Chapter Three

Aria Pov 

He just stared at me.

The white towel sat low on his hips, held by a single tight knot. Water still clung to his skin, tracing slow paths down the hard lines of his chest and stomach. His hair was damp, pushed back from a face that looked carved from something expensive and cold. He didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He only watched me the way a man watches something he has already decided belongs to him.

My heart slammed against my ribs.

“Who are you?” My voice came out thinner than I wanted. “What are you doing here?”

He still didn’t answer. His eyes moved over my face, lingering on the darkening bruise along my cheekbone, then lower, taking in the wrinkled clothes I had fallen asleep in, the way I had pushed myself up on my elbows. The silence stretched until it felt like another presence in the room.

I swallowed. “How did you get in here?”

That finally pulled a response from him. His voice was low, rough around the edges, the kind of voice that didn’t need to raise itself to be obeyed.

“The rooms connect,” he said. “I was told this suite was empty.”

I glanced toward the bathroom door and noticed for the first time the second door set into the wall beside it—narrow, almost hidden, the kind that joined two VIP rooms when someone paid enough. Heat crawled up my neck. I had been so tired, so desperate to lie down, that I hadn’t even checked.

“I asked for a cheap room,” I said, the words tasting useless even as I spoke them. “They gave me this one by mistake.”

His gaze flicked to the key card I had dropped on the nightstand, then back to my face. Something unreadable moved behind his eyes.

“You’re hurt.”

It wasn’t a question. I touched my cheek without thinking and felt the tender heat of the bruise.

“It’s nothing.”

He took one step closer. The towel shifted with the movement, and I hated how my eyes followed the line of muscle disappearing beneath the white fabric. I forced my attention back to his face.

“It doesn’t look like nothing,” he said.

Another step. The air between us changed. I could smell the clean scent of hotel soap on his skin, something dark and expensive underneath it. My pulse was too loud in my ears.

“You should put clothes on,” I said, but the words lacked any real strength.

He stopped at the edge of the bed. Close enough that I would have to tip my head back to keep meeting his eyes if I stayed where I was. I didn’t move.

“Tell me who did that to your face.”

The demand was quiet, almost gentle, and somehow more dangerous because of it. I shook my head.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

The sentence landed heavier than it should have. I didn’t know this man. I had no reason to tell him anything. Yet the way he looked at me—steady, unblinking, as if he had already claimed the right to the answer—made the truth press against the back of my teeth.

“Someone I used to trust,” I said finally. “That’s all.”

He was silent for a long moment. Then he reached out. I should have pulled away. Instead I sat frozen as his fingers brushed the edge of the bruise, the touch so light it barely existed. Heat followed the path of his skin against mine.

“He won’t touch you again,” he said, as if it were already decided.

I laughed once, short and sharp. “You don’t even know me.”

“I know enough.”

His hand didn’t leave my face. His thumb traced the line of my cheekbone, careful of the tender spot, and something low in my stomach tightened. I should have told him to stop. I should have stood up and walked out of the room. Instead I stayed exactly where I was, breathing too fast, watching the water still sliding down the side of his neck.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re deciding something.”

His mouth curved, not quite a smile. “Maybe I am.”

The space between us disappeared. One moment he was standing over me, the next his knee was on the mattress and his hand had slid from my cheek into my hair. He didn’t yank. He simply held me there, tilting my face up until there was nowhere else to look except his eyes.

“Tell me to stop,” he said.

I opened my mouth. No sound came out.

He kissed me.

It wasn’t gentle. It was claiming—slow at first, then deeper, as if he had been waiting longer than the few minutes we had been in the same room. I made a small sound against his mouth and felt him answer it with a low noise of his own. His free hand settled at my waist, fingers spreading over the fabric of my shirt, pulling me closer until my knees brushed the damp towel and the hard heat of his body beneath it.

When he finally lifted his head, my lips felt swollen. His breathing had changed.

“You shouldn’t let strangers kiss you,” he said, voice rougher now.

“You’re the one who started it.”

“And you’re the one who didn’t stop me.”

He kissed me again, harder this time. I felt the shift of the towel as he braced himself over me, the brush of bare skin against my clothes. My hands, traitorous, rose to his shoulders. The muscles under my palms were solid, still warm from the shower. He made a sound of approval and pressed closer, deepening the kiss until I was lying back against the pillows with his weight balanced above me.

Questions still crowded my mind—how he had ended up in the connecting room, why he looked at me like he already knew the taste of me, why my body was answering him so quickly—but every time I tried to form one, his mouth distracted me again. He kissed the corner of my lips, the line of my jaw, the sensitive spot just below my ear. Each touch sent another slow pull of heat through me.

“You’re shaking,” he murmured against my skin.

“I know.”

“Is it fear?”

I shook my head once. His hand slid from my hair down the side of my throat, resting lightly over the place where my pulse raced.

“No,” I whispered. “It’s not fear.”

He drew back just enough to look at me. The towel had loosened. I could see the sharp cut of his hipbone, the dark trail of hair disappearing beneath the white fabric. His eyes were darker than before.

“Tell me to leave,” he said again, softer this time.

I didn’t.

Instead I reached up and pulled his mouth back to mine. The kiss turned hungry. His hand found the hem of my shirt and slipped underneath, palm spanning my waist, thumb brushing the underside of my breast. I arched into the touch without meaning to. A low sound left his throat, and he pressed his hips forward. Even through the towel and my clothes I felt how hard he was.

The last coherent thought I managed was that I had come to this hotel to escape one man and had somehow ended up under another. Then his fingers traced higher, and thinking became impossible.

I am already getting wet.