a burning building. Her gorgeous blue eyes captivated him. It was as if he were talking to someone whom he only dreamed of.
“Look,” she said, her speech a breathless staccato as she tried to wiggle out of his grasp. “I don’t know who you are or what you are doing here, and I don’t care. Just let me go and we’ll pretend this never happened.”
Lucy worked her wrists up under his chin trying a Krav Maga move she’d learned from a bodyguard friend of hers to break his grip, when unexpectedly, she felt his hands loosen around her arms. He seemed to her to be looking down her slip, but it was the bracelet on her wrist that really caught his attention. She backed away from him but thought better of running, still not certain she could easily find the exit and hoping to calm him down before anything really bad happened.
“Are you done?” he asked.
“You tell me.” Lucy was feeling even more frightened when it occurred to her that maybe he’d followed her here. Maybe he was some kind of celebrity stalker waiting for an opportunity to get her alone. To get a front-page box for killing a socialite. She’d seen that movie. A few of them. But she also had to consider that, if he wanted to kill her, she’d probably be dead already. “What do you want?”
“Same as you.”
Lucy heard the scratch of a match head along a striker, then the incandescent burst of phosphorous, and both the stranger and the path were revealed, at least in part. He walked toward an elaborate iron candle stand.
He lit the first votive.
It illuminated through the rose-colored glass holder. The candle threw more shadow than light but there was just enough for her to see him, or at least his silhouette cast against the wall of the side altar.
She got a better look. He was young, probably not much older than she was, she observed, but there was nothing boyish about him. He was drop-dead gorgeous, with sharp features and a strong chin. Classic looks that fit in perfectly with the classical stylings of their surroundings. He was wearing black jeans and a tight black V-neck sweater that looked like it was almost shrink-wrapped on him. His dark brown hair was thick and sexy, like a lead singer of a band—well-coiffed in the messiest way. And his eyes. Those hazel eyes that pierced the darkness were even more entrancing in the candlelight. If she was going to be trapped with someone for three days, she could do worse.
“You need to change?” he asked.
“Oh, that was the whiskey talking,” Lucy said, embarrassed at being overheard in such a vulnerable moment. “I just needed to get out of the storm. To change, you know.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Guess this is the place to be tonight, huh?”
“For us it is,” he replied with a smile. “What’s your name?”
He didn’t know her. A good sign. She thought about lying to him but she hadn’t needed to introduce herself in quite a while. And she liked it.
“Lucy.”
“Sebastian,” he replied, pulling up his sweater to the elbows and extending his hand.
She noticed each of his exposed arms sported a full sleeve of black ink from his bicep to his forearm, but it was the tattoo around his wrist that really got her attention. That gave her pause at first, and then set off a full-fledged panic.
It was a tattoo of an arrow, in the same style as her bracelet. It was intricate—the shaft wrapped around his wrist with the head and nock meeting on his palm side. Almost touching.
Lucy took a big step back and grabbed the pew once again, so flustered that she lost her footing.
“What is that?”
“A reminder,” he answered.
She was shaking as her skin turned not just to goose bumps but bubble wrap. “I’m out of here.”
Sebastian didn’t try to stop her. If she wasn’t so afraid of him right then, she might have even supposed he was letting her go. She backed away and headed tentatively toward the door she’d come in, but she might as well have been trying to navigate a caved-in mineshaft. She slipped to her knees and started to cry.
Lucy fell the second time.
Overcome by both the throbbing in her skull and the realization that she might have just made the biggest mistake of her life by entering the church. One thing she was sure of, she couldn’t stop. As her sobs intensified, she felt his hands on her once