I open the door and Colton stares at me, looking like a knight in his steel colored suit, silver peppered hair swept to the side and damp with his sweat. In fact, his whole body is coated in a fine layer of sweat, beads of it dripping down his forehead.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Fine,” he grumbles, pushing past me and nodding at the door. “Close that. We’ll hole up until they get here.”
“Until who gets here?” I say, confusion making my words tremble.
“Backup,” he says.
I close the door and turn to him, folding my arms.
“Is Scrappy okay?” I ask.
“Oh, yeah,” he says, with a half-smile. It fades quickly. “He’s with Maxwell, safe at the estate. This isn’t about Scrappy. I came here to see you and I was jumped, probably by the same bastard who set my gyms on fire. He tazed me but the motherfucker managed to get away.”
“Wait a second,” I murmur, walking closer to him, breathing in the animal manly musk of him. “He tazed you, and he managed to get away?”
“Yes,” Colton says flatly.
“I don’t understand.”
“He shot me with a Taser, I knocked it away and chased him. He had a car waiting and he got away.”
“Aren’t those things meant to drop you in like a second flat?”
He chuckles grimly. “We used to pull pranks on each other in the SEALs that make Tasers look like NERF guns. I’m just pissed he got away. Anyway, you need to come with me now. I’m taking you to a safe place. I can’t have you in danger because of me.”
We’ve been moving closer to each other, as though by some irresistible force. I feel it pulling on my every nerve, every sinew in me buzzing with the proximity.
“I don’t understand why you were here in the first place, though,” I murmur, thinking, Virgin, virgin. “If not for Scrappy.”
“Liar,” he says, a savage bantering note in his voice. “You know exactly why I’m here.”
Hope whelms inside of me and I try to kill it. I feel myself wrapping my arms tighter around my body, my breasts pushing up, unattractively, my whole body tingling and goose pimpled.
“No, I don’t,” I say.
He leans down and stares at me with eyes that are like jewels at the bottom of green-tinted water, shimmering, captivating. I stare and the sudden, insane urge to kiss him again grips me.
“I’m here because you left before I got a chance to tell you how happy I am that you’re a virgin,” he growls. “I’m here because I don’t think you fully understand my interest—no, fuck that, not interest. You don’t understand my obsession with you, Kat. You see, you sexy fucking princess, I didn’t want a quick fling with you. I’m claiming you. I’m making you mine.”
“Y-yours?” I whimper, detesting the stammering hesitation in my voice. I search his face for a trick. There’s always a trick. “What do you mean?”
He grips my shoulders in his hands, squeezing with an alpha’s certainty. Shimmering pleasure drifts over my skin, daring me to believe, daring me to melt into him.
“The first time I saw you,” he snarls, “I knew that I had to have you. I just knew it, in my bones. You said you thought I was angry? No, Kat, I was captivated. Every second we were in that office, I was trying to beat down the beast inside of me and stop myself from mauling you.”
“Mauling,” I whisper, the word burning my tongue with its implications.
He leans down and brings his lips close to mine, so close they brush and his breath washes over me.
“Mauling,” he growls. “Taking you like the animal I am. I’m going to put my seed inside of you. My seed fucking belongs in you. You’re going to bear my children and—Jesus, Kat, you’re mine. If somebody else tried to claim you, I don’t know if I’d be able to stop myself from putting them down. That’s how certain I am.”
“This is crazy,” I whisper, mind whirring, doubts spiraling.
I search his eyes for the trick, trying to divine some way this could all be some cruel joke, rooting around for a reason, a motive. But I can’t see any benefit in Colton Crew, one of the richest men in America, tricking me into believing he wants me.
Why?
Where’s the endgame in that?
And yet it makes no freaking sense.
“Yes,” he says, even closer now somehow, our lips moving against each other. “It’s crazy but it feels so damn right.”
We’re so intimately pressed against each other I’m not sure who kisses who first. In the end, it doesn’t matter, because we sink into the moment with the flames of our passion fanning us, moving through us.
I gasp but the noise is muffled by the gruff firmness of his lips, the way he grabs my hips and pulls me into him, my nipples tingling with the friction-laden contact, my sex buzzing, my womb giving a pang of need.