CHAPTER 4:THE WRONG NAME

"Ryker, the lights..."

"They'll come back on." His voice was a low, jagged rasp, vibrating against my jaw in the pitch-black room. "Everything comes back eventually. Except her."

The wind slammed against the tall leaded glass of the study, rattling the heavy dark wood. I could hear the harsh, unsteady cadence of his breath…thick with the heat of aged bourbon and dark, suffocating despair. He was standing too close. So close that the broad, imposing wall of his chest was practically brushing against the front of my dress, trapping me between his towering height and the heavy mahogany desk behind me.

"I should go find a candle," I whispered, my pulse hammering in my ears. "Or check the fuse box in the hall."

"Stay."

It was a single word, spoken in a dark, velvet command that seemed to freeze the blood in my veins. Every instinct I possessed screamed at me to shove past him, to run out into the storm and never look back. But my feet remained rooted to the rug, paralyzed by the sheer, magnetic pull radiating off his body.

"Ryker, I don't think..."

"You never think. That's your problem, Selene." His hand shot out through the darkness, his long, calloused fingers wrapping around my upper arm. His grip wasn't violent, but it was absolute, binding me to him. "You just stand there…quiet, careful, taking up as little space as everyone in this family has always demanded of you."

He pulled me half an inch closer, the heat of his body washing over me in suffocating waves.

"She would have laughed by now," he rasped, his thumb digging into my skin through the sleeve of my dress. "Made a joke. Made this dark easier."

"I'm not her," I said, my voice trembling with a bitter, defensive edge.

"I know." His voice cracked, just slightly, the sharp edges of his grief breaking open under the whiskey. "I know you're not her. I keep telling myself that."

"Then let go of my arm."

He didn't. Instead, his other hand rose into the dark, his large, hot palm cupping the side of my face. His fingers slid into the heavy waves of my hair, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw with an agonizing slowness—as if he were trying to memorize the contours of something he was terrified of losing twice. The contrast of his rough skin against mine sent a sharp, electric jolt straight down my spine, pooling low and heavy in my stomach.

"Ryker, stop," I breathed, my throat tight, my lungs fighting for air as he stepped fully into my space. "Whatever you think this is... stop."

For one second, I thought he heard me. His hand stilled against my cheek. His rough breathing caught in his chest.

Then the storm outside cracked the sky open with thunder, and something in him broke along with it.

"Vivian," he whispered.

And I understood, in that single word, that he wasn't in that room with me at all. He was somewhere else entirely, six months in the past, still standing at the edge of a hospital bed, still begging a version of my sister that no longer existed to come back to him.

"Ryker, look at me," I pleaded, my voice trembling. "It's Selene."

He didn't stop.

His mouth slammed down onto mine…a dark, desperate theft born of raw agony, liquor, and a sudden, terrifying hunger. His lips were hot, bruising, demanding, tasting of dark scotch and cold rain. I gasped in shock, and the moment my lips parted, his tongue invaded, possessive and deep, capturing my mouth with a fierce, suffocating intensity that made my head spin.

"Ryker, look at me!" I gasped against his lips, my hands slamming against his broad chest. "It's Selene!"

I said his name again. Then my own, over and over…a losing argument against a grief too large for either of us to control.

I don't remember deciding to stop fighting him. I only remember the fire long gone cold in the grate, the wind rattling the windows, and somewhere far away, the sound of my own voice, small and breaking, saying his name like it might still be enough to wake him up.

It wasn't.

By the time the words stopped meaning anything at all, the only thing left in that dark study was the storm, and his hands, and a mistake neither of us would be able to undo by morning.

A low, guttural groan tore from his chest as his arms wrapped around my waist, dragging my plush frame flush against his tall, hard body. He lifted me effortlessly, setting my broad hips onto the edge of the mahogany desk, scattering papers and crystal glasses onto the floorboards. He stepped between my knees, his large, calloused hands sliding up the heavy silk of my skirt, pushing the fabric past my knees, past my thighs, until his bare palms met the scorching heat of my bare skin.

I arched into his touch with a helpless gasp as his fingers dug possessively into the generous weight of my hips. He didn't care about delicate, fragile beauty…his hands gripped my lush curves with a fierce, ravenous urgency that made my heart hammer wildly against my ribs.

He shed his trousers and pulled my dress down over my broad shoulders, exposing the full, aching swell of my breasts. His dark green eyes burned through the shadows, lost in a storm of blind need. His mouth descended to cup one flush peak through my lace bra, sucking the damp fabric into his mouth until a sharp cry escaped my lips, my fingers tangling desperately into his thick hair.

When his slick, hot length pressed against my entrance, the sheer sensation ripped a sob from my chest. He guided himself in, his muscles trembling violently with restrained power.

He drove deep inside me in one smooth, overwhelming stroke.

I gasped, my eyes flying open, my back arching off the desk as he filled me completely. The stretch, the weight, the exquisite, scorching friction was almost too much to bear. He didn't stop. He set a deep, rhythmic, punishing pace that shook the heavy desk beneath us. Every thrust was a wave of agonizing pleasure that built a scorching fire deep in my belly.

My plush thighs wrapped tight around his waist, pulling him deeper, matching his frantic pace as the rain slammed against the glass. The friction of skin against skin, the heavy scent of our arousal, and the suffocating weight of his broad body pressing down on mine drove every logical thought from my mind. I was swept away in his dark storm, giving him every inch of my body even as my heart bled for the woman he thought he was holding.

He quickened his thrusts, his hands gripping my hips tightly, lifting me to meet every fierce, possessive strike.

"Ryker... please..." I cried out, my head thrown back, my body trembling on the razor edge of release.

He drove into me one last time, his entire body going rigid as his release claimed him, spilling his searing heat deep within my body. The sensation triggered my own climax…a violent, blinding shockwave that rippled through my core, making me sob aloud as I clung to his broad shoulders.

He collapsed over me, his heavy chest rising and falling against mine, his forehead resting against the damp skin of my neck as the thunder slowly echoed away into the night.

I woke before he did, gray light bleeding through the tall curtains, the storm finally spent outside.

I lay very still for a long moment on the leather sofa where we had ended up, staring at the ash-filled hearth, cataloging the exact shape of everything I'd lost in that room overnight. My body ached in ways I didn't want to examine too closely…a deep, bruised soreness across my hips and between my thighs. My throat was raw from saying his name so many times it stopped sounding like a word at all.

I thought about getting up quietly, slipping out before he woke, sparing us both whatever conversation was waiting on the other side of his eyes opening. I didn't move fast enough.

Ryker stirred beside me, and I felt the exact second he woke fully, the exact second his body went rigid as reality crashed back over him.

He sat up slowly, dragging his hand over his hard jaw. He looked at the torn sheets, then turned his gaze onto me as I pulled the sheet up over my chest.

"What did you do."

It wasn't a question. It was an accusation, delivered flat and cold, like I was the one who'd whispered the wrong name in the dark.

"What did I do?" I sat up, my voice shaking despite every effort to steady it. "I told you to stop. I said your name. I said mine. You didn't hear either one."

His green eyes flared with a cold, defensive anger. "That's not what I remember."

"Then your memory is doing you a favor, because I remember every single second of it."

He turned to look at me then, something raw and unguarded crossing his face before he shut it down again, replaced by the same cold, arrogant mask he wore for the rest of the world.

"This doesn't leave this room," he said flatly.

"Don't worry." I found my emerald dress crumpled on the floor and pulled it on with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. "I have no interest in telling anyone I spent the night with a man who thought I was someone else."

He flinched at that. It was the first thing he'd done all morning that looked like guilt instead of anger.

"Selene..."

"Don't." I kept my back to him, focusing on the buttons of my dress instead of the sound of his rough voice. "I don't want to hear whatever you're about to say. Not this morning. Maybe not ever."

"I need you to understand..."

"I understand plenty. I understood it the second you said her name into my hair, clear as anything, no confusion left in it at all." I finally turned to face him, my composure held together by nothing more than sheer stubbornness. "You don't get to explain your way out of this, Ryker. Some things don't come with an explanation good enough to fix them."

I was halfway to the door when his phone rang on the desk. He answered without checking the screen, his voice hoarse and distracted.

"...what do you mean, photos," he said slowly, and I watched the color drain out of his face for the second time in twelve hours. "No. That's not possible. Nobody was..."

He stopped talking, listening, his jaw tightening with every second that passed until the bone looked ready to snap.

"How many people have seen it?" His knuckles had gone white around the phone.

I stood frozen by the door, my hand on the brass handle, watching whatever remained of that man's composure collapse in real time.

"Send me everything you have. I'll be there within the hour."

He hung up and stood there for a moment, staring at nothing, before he finally looked up and found me still standing in the doorway. He looked at me, really looked at me, like he was seeing me for the first time since I'd walked into that study the night before.

"Selene," he said, lowering the phone from his ear, his voice careful and calculating. "We need to talk."

"About what, exactly?"

"Someone photographed you arriving here last night," he said, his tone ominously calm. "It's already online. And there are reporters camped outside the gate right now, waiting for you to walk out that door and hand them the rest of the story."

I had no idea yet, standing in that room in yesterday's dress with my whole life already unraveling behind me, that this was the morning everything changed…the morning that would end with lawyers instead of apologies. I didn't know that within days I would be wearing his ring, carrying a secret I hadn't even discovered yet, and standing in a marriage neither of us had chosen.

I only knew, watching his face, that whatever came out of that phone call next was about to be so much worse than a single mistake made in the dark.