The silence between them was charged, electric, a living thing that thrummed with everything they weren't saying. Outside, thunder rolled across the sky like a warning neither of them intended to heed.
But plans, she was learning, had a habit of crumbling when your heart decided to mutiny against your brain.
She couldn't. God help her, she couldn't. Because the truth — the terrifying, exhilarating truth — was that she didn't want him to stop. She wanted to burn.
She should have pulled away. Should have remembered why this was dangerous, why she'd built those walls in the first place. But his touch was fire, and she'd been cold for so long.
She finally turned. A mistake. His eyes were the color of a storm at midnight, and they pinned her in place with an intensity that stole her breath. Every logical thought she'd carefully assembled scattered like leaves in a hurricane.
The rain hammered against the floor-to-ceiling windows of the penthouse. She pressed her forehead against the cold glass, watching the city below blur into rivers of light. Behind her, she could feel his presence like a physical force — dark, magnetic, impossible to ignore.
He closed the distance between them in three measured steps. His cologne — sandalwood and something darker, something that was purely him — wrapped around her like smoke. "Doing what, exactly?" His voice was low, dangerous, a velvet threat.
