“Try me,” I said, unlocking it.
“You won’t, because you want to know why I’m here. You want to know what I have to say. Whatwe have to talk about.”
He paused, leveling a look at me that was hard enough to make my stomach tie itself into knots. Nobody had ever looked at me that way. Certainly not my ex. The absolute intensity directed straight at me from Lincoln had a force to it that I’d never experienced before. A wildly powerful, barely contained carnal interest. In me.
“You want to know why I’m keeping my distance,” he continued after a moment, “but inviting you in. To talk.”
“Did you just invite me in. Tomy grandmother’s house, thatyou broke into?” The audacity …
Lincoln stepped back through the doorway. “Are you coming or not?” he called from inside, the only answer he was going to give.
It took me several long seconds to overcome my anger at him, but during it, I noticed something else. The prickly warning sensations that had plagued my spine were gone. At some point they had vanished. Now I looked at the house and thought about going in.
Nothing. It was safe.
Infuriated at Lincoln still but sensing no further danger, I went to the house and up the steps, pausing in the frame of the door to peer around inside. Just in case. But there seemed to be no setup.
“Close the door.”
The command came a moment after I crossed the threshold, cutting me off before I could unleash a fresh tirade of anger atthe arrogance of his breaking in. The quickness of it shattered my carefully constructed argument, the pieces falling around me like wilting flower petals.
“No,” I said as I watched him. He was pacing back and forth, like a caged animal desperate to break free. With his size and muscles, the intensity could not be ignored. “Not until you calm down at least.”
Lincoln came to an abrupt halt, looking down at his clenched fists. Taking a deep breath in, he exhaled with a shudder, much of the tension leaving his shoulders as he did.
It should have worked. I should have felt more at ease around him. Instead, the ferocity of what he’d been keeping caged inside swept outward and washed over me. That should have been intimidating or outright scary. What it should not have been was alluring.
Drawing me in toward him, like I was the moth and he was the flame, was not part of the agreement. There was no containing something like him, no matter what a part of me was saying. No,screaming. I could not fix him. Could not make him better.
So why was I taking a step toward him, reaching blindly for the door to let it close behind me, which would trap me in the house with him?
Yet throughout it all, his stare never left me, never strayed. Lincoln had eyes for me, and me alone, and that was … unfathomable. Who was I to capture the attention of such abeast of a man as him?
Like a hunter, he watched my every move. Stalking me with his eyes. Waiting, wary, but fearless. Bold.
“What do you want with me?” I heard myself say into the silence. It wasn’t quite the angry answer-demanding riposte I’d intended. But it was what had come out.
“It’s not about what Iwant
,” Lincoln said, growling from somewhere deep in his chest at the final word, his eyes burning with a very clear-cut definition of what he meant.
Skin tightened everywhere across my body at the insinuation. Meanwhile, in the center of my stomach, a roiling ball of heat to rival the sun exploded into being, threatening to flood every corner of my body with its mind-melting warmth. If my danger sense was going off, it was overpowered by the roar of blood rushing through my veins, every nerve ending brought to life by one single word.
“We barely know each other’s names,” I whispered into the furnace that was once the foyer of my grandmother’s house. I didn’t trust myself to speak any louder.
“I know,” Lincoln replied, one hand clenching around the back of a nearby chair in the sitting room. The wood creaked under his grip. “Trust me. I know. Yet …”
The number of things contained in that “yet” slammed into me like a hurricane, giving life to the million different scenarios and fantasies locked away in a tightly guarded corner of my brain. They all sprang forward like a water main with a leak.
I’d kept them there because, as I’d just told him, I didn’t know a thing about him besides his first name. So it wasn’t helpful to think so intensely about someone. Now they came rushing over me in a swirling storm that I couldn’t dodge. Even if I’d wanted to.
My body tingled as he fixed both eyes on me-the blue icy and hard while the golden amber glowed with heat and power. Theystood as a perfect definition of the dichotomy of Lincoln as I knew him.
“Lincoln,” I forced myself to say through the maelstrom in my mind and the full-body tingling his attention was eliciting. “Why. Are. You. Here?”
Each word had to be its own sentence, else I risk losing control of my mouth. Of saying something we both might regret.
He didn’t look away. He stared straight into the storm, facing it down without moving or even flinching.
“Because I want to be,” he ground out, his chest rising and falling with a heavy breath. “I need to be. I-“
He shook his head violently enough to send his long hair flying. “You were born here. In New Lockwood, I mean. Correct?”
There was no stopping my eyebrows from shooting up at the sudden change-not only in topic but in his body language. He was once again locked down, trembling in place as something inside him struggled to break free but was unable to escape the cage he was keeping about himself.
“Uh. Yes?”
“Then you left,” he pushed.
“Your ability to ferret out answers is nigh unmatched,” I replied, trying to pull together the pieces of my mind once more. Where was he going with this? What did it have to do with … with whatever had almost happened a moment ago?
“Tell me about that,” he said tightly.
Is that desperation in his voice? What in the name of heavens is going on?
I didn’t hide the skepticism. “That’s what you want to ask me about?”
The burning in his eyes betrayed the lie, but he nodded slowly anyway. “One of the things I want, yes. One of many.”
My mouth drained of all moisture as something slipped through his walls to punch me right between my breasts. A reminder of … of something unspoken.
“So will you tell me?”
“Lincoln, there is noway you came out here and broke into my grandmother’s house just to ask me this simple question. You could have knocked on the door and asked me when I answered. Like a normal person.”
He smiled, and my heart stopped for a pair of seconds. “Yet here I am,” he said. “Nor am I normal.”
“Okay, fine,” I said over the butterflies. “My parents moved away when I was ten. That’s it. That’s the entire story. Sorry to disappoint. Now will you leave my grandmother’s house?”
“That’s not it. I want you totell me about it, Sylvie,” he growled.
I had to brace myself after hearing my name on his lips. The sound of it hit me like a fishing lure, snagging on my chest and pulling me in closer. I hated that feeling of weakness, of nearly succumbing to his inadvertent … whatever it was.
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