Page 179 of Psycho

It was as he said. He was my ruin.

But how badly I fucking loved being ruined by him.

I watched him with hooded eyes as I tried to catch my breath.

My heart pounded in an uneven, hard rhythm when I saw him pull out black nylon ropes.

Then a small blade that I recognized as the one he carried, the one he had used to ruin most of the shirts I wore to bed.

“Trust me?” he asked.

I didn’t answer him right away, not because I didn’t know what the answer was, but because I was surprised at how quickly the answer appeared in my mind.

“Yes,” I said.

I trusted him, but I shouldn’t.

I knew that.

I reached up and cupped his cheeks, running the pad of my fingers over the scar on his face.

He turned and kissed my palm once.

I knew the kind of man Micah Stone was.

I should be scared of him.

I shouldn’t trust him.

He gently pulled my hand away from him and pushed me back down, so I was lying on the bed.

I looked at him questioningly, but if he saw that, he wasn’t planning on answering me.

Instead, he grabbed the ropes and got to work.

I didn’t fight him.

I was wary about where he wanted to go with this, but I wasn’t fearful.

I thought of all the men in the world—of all the people in this world, Micah would be the one who would burn it down for me, had I asked him to.

And what a powerful feeling that was.

To know this psycho would do every corrupt thing and would have taken on the devil himself—for me.

Micah Stone loved me, didn’t he?

My breath caught, and he met my eyes briefly before he went back to work.

I watched as he made quick work with the ropes, tying my hands and feet to the four corners of the bed.

I flexed my muscles but found I couldn’t move.

I wondered just how much experience he had with bondage.

He grabbed the blade on the mattress and ripped it through the fabric of the shirt.

“You’re going to have to buy more shirts for me to wear to bed,” I said drily as he pulled the tattered fabric away from my body, leaving me naked and tied to his bed.