That’s the last thing I sense as a smile grazes my lips and my eyes droop.
I’m not supposed to sleep. I should leave, but my mind has another idea and I can’t open my eyes.
“Are you okay?” His strong voice barges through my haze.
“Yeah, I just need to sleep a little. Give me five.”
There’s a pause, a shuffle of his body behind mine before he unties my wrists.
A soft moan leaves me, but it’s interrupted when I hear his demanding voice near my ear. “What’s your name?”
Jane is my fake name, so I say that, or I try to as I whisper, “Anastasia.”
*
When I wake up, I’m on a bed and I’m not alone.
Oh, God.
Please tell me I didn’t stay.
I stare to the side and blink rapidly when I see the man from last night sprawled on the bed, the sheet barely covering his cock.
He’s naked. All of him.
I didn’t see him naked when we had sex.
No, not sex.
That was definitely fucking. Harsh, raw, and primitive fucking.
My core still tingles in remembrance. It feels tender, too, just like my neck that’s bruised from all the marks he left behind, but I don’t focus on that. My attention is stolen by something far more important.
Tattoos.
He has a lot of them.
On his upper shoulder and bicep, there’s a full, angry-looking samurai as if he’s about to go to battle. The details on the warrior’s face are striking, haunting even.
And I can’t stop staring at him, at the darkened look in his eyes, as if he, too, doesn’t like eye contact.
For some reason, I didn’t think someone as put-together as this British stranger would have tattoos, but seeing that he does adds even more mystery to him.
Businessmen don’t usually have tattoos—not the ones I know, anyway. Unless his background is different from what I’ve been picturing.
I shake my head.
I really, really shouldn’t be curious about him. It was a one-time thing and it’s now over.
The clock on the wall ticks half past three in the morning. I can drive back before sunrise and sneak back into my room.
Slowly, I shift from under the covers and wince. I’m so sore, it hurts to budge an inch.
He must’ve cleaned me since there’s nothing between my thighs. Not even my own stickiness. He covered me, too, which is a kind gesture I wouldn’t have expected from this stranger. He seemed like the “fuck them then leave them” type of man.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into it.
I carefully put on my torn dress, grimacing every few seconds when my core throbs. It takes me some time to work around the ruined dress.
The brute stranger must’ve ripped it when he was removing it.
It’s not only a slight rip. There’s a long gash on the side that extends to my hipbone. I can’t possibly walk outside like this.
So I grab his jacket and put it on. It swallows me and the dress, but it’s better than nothing. His scent fills my nostrils and I try not to think of that or what happened a few hours ago.
It’ll just make this complicated.
And I don’t need complicated.
“I’m sure you have many of these, so you won’t mind if I take it,” I whisper. “If you do mind, you shouldn’t have ripped my only red dress.”
He doesn’t even stir and I don’t know why I’m disappointed. I shouldn’t be.
I’m subconsciously reaching for him—or, my hand is. I just want to touch his hair once, see if it’s as soft as it looks.
He shifts and I quickly retract my hand.
What the hell was I thinking?
I can’t touch him. I have to completely erase him from my memories.
Not only for my own good, but also for his.
If my family finds out about what we’ve done, they’ll kill him. No questions asked.
It’s why I stayed a virgin until twenty.
But I’m not anymore.
And soon, I’ll be free.
“Thank you for crossing this off my list,” I murmur. “I hope we never meet again.”
And with that, I grab my heels and silently step out of the room.
3
KNOX
Gray shadows creep up on me.
Their ghostly hands reach out to my neck and wrap a noose around it. My trachea jerks and crushes to pieces as the distorted voice whispers.
“Look at me.”
My fingers flex, but I don’t reach for the hands that are stealing my air. If I touch them, they will force my eyes open, they will make me see.
“Baby boy…” The voice is less distorted now, honeyed, almost in a singsong. “Let me look at those eyes…”