The Earth had flipped on its axis, dragging his brain along for the crazy ride.

“How did you find me?” she asked, cool as the other side of the pillow.

“I have my ways, princesa.”

Long denim-clad legs swung off the chair behind her, and combat boots thumped the ground. A beast of a man towered over Darcy’s shoulder, boasting raw scar tissue on the right side of his face that gave the impression he’d road tripped to hell and made a few friends there. His protective stance sent a surge of fury through Beck.

Darcy and . . . nah-ah.

“It’s okay,” she said, looking up into her protector’s smoke-dark eyes. “Beck’s an old friend.”

Old friend? Hell yeah, he was.

With care and a slightly unsteady hand, she placed a wrap over her recent work, which looked like—was that a habanero pepper? Both of the guy’s arms were blanketed in ink, barely room to spare for a postage stamp.

“I’ll stay while you lock up,” the brute said, one eye on Darcy, the other on Beck.

“I’ve got this, Brady.”

Brady crossed his arms resolutely and planted his feet.

Seeming to arrive at a decision, Darcy pushed out a noisy breath. “Brady, Beck. Beck, Brady.”

This dude was clearly important to her, not in a romantic sense, because if he was her man there would be zero debate about leaving her solo with another guy. But he was important on some other level, a realization that did not put Beck at ease. Darcy seemed A-okay with the situation, though. Her worlds had collided and she was figuring it out—with a lot more mental agility than Beck.

Beck stepped forward and held out his hand, half amused because the situation had the ring of a hostage handoff in Berlin circa 1985. She’s safe with me, new scary friend. Brady acknowledged Beck’s outstretched hand with a look but refused to take it. Alrighty, then.

Without further pleasantries, not even a “later” for Darcy, Brady headed out into the Chiberian night in short sleeves, ink as armor. Watch out, darkness.

Beck turned back to Darcy, his surprise momentarily giving way to blatant curiosity. “Where’d you find him?”

“Paris. Don’t take the handshake thing personally. He doesn’t like to be touched.” She clicked off the music with a remote control, and then with nimble fingers unhooked the needles from the tattoo machine and placed the apparatus in a box like a cube-shaped microwave. Entranced, he watched her, waiting for the wavy lines in front of his eyes to clear. On the off chance he was stuck in a crazy fever dream, he shut his lids, counted to three, and opened them again.

Nope, still there.

Darcy Cochrane, heiress, charity doyenne, and one of Chicago’s elite, had turned into a tattooed biker chick. So, no motorcycle as far as he knew, but she had the boots and the ’tude and the fucking ink. This was a million times removed from old Darcy with her pink, fuzzy sweater that used to have him in fits. And not even on the same planet as Darcy 2.0 from last night with the designer clothes and the pearls.

“Think I’m gonna need the non-Twitter version, Darcy.”

“Oh, but we never needed words, querido.”

Throwing his own smooth line back in his face? Nicely done, princesa.

He leaned on the counter, making it abundantly clear he was settling in for the long haul. In the bruising silence, he raked his gaze over her from head to toe, trying to craft his own story of what her body art meant. Last night she hinted at bad blood between her and Daddy, but hell if this wasn’t one head-kicking case of rebellion. Those images were etched into her skin for a reason.

“So paint me a picture.”

Oh, he looked good. Grumpy and annoyed that he didn’t have all the information, sure, but surly had always looked like sex on him. All that heart-wrenching intensity, and when it had been focused on her as he moved inside her, it was so easy to believe they were the last two people on Earth.

Mr. Miggins, her crusty old kitty, snaked a figure eight through Darcy’s legs and scratched out a plaintive mewl. Evidently, already feeling the tension.

May as well start with the easy stuff. “I’m filling in for the owner who heads to Florida this time every year. Snowbird. I do this during the downtime when Grams can’t bear the sight of me fussing around her. I’m staying in the apartment upstairs.”

“That covers the last three months.”

Needing to do something, anything, to escape his visual dissection, she turned the knob to the high setting on the autoclave so the tattoo iron would be sterilized in fifteen minutes, then set about tidying up her work area. Always be moving.

“I’ve been in Paris for the last couple of years, working with François Bernet. He’s a well-known tattoo artist and he’s taught me a lot.” Both in and out of the sack, when he wasn’t being a controlling French jerk, but Beck didn’t need to hear that.

Too late. The crimp creasing his forehead said he’d read between the lines and come away with “Darcy did Paris” in more ways than one.

After some first-rate glowering, he found his voice again. “I knew you loved art, but . . .”

“You had no idea how much?”

“I’m pretty sure Skin Ink 101 is not an elective at Harvard.”

She sighed. “I dropped out my sophomore year. The expectations . . . well, they got to be too much.”

“Was your engagement part of those expectations?”

She had wanted to study art, but there was no room in her father’s plans for a foolish girl’s dreams. A Chicago media and real estate tycoon, Sam Cochrane had a rather feudal attitude when it came to the family’s fortunes. For years he had treated his children as cogs in a plan to consolidate power without dirtying his hands with outright politicking. The front lines were of no interest to him, not when playing puppet master suited him better. The Collinses were a wealthy Connecticut family where everyone over the age of thirty was a U.S. congressman and had numbers after their names. Preston was the dynasty’s most eligible bachelor.

“I met Preston at a political fund-raiser my father encouraged me to attend. We dated for a few months and he asked me to marry him. I was only nineteen. I thought it was what I wanted, but every day closer to the wedding I became more panicked. I bailed two weeks before the big day.”

Darcy had stared down a lifetime of bruncheons and getting her hair ombréd, and realized this was not how she was supposed to go out. Finding out that Preston and her father held regular powwows with agenda items covering everything from how many children she should push out in the next five years to whether a political wife actually needed a college degree had woken her up from the Matrix-like life she’d been sleepwalking through. When she asked for her father’s help canceling the wedding, he told her to play ball or be cut off.

“Let’s just say I didn’t want my life to be mapped out for me.”

On a grunt, Beck flipped open one of the flash books, the shop’s equivalent of clip art for people who wanted a tattoo but had no imagination beyond the initial impulse.

“Last night you ran out on me,” he murmured.

“You ran first.”

Electric eyes snapped to hers. Jaw muscles bunched. She longed to bite back the hastily spoken words. Not supposed to care, Darcy.

“Ancient history, princesa.”

“And you can cut that princesa shit out, for a start.” For a start? No, no, no. Nothing was starting here because he was right. They were ancient history and dredging up the whys and whats was about as useful as Matthew McConaughey’s shirt collection.

“Why are you here, Beck?”

“You ran out on me,” he repeated, the edge in his voice hitting the hollow between her lungs. He shut the flash book, the sound a brutal echo in the tense silence, and skirted the counter, devouring the ground with long, measured strides. She backed up into the remaining inches available until her butt met the chair.