Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
“I don’t know anything anymore.” I crouch down so we’re eye level, close enough to see the pulse beating in her throat. “That’s the problem, Mia. You’ve made it so I can’t trust a single memory I have of you. Every smile, every touch, every fucking I see you, Nate—how do I know any of it was real?”
“You don’t.” Her eyes are bright now. Too bright. “You can’t. That’s the point. That’s what I was trained to do. Make you trust me. Make you open up. And you did, and I…” She stops. Swallows hard. “I did my job.”
“Your job.” I let out a broken laugh. “Right. Your job was to fuck me and file reports. Your job was to kiss me and tell me I was someone you cared about while you were calculating the best way to put me down, like a fucking dog.”
“That’s not—”
“Not what? Not how it happened? Not what you were thinking?”
I grab her chin, forcing her to look at me. She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t pull away. Just meets my gaze with those dark, steady eyes that have haunted me since London.
“Tell me what you were thinking,” I say quietly. “When you were in my bed. When you were on your knees for me. When you were screaming my name. What was going through your head?”
Her breath catches.
“Nothing,” she whispers.
“For once, you’re a terrible liar,” I sneer.
“I wasn’t thinking about the mission!” Her voice cracks. “When I was with you—when we were together—I wasn’t thinking about anything except you. How you felt. How you tasted. How you—” She stops herself. Shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Well, it matters to me.”
“Why?” she says, the word ragged and breathless. “What difference does it make? I’m still an agent. You’re still my captor. Nothing I say is going to change what happens next.”
“Oh, but you don’t know what happens next.”
“Yeah? Well, neither do you.”
We’re too close. I’m still holding her chin, my thumb pressing into the soft skin under her jaw, and I can feel her pulse racing against my fingers. Her lips are parted, her breath coming fast, and that familiar heat is building between us—that magnetic pull that’s been there from the very beginning.
I want to kiss her.
But it’s more than that.
There’s more and it comes from somewhere dark and hungry.
Take what’s yours.
I jerk back like I’ve been burned.
“You need a shower,” I tell her.
So I make her shower again, and for once she doesn’t protest.
Not because she needs it—she doesn’t—but because I need the distance, and from her willingness, it’s apparent she does too. I need to hear water running and know there’s another a door between us, even if it’s a door I could walk through any time I wanted.
And you want to.
I do. I fucking do.
But instead of leaving, I stand outside the bathroom, listening to the water, imagining her naked under the spray, and I hate myself for how hard I am. For how much I want to walk in there and press her against the tile and fuck her until neither of us can think.
She’s your prisoner.
She lied to you.
She was going to—
The water shuts off.
I take a step back, trying to arrange my face into something neutral, trying to will away the evidence of how affected I am.
The door opens.
She’s wrapped in a towel, water still beading on her shoulders, and the sight of her is like a gut punch. Small and fierce and so fucking beautiful it makes every part of me ache.
“I left you new clothes,” I manage to say, gesturing to where I laid them out on the bed. Then I lock her back in the room, go to the kitchen and pour another drink and try to remember a time when my life made sense.
Night falls like a curtain, no twilight, the way it seems to when the clocks fall back and winter is on the way.
I bring her dinner. She eats without complaint this time, which feels like a victory even though it isn’t.
I ask more questions. She gives me more silence.
The pattern is thus established—I push, she resists, we orbit each other like binary stars caught in a gravity well neither of us can escape.
At eleven p.m., I leave her alone and retreat to my bedroom.
At midnight, I’m still staring at the ceiling.
At one a.m., I give up on sleep and find myself in the hallway again, hand on her door, that magnetic pull dragging me toward her like I’m caught in a current that’s threatening to drown me if I don’t do something about it soon.
Stay away.
I open the door anyway.
She’s awake. Sitting up in bed, blanket pooled around her waist, my T-shirt slipping off one shoulder. The city lights paint her in silver and shadow. She is a vision of light in all this darkness.