For 100 Reasons (100 3)

“Yours,” she says, clutching me as I move inside her. Her beautiful face is slack with pleasure, lips parted on a gasp. “God, Nick, yes . . . only yours.”

She starts coming again and her sharp cries spur me into a desperate rhythm. I plunge hard, furious in my need for release now.

My orgasm erupts in a violent rush, flooding her in hot unrelenting bursts. On a coarse snarl, I lower my head to the curve at the base of her neck and shoulder, my teeth taking hold of her soft sinewy flesh as her sheath milks me. Those tiny contractions strip me of all control. I shudder and jerk atop her, wrung out and utterly owned.

God help me, I’ll never get enough of this—of her.

“Mine,” I whisper harshly.

I don’t care if she knows how badly I need to believe that. I need her to understand it too.

My past has stolen so much from me. The other night it almost took her away too.

Never again.

No matter what I have to do to ensure that.

Even if it means I have to walk through hell itself to keep her.

Chapter 22

I wake up alone in Nick’s bed sometime in the middle of the night.

We’d made love again after returning home to the penthouse, then fallen asleep sated and content in each other’s arms. My body is still warm, my senses still thrumming from all of the ways we pleasured each other, so it is a jolt to open my eyes and realize he’s gone.

The sheets on his side of the big bed are cold. His phone rests on the nightstand where he set it when we went to bed. The room is dark and silent. No light in the adjacent bathroom, nor in the hallway off the large bedroom suite either.

An unreasonable panic sweeps through me when I see no sign of him here at all.

“Nick?” My voice sounds hollow in the darkened, vacant room.

Apprehension makes my nape clammy as I slip out of bed and set my bare feet down on the rug. Shrugging into the short kimono draped on the small cushioned bench at the end of the bed, I head out of the bedroom and into the living area of the penthouse. He’s not there. When I don’t find him in the kitchen either, I pad anxiously down the corridor that leads to his office and study.

“Nick? Are you here?”

Next I check the second floor of the palatial eight-thousand square-foot penthouse, worry mounting when I find no trace of him in the library or the entertainment room. He’s not in any of the places he might have gone to burn off sleepless hours.

He’s not out on one his late-night jogs either. His running shoes are all arranged neatly in the foyer coat closet, not a single pair out of place.

And anyway it’s not like him to leave me in the middle of the night without a word.

I think about how troubled he’s gotten since we were apart. He’s always had his personal demons but he seemed able to keep them at bay until recently. Or had he?

I think back to the private room in the back of Dominion. The wreckage Nick had hidden from me the entire time we’d been together last year. The admission that he’d been walking a razor’s edge of despair and torment in the months before we first met.

A dark possibility leaches into my subconscious—one that chills me to so much as consider.

No.

Oh God, no.

“Nick!”

I race back into the bedroom, my mind spinning with a hundred ugly scenarios, each of them with an outcome I’m too terrified to imagine. My heart is in my throat, my pulse hammering so loudly in my temples I almost don’t hear the muffled keening sound coming from somewhere nearby. But then I hear it again and I freeze, all my faculties trained on that pitiful, wounded animal noise.

“Nick?” Every cell in my body feels stretched to the point of shattering as I pad in the direction the awful noise seems to come from.

Nick’s enormous walk-in closet is open, but dark as pitch inside.