“Say something sweet to me,” I told him, feeling playful.

He studied me very seriously, like it hadn’t even occurred to him that I wasn’t being entirely serious just then.

Flirting was a foreign concept to him.

“You’re a peaceful woman,” he said, each word uttered very carefully.  Like they had some special meaning.

I blinked, long and slow, lashes peeling apart liked they’d been coated with honey.

I was trying to decide what to make of that pronouncement.

Peaceful sounded just a touch too close to boring, I was thinking.

“What I mean is, you make me want peace . . . you bring me peace.  Believe it or not, this is a very mellow version of me.

I eyed him.  “Are you serious?”  I sincerely did not think he was.

“Yeah.  Scary, huh?”

To be honest, it was a bit scary, because I’d never seen him approaching anything close to mellow.  Never seen him at anything less than intense.

I’d hate to see him at full speed.

Yikes.

And then my mind wandered back to what he’d just said and how it pertained to me.

Wow.  He really had come up with something sweet.

He with the deeply cold eyes, always so intensely frigid had somehow found the words to warm me, head to toe.

I thought he might have stayed the night that time when he was finished with me in the wee hours of the morning, but I wasn’t sure, because I was certain that he didn’t sleep in my bed with me.  I’d have noticed a thing like that.

Instead, I suspected he camped out in another room, on my couch maybe.  I couldn’t have said why I suspected that, looking at the thing.  Not a cushion was out of place, but that was no matter.  He was the type to leave things just how he’d found them.

I’d never seen him relax, not for a second.  Even when I was sitting, drinking my wine, he had remained standing, pacing, waiting.  Never just holding still, and only lying down for activities that did not involve anything remotely close to sleeping or resting.

Either way, he was gone in the morning when I woke up.

It should be noted that casual sex might have suited me just fine.  I’ll never know.  Heath was simply not the man to try it with.  He hit every single one of my hot buttons.

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

I shut and locked the door, lingering there for a moment.

What a strange night that had been.  What a strange kiss.

It was the oddest thing.

I’d just been on a date with my friend Dair.  We’d been flirting for quite some time, but we were both so busy, and hesitant, that it never went anywhere.  And then he’d called me out of the blue, wanting to go out on an actual date.  I couldn’t think of one good reason to turn him down, and so I went.

I really liked Dair, knew he was the kind of man I should want, but my heart just wasn’t in it.

Perhaps I wasn’t ready to move on yet.  The divorce had happened over a year ago, but it had been a long, ugly marriage.

Oh, and there was the small matter of my sometimes lover.  But that situation was less about moving on, and more about getting off, or so I told myself.

“What was that?” a deep, biting voice barked at me from the darkness of my living room.

Of course I knew who it was instantly, but still, I jumped about a foot.

Think of the devil.

“You,” I said, breathless now, heart rate accelerated with more than fear with those three rough words.

“Me,” he agreed.  “Come here.”

I shouldn’t have listened.

I should have turned on a light and demanded to know why he’d broken into my home.  I should have asked him ‘Was the door unlocked this time?’  Because of course it hadn’t been.

But all I could remember when I heard that rough, bar brawler voice was pleasure that remained so acute in my mind it made my whole body tingle just with the memory.

I moved toward the chair he sat in slowly, just making out his shadowy figure by the dim light cast from the street lamps out front.

I let out an embarrassing yelp when he snatched me by the hips and set me astride him, both of my arms held behind my back by the wrists.

God, he was fast.

All my traitorous body could seem to remember about that speed of his was how fast his hips moved as he hammered into me.

“You’re kissing him now?” he asked me, voice low and mean.

I swallowed, then licked my lips nervously.

I was stuck somewhere between fear and desire.  I knew he was dangerous, every cell in my body knew it, but it didn’t seem to be any kind of a deterrent to my damned libido.

“I haven’t heard from you in weeks,” I said steadily, tone matter of fact rather than plaintive.  “You come and go as you please, fuck my brains out, and leave while I’m still sleeping it off.  Why shouldn’t I be seeing other people?”

“Don’t go out with him anymore.  And if I catch you kissing some guy on your porch again, I’m warning you now, you aren’t going to like his face much when I’m finished with him.”

“You have no right to tell me what to do,” I told him firmly, even as my body quaked.  “I don’t even know you, and I certainly don’t know where you disappear to.”

“I’ve been out of town,” he said, tone surly.  “I’m back.  And you know me well enough.  Certainly enough to know how this night will end.”

I struggled against him briefly because he was pissing me off with every word, but that only seemed to add to my problem, as every shift of my body had me rubbing against his obvious hard-on.

“Missed you, too, sugar,” he rasped, pulling my face closer to his.

I gritted my teeth, pissed off by his attitude, and more pissed off by my body’s increasing reaction to it.  “Really?” I asked archly, a sarcastic bite in my tone.

“Really.  It’s going to be a rough night for you.  That little kiss out on your porch has gone and pissed me off, so I’ve got some frustration to fuck out of my system.  But first, I need you to wash your mouth out.

Who did he think he was, telling me what to do?  If anything, it should be the reverse.

I was pretty much old enough to be his mother.

He set me on my feet, and I backed away on unsteady legs.

I went to my bathroom, bending over the sink to brush my teeth, but only because I thought it was fair.  I’d want him to do the same if he’d just been kissing some other woman.

My eyes shot up as he gripped my long hair, wrapping it around his wrist once, twice, slamming his hard-on against my ass.

“You can’t even begin to know how screwed up it was for you to kiss Dair like that.”

I blinked at his reflection in the mirror, spitting out my toothpaste.  A chill ran through me.  Fear.

“How-how do you know his name?” I gasped.

He gave me one of his cold smiles, his eyes scary, even while he kept rubbing against me from behind.

“I know a great many things about you and your life, Lourdes.  And there’s a thing you should know about me.”

I didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to know.  He was really freaking me out now.  But it seemed called for.  “What?”

“It’s unwise to rile me.”  He reached his free hand around me, cupping my sex crudely.  “This is mine.  It will go much better for all parties involved if you stop questioning that.”

My body was throbbing, but it was a distraction I didn’t want right then.  I wanted to focus.  He didn’t get to say a thing like that and not explain himself.

“How?”  My voice was a hoarse whisper, but I got the word out.

“How is it unwise?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, voice gaining strength.  “How do you know ‘a great many things about my life’?  How’d you know his name?”