I shook my head. The answer to everything he was asking me was no. No, I would not tell him. No, the things we’d done did not give him the right to all my secrets. No, he could not bully it from me.

“Please,” I said. “Don’t push.”

He seemed stunned that I’d asked. And he rocked back, a little. Our entrenchment not as deep as I’d thought.

“Okay.”

I felt a threatening softness toward him at his capitulation. It wasn’t his nature and it didn’t come easily.

He poured himself a cup of coffee, ate the leafless strawberry I’d been playing with. His fingers were wide and blunt, the nails cropped close. White calluses covered the tips.

I still wanted those hands on me. I still wanted to know what it would be like to be touched by him.

“I’d like to go home,” I said.

“Do you? Do you really want to go home?” That voice, that soft, dark, rough voice that led me places I’d never imagined I’d go.

His eyes were hot on my body. He’d been thinking the same thing I had. He still wanted more of me. Despite everything.

“You’re the one who didn’t want to see me,” I said because I could feel all of this turning. I was getting swept up again by him and heading toward water that was inevitably going to be over my head. “You ended it because I said I wanted to see you. I didn’t even mean it, I just wanted it, and you said we couldn’t talk to each other anymore. And now you want me to stay?”

“I do.” I opened my mouth to argue but he held up his hand. “And no more lies, Annie—you want to stay too.”

I did, but hadn’t I been reckless enough? Wasn’t it time to go back to being Annie McKay?

“No. I need to find out if Ben is okay. If Joan—”

“Call.”

“What?”

“Use the phone…Call…what’s his name at the desk?”

“Kevin. He’s your employee, isn’t he?” My words were wasps, stingers out. I wanted to touch him and wound him. Every breath I pulled into my lungs sizzled. Burned.

Anger was no stranger to me. I lived with anger. A low-level seethe every minute. An anger I’d had to swallow over and over again. Because while I might be angry, I couldn’t show that anger. Showing anything but a bland and smiling face would get me hurt.

Never, not with my mom and certainly never with Hoyt, had I been allowed to behave this way.

Childish and petulant. Pissy.

It was fucking revelatory. A delight. It felt like I’d unbuttoned a pair of too tight pants. Pants that had been suffocating me.

“It’s a means to an end, Annie. Easier to keep an eye on Ben.”

“Why do you need to keep an eye on Ben? Were you related to that girl in the fire?”

“Why are you twenty-four years old and never touched yourself before?”

He was not going to pull a single punch. If I stayed, it was open season on my secrets.

From his back pocket he pulled out a phone and looked up a number before handing it to me. “Call him. Make sure your friends are okay.”

I pressed call on the screen and walked back toward my room.

“Flowered Manor RV Park.” It was Kevin.

“Kevin,” I said. “It’s Annie. I’m calling to make sure everything is okay.”

“Well, we got some power lines down because of the storm, but other than that everything is okay.”

“Last night…Ben?”

“He’s fine. Came in this morning before the rain to get a newspaper. Grumpy as a cuss. But that’s usual.”

“And Joan?”

“Haven’t seen her.”

“The guy on the motorcycle?”

“I heard about that. No sign of him this morning. Where are you?”

“I’m…” Christ. Where am I? “At a friend’s.”

“You have friends?”

“Very funny. But that guy last night…he didn’t do anything?”

“He was loud, apparently. Caused some trouble and then he left.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You stay dry,” he said. “And indoors. Not fit for man or beast out there.”

“Thank you, Kevin.”

I hung up and cowardly felt like hiding in the room.

Because Dylan wanted me to stay and I…I wanted to stay. Well, that wasn’t the total truth. My body wanted to stay. And my body ached for him. I felt like those phone calls between us were a promise, like the storm rolling in over the valley. And I was flush with the potential to make good on that promise.

My head was trying to make a case for getting the hell out of here.

You are alone in an isolated cabin with a man you don’t really know.

I knew enough though, didn’t I? Enough to know that if I stayed, something amazing would happen. He would touch me. Kiss me. Make me come. And not by myself. Not alone in a shitty trailer on the edge of a swamp.

The need for connection—for what we had on the phone to be made real. Physical. It was all that mattered.

I was Annie McKay, and I could go back to my strange, hollow, friendless existence later. I could go back to hiding and waiting later.

I did not think about Hoyt. My husband.

Marriage, I decided, was not the word for what I had.

Another time I would figure out what word fit. Another day.

But right now…Dylan.

In the end it wasn’t a decision. Dylan was an instinct. An urge, like a tide in my blood.

I would do this. I would have this.

And then I’d forget it.

I went back into the kitchen to find him standing in front of the windows, watching the storm. The rain and the clouds. The flash and crackle of lightning, spanning the distance between heaven and earth. A link—electric and momentary—between the two.

“Everyone okay?” he asked without turning around.

“Yes. They’re fine. Apparently, Max left without doing anything.”

He made a low assenting noise in his throat.

I set the phone down on the table and clutched my shaking fingers together. “Now what?”

Lead me, I thought. Lead me like you’ve always led me.

He turned, his face, that nose, those lips, the edges of the scar there on his neck.

Dylan.

“Now, take off your clothes.”

DYLAN

Truthfully, Dylan expected her to comply. Dylan expected her to do everything he asked. She was twenty-four and she was so innocent. The kind of innocent that never went away. She could watch a dozen strippers give blow jobs and she’d still be innocent.

Pure, that’s what Annie was. She was pure.

Pure, but curious…it was a killer combination.

That purity, it was a part of her. It was in her eyes as she watched him from across the room. It was in her voice. Fuck, it was in the ramrod straightness of her spine, like she knew she shouldn’t be here. Like she knew she was better than this place, and what was going to happen here.

Dylan wondered again where she was from, what kind of life she’d had that kept her insulated from the world. What she was so damn scared of. But then he shoved the thought aside, because she’d made it clear it wasn’t his business.

He’d never been innocent. He’d been ruined since the moment of his birth.

And he was going to smear her with all the filth on his hands. He was going to get it all over her.

The devil in Dylan Daniels was in charge now. And the devil couldn’t wait.