Page 4 of After Dark
She was pretty sure he knew that too.
He shifted back and tucked his cock back into the workout trousers he was wearing. Maybe he’d been on a run. Or really had been working out at that gym of his down near the marina.
She was breathing too hard, but she didn’t move until he nodded—curtly. Only then did she rearrange herself, trying her best not to feel crushed. Or silly, in her heels and flirty skirt with his come on the ground at her feet.
It was meant to be humiliating, and she supposed it was, except after eighteen months even this felt like a gift.
Arlo stood before her still, his arms crossed and that foreboding look on his granite face, and she wanted to say so many things…but she didn’t dare.
Not when he looked at her like this.
Like she really should have stayed away.
“What,” he asked in that lethally quiet voice of his that landed in her like another brutal thrust of his cock, a deep, red burn that didn’t quite tip over into that blissful heat that only he could bring out in her, “thefuckare you doing here, Josette?”
Chapter Two
He shouldn’t have fucked her.
Arlo regretted it immediately because it had been so wild and spontaneous—but that tracked, because there wasn’t much he didn’t regret when it came to this woman who had plagued him since the day they’d met.
First with her sheer, unbelievable perfection, like she was finally his dream come true. All his wildest fantasies in the flesh, at last.
Then with the walls that she’d kept so high, meaning her perfection was a lie—or, rather, that she was real after all. That was how he’d taken it. And those flaws made her more perfect, because he sure as fuck wasn’t perfect himself.
He’d believed they were working toward something.
But then she’d bailed in the night and that had been clarifying. It meant all of it was a lie. It meant nothing between them had ever been true. He’d told himself over the last year and a half that he’d come to terms with that. That he’d accepted it, anyway.
Except that after all this time, he’d discovered that onething between them was still entirely and calamitously perfect, and that was the way she took his cock.
A wet dream made flesh and easily confused for something celestial, that was his Josette?—
Except she wasn’t his anymore. Maybe she never had been.
So it felt like adding insult to injury that she was even prettier than he remembered, and that was a feat, because she fucking haunted him as it was.
“If I were you,” he told her with a soft menace that he could feel like a deep burn inside of him, “I’d use my words this time.”
She had the grace to wince at that. Tragically, that didn’t make her any less pretty. It didn’t make his traitorous dick any less hard.
The trouble, then and now and always, was that she looked like an angel.
And that was a problem for a man who’d spent most of his life in hell.
Sometimes he thought he’d only dreamed her into being. Maybe he wished he had, because a dream should have been easier to dismiss. But she was in front of him now, she washere,and she was so beautiful it seemed to punch straight through his chest.
The only blow that was likely to land on him after all the training he’d done all these years, and she wasn’t doing a thing. Just standing there, all in white, with her gaze on him in that way she had.
Like he was the only man alive. The only man she could see.
If he thought too much about that, Arlo was going to get lost in his bitterness, and he didn’t need to give in to that. Not when Josette was actually here tonight instead of just afigment of his imagination the way she’d been too many times this last year and a half.
He focused on the exquisite problem of her instead.
It was her hair in all those copper curls, flowing down around her shoulders. The impossible ivory of her skin, covered everywhere with freckles like she was dusted with gold. He had studied each and every one of those freckles as if his life depended upon memorizing their placement. He was pretty sure he could draw them from memory.
Aside from the peaches and cream canvas of her skin, she remained wholly unmarked by tattoos or scars, a blank expanse of silken softness that made his mouth water.
