close I got. I swallow, pushing my hands up through my hair and shaking my head.
Chastity was right. Father says the devil is in the details.
Well, the devil is certainly in Rowan Hammond.
I know it’s wrong. I know it’s a sin. But heaven help me, he’s leading me into temptation.
Sweet, sweet temptation.
And I think I might be helpless to resist.
Chapter Ten
Rowan
“So, I’m just curious.”
I glance over at Jade working the left hand side of the bar. We’re busy for a Monday. That’s not a bad thing.
“What’s up?”
“Are we going to just ignore the giant, fist-sized bruise on the side of your skull?”
“Ideally, yeah.” I glance back at the frat-boy standing in front of me — the last dregs of the summer tourists crowd. “Thirty-nine bucks.”
“Cool, thanks bro, keep the change!”
He drops two twenties on the bar, and he and his buddy somehow grab the four beers and four shots of Irish whiskey and head back to their table of cronies.
“Douchebag,” I mutter, snagging the cash off the bar.
“C’mon.”
“Jade, leave it.”
“Boyfriend?”
I shoot her a look. “I’m fairly positive my sexual orientation has been made abundantly obvious by now.”
She snorts. “Not yours, tool, I mean the boyfriend of whatever skank you banged.”
“Isn’t it against your feminist code to be slut-shaming like that?”
“If it walks like a duck and fucks its way through the entire male population of Shelter Harbor like a duck…”
“This duck have a number?”
She grins and rolls her eyes. “Not going to tell me are you?”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
“Anything to do with the huge dude who I saw you talking to out back the other night with that church girl?”
“Nope.”
“Right, so who was that?”
“Jade, fuck. A beer delivery guy, I don’t know.”
“They deliver pretty late now, huh?”
I ignore her.
“Seemed a little past church girl’s bedtime, too. Little late for her to be slumming around the backdoor of a place like this with a dude like you.”
“You going to pour drinks or keep quizzing and insulting me?”
She rolls her eyes again before she turns and smiles at a couple of men who are wildly misreading her body language.
Except, Jade’s at least half right. About the Eva part at least. It was too late for me to be bringing her around here. It was too late to have her out alone, just the two of us, and her looking like, well, like she does.
Because the thing is, I’m not sure how not to flirt with a girl that catches my eye like she does. However forbidden, however off-fucking-limits Evangeline Ellis is, I can’t seem to just shut the fuck up and leave it be around her.
Throw in driving home side-by-side in the pickup, the windows down, the early fall breeze blowing in and tussling her blonde hair, and the moon just catching her face?
Forget it.
Throw in her literally dropping into my arms ten minutes before, her body tight against mine and her hands on my skin, and it’s a lost cause.
I’d been rock hard the whole damn drive back to the rental house. This sweet, sinfully, untouchable piece of temptation sitting in the truck next to me.