Page 36 of The Secrets He Keeps

Though she’d been pleasured beyond prior experience and had gotten exactly what she’d wanted out of her one night with the man, she wanted more. A hell of a lot more.

But she was no fool. She allowed herself just one more moment. One moment to acknowledge the loss filling her heart. One moment to remind herself who she was and how she’d gotten where she was now.

Men were a distraction at best, a liability and a source of destruction at worst. And Erik Maxwell had just proven himself to be the most dangerous of all.

His hands gently framed her face while his thumb brushed across her lower lip.

“Callista.”

Her name was spoken softly but intently in his rich, gravelly voice. She barely noticed his accent anymore, but she heard it then in the way he formed the vowels of her name.

With her belly swirling, she opened her eyes and forced a gentle smirk to her lips. “Well done, Mr. Maxwell.”

His gaze narrowed as one brow arched in question. “You cannot bring yourself to call me Erik?”

She lifted a hand to pat the side of his face where black and gray stubble roughened his skin. It took all of her willpower not to caress the hard line of his jaw or drift her fingertips across his frowning mouth. “Of course...Erik.” His name felt too perfect in her mouth—succinct, formed with a smooth roll of the tongue that ended with a short kick in the back of the throat. “I suppose I shall have to offer my concession.”

“I don’t want a damned concession,” he said slowly. Heavily.

She tensed beneath him. “Then what do you want? You never did name your prize should the seduction succeed.”

Eyes that had been dark and mysterious in the aftermath of his pleasure suddenly hardened. “I want you, Callista. Don’t pretend you don’t know that.”

Though a fist clenched tight around her heart, Callista kept a smile on her lips. Sliding out from underneath him, she rose from the bed. “You just had me, darling.”

She walked across the room to the washstand. Though she tried to avoid his reflection in the mirror above it, the image of him sitting strong and proud at the edge of the bed, his hair delightfully mussed, his feet planted wide and firm on the floor, his gaze burning a hole in her back, would forever be imprinted in her mind.

She took her time wetting the cloth before smoothing it over her body, wiping away the lovely smell of him. Of her. Of the two of them together.

“Callista, I...”

She really couldn’t allow him to go on. The tone of his voice already suggested what he might say, and if she heard him say the words, she might actually want to believe it. And then she’d be doomed for certain.

“I must get back to my guests. You can dress in the other room if you’d like. I imagine you can find your way out.”

The silence that followed her words was as cold as any winter she’d endured in her poverty-stricken youth.

It was best if he decided to hate her.

They could go on in their prospective business endeavors, never having to cross paths again. If he happened to see her in the street or at the theater, he could avoid her with a scowl of disgust and eventually she wouldn’t even be bothered by it.

“That’s it, then?” he asked thickly.

Lifting her hands to twist her hair up into something resembling a proper coiffure, she replied, “What else could there possibly be?”

He didn’t reply. And after a while, she risked glancing in the reflection at the room behind her.

It was empty. He’d left.

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