His eyes filled with understanding. He saw things no one had ever seen inside her. Things no one had ever cared to see. Things she’d sworn never to let anyone see.

He picked up her hand, warming her from head to toe, warming the coldest parts of her. Her dark, unreachable soul, her always-hungry-for-him body, all of it a molten mess from one touch. His gaze kissed their joined hands. He saw every bit of his power over her. Felt it. Power he’d gained sneakily with lies. She tugged at her hand, but she couldn’t put enough force into it to pull away when he pressed it into his chest.

How she loved touching his chest. The warm, thick press of it against her palm. The comfort her entire being drew from it even when she tried not to. The sense of belonging that rested in the solid, beautiful planes.

“You feel that? It only beats like that when you’re around.” Her hand picked up the hypnotic rhythm beating against warm, hard muscle. “It’s always beating. I’m always me. But when you’re around it beats differently. Everything feels different. I’m me in a different way. But it’s more me, not less. You make me myself in a way I want to be.”

Snatching her hand out of his, she put distance between them. “Don’t say that. You only want to be with me because I’m not interested in a relationship. Because you can’t have me.”

The way he looked at her said he heard something beyond her words. He wasn’t listening to her. “I want to be with you because you’re what I’ve been searching for my whole life.”

“You’ve known me your whole life, Vansh.”

“No. You’ve been in my life, but I didn’t know you. You were hiding behind my brother. I’ve been waiting for someone who makes me feel this way, the way I feel around you. I always knew I would know when I met that person, and I do know.”

“So I make you feel good. That’s all I am, just another thing in your life that feeds your need to feel good. All the time.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed in the strong, almost poetically beautiful column of his throat.

She’d taken a hard swing at him, she knew. The thing he hated more than anything was her writing him off like this. Pain brightened his eyes, but there wasn’t a whit of anger in them.