Now, I felt it, his presence casting over me like a shadow waiting to swallow me whole. I tried to throw my hands up, my first instinct one of protection, but something heavy and cold and menacing kept my wrists locked together, stretched behind my head and chained to…something. I whimpered as my brain tried to pound out through my eyeballs.

“Good, you’re awake.”

His voice shouldn’t sound so sexy under the circumstances, but that gravelly timbre, barely above a whisper, registered low in my belly.

“Rafe?” I had to be hallucinating or dead. This couldn’t be real.

I sensed movement, a drift of air and swoosh of clothing, and a dim light switched on. Several seconds passed as I blinked my surroundings into focus. I was sprawled on the ground of some sort of cage, my hands secured to the bars. I yanked on my bindings, and the bite of chains to metal made me shudder. My gaze shifted, taking in the space beyond my prison, which was cloaked in shadow, and I thought I spied rows of wine bottles. I returned my attention to him, mouth hanging open as I tried to comprehend that he had me bound and naked.

Rafe stood on the other side and circled the bars with white-knuckled fingers as he glared down at me. “You can try to escape if you want, but I think you’re smart enough to know when you’re fucked.”

On some level, I’d known this day would come. The day I’d have to face him. The day he’d demand an explanation for what I’d done. I’d imagined screaming and yelling on his part. Furious righteousness. Never this. As he withdrew a set of keys and moved to the door of the cage, any hope of forgiveness I’d clung to vanished. I couldn’t stop shaking as he stormed inside.

“What do you want from me?” I asked, nervous about the answer, especially when I thought of how my nudity was on display.

“Do you really want to know what I want?” The corner of his mouth turned up in the legendary Rafe Mason smirk I remembered.

“Yes.”

He bent and crawled over me, his knees settling at the apex of my thighs, and palmed the concrete on either side of my head. I licked my dry lips, acutely aware of how his clothing tickled my skin. That mere contact, the brush of denim on inner thigh, chased some of the chill away.

“I want to fuck you,” he said, and the way those words played off his tongue, with a riff of sinister intent, made my heart jackhammer. His biceps flexed under the strain of supporting his weight, and my attention closed in on the tribal lines streaking out from underneath his sleeves. Breathtaking ink on hard man, winding down strong forearms to the back of his hands. He lowered his face, a tilt to his head, and commanded my gaze. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

I wasn’t sure what I expected him to say or do, and I couldn’t begin to measure how angry he was. “I don’t know what to say, Rafe.”