He grinned and cupped the side of her face. Once his lips pressed to hers, she felt everything inside her light up as if a fuse had been lit. “Now, how about we go back to my place and cuddle in a very different kind of way,” he murmured against her mouth, and although she might have laughed at his choice of words, right now, all she felt was immense heat.
Without speaking, because she didn’t know what to say anyway, Stella nodded. The world around her was sometimes violent, always filled with demanding alpha men, and was not flowers and candy. It seemed she picked a guy who was cut from the same mold as the men she had grown up around.
But despite those characteristics that some might find undesirable, Stella knew it was those hardened men—ones like the Vicious Bastards and Cadeon—who knew what love, safety, and protecting what was theirs really meant. And Stella was a very lucky woman to be surrounded and loved by them.