Page 7 of Arrogant Bastard

Halfway across the park, in the middle of the small wood, I force myself to stop behind a large beech tree. My pounding heart makes it difficult to hear, but I take shallow breaths and force myself to listen.

Nothing. Not beyond sounds of humanity recycling itself in a never-sleeping city anyway.

I turn my cap backward so it doesn’t give me away when I tentatively peer out from behind the tree.

I don’t fool myself into thinking I’m safe. They’re still out there. And my position is also a prime spot for a mugging by some drug addict desperate to fund his next hit. Or worse. I double-check my surroundings to make sure I’m truly alone. Then, as silently as I can, I reach for the side pocket of my backpack. The sound of the zipper opening rips through the silence like a jet engine, and I grit my teeth as fear climbs higher.

My hand closes over the compact Ruger I’ve been carrying since I got that unwanted phone call three weeks ago. The gun’s cold metal brings no reassurance, but I’m grateful for the false protection it provides. As much as I hate them, guns will make even the meanest bastard hesitate for a second before—

“Are you going to shoot me with that thing, Faith?”

My mind goes blank for a damning few seconds before it attempts to grapple with the detonation at its epicenter.

The voice. That voice! Oh God.

Icy shivers drench my body, followed immediately by a furnace-hot craving so sinful and monumental that I stagger back on my heels and sag against the tree. I’m aware my mouth is open on a wordless, stupefied gasp, but I can’t get it to close.

He’s here.

Killian Knight.

The gravity of his presence pulls mercilessly at me, as if it’s determined to yank me straight into his orbit. My free hand grips the bark of the tree. For support? Resistance against the need pounding through me? I have no idea.

Somehow I fooled myself into thinking he’s forgotten about me. That he pushed me into his past and moved on after Cairo. Every thought I try to form fractures. The reality that he’s here, with the sort of manpower he always commands, blocks out everything else until only his name reverberates through my head.

Killian.

“Yes, it’s me, baby,” he answers, exhibiting that unnerving decoding of my thoughts that always freaked me out.

Oh God…

“No,” I manage to croak.

“Yes,” he counters. Then he steps out from behind the nearest tree. A dark shadow in a world of sinister shadows. The description is so apt that I swallow hard.

Run.

I can’t move. I’m frozen in place as he closes in on me. Half a dozen feet away, he stops. His gaze is hooked into me, his eyes probing me in the near darkness.

“Have you forgotten what I taught you?” His voice is deep. Smooth. As dark and decadent as the inner sanctum of a club he once took me to in Morocco. And hypnotic enough to make me fall off the edge of the world with him.

“I…what?”

“Aim for the head, sweetheart. That is, of course, if you’re planning to shoot.” He’s shrouded in darkness, his attire as dark as my own.

I can’t see his face clearly enough to ascertain whether he’s undergone as much change as I have. But I don’t need to. Killian Knight represents danger in every form. But it was my raw addiction to him that I feared the most. And like every recovering addict, the terror of a relapse is never far away. In my case, it’s a mere six feet away.

Run.

“You think I won’t shoot?” I challenge, instead of doing what my instinct is screaming for me to do. Logically, running is no longer an option. He’ll catch me before I make it to the next tree. It’ll be a waste of time to try.

“No, on the contrary, I think you very much want to. Which is why I’m telling you to aim for the head,” he states evenly. His advice doesn’t stop him from taking another step toward me.

My gut clenches as I catch the first faint scent of him. I stop breathing because I don’t want his intensely intoxicating smell in my head. “What the hell do you want?” My voice is nowhere near steady, but I don’t care.

“What I’ve wanted since that day five years ago. August twenty-fifth, wasn’t it?” There’s a hell of a lot more feeling in his voice now.

It evokes. It churns. It burns.

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