lowered, it’ll only be a matter of time before Rowena lets her secrets slip—and I’ll be waiting to collect each and every one.
“I’m going to let you go,” I lie smoothly, “just like that. Unless you have something else to tell us?”
“I’m pretty sure that I’ve said more than enough.” Her violet eyes swing in my direction, stopping just short of my body. “But I want to see you.”
Startled by the unexpected request, my lungs constrict. “What?”
“Before I leave,” she murmurs, taking one step toward me, “I want to see you.”
A deafening roar silences everything but my heartbeat. “You’re blind.”
“Just because I can’t see doesn’t mean anything. Isn’t that what you told me?” She takes another step, this one a bit wobbly, and then yet another. Until she’s standing an arm’s length away and staring up at me with those violet eyes that can’t possibly be real. Too otherworldly, too feminine for a woman more likely to shoot a man than nap in a field of heather like some fairytale princess. “Come here.”
It’s not a request, not quite a command.
I swing my gaze over to my brother, who stands like stone beside me. He’s studying Rowena with an expression that I can’t nail down, and I have this . . . Fucking hell, I don’t know what it is. A want. A desire. An urge to step between them, so that he can’t see her.
Can’t see this, whatever the bloody hell this even is.
“You owe me, Damien,” she says. “You cuffed me. You dangled me in the air. You put your hand on my throat like you were five seconds away from strangling me to—”
I’m not aware of my feet moving, of destroying the distance between us in two powerful strides. I look down at her shaved skull and the fresh scars gleaming an angry red under the soft, overhead lights. She tips her head back, as if assessing the size of me—how the top of her crown only comes up to my chest—and then she lifts her hand, fingers loosely curled.
The request doesn’t need explanation.
This is insane.
Utter madness.
And yet I touch her wrist, gently circling the delicate bone. Place her fingers on the scruff of my jaw and suck a harsh breath deep into my lungs when the heat of her palm cups the side of my face.
Ten minutes ago, I had her at my mercy and now . . .
Her forefinger traces the shadow of my stubble, the bridge of my nose. She skims the crest of my cheekbone, pausing to discover the tiny scar that creates a shallow groove just below my left eyebrow. And then that one finger sweeps downward, taking a direct path south, until her thumb brushes my lower lip. She tugs on the flesh, gently.
My cock hardens to the point of pain.
“And?” I demand on a husky rasp. “Am I what you expected?”
“No horns,” she whispers, “no elongated incisors. Turns out that you’re human, after all, Damien Priest.”
“Monsters hide in us all.”
“That might be the only thing you’ve said that we can agree on.”
A small smile quirks her lips, and I can almost picture her . . . before. The sweet mouth. The flirtatious laughter. The long, flowing hair that would no doubt feel like silk wrapped around my fist. She had the face of an angel and now she’s something entirely different.
Fallen.
Cast down from the heavens to unleash destruction on the rest of us mere mortals.
And none of that explains why I’m desperate to grasp her hand in mine and nip at her fingers. To draw them into my mouth, one by one, until she’s whimpering again—a sound meant only for me—and I’m showing her all the ways that we monsters know how to make a woman beg.
I’d drive her to her knees. Spread her legs wide. Run my tongue over the curve of her ass and circle my fingers over her clit while her forehead kisses the floor and her hands curl into trembling fists. She’d beg for me to stop, she’d beg for me to make her come, and if she was good, maybe I’d—
The curve of her smile deepens, one corner hitching slightly higher than the other. Dropping her hand away from my face, she traces the seam of her lips with the same finger that she used on me.
It’s deliberate. A challenge.
Men are easy to break—her words, not mine. Fucking hell. In this moment, with my cock throbbing in my trousers and my heart racing in my chest,