Not Just the Boss's Plaything

She didn’t understand it, but she burned.

This isn’t right, a small voice cautioned her in the back of her mind. This isn’t you.

But he was so beautiful she couldn’t seem to keep track of who she was supposed to be, and her heart hurt her where it thundered in her chest. She felt something bright and demanding knot into an insistent ache deep in her belly, and she found she couldn’t think of a good reason to step away from him.

In a minute, she promised herself. I’ll walk away in a minute.

“You should run,” he told her then, his voice dark and low, and she could see he was serious. That he meant it. But one of his hands moved to trace a lazy pattern on her cheek as he said it, his palm a rough velvet against her skin, and she shivered. His blue gaze seemed to sharpen. “As far away from me as you can get.”

He looked so grim then, so sure, and it hurt her, somehow. She wanted to see him smile with that hard, dangerous mouth. She wanted that with every single part of her and she didn’t even know his name.

None of this made any sense.

Alicia had been so good for so long. She’d paid and paid and paid for that single night eight years ago. She’d been so vigilant, so careful, ever since. She was never spontaneous. She was never reckless. And yet this beautiful shadow of a man had the bluest eyes she’d ever seen, and the saddest mouth, and the way he touched her made her shake and burn and glow.

And she thought that maybe this once, for a moment or two, she could let down her guard. Just the smallest, tiniest bit. It didn’t have to mean anything she didn’t want it to mean. It didn’t have to mean anything at all.

So she ignored that voice inside of her, and she ignored his warning, too.

Alicia leaned her face into his hard palm as if it was the easiest thing in the world, and smiled when he pulled in a breath like it was a fire in him, too. Like he felt the same burn.

She stretched up against his hard, tough body and told herself this was about that grim mouth of his, not the wild, impossible things she knew she shouldn’t let herself feel or want or, God help her, do. And they were in the shadows of a crowded club where nobody could see her and no one would ever know what she did in the dark. It wasn’t as if it counted.

She could go back to her regularly scheduled quiet life in a moment.

It would only be a moment. One small moment outside all the rules she’d made for herself, the rules she’d lived by so carefully for so long, and then she would go straight back home to her neat, orderly, virtuous life.

She would. She had to. She would.

But first Alicia obeyed that surge of wild demand inside of her, leaned closer and fitted her mouth to his.

CHAPTER TWO

HE TASTED LIKE the night. Better even than she’d imagined.

He paused for the barest instant when Alicia’s lips touched his. Half a heartbeat. Less.

A scant second while the taste of him seared through her, deep and dark and wild. She thought that was enough, that small taste of his fascinating mouth. That would do, and now she could go back to her quiet—

But then he angled his head to one side, used the hand at her cheek to guide her mouth where he wanted it and took over.

Devouring her like the wolf she understood he was. He really was, and the realization swirled inside of her like heat. His mouth was impossibly carnal, opening over hers to taste her, to claim her.

Dark and deep, hot and sure.

Alicia simply...exploded. It was like a long flash of light, shuddering and bright, searing everything away in the white hot burn of it. It was perfect. It was beautiful.

It was too much.

She shivered against him, overloaded with his bold taste, the scrape of his jaw, his talented fingers moving her mouth where he wanted it in a silent, searing command she was happy to obey. Then his hands were in her hair, buried in her thick curls. Her arms went around his neck of their own volition, and then she was plastered against the tall, hard length of him. It was like pressing into the surface of the sun and still, she couldn’t seem to get close enough.

As if there was no close enough.

And he kissed her, again and again, with a ruthless intensity that made her feel weak and beautiful all at once, until she was mindless with need. Until she forgot her own name. Until she forgot she didn’t know his. Until she forgot how dangerous forgetting was for her.

Until she forgot everything but him.

When he pulled back, she didn’t understand. He put an inch, maybe two, between them, and then he muttered something harsh and incomprehensible while he stared at her as if he thought she was some kind of ghost.

It took her a long, confused moment to realize that she couldn’t understand him because he wasn’t speaking in English, not because she’d forgotten her own language, too.

Alicia blinked, the world rushing back as she did. She was still standing in that club. Music still pounded all around them, lights still flashed, well-dressed patrons still shouted over the din, and somewhere out in the middle of the dance floor, Rosie was no doubt still playing her favorite game with her latest conquest.

Everything was as it had been before she’d stumbled into this man, before he’d caught her. Before she’d kissed him.

Before he’d kissed her back.

Everything was exactly the same. Except Alicia.

He was searching her face as if he was looking for something. He shook his head slightly, then reached down and ran a lazy finger over the ridge of her collarbone, as if testing its shape. Even that made her shudder, that simple slide of skin against skin. Even so innocuous a touch seemed directly connected to that pulsing heat between her legs, the heavy ache in her breasts, the hectic spin inside of her.

She didn’t have to speak his language to know whatever he muttered then was a curse.

If she were smart, the way she’d tried to be for years now, she would pull her hand away and run. Just as he’d told her she should. Just as she’d promised herself she would. Everything about this was too extreme, too intense, as if he wasn’t only a strange man in a club but the kind of drug that usually went with this kind of rolling, wildly out-of-control feeling. As if she was much too close to being high on him.

“Last chance,” he said then, as if he could read her mind.

He was giving her a warning. Again.

In her head, she listened. She smiled politely and extricated herself. She marched herself to the nearest exit, hailed a taxi, then headed straight home to the comfort of her bloody laundry. Because she knew she couldn’t be trusted outside the confines of the rules she’d made for herself. She’d been living the consequences of having no rules for a long, long time.

But here, now, in this loud place surrounded by so many people and all of that pounding music, she didn’t feel like the person she’d been when she’d arrived. Everything she knew about herself had twisted inside out. Turned into something else entirely in that electric blue of his challenging gaze.

As if this really was a Shoreditch fairy tale, after all.

“What big eyes you have,” she teased him.

His hard mouth curved then, and she felt it like a burst of heat, like sunlight. She couldn’t do anything but smile back at him.

“So be it,” he said, as if he despaired of them both.

Alicia laughed, then laughed again at the startled look in his eyes.

“The dourness is a lovely touch,” she told him. “You must be beating them off with a stick. A very grim stick.”

“No stick,” he said, in an odd tone. “A look at me is usually sufficient.”

“A wolf,” she said, and grinned. “Just as I suspected.”