Page 86 of The Little Shop of Grand Curiosities

The vein in his forehead pulsed. “You honestly think it was easy walking out of that room?”

“Then why did you leave?”

“Because of the way you talked about him the other night!” he exploded. He looked wild and undone—and a little broken. “I was trying to do the right thing for once and not let this ridiculous passion between us get in the way of you and the man you love.”

“Love? I do not loveRyker. And you and I share no passion,” I hissed.

He loomed closer, crowding me, closing me in his body until I began shaking. The want washing over me like a tide.

“Then what would you call this?” he demanded.

“A continuous lapse of sanity.”

His fists tightened around my wrists. He leaned forward and carved his hips into mine. “Is there abut, Nepheli?”

Looking at him became almost unbearable. He was everywhere and in everything. In my caving chest, in my burning skin, in the next words that left my mouth without permission, “But then you look at me. How dare you look at me?”

He smiled. A slow, lazy curve of his mouth. “I’m sorry, darling. My eyes don’t obey me anymore.”

“You’re lucky,” I whispered. “Nothingin my body obeys me anymore.”

Carefully, his hands left my wrists and glided downward to cup the sides of my face. I wanted to collapse on his shoulder. I wanted him to hold me really, really tight and tell me that it was all going to be okay. That it didn’t matter he was heartless. He would find different ways to care for me. That my heart, this pounding, fragile thing dangling so precariously between our bodies right now, was enough for the both of us.

“Kiss me,” I said. It sounded impulsive, a request plagued by the heat of passion, but it was as imperative as my next inhale.

A shiver went through him. I raised my hand and cupped his cheek, waiting, wanting, asking. He closed his eyes and leaned into my touch for a long, rending moment. When he opened them again, they were dark like onyx and hard with resolution. “I have to let you go, Nepheli. I don’t want to hurt you. And I will hurt you. Eventually. Inevitably. That’s what I do. That’s what I did to myself. I used to think heartbreak was a personal thing. An inward agony. But it’s not. It’s the people you hurt afterward, when you’re raw and unhealed, who suffer the most. So don’t ask me to kiss you. Do the wise thing and ask me to let you go.”

ButIcould not lethimgo. I tried to remove my hands from his face and only ended up gliding them over the hard plane of his chest. I tried to reason with myself, remember that I had protected my heart from the world my whole life. How could I put it in danger so carelessly now?

Easily, the bold, star-made girl inside me argued.So very easily.

“Kiss me.”

Apollo shook his head, yet his body aligned with mine, his hands slipping down to the lowest part of my waist. “Ask me to get my hands off of you.”

“Kiss me.”

“Tell me you never want to see my face again.”

“Kiss—”

“Nepheli!” he begged, shoving off to knock a fist against his empty chest. “Darling, I’mheartless. I’m as volatile as the wind. I’m a danger to your sanity. One moment I’m a decent man, and the next I act in ways I don’t want and say things that I don’t mean, and I have absolutely no control over myself when I’m around you—”

“Do you want me?” I demanded, stepping forward.

He stepped back. “Aren’t you listening to me? I’m bad for you.”

I took another step. Stomach flipping. Ears ringing. Heart throbbing. “Do. You. Want. Me?”

He only stared at me, wild-eyed and breathing hard. His silence was an axe to the chest. It struck me right in the heart.

Not bearing it anymore, I went to leave.

He caught my wrist. “Like a madman,” he gasped. “I want you like a man possessed. I need you like the air I breathe. My head is so full of you, you’d have to kill me to grant me some peace, and I cannot be killed, damn it! You think you’ll leave Thaloria, and I’ll be okay? That I’ll be rid of you? There is not enough distance you can put between us to repair the damage you have done to me. You are all I want and everything I cannot have.”

Desperately, my body collided with his, and our foreheads found each other. “Kiss me,” I whispered. “Kiss me until you have a heart again.”

I rose to my toes and brought my mouth to his, and before I knew it, he was kissing me back a million times harder, as if the kiss were an object I threw in the air and he caught mid-fall.

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