Carved, chiseled stone.
Chest and shoulders so wide. Abdomen flat and defined, muscles shaking with his own need.
It left me feeling half deranged, half a second from dropping to my knees and licking across the deeply cut grooves.
Bowing at his feet.
“You should see what you look like right now, Grace. Like art hanging on my wall. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a girl as beautiful as you.”
“Ian.”
He took a step forward, and I was slammed with another blast of his potency.
My eyes moved everywhere, from that gorgeous face and down that striking body. The waistband of his pants hung on his narrow hips and barely concealed the v that dipped down beneath the fabric.
But it was the marks written all over him that had my own chest pressing full.
Heart beating manic as my gaze traced over the designs etched and marred across his skin.
Scarred like brands of anguish.
A trademark of torment.
More of those demons screamed across his flesh. It appeared as if they were howling as they flew into his world that had been dimmed in the blackest night.
Roman numerals were stamped across his collarbones, and his abdomen and sides were covered in barren trees and devastated landscape and a watch that seemed to have run out of time.
Everything was a little warped, a dark fantasy, as if it all was being viewed through a veiled, distorted mirror.
But it was the words printed on his side as if they had been scribbled onto his skin by a small child with a crayon that had my spirit screaming.
Forever and Ever.
There was something so heartbreaking about it that I felt mine reaching for him, every inch of him something I wanted to touch and soothe and ease.
Because all of that ink was covering scars.
As if he’d been whipped and burned. Battered and bruised.
It seemed impossible that he had grown to stand the most powerful, influential kind of man.
I was overcome with the need to know him. To climb inside. To search and hold and stay.
Did any of my worries matter, anyway? Because something about this felt so fleeting while there was a huge part of me that wanted to reach out and hang on for forever.
See him, know him, understand him the way I wanted him to understand me.
He started to edge toward me, barefoot, wearing only his suit pants.
Menacing and persuasive.
Sexy and sure and brimming with that arrogance.
Tension held fast to the atmosphere, the man more intense than I’d ever felt him before.
“Don’t ever fucking feel pity for me. I know what you’re thinking. Don’t fucking go there. Just know that every one of those scars made me who I am today.”
I wanted to shout it back. Beg him to let me in. To show me what that meant. Tell him that my scars made me who I was, too. Though mine were invisible. Written deep. My children a gift given in between.
But my tongue was locked up, held in a blast of that energy that surged, higher and higher with each step that he took in my direction. My empty lungs filled up with the scent of cinnamon and orange, an insinuation of sex that dripped from his skin.
The man a bottle named Bliss.
He planted his hands on the wall over my head.
Towering.
Obliterating.
Casting me in shadows.
I didn’t know whether to hide or run toward the mayhem.
To dive into his disturbance or crawl for safety.
But I was stuck, helpless but to fall for him.
He trailed his fingertips from the cap of my exposed shoulder, dipping it down across my collarbone.
A shiver rolled, trembles shaking me all the way to the core.
“Cold?” he murmured, his voice a blast of heat across my skin.
“No,” I barely managed to choke out.
Ian ran his nose up my jaw, and he inhaled as he went.
All the while I struggled to breathe, emotions flying at me from everywhere. Questions and concerns and worry, my judgment cast into the surety of his hands.
His chest expanded, his heart racing just as fast as mine.
As if the two were catching time.
Was it possible that he felt this, too? As if he were standing at the precipice of something great? That one second more, and we would never be the same?
Because I knew in another breath, I would forever become a part of him.
He pressed his pelvis to my belly. “Grace.”
The man was so hard. Enormous.
“Ian . . . I . . . I don’t understand how you make me feel this way. How you make me want things I don’t want. Give myself in a way that I don’t.”
I watched his expression sift through a million emotions—anger and need and lust and fear.
I wanted to reach out and hold every one.
Oh, I was in so much trouble. Stumbling over the edge as the ground crumbled out from under my feet.