Chapter Seventy-Nine

Safiya

G rayson Ryker Gautier kissed me.

Dominant and consuming and primal, he had kissed me .

I had no frame of reference, except for a boy in the village when I was too young to know what he was attempting when he had leaned toward me one bright afternoon.

But that had not been a kiss.

I had read classic literature. I had learned English vocabulary and its nuances. I had read contemporary romance novels. I had even read that popular one with explicit scenes. I had read so much that I was foolish enough to think that I would know what to expect.

But the second Grayson had taken control, the very moment he had put his lips to mine, all sense and reason had left me.

I did not have pretty words.

I did not have cascading nuances.

And nothing, absolutely nothing , could describe how the yearning and untended fire that had been building in me since the moment our eyes had met eight long years ago would explode into this frenzied madness.

A frenzied madness that was the dominant, consuming kiss of a merciless killer. Manipulating my body's response to him with more skill than when he aimed his large guns, the American SEAL had not merely kissed me.

He had not simply laid claim.

He had not only staked ownership.

Grayson Ryker Gautier was a libidinous paragon of sexual prowess.

And he was a thief.

Robbing me of every one of my firsts, he was my first hope.

My first blue-gray eyes.

My first soaring flight through the stars.

My first ocean.

My first crush.

My first heartbreak.

My first soul stealer.

And now, my first life-altering, earth-shattering, no-turning-back kiss.

Bringing my finger to the slightly throbbing flesh of my bottom lip, wishing his breath was still on mine, I traced the tenderness, but as soon as I did, his large hand was there.

Threading his fingers through mine, pulling until my arm was extended, he brought the back of my hand to his lips.

Then he bit me.

The stretched-thin skin over my knuckles flared with a sharp, quick snap of pain, but then radiating, forbidden heat flushed over my hand and crawled up my arm until it prickled across the back of my neck.

I shivered, my lip throbbed, and a new kind of pain pulsed between my legs.

His low, despotic tenor filled the cabin. "Do you know what you're feeling right now?"

Floaty, needy, desperate, confused. Machinated by design. "Yes."

His thumb stroked over the spot he had assaulted with purposeful intent. "Tell me."

"Robbed."

Driving out of his mother's neighborhood, he turned south then glanced at me. "Of choice or time?"

It was choice.

One kiss, and my body had become his servant. So uncompromisingly so that I did not know if it was by his design, or if this, us, had been written in the stars before his feet had ever touched the soil of my birthplace.

But now, it was also time.

Eight years .

Eight years he had waited to do this. To kiss me like that, to hold my hand, to show me his mother—because that had not been an introduction. It had been an orchestrated presentation of what he had wanted me to see. His past, his upbringing, his responsibility.

It had been to counter the effect of what I had seen in that office building.

But now I was also seeing something else.

Something I had repressed.

Something my conscience had been pushing at me.

That fraction of a glimpse.

That split-second when he had picked me up off the floor in the middle of a shoot-out and I had gotten a single glance into a room full of dead men.

But it had been more than that.

I had caught a glimpse of a particular man. A very, very horrible man. One I knew. One everyone in my village had known. His heinous acts of terror so evil that no one ever dared to speak his name aloud for fear of becoming one of his victims.

A man whose currency was trafficked women and whose religion was terror.

A man I had seen lying in a natatorium of blood.

That was the man Grayson and his stepbrothers had killed.

This was the reason for all of those women.

All of his absences, all of his secrecy, all of his protocols.

This was what eight years looked like.

And I had not put it together before this very moment.

"Time," I whispered, suddenly seeing a Navy SEAL turned paramilitary operative turned warrior turned mercenary in a very different light. "You assassinated Ibrahim al-Hashimi."