He laughed a gruff sound. “You’re just seeing what you want to see.”
My teeth clamped down on my bottom lip, my hand shaking like mad when I reached out and brushed back the longer pieces of hair from his forehead. “I see someone who is brave. I see someone who is fearless. I see someone who saved my daughter.”
A tremor raked through him at that, and I let my fingertips wander, gliding down the strong angle of his cheek. The man so beautiful he was making it hard to focus on what I needed to say without getting distracted by what I wanted. “But I also see someone who is hurting.”
He snatched me by the wrist.
I gasped.
“Pain is just a reminder of your sins.” His confession was nothing but a growl.
I searched his face.
“Of what you’ve done,” he rumbled.
My chest quivered at the rake of his harsh words. Blow after blow.
“Of what is to come.”
“And what is it that is to come? What are you waiting for, Leif?”
“Something I would never implicate you in.” His face pinched in misery. “I . . . I should go.”
I gave him a tight nod, not even surprised by the rejection because I could physically feel his pain.
He pushed to his feet. He hesitated as he stared down at my daughter. Everything ached when he reached out and brushed his fingertips through her hair, sheer affection on his face.
His jeans ripped and stained with his blood. Shredded from his surrender.
This man who would have died for my daughter.
He walked out the door without looking back.
That energy shivered and shook and cried out. Demanding to be heard.
My attention moved to Penny. My child fast asleep.
Safe.
Warm.
Loved.
We’d been through so much in our lives, but never once had I been so terrified as this. Faced with losing the one thing worth living for.
And Leif, he had returned that to me. Given us another chance.
He had sparked something in me from the second he’d crashed into my world.
Fire and ice.
I’d thought he’d been purposed, but never had I imagined he could have been purposed for this.
For something greater than I’d prepared myself for.
And I recognized it, so distinctly.
His pain.
The way he viewed himself, as if he’d been condemned to live without.
Alone.
Destitute.
As if he believed he truly didn’t deserve or have the right.
I was on my feet before I knew they were under me, the weakness I’d been feeling all day swept away by the desperation to touch.
To feel him alive under me, too.
For him to understand the man I saw in him.
To return a little of the hope he’d restored in me.
I raced out of the suite and down the hall toward the massive bonus room, the one that opened to the wall of windows and overlooked the pool and yard.
The storm bared down. Gusts of wind that lashed through the trees. Sent them whipping and shivering and howling beneath the moon that burned through a thin break in the clouds.
The man was a shadow beneath, his shoulders hitched high as he strode across the yard toward his little home.
If he even had one.
The man lost.
A wanderer who raged as he searched through the earth for where he fit.
I wanted to carve out a place for him. Show him what it was like to belong. To be treasured and loved, the way he showed without asking for a thing in return.
I burst through the door he had exited, pummeled by a squall of wind.
A fierce fury that blasted through the air.
“What if I don’t want you to go?” I shouted above it. “What if I want you to stay, right here, with me?”
In the distance, he froze, as if he had been impaled by the plea. Staked to the spot.
Slowly, he turned. Rain began to pelt from the sky.
“I keep telling you that you don’t want me. That you don’t have the first clue what you’re asking for.”
Brown eyes flashed beneath a streak of lightning. The man momentarily lit in a bright flash of light.
Afire.
Aflame.
Before he returned to shadows. To the darkness.
“You’re wrong, Leif. I want you. I want all of you. I want your hurt and your fears and your sorrows. I want your beauty and your songs and your mind. You’re wrong when you say it’s my beauty reflected back at me when I look at you. Not when you’re the epitome of it. I feel it, Leif. I see it.”
His face pinched in pain. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
My hands clenched. “I know that. Why do you think I’m standing here?”
“I can’t give you what you deserve, Mia.”
“Then give me what I want.”
A sound left him that was somewhere between a groan and a roar, the rain beginning to pound as he hovered and hesitated and tried to resist.
I saw the second he snapped.
The moment I whispered, “Please.”
He crossed the space like some kind of warring avenger, on his way to plunder and annihilate.
To steal.
What he couldn’t know was what he was steadily stealing was my heart.
By the time he got to me his hair was soaked, rivulets of water twisting down the hard contours of his striking, glorious face. His jaw set in stone and his body a rigid, powerful force.
Clothes drenched.
We collided in a flash of hands and tongues and nipping teeth.
He gripped me by the hips and jerked me to his hard, hard body as his mouth slanted over mine.
The kiss frantic.
Possessive.
A growl climbed his throat and spilled into mine as our tongues twisted and fought, those hands tugging me closer, against all his heat.
Flames leapt.
Climbed for the sky.
One touch, and I was melting.
Liquid silver in his hands.
“Leif.” I clamored to get him closer, my fingers slipping through the slick strands of his brown hair.
He groaned and pushed me up hard against the door, controlling the mind-bending kiss.
I knew after this, I was never going to be the same.
“Fuck, Mia. Fuck. What have you done to me? I can’t . . . I can’t.”
I could feel his brow drawing tight, his frantic kiss fueled by guilt, his heart pounding with greed.
“Yes, you can. I want you. I want you. Please let me show you who I see when I look at you.” My nails dug into his shoulders, tearing at his shirt.
The thin, short nightdress I was wearing was soaked, sticking to my skin, my aching breasts straining against the material where I pressed myself against his body.
A rumble of need curled up his throat. “I will ruin you.”
“I want you to,” I begged.
I was already there.
My wreckage strewn at his feet.
He hoisted me up, and I wrapped my legs around his waist while he kissed me mad.
Savagely.
Fiercely.
No restraint.
His hands kneaded my bottom and his cock rubbed between my thighs.
I clung to his hair, probably tugging too hard as he entered the code, opened the door, and carried me into the lapping shadows of the massive room.
The storm battered the long bank of windows. When the door closed behind us, it cut the volume to a howling, moaning whisper.
Thunder rolled. A low warning of what was to come.
He carried me all the way across the room, winding between the half-painted pictures that waited on easels. Ones I still couldn’t find the inspiration to complete. When he got to the far side, he set me down on top of a sideboard table, keeping my legs wrapped around his waist.
The fabric of our clothing stuck to
gether.
Our hard pants rose into the air.
My heart struggled, leaping around in a desperate bid to meet with his, not sure if I would ever really be able to fully reach him.
Knowing it was okay if I didn’t.
That maybe he needed this one singular night as much as I did.
That we needed to share this.
He angled back for a breath, those brown-sugar eyes looking at me with terror. As if I could possibly be the one to hurt him. Like taking me would cost him everything.
As if he wasn’t the one who had already scarred me.
Written himself on my spirit and my soul.
A man I could never forget even if he walked out right then.
I needed to show him. Needed him to know.
I kept him in the grips of my gaze as I slipped off the stained wood and slowly sank onto my knees.
A shiver of reservation rocked through him, though his body bowed forward with need.
With lust.
With this energy that filled the space until it was the only thing we could breathe.
With trembling hands, I reached up and slowly undid the buckle of his belt, watching up at him while he watched down on me.
Tension winding.
Flickers and sparks in the space.
The man gravity.
That severity whipped around him, as intense as the storm.
Pulling me into his darkness.
I licked my lips as I got the belt free and tugged at the button of his jeans.
Leif grunted, his big hand coming down, the pad of his thumb sliding across my bottom lip.
Chills streaked. Desire making me shake.
“You don’t have anything to prove, Mia. You don’t have to do this.”
“You think this is obligation? Because I think I owe you something?” I jerked his belt from the loops. “This has been coming since the second I saw you. Since the second you had me pinned to that floor of the attic because I couldn’t walk away.”
I pulled down his zipper. The sound of it curled into the room.
A promise.
Reprieve.
His stomach tremored under the skin-tight tee, and his jeans stuck to his flesh as I went to pull them down, damp and heavy, just like every aching part of me.
My belly quivered and desire went racing like a stampede.
All reason trampled underfoot.
Breath punching from my lungs when his penis bobbed free.
Hard and long and thick. The head engorged and fat.
His jaw clenched tight, and he traced his thumb up and down the angle of my cheek. “Beauty.”
Didn’t he get that was what he had become to me?
The gorgeous stranger in the attic.
A dark storm.
A white light.
He watched me as he kicked his shoes off, and I tugged his jeans the rest of the way down. Leif shifted to free the wet fabric from his ankles. My gaze moved directly for the wound up high on his thigh, the skin pitted and torn and scraped.
I leaned in and kissed across the marred flesh.
“Fuck, Mia,” Leif grunted in shock, a hand fisting in my hair like he wanted to stop me. I grabbed him by the back of both thighs, letting my lips lightly brush the injury.
“Mia . . . what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Adoring you. The person you are. The sacrifice you made.” My hands shook harder. “You could have been killed, Leif. I . . .”
I trailed off, unable to finish the statement, knowing it would reveal too much. That he would see he had already gotten to me.
He wasn’t even mine and losing him would destroy me.
Those eyes flashed. Desperation and desire.
He tugged at the hold he had in my hair, urging me up onto my feet.
“Angel,” he mumbled.
In a flash, I was propped back onto the table, and he was taking me by the knees, spreading me so he could make room for himself. My nightgown bunched at my waist, and he pushed his bare cock to the sheer lace of my panties.
“Fuck. Can’t get you off my mind, Mia. Tried, baby, I tried. But I close my eyes, and it’s you I see.”
I gasped. Moaned. Begged. My hands sought refuge under his shirt, pushing it up as I let my palms run the contoured lines of his abdomen. He tore it the rest of the way over his head.
One second later, the man was completely naked.
Glorious.
Magnificent.
Muscles hard and lean.
Rigid, brutal beauty.
His chest packed and the skin clean, a single tattoo of a palm tree marked on the underside of his bicep.
Scars littered the lower left side of his abdomen, a spray of four or five deep, discolored indentations.
I brushed my fingers over them. He flinched and I had the urge to kiss across them, too.
I did, leaning in and brushing my lips across the marred skin, not knowing what happened but sure whatever it was, it was wholly significant.
Part of what had shaped this broken, guarded man.
Rain pounded and the storm grew strength, and my chest was heaving while he stood there looking at me while I touched him.
Explored him.
Tenderly.
For a moment, he just watched.
Taken.
All that firm, toned flesh shivered beneath my touch.
Then he dove for me again.
Mouth capturing mine as his hands pushed under the material of my nightgown. His fingers found the edges of my panties, and he hissed when he dragged them down, the fabric eliciting a chill as it skimmed the length of my legs.
He dropped them to the floor.
“It isn’t right, Mia. What I’m about to do to you. But I need it. Fuck, I need to feel something good. You, beautiful girl. I need to get inside of you.”
His kiss was manic, a hand at the back of my head, angling me to take control.
He tasted of whiskey and sex and grief.
With the other hand, he gripped me by the hip and tucked me close.
Our bare skin grazed.
Shock streaked through my body.
Electric.
The barest brush, and I was already being burned alive.
My fingers searched, palms gliding over his chest. His muscle rippled beneath my touch. I kept going lower, dragging over his abdomen that twitched and shook until I held him in the palm of my hand.
My belly flipped as I stroked him.
“God. Mia. Yes.”
The words wheezed from his throat, and his hand slipped from my head to my shoulder where he jerked the strap of my gown free, exposing one breast. He dipped down and swirled his tongue around my nipple.
I whimpered and gasped when he dragged his fingers through my center, the flesh drenched and throbbing.
He slipped two fingers inside of me, and I was already coming undone, his name a plea.
Bliss built. Too fast. Mind-numbing. I could no longer think.
“You want me, sweet girl?” The words might have been nice, but they came out a threat.
Raw hunger had taken to his gaze when he edged back to look at me, lust flexing every gorgeous muscle of his body.
“Yes.”
“Tonight, I own you, Mia West.”
My chest tightened, and my heart did that stupid, stupid thing.
Because falling for this man would only break me in the end.
He kissed me again, and I’d never been kissed this way.
In a way that was all consuming, desperate and dire. As if both of our lives depended on it.
I was terrified that maybe they did.
Our mouths at war.
Our hands an entreaty.
Our mingling breaths a covenant.
He dragged me to the very edge of the table, so close that my bottom was barely hanging on, and his hand clenched down on the side of my neck when he edged back to position the head of his cock between my trembling thighs.
He barely pre
ssed in an inch.
I thought I might pass out right then.
He tightened his hold, fingers curling into my hair at the back of my head.
I could feel his manic heart going boom, boom, boom. In sync with the storm. In sync with my mind.
The man held me steady.
Riding a sharp blade of bliss that I knew was getting ready to cut me wide open.
Our foreheads touched.
I exhaled a shaky breath against his lips.
He rocked forward.
Hard.
Filling me full.
Thunder cracked, lightning a blanket of blinding white at the windows.
The room shook.
And I couldn’t breathe.
The perfect intrusion was close to pained as my body fought to adjust to him. To his size and his presence and his aura.
Everything about him overwhelming.
Too big and bold.
I was consumed. Gone. And he hadn’t even begun to move.
“Fuck…Mia.” Leif’s throat bobbed heavily, and he struggled for air, to hold himself together.
“You feel so good,” he muttered with his forehead still pressed to mine. “Too good. God, what have I done? What have I done?”
Our bodies burned.
Fires and flames.
“Leif. Please. Let go.”
On a groan, he did.
He gave.
Owning me, just like he’d promised.
His hips surged deep. Hard, fierce strokes that forced the air out of my lungs with each frenzied thrust.
The sound became a moan.
His name.
His name.
He angled back, taking me by both hips, staring me down as he fucked me straight into oblivion.
Nirvana.
An eclipse.
His darkness surrounding. Stars all around.
“Mia. Fuck me.”
He seemed to get lost, too, spiraling, one hand coming to the back of my neck, dragging me to his kiss. The fingers of his other hand sank into the flesh of my hip, jerking me forward to meet each drive of his body.
He worked me into a sweat.
Worked me into a puddle.
Worked me into chaos.
Pieces of me coming apart.
Cracking.
Splintering.
I buried the scream in his neck when he broke me with bliss. As pleasure unfurled from that tiny pinpoint and scattered into eternity.
Where he sent me wandering in his mystery.
Kiss the Stars Page 20
