Everything was perfectly in place.
A designer sofa that faced a television on a designer stand. A white marble table set for ten that gave the impression that it’d never been used. An immaculate kitchen that I doubted had ever seen a dirty dish.
As if he thrived on control.
Ian stepped forward and plastered his chest to my back, his head dipping down and his nose digging through the strands of my hair to find the sensitive flesh of my neck. A big arm looped around my waist and tugged me firmly against all that hard, hard man.
Rigid muscles and massive, rock-hard cock that prodded at the small of my back.
A threat.
A promise.
A shiver rolled through every inch of my body, and a trembling breath left my lungs. I gulped around the knot of desire that climbed my throat, nerves of uncertainty only amplifying the sensation, fear and need and a desperation unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.
I tried not to fidget as I forced the words from my tongue. “I’ve only been with two men in my life. I’m not sure I know what I’m doing.”
I felt so far out of my element.
Gone to who I was.
A prisoner to this man who was commanding all of me.
A harsh gush of surprised air left him, and I felt the tension fill that beautiful, powerful body, the pants he released at my neck rippling with restraint and hesitation and questions.
Ian ran a hand down my left arm, his touch searching as he hit my left finger, as if he were looking for the proof of a rusted ring.
“There’s so much you don’t know about me,” I whispered.
Slowly, he spun me away so I was facing him, which didn’t help matters at all. Because all that energy spiked, a thrum in the space between us.
He backed me deeper into his condo, his presence so profound as he edged closer and closer. “There’s plenty that you don’t know about me, either.”
He’d taken on a predator’s stance. Lust a gleam in those crazy-colored eyes. Maybe there was a bit of demon to him, after all.
“Two?” he continued. The grit grinding from his tongue made it sound like a challenge.
My belly tightened, and I could barely nod as I was taking a fumbling step back, then another, until I’d backed myself into a wall.
He watched me from the middle of the room. So gorgeous I couldn’t see straight.
“You want to leave?” he asked, so low I felt his voice scrape across my skin. “Because I’m about to make it three.”
“No,” I managed.
Not even close.
I wanted to run to him. Let him hold me and keep me and pray that he wouldn’t break me.
But I knew that he would.
Knew it so deep with the way he was watching me, with the way a storm of mayhem and chaos and menace whipped around him as if he were commanding the night.
I think we both knew that’s exactly what it was.
He’d taken control. He had me, and he was going to annihilate me.
“Good,” he almost growled as he kicked off his shoes and socks. “Think I might die if I don’t get to show you. If I don’t get to feel you. If I don’t get to touch you. I don’t think I’ve ever needed to be inside a woman the way I need to be inside of you. Is that what you want? To feel me inside you, Grace?”
His words hung in the dense, thick air, his chin lifted as if he were daring me to deny it.
To deny him.
Impossible.
He stayed in that same spot as he worked his tie the rest of the way from his neck.
Purposed, he ticked through the buttons of his vest, peeled it off his massive shoulders, and dropped it to the floor.
Then he started to do the same to his shirt.
I leaned against the wall, my knees weak with want, pressing my thighs together as if it might relieve the flames that lapped higher.
He shrugged his shirt off his shoulders.
I nearly came undone right there.
“Is this what you want?” he challenged, those words he fired from his mouth nothing but seduction.
The man was an overwhelming surge of severity that washed over me.
Oh God. Was this really happening? Or was I just having another one of those hallucinations, my mind conjuring the most dangerous sort of perfection?
My lips parted on a needy gasp, and my mouth went dry at the sight in front of me, my back hitched to the wall as if I were hanging from it.
“Yes,” I managed.
From where I was pressed to the wall, my eyes raced over him, trying to take in every inch where the man stood there like a fortress.
A predator sent to protect or destroy, I still wasn’t sure.
The only thing I knew was he was nothing but packed, solid muscle.