Page 45 of Infernal

The hard part was forcing myselfnotto feel anything for him. That was a battle that was getting harder and harder to win with every passing day. No matter how much I pushed him back, he somehow continued to gain ground on me.

“It would be easy to love you,” I admitted and immediately lowered my eyes as my confession sounded back to me.

He picked up my chin and forced me to look at him. His face was draped in shadows and moonlight, and it was the perfect representation of the dark angel he was.

“Say that again,” he demanded.

But my lips refused to part. Admitting that out loud once had been one too many.

Gripping my waist, he gently turned me around and then walked me backwards until my back hit the door with a soft thump. We were no longer two people standing in a room together. We were the only two people in the universe, and nothing existed between us but the insufficient fabric of our clothes.

“Say it again, angel. I beg of you.”

There wasn’t enough willpower in the world to deny him. Not when he was looking at me the way he was, so vulnerable and eager, and dangerously close to me. “I said it would be easy…to love you.”

Dominic’s eyes glittered something beautiful and otherworldly, and my heart rate picked up feverishly as I fought the unrelenting urge to sink in closer to him.

Grazing the back of his knuckles against my cheek, he looked down at my chest, as though he could hear the change in tempo, and then met my eyes again. I covered my heart, afraid it was going to smash a hole right through my chest.

“Don’t do that.” He pulled my hand down to my side and held it there. “I live for that sound, angel.”

The room suddenly went all topsy-turvy on me as an unbearable pull urged me to get even closer to him, to sink all the way into him and never right myself up again.

This had gone entirely too far, but I didn’t know how to pull us out of it anymore.

“I told you to stop saying things like that to me.”

“It seems to be beyond my control, angel.”

“You’re doing it again.”

The corner of his lip pulled up into a lopsided grin, a delicious one, and my heart went all crazy again.

This was so wrong, so very very wrong.

“Please, Dominic…you have to stop.Thishas to stop.” My voice was so small and forlorn, it barely sounded like mine.

“Why?” he asked and then frowned. “We haven’t done anything, angel.”

Maybe not technically, but we were definitely teetering around the edge of something I wouldn’t be able to come back from. “You don’t know what this is doing to me,” I confessed, my words coming out with broken undertones. “I feel like I’m being pulled in two separate directions and it’s only a matter of time before I snap.”

His eyebrows creased, probably because he knew where I was going with this. Or maybe, just maybe, it was because it pained him to know that I was hurting this way.

“We can’t keep going like this.Ican’t keep doing this,” I said, gesturing to our touching bodies. “The guilt is eating me alive. I can’t sleep, I can’t think straight. I can’t do anything right, and if I fuck this up—if Trace dies because I was too wrapped up in the bloodbond to think straight, I will nevereverforgive myself for that. Or you.”

He let the words sink in for a moment and then pinched his eyes shut.

“Let me go, Dominic. Please.”

“I don’t know how to do that, angel.”

God help me, because I wasn’t sure how to do it either.

The cold hard truth was, I had feelings for Dominic. Feelings that had become impossible to ignore, and while I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant for me, I also wasn’t in the position to explore it. Either way, I couldn’t keep allowing myself to succumb to Dominic every time the going got too hard for me.

That wasn’t fair to Trace, and it wasn’t fair to Dominic either.

Armed with my undeniable truths, I pulled my hands free and forced him to back away from me. And while it took everything in me to pull it off, my heart knew it was the right thing to do.

---