Page 4 of Just One More Night

I have no idea, she had replied, honestly.

And for a long moment, possibly a lifetime, she had been aware only of him. That look on his overwhelming face. That gaze of his that made her want to cry. The electricsomethingthat arced between them, even with concrete digging into her bare knees and her hands in the air.

For that little while, nothing else existed.

Nothing.

He had muttered something she’d understood was profane, even if she hadn’t understood it.

And then everything got fast.

Indy remembered it like a blur, though she knew that each action had been precise. Surgical.

He had looked at her. She’d seen something in his gaze, something that had made her breath catch.

Something that had gone through her like an earthquake.

Then he had turned and taken down the other three men standing there with him. She had hardly had time to gasp, to shake, to react. She’d thought of poetry again, all of it lethal, as he’d spun around with blistering speed and laid all three men out flat.

Two kicks, one punch.

Like he was an action star.

Come, he’d said to her when they were all slumped on the ground.You cannot be here.

He’d reached down to pull her up to her feet with a possessive grip on her arm.

And Indy had gone willingly.

More than willingly. Because he’d saved her, that she’d had no doubt—even though it hadn’t been clear if he was one of the things he’d saved her from.

But there was something about his grip on her arm. The way he’d moved them both out of that alley. Quickly, but with that same liquid grace she’d already seen used with lethal intent on his friends.

It had occurred to her then that she ought to have been more scared than she was. As scared as she’d been when she’d first understood what was happening to her. As scared as she’d been before she’d actually caught his gaze and everything had...shifted.

If you’re just going to kill me in a different location, she’d said as he led her away from the alley,I have to tell you that it will be very disappointing.

They’d made it out into the street by then. She could hear the pumping sound of the club she’d so foolishly wandered away from, though she couldn’t see it. Had she wandered into the alley from the other side? And yet Indy hadn’t really cared, because there had been a streetlight and she couldreallysee him then.

He was built like a weapon far deadlier than any old hatchet. His beautiful eyes were breathtakingly blue, and he had a set of lips that should have made him a courtesan—and might have made him pretty if his face wasn’t drawn in such harsh, male lines. She’d thought she would happily pay the whole of her life savings, and then some, to have that mouth between her legs.

But those were the only two soft things on his body.

Everything else was muscle. Thick and honed at once, so that he fairly hummed with power. With threat.

She remembered thinking how odd it was that she had been with so many men and had always happily explored all the various ways they used their power. Physical and intellectual alike, but nothing like this. Like him.

This man was darkness personified and his body showed it.

Indy had noticed a tattoo rising from the neck of his T-shirt, the same T-shirt that strained to contain his biceps. The same T-shirt that seemed unequal to the task of his hard, ridged abdomen. He wore dark jeans and the kind of dress shoes men wore on this side of the Atlantic because trainers were frowned upon for nightlife purposes in so many European countries.

She had been fully aware that he had that gun tucked in the small of his back. But looking at him, not only did she also know that his hands were weapons all by themselves—not to mention the feet that she’d seen in action with her own eyes—but that he likely had other things stashed around on his body, as well.

His profession seemed pretty clear.

I’m not going to kill you, he had said in that accented voice of his that lit the night on fire, low and gravely with that impossible blue gaze behind it.

Or maybe the fire was only in her, making her wet and hot and something too close to desperate.