The Dare Collection 2018. Taryn Leigh Taylor

actually hurt. “I’m not sure I’m the one who can’t handle it.”

      He made that low sound that made her think of a wild thing growling. “When I say there’s blood on my hands, I mean it. Real blood, not some story one of your tight-assed lawyer friends tells in a bar to sound interesting. I’m talking about real life. Real shit. The kind of stuff that people like you need to pretend doesn’t exist so you can sleep at night.”

      That was supposed to wound her, she understood. She only shook her head. “I don’t think I’m the one who’s pretending, Charlie.”

      He made another noise that sounded as if it was ripped from deep inside him. It made every hair on her body want to stand on end.

      “This isn’t a door you want to open, Maya. I don’t know how many ways I can tell you that.”

      “Then don’t open it.” She was aware of how much she was shaking. Shivering, everywhere. As if she was lit on fire and freezing cold, all at the same time. “You’re the one who came after me. You’re the one who let yourself into this room. Or was that another accident? Something else that just happened near you while you were pretending not to notice?”

      “What the fuck are you doing to me?”

      That was torn out of him, too, his expression anguished. His tone worse.

      She shouldn’t have laughed. But she couldn’t seem to help herself. “I’m not doing anything to you. I’m just trying to see you. Call me crazy.”

      He moved then, a big rangy predator, and she knew she should have been terrified. She should have screamed. Run. Done something—anything—to save herself from the man who advanced on her with all that barely leashed ferocity.

      But instead, she melted.

      And when he swept her up against him, plastering her body against that ridiculously well-cut suit he wore, he gripped her shoulders in his big hands and bared his teeth directly in her face.

      And that didn’t scare her, either.

      On the contrary, she felt it like fire, delicious and intoxicating. It swept through her, lighting her up everywhere it touched.

      “I don’t have any truth to tell you, Maya,” he told her, up close and practically bristling with all that power and fury he carried around inside him. “The man I used to be died in Texas, and it’s better all-around if you leave him buried there. There’s not one part of who he was that matters now. Here in Italy I own a hotel I wouldn’t have been able to afford to stay in a year ago. I go to business meetings with men who would never have acknowledged my existence. I’m a goddamned upstanding member of society.”

      “I don’t think you believe that, either.”

      He let out another one of those noises that rolled through her like a storm.

      And then his mouth was on hers.

      By now she expected the kick of it, that wild passion that flattened her and exulted her. She expected the impossible glory of his mouth on hers, the sheer, shaking madness of it.

      This time, as his tongue plundered hers, he set his hands on either side of her face. To hold her still, she thought—

      But then his mouth gentled. The kiss changed.

      She wouldn’t call it soft. There was nothing about this man that was soft.

      Still, she felt tears well up behind her eyes as he kissed her, again and again, not as if he wanted to toss them off an edge of a cliff, but almost as if...

      But she didn’t dare use words like cherish, not even in her own head.

      “I was conning men out of their money when I was ten years old,” Charlie said against her mouth. “No one trusts a thing I say, not even me.”

      And it was the agony in his voice that made all that emotion she was fighting flood her eyes and start down her cheeks.

      “Charlie...”

      “Don’t trust what I say,” he told her, his voice gritty and things in his gaze she was afraid to name. “Trust this.”

      He bent, then swept her up into his arms, carrying her like some kind of fairy-tale princess as he moved across the room. Out of the light, into the dark bedroom, where she hadn’t bothered to turn on the lamps. He didn’t, either. He lay her down on the wide bed as if she was indescribably precious to him, and then he crawled there next to her.

      And she thought she knew him. She expected the rough beauty of his hands streaking over her, hard and wild. The kick, the magic, of that mad rush to the finish.

      But instead, he stretched there beside her, turned her toward him and touched her as if he had never seen a woman before.

      His blue eyes were bright. His expression was something like grave.

      He helped her out of her clothes and shrugged out of his. Then he took his time, moving like some kind of prayer in the hushed, dim light, as if he was worshipping every square inch of her.

      It was like a dream. The slide of skin against skin. The scrape of his teeth, his beard. The bright fire every time he tasted her with his mouth.

      Until finally he settled himself between her legs. He made an approving noise and then slid his hands beneath her, lifting her to him like an offering.

      And when he licked his way into her pussy, she lost it. She tumbled end over end, rolling over and over and over again as if she might not stop. Ever.

      She didn’t know if she was breathing or sobbing, or both. It was possible she was laughing, and she couldn’t tell. It was all too much. She was already weak and out of her head when he climbed up beside her again, sat up in the center of the mattress and then pulled her over to straddle his lap.

      It wasn’t the first time she had taken him this way, but this was different.

      His gorgeous cock reared up between them, hard and thick and satiny soft, and he let out a shaky breath when she wrapped her hands around it. But this was no time to play, not when he had his gaze fixed on her like that. As if he had been blind all his life until this moment and only now could he see.

      As if the only thing he could see was her.

      She knelt up, using both hands between them to guide the thick head of his cock to her entrance. Then, relying on the way he gripped her around the waist, she sank down over him. She took him into her in a rush, reveling in that deliciously deep stretching as her body made room for him. Or tried to.

      And this, too, felt like an act of worship.

      She couldn’t tell which one of them moved. She only knew that together they flowed over each other, into each other. She saw something in his face that she couldn’t put into words, but she felt it. With every slick, deep thrust of his body into hers, she knew it.

      She became it.

      Over and over and over again.

      And maybe he had lied about a thousand things, but this was the truth.

      She knew it the way she knew the span of her hips, the jut of her breasts. She knew it as if it was already a part of her, bone and sinew, need and longing.

      She lost track of how many times she tumbled over one cliff only to find a steeper one, a wilder fall.

      Until he flipped them both over, coming over her in the dim light that felt like a caress, pounding himself into her at last.

      And calling out her name when he fell, like a vow.

      Hours could have passed after that. Or mere moments. Maya would never know.

      She was off somewhere, then she was back, and Charlie’s hard, beautiful arm was her pillow.

      She didn’t know how she knew he was awake, only that he was. She drew a circle on his skin with her finger, then laughed at her own display of sentimentality.