Page 48 of One More Night

He nods as he moves into my periphery. “If you hadn’t come, I would have brought you here anyway.” There’s no need to look at him to know the hunger in his eyes. “God, you’re downright sexy in that dress.”

“It was the look I was hoping for,” I tease.

His eyes hold mine when I finally dare myself to look at him again. “I gave you your night.” He frowns, hands slung in his pockets. “Do I take the dress as a good sign?” The formal shirt he wears sits partially unbuttoned, as though he’s pulled the tie off moments before and decided to kick back after a long day. It’s disheveled, yet dangerously suggestive.

“I was told to cut you loose.”

“I know.”

I tip my head. “Chase?”

“He thought he’d drive the nail into the coffin one more time with a visit last night.”

Damn him and his meddling. “He has good intentions,” I reason in an effort to defuse any possible war brewing between the two.

“As do I.” Jordan sighs, the action making his wide chest rise and fall against the restriction of his shirt. “You were eighteen when I finally found the courage to ask you out. I was twenty.” He rolls his lips between his teeth before continuing, the slightest drop to his head. He’s nervous, telling me this. “You laughed at me. Told me to stop being such an idiot, and then closed the door in my goddamn face.”

“I forgot about that.” The memory comes back, hazy yet true. I did laugh at him. “I thought you were playing a joke on me with Chase.”

Jordan shakes his head, hands seemingly twitching in his pockets. “My best memory of you was at that party, but I saw you before that, Corinne. I just didn’t know I loved you until Chase’s birthday.”

“Love?”

“Obsessively.”

The intensity should scare me, but instead I’m drawn like a moth to the flame: aware of the danger, yet unable to pull myself from the beauty of it all.

“You were at the bar the night I celebrated graduation,” I say.

He nods, one hand slipping free of his pocket. “I was always there, baby. Always watching.” His fingers brush the side of my jaw with such reverence I’m almost brought to my knees. “Every step.”

“And yet you waited until last week to make yourself known.”

“If I had made a move earlier …” He shakes his head, stepping away. “I wanted you to hurt for what you did turning me down that day. I would have accepted you saying no. I would have respected your choice. But you laughed at me. Fucking mocked me. You made me think you cared about me, and then you sniggered at my most vulnerable moment.”

“I’m sorry I did that.”

“No.” His jaw clenches. “Don’t apologize. You shouldn’t have to. My vendetta?” He laughs at the word. “It was so wrong. So… mad.”

“But?” I prompt sensing he leads somewhere with this.

“But what I am now—obsessed…” He closes the space between us, his scent a heady aroma as he captures me against his hard body, one hand punishing as it holds my chin steady. “God, Corinne. It’s so much worse.”

My head screams yes, it is. My heart says give him a chance. And my gut says, run.

“It’s not madness.” I whisper. “It’s how you love.”

I see it now. The way he works, the single-minded focus he applies to anything he does. It was there as a kid, it was there years later, evident in the hours I got before he vanished yet again only to turn up last week with the same intensity shining through.

Jordan is obsessive by nature. And I’m sick for desiring that kind of focus be put solely on me.

But I want it.

I crave it.

I ache to be the center of his world, and God save anyone who steps in the way of that.

“How I love?” He chuckles. “You have a funny concept of love if you think this fixation is healthy, baby.”