“Stop it,” I say quietly, but a stream of tears pours down my face because nobody has ever seen so clearly into me before, and I’m scared, and hurting, and his hazel eyes just won’t let me go.

He tightens his hold on my shoulders now, his gaze fiercely tender and still hungry for me as he adds, “I know you’ve used sex to stop feeling lonely too long, Melanie, and I know you’re the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen, always trying to make the best of everything. Giving every frog a chance, because you were given that chance, right? So why would you deny a chance to someone? Anyone? Even a f**king ass**le like me?”

He slides a hand down my face and caresses my cheek, the kind of caress only he gives me. The one I feel under my skin, down to my nerves, my bones.

“I know that you quit a semester in college to stand by your best friend when she was injured,” he adds, “and you never told her you postponed the semester because you wanted to keep her company. I know you’re the sort of girl who’d buy a Mustang in a city where it rains almost every day of the year because it’s worth it to ride with the top down for the days where there’s sun. I know you, Melanie. Fuck, I know more about you than I wish I knew because I would not change one thing . . . one thing . . . one word . . . of the ten-inch file I have of you . . . on my f**king desk.”

I drop my gaze from his with a quiet sob, and he tips my head back and forces me to look into his face, which is fierce with conviction, as fierce as his hot, penetrating gaze. “Your saucy ‘I got this’ persona? I like her. I know her, but I see the glimpses of you, Melanie. The real you. The one who’s frightened. The one who doesn’t like being alone. The one who’s vulnerable and makes me want to say I got you. Come here, I f**king got you, princess.”

“You know all this about me and I don’t even know you!” I cry.

“Yeah you do,” he counters, and he cups my head and crushes my mouth with his, and the hunger in the kiss sizzles through my nerve endings, lights me on fire.

Hot lips. Taste. He’s not the only one hungry for the taste. I want it too, badly.

Please, please, be smart, Melanie!

Leave, Melanie!

“God,” he growls when my mouth seems to part of its own will and I somehow find my fingers digging into his biceps. “I’ve been taught to con and blackmail, lie, cheat, anything it takes to get what I want.”

The hot suckling motion of his mouth makes my toes curl, my body burn and arch closer to him as he wraps his arms around my waist.

“And I want you. These sweet little teacup br**sts. I want my mouth on them again.” He cups my ass with one hand, and one tit with the other. “I love when your ni**les bead for me. They bead at my voice. At a glance from me. I love your ass. I love your f**king mouth.” He seems to be going crazy, doing everything at once. Massaging my ass. Massaging my tit. Gobbling my mouth. Then he kisses my neck, flicking his tongue out to taste me. A shudder rockets through me. God. It’s ecstasy. Agony. Both.

“ ‘Zero’—do you know what he does, princess?” he dares me, taking a hot, sensual bite out of my lower lip before easing back to look at me with hooded eyes. “He looks for a weakness and pounces on it, wrecks the prey, and makes it pay.”

I shudder over the sensual tone of his voice and whisper, “I’m sorry for them.”

“Hmm. You should be.” He heads to my ear, his breath hot as he grinds his erection against me. “I think I know your weakness, Melanie. I know your weakness. Your weakness . . . is me.”

“Stop.”

“I’d stop it if you meant it. Mean it,” he commands, then cups my face and looks at me, waiting for me to mean what I say, his eyes electric. “Right now. Mean it,” he whispers seductively, his breath hot on my face. “Tears?” He edges back, his eyes sober and yet relentless. “Tears . . . why? I haven’t made you come yet.”

I want to pull free.

But I’m shaking and craving and wanting. It’s true that I want his body, every hot, delicious inch, but more than anything I want to know who he is—who the man who has this effect on me is.

He. Is not. Real, MELANIE!

He is a liar, a player, a f**king scoundrel and a rogue. You don’t need him! You don’t want him!

“Tell me who you are!” Suddenly my voice rises with my bewilderment.

He looks at me, dark shadows crossing over his eyes, then he surprises me when he leaves me and sits on the bed. Setting his elbows on his knees, he leans over, looking at me, every inch of him tormented. He runs his hand through his hair and, slowly, I watch as each copper-streaked strand falls into place one by one. Silence drags on, the tension palpable until he breaks the silence, a low, hard bitterness spilling into his voice.

“I was raised by my mother, Lana King. She left my dad when she got pregnant, to protect me. One day when I was thirteen I came home and she was tied up in a chair, gagged, among a group of men—among them my father. He offered . . .” He trails off, then smirks coldly. “He told me if I killed one of his men, she’d be untied and set free. I didn’t know he had a deal with her, that she’d told him I wasn’t a killer like him—that he’d promised to let me go if that was true. I didn’t know about that f**king deal when I took the gun he offered, aimed it, fired it, and killed him. And I never saw her again.”

His voice turns empty and cold, like an echo of an old tomb.

I’m not sure if it’s the tone he uses, the words he tells me, or the lack of sparkle in his usually brilliant, beautiful eyes. “My uncle Eric told me my father had made a deal with my mother. He would take me if I proved to be his son. My mother promised him that I was nothing like him. And then I shot a man. I didn’t hesitate. I shot him.”

A war of emotions rages in me, my feelings toward him becoming confusing and as painful as anything in my life has ever been.

“I doomed myself to a life of this.” He signals around him. “Maybe I should’ve shot my father. It could’ve been over, right then and there. But blood is a curious thing.” He looks at me, a slight confusion in his hawklike eyes. “It ties you. Even when you loathe your kind, something here . . .” He puts his fists to his chest. “Somewhere here you’re still loyal. I spent eight years with him, believing he’d let me see her. Until I realized he wasn’t ever letting me see her so long as he knew I didn’t really give a shit about him. So I went rogue, dropped him, and tried to find her, doing little jobs in between. I followed every trail I could find. Nothing. She vanished without a trace.”

His bearing is stiff and proud, but I can finally see the chaos in his eyes. I imagine him, a young teenager, torn in two. Using his smarts to survive, while still trying to find and protect his mother.

His every disquieting word races through my mind, his childhood so different from mine that I don’t understand it, almost.

“He’s summoned me back now that he’s dying. He’s got leukemia and he wants me to take the reins of the Underground.” He laughs sadly. “A man like him, I can’t even imagine him sick. But he needs to pass on his torch. Wyatt—I know he’s been more of a son to him than I have. But he wants the alpha.” He pulls out a piece of paper. “When I saw you on this list, you were supposed to be something I worked out of my system. That blonde in my dreams. Then there you were. There you were in the f**king bar with that f**king ass**le trying to take you home—and then there you were, a f**king devil of an angel in the rain.”

“Don’t even talk to me about the rain!”

“You wanted to talk, so I’m talking to you now.” He walks forward, stopping in front of me, the faint smile tugging his lips holding an infinite amount of sadness. “This isn’t how I wanted to spend your birthday, Melanie.” His voice is a tender murmur, squeezing my heart.

I won’t cry, I won’t f**king cry. I blink and swallow.

“All I ask is that you let me celebrate you when I get back. If I only get to spend one day with you, I want to spend this day. With you.”

I can’t stand the way he knows me. The way he understands me. The way he makes my every dream come true and breaks my every fantasy. If there were a day I’d need him in a year, it would be my birthday. But suddenly I desperately need to go home.

“You’re leaving right now?” I whisper.

His eyebrows rise inquiringly. “I have to. Just one more mark. I owe it to my mother.”

He comes over and wraps me in his arms. I close my eyes as his heat envelops me, his scent, him. When he tries to pull away, I pull his arms closer, suddenly just needing this a minute longer. “Why do you want my arms?” he whispers in my ear. “I just told you they’ve done more harm than good.”

“Not to me.”

“Because you fell for me, you fell for me and all my bullshit, and even with everything I just said, you’re still falling, aren’t you,” he rasps. He kisses the back of my ear. “I’m right here to catch you.” He kisses the back of my ear, harder. “Let me catch you.”

I duck my head to compose myself.

He ducks his dark head too and glances at my toes. On each foot, my toenails spell, in perfect blue and hot pink all the way around, GREY ♥

“Nice toes.”

I curl and tuck them into the rug. “I got a pedicure. At the best place in Seattle.”

All for you . . . I think miserably.

His grin gives me butterflies in my stomach, and I wish I had an ax and I could literally kill them. “That someone could get you to sit your restless little ass for a while to get to do that is a testament to their abilities.” He looks at me with those eyes that reach strange little places inside me, and my stomach starts to feel heavy from the complete overload of my emotions. “Or to your conviction to wear my name on your feet?”

He kneels, and I hold my breath as he takes my toe and kisses it.

“Grey, you’re kissing my toe,” I say, voice thick and cottony.

“It’s got my name on it.”

When I pry my foot loose, he exhales a long, long breath and rises to his feet, to over six feet of beautiful lying man, then he quietly starts getting some of the stuff on the bed into his black jacket. I stare into the shadows, watching him slip on his gloves, feeling like this innocence I just lost will never, ever be recovered.

“I feel like my boyfriend just died. I will never, ever, have Greyson anymore.”

If I sound sad, he looks wrecked.

“I feel like my alias just killed my girl. And she’ll never look at me the way she did before.”

We stare the way we do, except we usually smile here.

This time we don’t.

Go home, Melanie, I think miserably.

He steps forward cautiously, and I remember how obsessed he is with my eyes, and I feel a strange sadness for him when he somehow cups my face, thinks about kissing them, but drops his hands instead.

“I’ll be back. Stay here with your friend for the day tomorrow, and think, Melanie. When I’m back, I dare you to look into my eyes and tell me you don’t want me.”

I don’t know what he’s going to do, but terror, lust, love, every emotion swims in me as he crosses the room to leave. “Greyson, swear to me that you won’t kill anyone!” I cry. “Swear, or we will have nothing to talk about. Nothing.”

My heart pounds in my temples, my chest, my fingertips as I wait for his answer to my impulsive ultimatum. He stands by the door and laughs softly, then he pulls something from his jacket, pulls off the cartridge from his gun, sets it down, and swings the door open. He didn’t give me his word, but I believe him.

I don’t know why, but I believe him.

I wait until he shuts the door behind him to have the mother of all nervous f**king breakdowns.

TWENTY-ONE

THE LIST

Greyson

It was an easy mark.

I slip inside the darkened home, wake him up with the tip of my SIG right on his temple while he startles up in bed. He shook like a flag in the wind as he opened the safe, gave me the money.

He’ll probably never again sleep.

Welcome to the club, old man . . .

But I’m not thinking about that anymore. His name is scratched, the fights were good tonight. Riptide owned the ring—and that’s fine by me. Riptide is money, and the Underground is all about money.

But I’m not thinking about that either.

I’m thinking about her. Wondering if she’s sleeping. Or even half as tortured as I am. It’s six a.m. at the hospital, and I’ve been sitting here, hating what I already know.

Hating that I already know what she’s going to tell me later on today when I go to see her.