I swore, the man had me intoxicated.
Enraptured.
“I thought you said you were doing the exact same thing?” I challenged on a whisper, his lips so close to mine, my eyes tracing every line of his face.
Looking for something.
Trouble.
That’s what it was.
It took about all the strength I had, but I edged back an inch, desperate to put some space between us before I did something I was going to regret.
Like it knocked him out of the daze, he took a step back, too. Frustrated, he dragged his fingers through the wayward, unruly locks of his brown-hair, the longer pieces on top hinting at a disaster but the sides trimmed around his ears. “Don’t like parties much. Especially the kind going on downstairs.”
Even though I knew better, my eyes went exploring, taking him in through the lapping shadows. The strength of his arms that peeked out beneath his rolled sleeves, wiry and vibrating.
Like his demons were crawling his flesh.
All his wrongs written in the jerks and tics of his packed, bristling muscle.
Everything about him was brutal.
No pretenses and zero fucks to give.
Exactly the kind of guy I’d sworn off years ago.
I tore my attention back to his face, doing my best to claw my way back to solid ground.
Only that wasn’t a safe place, either. One glance across those lips and up to his eyes and my stomach was clamping in a needy fist. “Then why are you here?”
He angled his head with a rumble of low, seductive laughter. “I’ve been asking that question myself.”
“Did you figure it out yet?” The words came out a breath.
The slowest grin pulled across his sexy mouth. “Starting to get an idea.” He reached up and fiddled with a lock of my black hair, eyeing me as he did, the world unsettled and vibrating around us. “How about you, gorgeous? You don’t strike me as the type who begged someone to get through that door. Don’t seem like you belong in a place like this.”
Defensiveness blustered through my being. “And what kind of place is that?”
He laughed a scornful sound. “Don’t tell me you don’t feel it. The greed and the gluttony running rampant downstairs. Every prick showing off what he’s got. Desperate for more. To elevate himself. Not caring who the fuck he tramples to get himself there. Money and fame fucks with your head. Or maybe they were all already fucked, and that’s what got them here in the first place.”
“And you and I somehow don’t count?” It was disbelief. Maybe disappointment. Because I was so not about lumping people into a group and labeling them.
“Didn’t say that,” he grated.
My family’s faces flashed through my mind. The rest of the band and their wives and their children. All these amazing people who had knitted themselves so intricately into my life that they’d become a permanent part of me.
Family.
“Not everyone is looking for an opportunity to take advantage of someone else. Not everyone here is bad.”
“Maybe not.” Brown eyes glimmered in the rays of murky, shimmering light. “But you sure seem to keep running into the worst of them.”
It was a warning. One I heard loud and clear. This man was lumping himself into his own pile.
Bad.
Vile.
Destructive.
But it was the bare warmth hiding in the pools of his eyes that kept me pressing.
This man nothing but a raging contradiction.
Emphasis on the raging.
Energy came off him like a storm held in the horizon. Dark and ominous.
And there I was, itching to disappear into it so I could discover why it was.
“I think you’re wrong. I bet I could ask you to hunt down the guy who got handsy with me and you’d do it without blinking. I bet you wouldn’t even care or consider the consequences.”
“I was right,” he said with a coarse chuckle, eyes skating my face.
Confusion pulled a frown to my brow. “About what?”
He was back to fiddling with that strand of my hair.
Winding me up.
“That you don’t belong here. You came running in here just as lost as me. Except you don’t have the first clue when you’re running straight for danger. You don’t make people earn your trust—you trust first and regret it later. You dig around to find the good when there is no good to be found. Sound about right?”
Air wheezed into my lungs, the room spinning with the blunt force of his words.
“Wow. You’re kind of an asshole.”
He laughed. A low roll of scorn. “You say it like I’m not already fully aware of who I am.”
It felt like he’d called me out on my every deficiency. Accused me of being weak for the sake of being kind.
But the truth was, I was begging him to give me a reason to trust. Praying that this seed of bitterness wouldn’t take hold and invade every element of my life. I didn’t want the last grains of hope I was holding to bleed through my fingers.