PROLOGUE

Ellie

Locking the door to my apartment, I slip off the sky-high heels before making my way down the short hallway and enter the bathroom where I turn on the shower and strip myself of the light blue slip dress I’d decided to splurge on. For once when I went out, I wanted to wear something besides jeans to the dance club, to tame my wild hair, to feel beautiful and let go.

And I did.

I felt gorgeous. Like Cinderella the night the Prince finds out who she was.

But, the man who swept me off my feet, he wasn’t a prince, he’s more like a knight in shiny black armor. Deep and mysterious and intriguing. A man who captures everyone’s attention with a single glance.

I knew right from the get-go he’d possess and control me.

And, I let him, despite that gnawing sense of danger in my stomach.

He looked vaguely familiar, but I was too wrapped up by the uncontrollable emotion that spun between us to place him, too off course from the usual way I lived that I became vulnerable and for once in my life, I gave in to the stirring depths of need.

“People say it’s hard to find a beautiful woman, but easier to find a pretty one. I wonder what they’d say if I told them I found both in you.”

I wanted to tell him he was lying.

I didn’t.

Twisting the satiny material in my hands, I bring it to my nose and let out a whimper.

“It smells like him, and much like the sins we committed.”

Folding it neatly, I place it on the vanity and step into the shower, the scalding water stinging the marks he left on my skin only hours before as I tilt my head back and reminisce. Then I’m going to secure them in the drawers of my mind, bring them out and dust them off when I’m lonely.

I can’t help recalling first how the man ate me up all night with a lusty gleam in his eyes, how my stomach dipped after we danced, and he ran his nose along the side of my neck. How, for the first time in my life, I let myself get lost in the arms of a man.

I should have known better.

“Come home with me,” he said.

Those tempting words were all it took for me to say yes.

I shudder from the memory of his mouth as he kissed me dominantly, backing me across a darkened room until my back hit a window. The coolness of it doing nothing to calm the flame of my heated flesh.

I gasped, heart pounding when he slid his hands up my bare legs while his tongue explored my mouth with sensual glides of his velvet tongue.

“Softest skin I’ve ever felt.”

My breath caught, pants escaped the higher his hands went, and the urge to tell him to stop, the part of me that knew what I was doing was reckless and wrong rose from my lungs, but it never escaped my lips. His warm tongue left my mouth and went to my neck, his strong hands grabbed hold of my ass, and lifted, growling when he realized I wasn’t wearing any panties. My legs wrapped around his back and my arms around his neck. I wanted him, even if I’d regret it.

He pushed against me, his hard cock long and thick underneath his jeans, and God I wanted to come right there when he eased a hand down the crack of my ass, his fingertips grazing my wet folds.

“Fuck.” He growled, stroking me once, twice before plunging a finger inside me.

He used his teeth to pull both straps of my dress down my shoulders, then drew a nipple into his mouth.

I moaned, banging my head against the window as he drew, bit, licked, and fingered me into a frenzy. I ran my hands through his black hair as he scraped his teeth from one breast to the other, his stubble scratching along my flesh, his mouth showing no mercy toward my stiff peaks.

“You are so fucking tight, so fucking wet; I want to devour you.”

I couldn’t speak.

I just tugged onto his hair a little tighter.

He kissed my neck, and I shivered, everything in my body was lighting on fire.

“I want you; are you sure about this?” I still couldn’t speak, so I grabbed his face and answered by sealing my mouth to his.

Removing his finger, he circled slowly around my clit. It was delicious, wicked torture and all I could do was scream and moan from the sensation of his touch, the way he worked my body was so intense that when he placed me back on the floor, stripped me of my dress and himself of his clothes and rolled on a condom, my legs were violently shaking.

“I don’t think I can go slow, if I hurt you, please tell me.”

I nodded.

He lifted me back up as if I weighed nothing; I wrapped my legs around him once again. He palmed my ass with one hand, slid his cock between my sex with the other and thrust forward, impaling himself fully inside me.

“Oh, holy hell,” I uttered, squeezing my eyes closed. The man is just as big down there as he is tall and wide.

“Jesus, are you alright?”

I was, and I wasn’t.

I was burning up, my fever rising for him to move, this man was filling and stretching me with deep-seated pain and inexperienced pleasure.

“Yes.” I urged him on by arching my back and squeezing his thick pulsating cock.

His lips met my throat as he pulled back and plunged again.

Each push and pull sent me higher, and the stranger, the man whose face I recalled, but his name sat at the tip of my tongue fucked me into oblivion against the window, our heated skin slapping against one another’s with every wicked stroke.

My arousal climbed and climbed as he kept hitting the one spot I needed most.

Never in a million years, a thousand romance books, a hundred romantic films, did I think it would feel like this.

Right. It simply felt right.

“Fucking beautiful, you are goddamn perfect — everything a man like me wants and more. If only you could see the way you look, the way you’re taking my cock up against this window, the lights behind you. Christ woman, you’re an angel that’s entered my darkness. Your cunt is so tight and warm.” His husky tone, even darker words against my sweaty skin soared me higher.

A quiver ventured through my center, this man intrigued me, held me prisoner by his shade of black.

He bit my collarbone, and I cried out as the pain itself clenched my walls around him, and I came on a ragged and heaving moan.

“That’s it, sweetheart, milk it, take what I’m giving you and drain us both dry.”

I cried out when he pulled out of me, grabbed my hips and pressed my front to the window, bending me at the waist enough for him to thrust back in.

My hands had nothing to hold on to but the fogged up glass they slid down.

I panted and bucked as he skidded his fingers down my stomach and began circling my clit.

“Please, I need more,” I whined, my voice sounding like a child. I didn’t care, because whoever this man was, I knew I would never see him again.

I caught his reflection in the glass, his inky black eyes that drew me in earlier like gravity were a little distorted through the fog, but I knew he was a dark fantasy, a dark knight that could never be mine.

His powerful aroma came off of him in waves.

Dangerous and intoxicating.

God, I’d give about anything to remember his name, to let him seep into my veins and take away my pain. To be his dark angel and for him to be the knight to save me.

He brought my mind back when he nipped the lobe of my ear, and I moaned just as he scraped his teeth across the back of my neck.

“I’m close; I need you to come one more time before I carry you to my bed and fuck you again.”

He pistoned into me then, his manly grunts giving me what I needed to come, and when he stilled, I could feel his hot spurts filling the condom, his cock pulsing and throbbing.

When he was done, he pulled out of me, wrapped his arms around me and carried my relaxed body to his bedroom where he fucked me again before tugging me to him and ordering me to sleep.

I didn’t, because for some strange reason, my mind cleared and I remembered who he was.

Panic. It struck through my veins.

Loss and grief. My mind screamed it while my heart fought that this man didn’t pick me up to toss me back into living in my past.

Nightmares and heartache and emotions I battled hard to make disappear.

I waited until he was sound asleep, slipped on my dress, and stumbled down the long hallway to where I grabbed my heels and clutch where they’d both laid by the front door.

And I left.

And as I rock back and forth on the shower floor, I feel it.

The danger that’s coming.

Leaving me nowhere to hide.