“Hiya, how are you?” The host at Akbars greeted me with a smile and a familiar handshake. I frequented this restaurant often—probably too often—and they knew me here. Well, it had been one of my favorite haunts when I’d been allowed to live in York. Now, it was a special treat, since I was only a visitor.

I summoned up my practiced, bright smile to cover my grief. “I’m great, thanks. How are you?”

“Good.” He returned my smile, oblivious to my pain. I must be getting really good at concealing my darker emotions. “Just you tonight?”

“I’m meeting someone. I’ll wait over here.”

I’d arrived early. Eagerness and ingrained anxiety about tardiness had brought me here five minutes prior to seven PM.

I fiddled with my fingernails. Would Scott realize just how desperate I was to see him? Would he think I was pathetic?

Before I could become consumed by my worries, his voice sounded behind me.

“Sorry if I’m late.”

I jolted, but his big hand touched my lower back, instantly grounding me. I resisted the urge to lean into him. My body craved more contact.

I forced myself to step away and turn to face him. “You’re not late. I was just a little early.”

He smiled. “Punctual. I like that.”

I supposed he would, being a military man. I glanced at the clock on the wall. He’d arrived three minutes before our date was scheduled.

Was he as eager to see me as I was to spend more time with him? Or did he simply hate being tardy as well?

My stomach danced with nerves, and my palms began to sweat. My emotions were a roiling mess, making me almost giddy. I couldn’t believe he was really here, after all these months wondering where he was in the world. Wondering if he was all right. If he was happy. If he was thinking of me, too.

But what did he want out of this dinner? Was he here for sex?

Although the idea of his big body pinning me down made my blood heat, I couldn’t shake a sense of dread. He’d said he’d read my books—my dark, kinky books. What did that mean? How would he see me now that he knew the depths of my deviant needs?

“Just the two of you?” the host asked, puncturing my mounting anxiety.

“Yeah,” I said breathlessly.

“This way.” The man picked up two menus and a handful of rose petals to scatter on the table.

“They always put rose petals on the table,” I babbled as we followed in the host’s wake. “They do it when I come here with my girlfriends, too. I mean, it’s not like a romantic thing.” I didn’t want him to think I was being presumptuous. He’d declared that he’d come to York to see me, but that didn’t necessarily mean this was a grand romantic gesture. Maybe he really did just want a signed book. Maybe after he fucked me, he’d pass it around to his buddies, and they’d laugh at the dirty dialogue.

The prospect made my stomach turn.

“Oh,” Scott replied simply as we took our seats at a corner table. His expression was blank, his emotions indiscernible.

“Anyway,” I chattered on quickly, “the food here is amazing. Some of my favorite dishes in the whole world, actually. Well, just one, really. I’m kind of a creature of habit, so I always order the same thing.”

His stare remained steady on me, his face still an unreadable mask. A moment of silence weighed heavy on me, but words stopped streaming from my lips. They all seemed to have deserted me.

“You don’t have to be nervous around me,” he finally said.

Shit. Was I that easy to read? I thought I’d gotten better at masking my more unstable, negative emotions. But I couldn’t seem to hide from Scott’s penetrating blue gaze.

The waiter came to our table, saving me from having to formulate a response. I ordered a beer and the same dish I always ate. Scott took a few minutes to look over the extensive menu and finally settled on a spicier option.

“That’s going to be really spicy,” I told him as the server walked away.

“I can handle a little heat,” he said with a smirk.

Was that a sexual innuendo? Scott had been so earnest and raw with me during our night together in Nashville. There hadn’t been much time for teasing. Well, unless I counted him teasing my breasts and my pussy with his mouth.

I flushed and glanced down at the table, hoping to hide my flash of lust from him. I didn’t want him to know how desperate I was. He’d claimed he’d read my books, but that didn’t mean he’d turned into an experienced Dominant since I’d last seen him. I wasn’t certain what he wanted from me.

I knew what I wanted from him: his big cock inside me, stretching me as he stared down at me like I was something precious. I craved to indulge in that connection again, but I feared he wouldn’t think of me the same way now that he knew the contents of my explicit books. I couldn’t imagine him regarding me with reverence after learning the depths of my kinky desires.

In Nashville, he’d looked at me like I was something good and pure. Surely, he couldn’t feel the same now. I didn’t consider my sexual needs degrading—quite the opposite, in fact—but to a vanilla outsider like Scott, they could alter his perception of my character.

I wanted to demand to know what he wanted from me, specifically; I wanted to cut to the chase, so I wouldn’t be tormented by uncertainty.

But I couldn’t bring myself to be so bold. I feared his response might sting too badly if he just wanted a quick, meaningless fuck.

“So, you’re in England for work?” I asked, directing the conversation to safer topics.

“Yes,” he said. He didn’t elaborate.

Crap. That probably wasn’t such a safe topic. Of course he wouldn’t tell me anything about his real job or where he was stationed. According to my dad’s friend who’d served in Delta, Scott would never be able to say where he’d been or where he was going. That was classified.

“You’re here for work, too, right?” he prompted, taking up the conversational slack.

“Yeah,” I said quickly. “I came for my signing today, but I’m also here to visit friends. I’m actually staying for six weeks.”

His brows rose. “Why so long?”

“I like it here,” I said, dismissing my secret grief with a casual wave. “As long as I have my laptop with me, I can work anywhere. I’ll spend my evenings with my friends and my days in Starbucks to hit my word count.”

If I’m not too blocked to write. I kept that cynical thought to myself. Scott didn’t need to know the extent of my damage, my struggles. In Nashville, we’d both needed to be held, but we’d talked about his pain, not mine. I’d lied and pushed down my true emotions, going along with his idealized view of me as a confident, composed woman. I couldn’t bear to shatter that illusion. It felt too good, and I cared more about pleasing him than unloading my baggage on him. If he needed a happy fantasy of me, I’d preserve that. I didn’t want to ruin the memory of the beautiful night we’d shared together.

If his perception of me hadn’t already been ruined by the contents of my books.

“But you used to live here,” he said, a statement of fact.

I blinked at him. “How do you know that?”

“I looked into you.” He shrugged.

I shifted in my chair, suddenly uneasy. The server brought our food. It smelled delicious, but I no longer had an appetite.

“How much do you know?” I asked, my mouth dry. With the resources he likely had access to, he probably knew everything about me. I’d thought he would know me too well after reading my kinky writing, but I hadn’t considered the fact that he might take the time to really look into me: Addison Burke, not my pseudonym Lauren Krane.

“Quite a bit,” he admitted, unrepentant. “But I don’t know you. Just background information.”

I frowned, irritation threading through my mounting dread. It wasn’t fair that I’d thought about this mystery man for months, knowing I’d never be able to find him again. And he’d been able to look me up and learn everything about my life. I supposed that was my fault for telling him my pen name, which had given him all the information he would need to research me.

And hadn’t part of me secretly hoped that he’d think about me, just like I’d so often thought about him?

“That’s not fair, you know,” I pointed out, crossing my arms over my chest. “I don’t know anything about you.” Something horrible occurred to me. “Is your name actually Scott?”

Had everything been a lie?

“Yes,” he replied, allaying that particular fear. “I know it’s not fair, but I still wanted to see you. Like I said, I know things about your life, but I don’t know you.”

I cocked my head at him. “What do you know about me?”

“I know you were born in Savannah, Georgia. I know you rode horses competitively between the ages of eleven and seventeen. You went to Duke University, and after that, you attended the University of York in England, where you got your MA in Archaeology. Then, you went on to start your PhD in the same subject. You quit the program, got married, and moved to North Carolina. You moved away from Raleigh after a year and bought a house in your hometown of Savannah. Two years after that, you tried to relocate to the U.K., but you didn’t stay longer than five months. You filed for divorce and moved back to America, renting an apartment in Chicago, where you live now.” He ticked off facts about my life on his fingers, his expression betraying absolutely no remorse over digging into my past. “I want to know more.”

I closed my jaw from where it had been hanging open. “What more could you possibly want to know?” I asked faintly, struggling to find air. “You seem to know everything.”

“Well, why Archaeology? Let’s start there.”

A strained laugh caught in my throat. “Sure. Let’s start there. I don’t know anything about you at all, and I never will. But I’ll tell you all my hopes and dreams and failures.” My words dripped with sarcasm.

His lips pressed to a thin line. “You do know,” he said quietly. “You saw me in Nashville. You saw me. I don’t… I don’t usually talk like that.”

I wanted to snap back that he hadn’t actually talked. He hadn’t openly admitted anything except for the fact that he used to be in Delta Force.

But I knew exactly what he meant. He’d opened up a facet of his soul to me that night. I might not be allowed to know facts about his life, but I knew him much better than he knew me. He only knew his fantasy of me, but I’d seen his deepest pain, his scarred heart.

“Your food’s getting cold,” he said, his tone detached. “Eat.”

I instantly lifted my fork, responding to the direct command without thought. I obeyed orders.

We ate in silence for a few achingly long minutes. He barely looked at me. I could feel him putting up walls between us, and I hated the barrier.

“I wanted to be an archaeologist ever since first grade,” I blurted out. “Well, I wanted to be an Egyptologist, at first. I had a picture book about King Tut, and I was fascinated by ancient Egyptian culture. My parents bought me an archaeology toy kit, and I ended up excavating a corner of the sand box at school. I thought the black plastic lining underneath was hiding dinosaur bones.” My cheeks burned at the memory of my classmates’ reactions to my behavior, their laughter. “I always was a weirdo.”

“I don’t think you’re weird. I think you’re fascinating. You’re one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. On paper, at least. That’s why I wanted to come here to see you. I had to know more.”

I peeked up at him, hardly able to believe his earnest words.

Fascinating?

In adulthood, I’d overcome the shame of being weird and started to think of myself as unique. But for a man like Scott to think I was fascinating was…heady. The way he stared at me with open curiosity was both thrilling and disconcerting.

“So, how do you go from being a six-year-old who loves ancient Egypt to studying postgrad Archaeology?” Scott prompted me to elaborate.

“Well, I fell in love with Greco-Roman history in high school, and I decided I wanted to become a professor of Archaeology,” I continued, compelled to respond when he was regarding me so intently. “I spent the next ten years pursuing that dream. Until I abandoned it to write romance novels.”

“I want to know more about that,” he said. “Your writing, I mean. When did you start writing? I know you first published during your MA. What made you decide to write a book?” He held up a hand before I could answer. “You know what? That can wait. You need to eat, and then, you can tell me all about it later.”

“Later?”

He grinned. “Yeah, over drinks. You didn’t think I’d let you off with just dinner, did you?”

I tried to puzzle out if there was a deeper meaning to his words. He might have said I was fascinating, but would he still look at me like his fantasy woman if I took him back to my apartment? Would he still touch me with awe if I were stripped naked in front of him?

“I, um… Well, I don’t know. I didn’t expect you to show up here. This is kind of throwing me for a loop.”

His expression dropped to something more neutral. “Do you want to call it a night after dinner?”

“No!” The vehemence of my reply surprised me. I might be setting myself up for heartache later, but I couldn’t help craving more time with him. “I mean, I’d love to go out for a drink. I know this awesome underground gin joint.”

His smile returned, and my insides went all gooey. “Sounds perfect.”