a confident edge that makes me dizzy with how certain he is. You would have to be certain, I guess, to work in the mines, to go below ground with all that rock above you. You’d have to know the very limits of your strength. Sometimes, I’ve heard, the lights go out down there. Total darkness. A pitch-black nothing for as far as the eye can see, which is not far, which—you get it.
Cole turns us in the hall so he’s two steps above me and tugs, heading toward my apartment the way he would if he owned it. I know this like I know the small dish of diamonds will appear at my work station each morning. I know it like I know the little velvet pouch crushed in my fist will appear each Christmas.
I know it like I know I’ll trade that diamond for cash, and send it—
No. Not to my mother.
Cole puts me in front of my own door and I reach for the handle. Locked. I must have locked it on the way out and I fumble for a key, fumble it into the slot, fumble the door open, relief and nervousness twisting their way through my nerves.
He steps in behind me and closes the door, and I face him because I can’t think of what else to do. I’ve never been on a boat before but I can imagine what it would be like to have the waves rocking under my feet. It feels like that now. I’m out in the middle of nowhere, hanging in space, my mouth open—no words coming out.
Cole doesn’t seem to mind this.
He puts his hands on my shoulders and draws me in close, and then he’s turning us again, graceful as a dancer, and it’s only when my back meets the hard wood of the door that my brain catches up and I know what he’s doing, I see him bending in, his mouth—
His mouth on mine.
He tastes like he smells, sharp and cold and clean, and a surprised cry escapes me, punctuating the most furious, desperate kiss of my lifetime. I’m not the only desperate one here. Cole tastes me like a drowning man drinks in air. “God,” he growls against my mouth. “I’ve wanted to do this for three years.”
“What?” My hands have come up all by themselves to rest against the front of his shirt. “I didn’t think—”
“You never thought,” he says, his low laugh punctuated by more searching kisses. “I wanted to talk to you that day, and you shut yourself away like a princess in a tower.”
“Well you—you—” It’s a struggle to find words, because he’s still licking, still biting, still kissing so intensely that I can’t catch my breath. “You hid in the mines.”
“Nowhere else to go,” he says, and of course not, of course there was nowhere else to go but to his job. That’s life on the mountain. “You ran from me. Were you scared of me, too?”
“I was scared that you’d think I was crazy,” I whisper against his lips. “I touched you.”
“I fucking remember.” His voice drops into a pained register. “Your fingertips burned my skin. I felt them there for weeks afterwards.” He sucks in a sharp breath. “I still feel them.”
I lift my hand to his face and rub a thumb over his now-pristine cheekbone. “You were dirty.” My hips buck toward his body without my permission. “You had just come from the mines.”
His hand skims the side of my breasts, my shoulder, and then his fingers are lightly around the front of my throat. It’s so possessive and filthy that it lights up my entire body, head to toe, nerve to nerve, all of that hot energy meeting at the apex of my legs. It’s like a thousand light switches being turned on one by one. I was asleep, drowning in grief, and now I’ve resurfaced under his touch. “You were dirty, too, weren’t you, Leona?”
The moment crystallizes, freezing in place so that the only sound is my own panting breath in my ears. How had I felt, looking at him that day?
Dirty.
Dirty, and hot, and it was so out of the ordinary that I hadn’t been able to take it.
“Yes,” I admit, and his hand tightens on my throat, tilting my chin up, up, up. “Yes. I was dirty for you.”
Chapter Five
Something happens, there with his hand at my throat and his lips on my lips and all my words subsumed into the fact of