“So did you.” She tried to turn the tables. “Of me.”

“I said you scared the shit out of me.” His eyes flickered with shadows, and she saw the torment in their depths, heard it as he spoke. “And you do. And you know why? Because I have to know whatever it is you’re hiding and I dread finding out what it is. I shouldn’t feel that way. I shouldn’t care.”

“Because it’ll make killing me harder,” she whispered, taking only small comfort in his torment being a sign he didn’t really want to, that he actually felt this connection to her that she felt to him.

He opened his mouth to reply and she shook her head, suddenly overwhelmed with unexplainable emotions. “Don’t answer. Please. I don’t want to know what you’ll say. We all have secrets. Mine are personal. They don’t affect you.”

“I need to decide that.”

“No.” Her fingers curled into her palms. “No damn it, you don’t.” Frustration filtered into her voice. “Stop pushing me.”

“You know I can’t.”

“You can. You say you aren’t loyal to Mendez. I’m helping you do what you were hired to do. That’s what matters. You know all you need to know.”

He framed her face and the touch was like sweet bliss, a relief. She didn’t understand why, but she’d needed him to touch her.  “I don’t know what I need to know,” he said, “until I know everything.” His thumb stroked her cheek, a soft caress that sent a shiver down her spine and tightened her nipples. “Everything, Kara. I have to know everything. I want everything.”

The way he said the words, like he had to own her, like he did own her, shook her to the core. She’d never wanted to be owned. She never considered that any man could own her, but she feared this one could, and would, if she let him. “You can’t have everything.”

He answered by leaning in, his mouth slanting over hers, his tongue delving past her teeth, doing a sensual slide into her mouth that sent a wave of heat through her body. “What you tell me stays with me,” he vowed. “Trust me, Kara.”

Her chest tightened uncomfortably, emotion welling inside her. Trust him? Was he serious? And why why why did she want to? This was how people got killed in this world. They fell for this kind of man, these kinds of promises. “I barely know you.”

He settled his cheek against hers, his lips against her ear. “You know me,” he said. “I see it in your eyes when you look at me.” He palmed her breasts and molded them together, teasing her nipples with his thumbs, and her thighs burned, the urge to clamp them around his hips impossible to suppress. “And I feel it in the way you respond to me.”