The hope.
The love I had to stop from raging on inside me.
Choking over a sob, I turned off the faucet and rubbed my face with a hand towel until it was almost raw, as if I could wash away every scar. Blot out every stain.
Or maybe find some way to bear a different name.
I suppressed a wail of agony that bubbled up in the towel.
Or maybe it was a war cry.
Tonight...tonight the shackles were too heavy and the only thing I wanted was to break free of them.
I dropped the towel and stared at my reflection in the dusky mirror.
My cheeks were red.
My lips swollen and bruised.
But my eyes were too wide. Too wild. Gone to a place where I shouldn’t have let myself go.
To him.
I felt shattered.
Broken into a million pieces.
Pieces that I was never going to mend or reclaim because every touch he stole belonged to him.
Tears blurred my sight, and I stepped away and forced myself to focus on pulling on the night slip and a pair of new underwear considering mine were tattered on his floor. I was a fool to think covering myself would shield me from the hope that kept trying to sprout.
It was dangerous.
Dangerous to my heart.
Dangerous to the man that I loved.
But how could I stop it when he touched me that way? When he held me that way? When he looked at me as if I were a treasure?
I froze when I felt the shift in the air, the intensity that lapped, the energy a cloud that hazed common sense.
Logan appeared as if he’d been summoned. Vapor that’d become whole.
He towered behind me in the doorway of the bathroom, the man staring at me through the mirror where I faced away.
He wore the same expression I needed to hide from.
Feral, savage possession.
Bridled violence to be unleashed at any moment.
A veil of protection shimmering around him to reach out and cover me.
He took a step forward.
Warmth skated through the cold air. It curled down my spine like an illicit embrace.
Wrong. It was so wrong. So wrong that I moaned when he stepped even closer. He reached out, pulled my hair aside, and pressed his mouth to the spot where my shoulder met my neck.