She had never been with a man who had grabbed her quite so confidently, and he was the last man on earth who should have, since she hadn’t indicated at all that she wanted to kiss him.

Maybe, just maybe, at the last moment she had dared him rather than retreated. Maybe she had seen in his eyes that she could have stopped him, and had chosen not to.

But that was only a maybe.

And the next thing she’d known he’d been kissing her.

And really, it wasn’t like she should have reasonably been able to guess that was what he was about to do, even though he was holding her like that. Because they’d had seventeen years of not kissing, so the fact that they had suddenly started kissing was a whole weird thing.

She stood by the fact that he was the one who was wrong and not her. That he was the one who had changed things somewhat irrevocably and she could only feel annoyance about it.

She suddenly felt utterly and completely alone standing in the middle of the bar. She hated that feeling. It reminded her of being a child. Helpless. Standing in the corner while there was screaming going on around her.

Of when she would retreat deep inside herself and force that feeling because she hadn’t wanted to be where she was.

She had even learned to do it when her father had turned his rage on her.

To just go to another place and detach.

This moment was oddly reminiscent of that and she didn’t like it at all.

It wasn’t long before the door to the bar swung open, and in walked Ryder.

She was getting really tired of this.

Really tired of him deciding that he was going to go ahead and be shocking when that was supposed to be her job.

He was supposed to be predictable and easy. He was supposed to be safe. But nothing that he was doing right now was safe at all. And she didn’t know what to make of it. Not even a little bit, not even at all.

She started to back away from the door, but his eyes caught hers and managed to glue her in place to the floor.

And then the sensation inside her flipped, and it was like a whole other different kind of being alone. This was an isolation. It was as if the bar around her was falling away piece by piece. As if it were transforming into something else entirely. All of the insignificant bits were crumbling and dropping out of the sky like so many fallen stars, scattered around the floor at their feet. And it left her. It left Ryder. And this growing intensity between them that was thick and black like a night sky.

“You don’t want them,” he said.

And the unspoken words there were that she wanted him.

And she didn’t know what to do with that. Didn’t know what to make of it.