I feel like I’ve been in a tumble dryer. My mouth is woolly, my head is pounding.
Prising open my eyelids, I find Mr Crosse watching me. Or is it? My vision blurs in and out.
Is this a hallucination? Or a dream?
I try to remember how I got here, or where I am. But it’s dark when my eyes dart around, and I can’t focus on anything.
“Anwyn,” he sighs, and for once it doesn’t seem to be exasperation. “Water?”
I’ve barely nodded before he has an arm beneath my shoulders and is helping me sit up, a glass at my lips.
His face is so close. Far nearer than we’ve ever been even in the last six months.
“Drink,” he whispers, not taking his eyes from my face. I’m glued to him too. Or I think I am. As cool water slips down my throat, I give in to the need to stare at him.
His arm is a warm solid band behind my shoulders and he’s cupping the back of my head with strong fingers.
Must be a dream. Being held by Mr Crosse? Being able to look at him. I can finally examine his eyes the way I’ve always wanted to. Well, if I could keep my focus. It keeps blurring, and my eyes won’t stay open. I’ve looked at him, covertly. But never had him look at me straight on. Not since the first night I sought refuge with him.
“Enough?” he asks gently, taking the glass away.
“So handsome,” I slur out the only thought in my head.
This isn’t real, because he doesn’t respond to my statement. Not with horror nor even a hint of a smile. Nothing. Just keeps looking at me, his chest rising and falling quicker than usual.
I bring my hand up to his face—nope, that’s his shoulder—ahhh. Yes. Slight bristles.
“Want to look … at you.” But my eyes are closing again without my volition. I have to keep them open. Really like this dream. Don’t want it to end.
I want…
I’m eased back onto… a bed? It’s so comfortable, and yet it’s not familiar. Not the bed I use when I stay with Mr Crosse. I try to look around but my head is so heavy, my neck stiff, I can only see Benedict. His grey eyes.
“Please… Kiss…” I can’t get the next word out as my vision swims.
“Sleep.”
The last thing I feel before I slip back into unconsciousness is warm lips and rough stubble on my forehead.
“Fix her!”
I’m too groggy to open my eyes.
“…Have to be patient.” A soothing voice.
“…Not a patient man, Doctor…” That’s… That voice, it’s brusque and commanding. Grumpy. Home. He’s the sound of home. Then a name. It’s Benedict Crosse, snarling. “Make her well, or suffer the consequences.”
I try to move, and say I’m fine. He doesn’t have to worry about me. I’ll be out of here in a moment. It emerges as a whimper.
Footsteps approach and I prise open my eyes to see grey wool-clad legs before my vision swims and spirals.
“Anwyn.”
My hand is held, strong fingers clasping mine and a thumb brushing over my knuckles.
There’s a sound like a wounded animal. Then black.
This time when I wake, I merely feel like I’ve been beaten up. My head aches a bit, but although I wince as I open my eyes the nausea and fog have cleared.
The room is painted in charcoal grey shadows and peach sunlight. I look around cautiously.
I’m in a bedroom. It’s old-world luxury. Deep green and black patterns and brocades, paintings with wide gold frames on the wall, and the scent of a forest and moving water. This one room is the size of the entire ground floor of the student house I live in.
Where am I?
The crisp white sheets rustle as I try to drag myself into a sitting position. I’m weak as a kitten.
“You’re awake.”
Benedict Crosse unfolds himself from a chair right beside me. The light spilling in from a gap in the curtains reveals half of his face, and my heart flips.
His expression is grave and he looks… Honestly if I didn’t know better I’d say he’d been up for two days straight. He seems exhausted. Wrecked, and a little over-intense. His grey eyes are silver, and the peachy light brings out the flecks of white in the hair at his temples and in the stubble that covers his jaw. He hasn’t shaved, I’d guess for a couple of days, and Mr Crosse is always perfectly shaved. He gets a five o’clock shadow, sure, but he is invariably in a suit, controlled.
Mr Crosse is basically a businessman from a men’s razor advert.
Except, right now he’s not. He’s the suggestive aftershave advert, all rough sex appeal and smouldering roughness. He’s popped open his shirt collar and removed his tie. His hair is mussed too, as though he’s been running his hands through it. There are dark circles under his eyes.
“What time is it?”
He checks the solid watch on his wrist. “Nine.”
I nod. Well that’s embarrassing. I’ve clearly overstayed my Sunday morning welcome. “Sorry I slept so late. I’ll get up.”
“In the evening, darling.” The corner of his mouth kicks up. “And you’re staying in bed.”
“Wait it’s…” There’s a tickle in my memory. “What day is it? And what happened?”
“It’s Monday night. And there was an attempt to kidnap you,” he replies calmly.
I blink.
Someone tried to kidnap me?
I scrabble backwards up the bed, until my shoulders bump into a panel. The image of a gun in Mr Crosse’s hands, pointed towards me, flickers.
“A successful attempt.” My voice is wobbly, but at least my vision is clear again. Except for the minor detail of the sight of Mr Crosse at my bedside being overwhelmed by the dread that’s congealing in my memory.
I’m pretty sure Mr Crosse pointed a gun at me and I’ve ended up with him, somewhere that isn’t my house.
Sounds a lot like kidnap.
“You were in danger.” He’s implacable. Unmoved.
I replay the incident in my mind, as best I can. It all happened so fast. A noise that woke me. The pain in my arm. I grasp my upper arm where, yes, it is a bit sore, and find a smooth hydrocolloid dressing over the skin.
“It happened then.”
Mr Crosse nods.
Another flash of recollection: the sudden weight of a man’s body slumped over me, knocking my breath away. The air is fire in my throat.
“The man,” I croak. “Is he dead?”
“Yes.” And Mr Crosse doesn’t sound at all regretful. Not even slightly.
“Was he one of your…?” I’m not certain what I’m asking.
His lip curls. “Not mine. Some… rivals who wanted to hurt me by taking you.”
How would that impact Mr Crosse? “They thought taking your son’s ex-girlfriend would affect you?”
He looks stricken and the sequence of last night runs on like a movie I was half watching, until I remember. Oh no. No-no-no-no-no.
“That’s it, yes.” His tone is excessively mild. He presses his lips together.
Of all the humiliating times for my massive crush on Mr Crosse to emerge from my mouth.
I told him he was handsome.
I asked him to kiss me.
I close my eyes. Maybe it would have been better to be kidnapped by Mr Crosse’s rivals, dumped at sea with hungry sharks, or stranded in a jungle with a ravenous panther. I’m wearing pale pink pyjamas. Something wild and dangerous eat me now, please.
No, I mean, not like that, and yet, yes, like that. Ugh. My brain.
“Fine.” I roll out of bed. From about a thousand angles this is something I’d prefer to forget.
“What are you doing?” And there’s a note of genuine panic in his words.
“I’m going home.” My legs aren’t wobbly, just a bit out of practice, but I get to the door. I yank it open one inch before Mr Crosse reaches me and slams it shut, trapping me between his forearms, his towering body, and solid wood.
“You’re not leaving,” he growls.
Heat flares over my skin as he looks down at me, and I look over my shoulder at him. I want the kingpin so much. My nipples pebble, and I’m half a second from climbing him like a particularly attractive tree.
I practically drooled over him last night. And yeah, I’m doing it again. My cheeks flush.
“Let me go.”
“It’s dangerous.”
It is here too. The warmth of his breath on my neck makes me weak. I turn in his arms, tilt my chin, and look up into his face. “Then give me a reason to stay.”
His jaw clenches and a frisson of fear goes down my back. Fear of what nearly happened last night and that if I leave here there’s no option but to give up everything I’ve built in London—my degree and my modest little job in the coffee shop. Chats with my fellow barista, Lina, and the happiness and fun and quiet companionship of being with Benedict, because he’s right that another London mafia is after me. Fear that Benedict hasn’t got anything more than the most tepid, cool emotion towards me when I burn every night. When I can’t sleep for wanting him. Or worst of all, that maybe this isn’t one-sided, but he won’t confess his feelings out of loyalty to his son. That Tom is more important than I will ever be to him.
“I can’t, Wyn. I can’t.” He leans closer, holding my gaze, a mixture of longing and torture. His arms shift until there’s nothing in the world but Benedict, surrounding me. His scent is intoxicating.
“Why not?” I breathe, trying to get all of his smell into my lungs, like I could trap it there.
“You’re my son’s girlfriend—”
“Ex-girlfriend,” I correct him.
“This is wrong.”
I keep piling up mistake upon mistake. Idiot.
I’m not staying here for more humiliation, even if it is entirely my own fault this time. I duck under his arm and pull at the door as there’s a click.
It doesn’t budge, and it’s a second before I see the glint of metal. A key.
“Give me that.”
Benedict goes to pocket it, then as I reach down holds the key above his head, way higher than I can grasp but instinctively I try, too ashamed and angry to restrain myself. I grab his arm and try to pull his clenched fist to me, and he groans, stepping backwards.
Then he’s across the room, shoving open a window and I’m speechless as he tosses the key out.
A small tinkle says it has reached the ground outside.
“Neither of us can leave now.” For a second I swear he’s going to smile, but immediately his expression is grave again.
I dive to the window, but I already know what I’ll see. This room is adjacent to the one I’ve slept in every Saturday for the last six months. And yeah, two floors below is the patio I’ve spent evenings lounging around on, reading smut and sipping mocktails.
All this time, I slept only a wall away from Benedict.
I wonder if he heard me…
My face heats. I bet he’s known all along.
“Just wake someone up!” I hiss. My body is aflame with desire after touching him, and I’m going out of my mind. I cannot stay here. I’ll die of horny embarrassment, which is not the way I wanted to go. I’m trapped with a man who doesn’t want me, who has seen my pyjamas. “You have guards. Get them up here, tell them you’ve been an idiot and dropped the key out of the window, and let me out.”
“No,” he replies in that scary mafia kingpin voice that makes me go still. The tone he uses when he tells me to eat a piece of fruit for breakfast, or finish reading that chapter on leaf morphology before I turn in for the night. “And you’re not going to scream either. Even if you did, they wouldn’t do as you asked, because they work for me.”
Usually, he uses that voice and I go to mush. It makes me instinctively obey. I do whatever he says because it’s so dominant. A dark, rough growl that vibrates through my body.
And yeah, it does all that delicious vibration this time too, but I’m pissed.
“You can’t just kidnap me and hold me prisoner,” I seethe.
“Yes. I can,” he replies implacably.
“No!” I grab fistfuls of his shirt and force him around to look at me, and in my still partially dozy lack of spatial awareness, I misjudge the distance between us. The precise gap that we both maintain so carefully. Two inches or a foot, a big enough space that I don’t know what it feels like to touch him.
My front presses to his. My forearms are on his sculpted chest, my breasts touching the top of his abdomen, my hips on his thighs. And nudging at my belly is a solid length.
And suddenly I know he’s not so unaffected.
He’s hard. The significance clubs me around the head.
Benedict Crosse wants me. Me.
I’ve gone six months thinking my inappropriate crush, which worsened week after week, was just that. Unrequited. He’s a powerful man, and he could have anyone. He’s twenty years older than me, experienced and with an air of authority that has me light-headed.
But he’s got an erection, and he has trapped us together in this room for… Well at least a few hours. He looks like he sat by my bedside while I slept off whatever they drugged me with. And suddenly, I don’t want to leave. I think I’m in exactly the place I should be.
I boost onto my tiptoes and lean into his warmth. Oh god his cock feels so big. I squirm a little and I’m gooey between my legs.
“We’re going to be together all night, Ben.” I dare to use his name. “Tell me why they were after me.”
He swallows and shuts his eyes. “Because you are precious to me.”
Precious. I’m dizzy with that one word.
I’m precious.
He killed a man who was trying to hurt me. My insecurities could find plenty of reasons to doubt this, but I don’t let them. Fingers crossed for foolhardy.
I pull on his shirt, dragging him down. For a second he’s immovable, an oak tree versus a hummingbird. Then with a groan, he lowers his head and takes my mouth.
And when I say takes, I mean that literally. His hand goes to the back of my neck, and his tongue plunders. I’m helpless against the force of his unleashed passion.
As if I’d protest. I try to get closer, to give as good as I get, but he doesn’t give me a chance. Our mouths are sealed together, and he holds me to him, my breasts crushed and heat flaring everywhere across my skin.
He drives me backwards and I think he’s going to push me to the bed, but he pivots so my back is against the door and he’s holding me, braced. He strokes my cheek with his thumb, fingers in my hair and whispers my name like it’s a prayer as he runs his hand up and down my side, teasing against my breast. His body traps me in place, his hard length digging into my belly and I’ve never felt anything so swoony in my life.
“Anwyn, we shouldn’t do this,” he says, then covers my lips again in a punishing kiss. He’s shaking, I realise. He wants me so much he can’t contain his need. That fills me with heady power. All this time I’ve been miserable because he didn’t want me and thought I’d have to grovel for the smallest acknowledgement of his affection. His impersonal protection he gives freely, but this? Up-tight, grumpy Mr Crosse? The head of the most influential and important mafia in London does not lose control.
He does with me.
I’m held as he kisses across my face and down my neck.
“This can’t be happening,” he growls, but doesn’t stop. The sensation of his rough stubble on my jaw makes me weak and heated between my legs.
“Ben, it is,” I whisper, because I’m done with denial. I’ve pined after Benedict Crosse for six months.
“We mustn’t.” But this time, he stops, slamming his palms on the door both sides of my head. “I can’t betray…”
“No one will ever know.” I’m not saying my ex’s name right now, and I think Ben doesn’t want to either.
“Fuck…” He dips his head and closes his eyes. A pulse beats fast in his neck.
There’s a long moment and for all the time I can see him fighting with himself. His sense of honour battling with his desire.
He eases back and I restrain a sob. No. No…
His eyes catch me as I’m falling into despair.
“Just tonight.”
My heart does an awkward, flopping flight. A swoop of happiness and a slam down onto hard ground. A young bird trying to fly. He wants me, but only for one night.
I nod, quick. Eager.
“No one can ever know. Especially not my son.”
The hurt that I’m something dirty, that he’d be ashamed of being with me, is another test flight for my fledgling heart. A secret is deliciously naughty. His. Private and cherished.
But the reference to his son? Ow. Stubbed toe and period cramps levels of ouch.
“One night, to get it out of our systems,” I say, because that sounds worldly and experienced. In fact, it’s just something I’ve read in romance books.
He sighs deeply, as though this arrangement is causing him considerable inconvenience. Well, listen up buddy. I’m inconvenienced by him being a mafia lord and kidnapping me and keeping me captive, not to mention wanting him for the past six months. We all have to deal with the challenges life throws at us.
“I’m too old and dangerous for you, Anwyn,” he grinds the words out, rough and low. “Say no, as you should, and I’ll tuck you back under the covers and sit by your side as you sleep.”
I trail my fingers down his chest. “Give me a reason to stay awake.”
He nods slowly. “Get on the bed.”
