AURORA
I swear on everything holy—and considering I'm not exactly the most religious girl around, that's saying something—that this man needs a manual called “How Not to Look Like a Gothic Predator About to Kidnap Your Intern.”
Because he takes one step.
Then another.
Calm. Smooth. Like he’s moving in slow motion just to torture me.
And I stand there, rooted to the floor of his office, telling myself: Don’t panic, Aurora. You survived organic chemistry in high school. You can handle this.
But when he gets close… oh, when he gets close, the entire room seems to lock up.
His fingers—long, cold, and strangely reverent—touch my throat. Just the backs of them at first, barely there, as if he’s afraid I’ll break. The kind of touch that would make anyone with questionable sanity sigh—and me? I almost swallowed my own tongue.
He moves up.
Then down.
His eyes follow the motion as if my throat were the eighth wonder of the modern world.
And I should have stayed still?
Definitely not. But I did.
Until he shifts the position of his hand.
I felt the exact moment the spell broke, as if someone had yanked a power cable inside me. He turned his palm, spreading his fingers, bringing them closer to my skin with that absurd intention to… grab me? Pull me in? Hold me there?
I’m not stupid.
I’m not innocent.
I can handle a good squeeze when things get heated, steady as a champion without even blinking. But that?
That was something else.
It was instinct.
It was hunger.
It was like standing in front of a predator who had just remembered the scent of my blood.
And before I could rationalize any of it, my body acted on its own.
My hands came up. I twisted my wrist, knocked his arm aside, and with one quick movement—courtesy of the self-defense classes my mother forced me to take when I moved to the city—I shoved his torso backward.
It wasn’t hard.
It didn’t knock down the nearly six-foot-four CEO.
But it worked.
He stopped.
And his eyes… God, his eyes went wide, as if no one on earth had ever dared touch him that way before.
“Aurora…” he said my name in that low voice that vibrated straight down my spine. “What are you—”
“What am I doing?” I shot back, my heart beating so fast it seemed determined to become a DJ inside my chest. “What were YOU about to do?! Oh my God, I thought you were going to strangle me!”
He blinked.
Once.
Twice.
As if the word strangle were something he was processing for the first time in his life.
“I would never hurt you,” he replied, every syllable far too firm, as if it were law. “That was not—”
“I don’t want to know what ‘that’ was,” I cut in, backing up one step, then another. “All of this… us…” I shook my head, feeling the shame, the adrenaline, and the shiver of last night’s memory burning together beneath my skin. “I spent hours with you at that motel, Adrian. Hours. And not once did you look at me the way you just did.”
He frowned, as if he were trying to understand his own reflection.
And I took a deep breath, trying not to lose my train of thought while part of my brain kept screaming: He’s dangerous. He’s dangerous. He’s dangerous.
“I’m not one of those girls who thinks possessive guys are cute, you know? I like mystery, sure… but I like the kind of mystery that doesn’t involve me thinking I’m about to become the star of a true-crime episode.”
He took a step.
And I raised my hand on reflex, signaling for him to stop.
“Don’t come any closer.”
And for the first time… he obeyed.
He stopped.
Literally froze, as if my raised fingers were some kind of invisible chain. And that gave me an even worse shiver—because a normal man, angry or frustrated, would have reacted. He didn’t. He just… halted every movement.
“I am sorry,” he said, and it was almost a whisper, but a whisper with weight. “I did not mean to frighten you.”
I swallowed hard.
“Well, you succeeded.”
Silence fell like a thick curtain between us.
And I felt small, and furious, and confused, and… even more attracted to him, which was the worst part of all.
Because all it took was one look at him—his slightly disheveled blond hair, his impeccable posture, his tense jaw, his eyes far too intense—to remember exactly what his mouth had felt like on my neck hours earlier.
“I need to get back to my department,” I murmured, looking away before he could unravel me again. “And… please… please, Adrian… no more of this.”
He tilted his head the slightest bit.
“As you wish.”
But there was something in the way he said it… something that made me feel that wishing had nothing to do with what he would actually do.
Even so, I turned my back and left.
With my heart racing.
With my mind in chaos.
And with the absurd feeling that I had just provoked an animal that was only beginning to wake.
And God help me… part of me wanted to see him fully awake.