Mathias wanted to press the issue, persuade her to give up the rest of her secrets. But she was trembling under his light touch. The tough-talking, hard-looking woman was shaking like a fragile leaf.
He coaxed her around to face him. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”
“I’d like to believe that,” she whispered. “But I just don’t see how.”
Mathias brushed his thumb over her lips, silencing her worries. For now, at least--for a moment--he didn’t want her to be afraid. She stared up into his eyes, and he knew there was nothing he wouldn’t do to keep this woman safe.
“We’ll figure it out,” he told her again, softer this time.
Then he bent his head down to hers and kissed her.
She didn’t resist him, didn’t push him away with defensive words or protesting hands. No, she wrapped her arms around him as he drew her deeper into his embrace. She kissed him back, with the same heat and need that was coursing through his own veins.
Mathias stroked his hand up the inked sleeve of her arm, then caught her nape in his palm while his tongue tested the giving seam of her lips. She parted for him, took him in on a quiet gasp.
He didn’t know how he’d managed to let the moment go from one of confrontation and mistrust to one of fierce, undeniable desire.
The comfort he’d meant to offer had incinerated, melted into something powerful. Something he wasn’t noble enough to resist.
He only knew that he wanted her.
And if he didn’t find the will to put the brakes on soon, there would be no turning back.
~ ~ ~
She wanted to push him away.
She wanted to tear her mouth from his, retreat to the other side of the room, out of his arms.
She wanted to scream, but it wasn’t terror or panic making her senses explode with the need to escape. It was desire.
Raw, hungry, impossible desire.
Something she had never known, had never expected to feel so powerfully. She could hardly contain it, the need Mathias’s kiss stirred inside her.
She could hardly breathe, hardly think straight, for the way it coiled around her, stripping away her defenses. Removing each carefully placed brick in the wall she’d built around herself ages ago.
If she let it fall, there would be no building those defensive walls again--not with him.
She would be at Mathias’s mercy, and he already knew too much.
He’d seen too much.
Nova moaned, forcing herself to break away from the pleasure of his kiss.
“Mathias, I don’t...I can’t,” she stammered, not even sure what she was trying to deny anymore. She only knew that if she let him continue touching her, kissing her, wanting her, she would be lost to him completely. “Don’t do this to me.”
“Don’t do what?” His deep voice was a growl against her cheek, then down along the side of her neck. “Don’t kiss you? Don’t want you? What shouldn’t I do, Nova?”
“Everything.” She drew back from him then, crossing her arms over herself when his body heat was gone and a chill settled into her bones. She put more distance between them, needing it in order to convince herself that she could do this--that she could push him away when it was the last thing she wanted in that moment. “I’m scared, Mathias.”
He took a step toward her. “Don’t be. Not of me.”
She bit her lip, trying to conjure the words she needed to save herself from giving in to him, from falling any further. But her heart wouldn’t cooperate with her head. Words lodged in her throat.
Then a knock on the door did the hard work for her. Eddie’s voice sounded on the other side. “Nova, you there? Let me in, will ya?”
God, she couldn’t let the kid see that she had someone in her apartment. Especially not a Breed male, whose glowing amber eyes and sharp white fangs were liable to send Eddie screaming back to Ozzy downstairs in the studio.