like they were alive.
“You’re really beautiful, Saint.”
I narrowed my eyes at him and lifted my hands to wrap around his wrists. My fingers didn’t reach all
the way around and I didn’t want to think about how sexy that was. It was on the tip of my tongue to
remind him that he hadn’t always thought that, in fact if my memory was correct he had said it would take a
bag over my head for him to be interested in spending any kind of intimate time in my offensive presence. I
still felt the burn as the memory flashed behind my eyes.
“I just want to help.”
“You are helping.”
No I wasn’t. I shouldn’t have come here. He wasn’t my problem. What he was struggling with and
whatever complicated family dynamic he was working with had nothing to do with me, but it was like I
was seventeen again and couldn’t deny that there was just something about him that grabbed at me, pulled
at my too-sensitive heartstrings.
I sighed and gave him a tight smile. “No I’m not. You need to let the people who love you, who care
about you, in to help you out with this. That’s a heavy load to try and balance alone. Especially on top of
everything else with your parents. It’ll be all right, Nash. You’ll see.”
His eyes got even darker, and it was like watching midnight fall over the sky. I was balanced on my
toes, and he had a firm grip on my face, so when he suddenly pulled me forward I was both startled and off
balance. I had to let go of his wrists to catch myself as I fell forward, and I swore the heat coming off his
bare skin when my palms landed on the smoothness of his naked chest was enough to meld me to him
forever.
I was going to ask him what in the hell he thought he was doing. I was going to tell him that I had
stopped by more for his father’s sake than his. I was going to snap at him that he was the last man on earth
I would let put his hands on me after the lasting damage his unnecessarily cruel actions and thoughtless
words a lifetime ago had done. I never got the chance.
One of his hands snatched up the end of my long braid and wrapped it around his fingers like a rope.
His other slid across the nape of my neck and unceremoniously jerked me forward until we were chest to
chest, mouth to mouth, and I was plastered all along the very much undressed front of him. I pushed
ineffectually at his rock-hard shoulders, tried to wiggle my way free, but he was too strong, had too good of
a grip on my hair—and if I was going to be entirely honest, even drunk and sloppy he was one hell of a
good kisser, so my effort to get away may have been halfhearted at best.
I had spent a good portion of my last year in high school wondering what it would be like to kiss Nash
Donovan. Granted, in my fantasies it usually involved candles, soft music, and him being madly in love
with me while I just laughed at him and told him there wasn’t a chance in hell he ever had a shot at getting
with me. Wouldn’t it just be fate to shove it in my face that even though I didn’t particularly care for him,
didn’t think there would ever be a situation or set of circumstances in the whole wide world where I would
let him put his hands on me … that as soon as I was tested in those beliefs I crumbled like the Berlin Wall
coming down.
His lips were a little dry, his skin rough from too many days without a shave, and when he moved his
head just a fraction to run his tongue along the seam of my lips, I refused to open, and I felt the slight brush
of metal against my upper lip from that hoop in the center of his nose. I thought it would weird me out, but
it made me shiver, and when he pulled my hair just hard enough to make me huff out a breath of pain, he
got the entrance he wanted and I quickly slipped from indignant and annoyed to something squishy and
foreign that made my heart rate pick up and my pulse flutter jerkily under my skin.
Man, could he kiss. He was intent on it, like whatever was