“Siena, you can’t offer me the world and then take it away from me. Do you have any idea what my life was like before you came into it? Bleak. Lonely. Violent. One of my earliest memories was of my grandfather blowing a man’s brains out. I saw it. The blood spattered everywhere, all over the walls. All over me. I was there when they beat a man to death. I think I was about six when that happened. When I threw up, my grandfather beat me while his men all laughed.”

Her entire body jerked. She gasped, her breath catching in her throat. She’d been lonely as a child, but she’d been happy.

“I was trained from the time I was a boy in the use of guns, knives, martial arts, boxing, kickboxing and good old street fighting. I knew I was going to be an enforcer in my family’s world. That was my job, and I did it from a very early age. You don’t have friends. You don’t dare care about a lover. You keep to yourself. If you’re the son or grandson or nephew of a Lospostos, you’re always a target.”

He was killing her. He couldn’t tell her this. She didn’t want to feel anything at all for him or for that little boy growing up. She’d been safe in boarding school with bodyguards all around her. He’d been fighting to stay alive. She heard the truth and knew what it meant. He didn’t have to spell it all out for her.

“Stop,” she whispered, because already her fingers, of their own volition, wrapped around his thick cock, holding him tight in her fist, as if she could hold him close and keep him safe that way. “You have to stop, Elijah.”

“My uncle murdered my parents. He wanted to be the sole power in the Lospostos family, and my father was taking us in a direction my uncle didn’t want to go. He threatened to kill my sister if I didn’t cooperate with him. He turned me into a killer, Siena. For years, that’s all I was. That was my life.”

“Stop,” she whispered again. She couldn’t stop her body from turning into his. She wanted to be strong. She sternly told herself to be strong. Where was her sense of self-preservation? She was an idiot for listening to him. For letting him tell her these things. So personal. So deep, so real she knew no one else had ever heard the things he was saying to her. “Elijah, don’t.”

“I’m not going to let you go.” He moved suddenly, his body rolling back over hers, his chest pressed to hers, his hips wedged between her thighs. One hand spanned her throat and his beautiful, exotic molten eyes moved over her face, a brooding, hooded perusal that stole her breath.