Chapter One

Eighteen months she’d been gone and her keys still worked.

She hadn’t expected that. Wasn’t even sure why she’d come up to the apartment to check when she’d been positive he would have gone ahead and changed every lock she’d ever touched within hours of her going.

That was what she’d told herself in those first, hard days after she’d somehow crawled away from this, as if calling a locksmith after a lover left like a thief in the night was the same thing as the leaving itself. As if it made them even.

Maybe she needed to believe they were.

But the lock was the same lock it always had been. The first surprise was that the building still had the same entry code. Then her key slid into the lock at his door and threw the smooth deadbolt the way it always had.

She tried it more than once, to be sure this wasn’t one of those dreams she’d had too often this past year and a half, only to wake up miserable somewhere that he’d never been and yet still haunted like something far more substantial than a simple ghost.

If this was a dream, she didn’t wake up, so that was already an improvement.

She hadn’t expected this to work and the odd fantasy she’d had that she might go inside and strip naked, then kneel there at the door the way she had when they’d been so deep in their life together—

Well, she couldn’t do it.

Not like this.

Not when she’d left that life so abruptly and cruelly. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to her until now that returning the same way would be equally abrupt. And far more cruel.

Assuming he allowed it to happen, which she couldn’t pretend was likely.

Maybe she’d needed to believe this, too.

Josette blew out a shaky little breath and carefully locked the door. Her hand was not exactly steady. She backed away from the apartment’s entrance, glancing around like she expected to be set upon by security guards in the small hall that led only to Arlo’s apartment.

Or worse, him, when she wasn’t ready.

When she was in a place she really shouldn’t be.

She hurried to the elevator and kept her eyes down in case anyone got on, then was unduly relieved when she made it to the lobby and could walk outside again. It was easier to breathe outside. When she’d finally made it in from the airport today she’d wandered out into the commons, a community gathering place here where the water of the estuary surged around the old Oakland Port 9th Street terminal and eventually led out into San Francisco Bay. Alameda hunkered down across the way. Coast Guard Island stood watch.

Back before, she’d spent hours staring down at all of this—and pretty, fairy-tale San Francisco in the distance—from his windows high above.

These days there was a new, fancy coffee place in the bottom of one of the apartment buildings and she’d found a table there. She’d spent most of the afternoon watching the giddy California sunshine dance in and out of shadows, trying to work up her nerve. Trying to find that spine she was terribly afraid she’d left in his apartment eighteen months ago along with several other things it turned out she couldn’t live without.

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But there were some things you couldn’t take back.

Josette knew that all too well. Outside again, she found her hand at the hollow of her throat again. Forever looking for the choker that wasn’t there any longer. She should have adapted already. After all, she was the one who’d taken it off.

She’d spent most of the afternoon in the shiny, hipster-y coffee house telling herself to go knock on his door, or call up from the lobby, whatever worked, but she hadn’t moved.

Maybe it was because the sun blinded her, so Californian and bright. Maybe she was as street-stupid as he’d always accused her of being and being back in Oakland scared her. Maybe she was the coward he’d showed her she was, and she didn’t like seeing that truth any more now than she had then.

But she was here. She’d come home. She told herself that counted for something.

She would know that she’d come back, that she’d tried to fix what she’d broken, no matter if he ever did.

Either way, she’d been frozen in place no matter how many coffees she drank. Then when the café closed she was frozen but also jittery and it had seemed like a great idea to go ahead and walk into the building she’d once called home, then march right up to the apartment that had once been theirs.

Was she happy he wasn’t there? Distressed?

Was she something like relieved? Josette couldn’t tell and she found that unforgivable. She’d had to hurt herself to leave him and it had been so difficult to come back, knowing that the intensity between them wasn’t something that could be slipped on and off like a lost sock in someone’s laundry pile. She couldn’t pretend she didn’t know exactly what she’d done to him. She couldn’t act as if any of this was casual.

It was tempting to call him her ex or a guy she’d been dating, and she’d done that as often as she could back east, but she’d known better. Because how could she explain him? How could she explain them?

He had been her everything and she had been his and walking away from that had consequences, just like coming back did. Serious consequences.

Maybe she wasn’t as prepared to handle those consequences as she’d thought she was.

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But she was outside again now and Brooklyn Basin was coming alive in the embrace of a deep red sunset. The dark was coming in fast. There was music in the distance and the usual crush of people wandering in the temperate dusk before the dark brought out the far scarier things who lurked in the shadows here. She wouldn’t stay much past nightfall. She would try again tomorrow.

Still, for a moment, she stood in the shadows and wished she could take it all back for approximately the seven millionth time.

And then, as if she’d conjured him up from the red and pink streaks to the west, there was suddenly a very hard, very familiar grip on her arm.

Then he was there.

She didn’t have to look up to identify him—she caught his scent, like cedar and salt, and she knew his touch better than she knew herself—but she did it anyway, because she’d always been a fool where this man was concerned. It was fault that ran inside her, tectonic and disastrous, and there was no getting away from it no matter how far she ran.

Lord knew she’d tried.

Looking at him after all this time felt inevitable, like doom mixed with that wild rush of heat she remembered all too well.

There’d been a time she’d called it joy.

And Arlo Finn stood before her, somehow even more terrifyingly perfect than she remembered, and she remembered every part of this man. She had memorized him immediately and completely. He was imprinted on her, inside and out.

They had clapped eyes on each other and that had been that.

It felt the same way now.

But tonight the wild red sky seemed to make him new, or maybe that was her trepidation and deep longing talking.

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For a breath, they studied each other.

He was a very large man who looked like exactly what he was: a very dangerous weapon that it would be foolish to underestimate. These days he ran private security but he’d started in the Army, then had some years he didn’t like to talk about. Josette had traced all the scars on his hard, tough body and could map them with her eyes closed. She’d kissed his broken nose and the space between those dark gray eyes of his that sometimes reminded her of rain, but tonight were more like steel. The kind people made into the bars of prison cells.

Arlo wasn’t anything close to beautiful. He was too rough, too real. He was made out of fists and ferocity, hammered over time, until nothing remained but a honed and deadly armory in the shape of a powerful, intimidating man.

Nothing had ever made her feel more safe, or more scared, than being with him. That was her curse.

Josette couldn’t speak. Her heart clawed at her chest. Her body reacted the way it always did—she melted. Her pussy was wet and greedy in an instant. Her skin burned where he touched her, a burn that spread to every last inch of her. Her breasts swelled against the shirt she wore, painfully. She was pretty sure she was sweating.

“Arlo…” she tried to say, but the ferociously grim expression on his face made her think better of it.

She was dimly aware that her head spun, like she was drunk, and that only made sense when her back hit a wall. Then he was a harder wall in front of her with his wickedly large, fiendishly clever, and extremely hard hands on either side of her head as he leaned in.

Josette thought he would say something—probably something she deserved to hear, not something she wanted to hear, but instead, he simply looked at her.

Like he was looking into her. Through her.

He’d pulled her out of the flow of the neighborhood, into some kind of alcove tucked into the shadows. Maybe it was an alley. She couldn’t bear to look away from him long enough to tell.

Arlo studied her face as if he’d been waiting for this moment—this exact moment, like it was preordained, like he’d known exactly when and how it would happen—and was not exactly thrilled that she’d turned up on cue.

This was not a new feeling when she was around him.

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Their issues were simple, really. He’d expected perfection and had delivered it on his end. She hadn’t been able to live up to his demands. Rather than discuss that yet again only to end up in the same stalemate, she’d bailed.

He didn’t have to lay that out for her. She knew. He knew. They had both been there that last night when she’d been unable to do what he’d asked and he’d lifted up her chin with one finger and had asked—eyes intense and direct—what now?

She’d been gone before dawn.

That sat between them too, uglier now that she was looking at him.

His dark gaze was an accusation all its own. His mouth was something far more ruthless than simply forbidding.

He didn’t speak. He moved, shifting back so he could reach down—his eyes still heavy on hers—to slide his hands beneath her skirt.

Josette watched as his gray gaze blazed, because he found her just the way he liked her. Shaved smooth and bare, no panties in the way, and soaking wet.

“I updated my profile on the Club app,” she managed to whisper. “I have full privileges.”

Because that was an easy way to tell him that she had a clean bill of health. She knew he did, too. She’d seen that he’d taken his profile active again on the app that catered to a very specific, very kinky audience and insisted upon weekly health status reports for access—a stab of pain that she had no right to feel, but had.

Arlo made a low noise she’d heard only rarely—when he was letting her see how much he wanted her—and then he lifted her up, one arm around her back. Like it was nothing to haul her up against him.

She knew this dance. She’d dreamed this a thousand times. His chest pressing her into the wall at her back, one hard forearm supporting her while she wrapped her legs around his waist, and his free hand working between them with a fierce kind of fury that flooded her with new heat.

But that was nothing.

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She felt the thick head of his cock as he pressed against her pussy, and he didn’t wait.

His gaze still on hers, jury and executioner, he slammed himself inside her—and he was too big for that. He knew it hurt. He meant it to hurt.

But Josette wasn’t wired like other girls.

She liked it when it hurt.

She more than liked it.

Josette came like a swift, hard punch, a muscular wallop that must have made her scream, because his hand was over her mouth. Not that she cared that they were in public, or nearly.

She tasted salt in his palm and his cock was enormous and lodged deep inside her, and her first orgasm was still tearing at her when he began to fuck her.

A hard, dark pounding. A retribution.

A recognition of who they were, what she’d done, how terribly she’d broken them.

It hurt. And it was glorious.

She came again and again, every climax another strike against her—more evidence of her guilt.

But she couldn’t stop.

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It was a brutal, beautiful fucking and all she could do was hold on, hoping her ass wasn’t getting scraped too badly against the bricks—though the truth was, she hoped it was. She hoped there were marks. That might be the only thing he let her take with her tonight.

For now, there was this. The sheer perfection of that battering ram of a cock and the way he used it to say all the things he didn’t. Wouldn’t.

Every accusation. Every harsh word.

He slammed it into her, reclaiming her and repudiating her, and he let her come and come—helpless to do anything but clench and shake and very nearly bite his hand.

Then, abruptly, he pulled out, his dark eyes wild and hot.

Arlo didn’t speak. He set her on the ground and then he pressed her back against the wall, and she knew what he was going to do before he did it. Her pussy was clenching in vain, she was empty and aching, and he stepped back anyway.

Then came in a scalding rush all over the concrete between them.

A uniquely hurtful punishment, just as she deserved.

He stood there a moment, one hand braced on the wall, and Josette could feel the cool air against the mess he’d made of her. She knew better than to touch herself, even to shift position. She didn’t dare touch him. And she had to bite back a protest, because every part of her felt empty. Her cunt felt cheated, so badly did she want to fell that scalding rush of his come inside her.

Arlo stared down at her and Josette had no illusions. He knew what she was thinking. He wanted her to feel like this. It was a proper little object lesson, wasn’t it? One she’d failed yet again. This had been for him and all she could think about was herself.

She was pretty sure he knew that too.

He shifted back and tucked his cock back into the workout trousers he was wearing. Maybe he’d been on a run. Or really had been working out at that gym of his down near the marina.

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She was breathing too hard, but she didn’t move until he nodded—curtly. Only then did she rearrange herself, trying her best not to feel crushed. Or silly, in her heels and flirty skirt with his come on the ground at her feet.

It was meant to be humiliating, and she supposed it was, except after eighteen months even this felt like a gift.

Arlo stood before her still, his arms crossed and that foreboding look on his granite face, and she wanted to say so many things…but she didn’t dare.

Not when he looked at her like this.

Like she really should have stayed away.

“What,” he asked in that lethally quiet voice of his that landed in her like another brutal thrust of his cock, a deep, red burn that didn’t quite tip over into that blissful heat that only he could bring out in her, “the fuck are you doing here, Josette?”

End of excerpt