As we cross into the thick forest from the clearing with the hot springs, I feel like I’m being weighed down from the inside. My stomach churns, and it’s like I have a brick in my gut.

Damien holds my hand, saying nothing.

I steal a glance at his tattooed back. His posture is upright and his gaze is forward. One of the muscles in his back twitches, and I’m reminded of just how damn sexy this man is. My mind flashes to the first night we were together, when I dug my fingernails into his back while he filled me, fucking me senseless.

Nails in his back were how I begged for mercy. Even though I liked it. I loved the way he took control once the switch flipped and we were on. I wanted that to happen again. I wanted it to be just like the first night, too. No backstory between the two of us. No history to worry about, and no secrets to keep. We were just two lost souls who collided for a night of carnal pleasure.

It was supposed to be just one night. That’s all I ever wanted.

As we walk farther into the forest, just the top half of the sun is visible on the horizon. Damien squeezes my hand and I flash a fleeting, fake smile at him.

He knew something was up with me. And I didn’t know how to tell him what I needed to confess. Once I crossed this line, he might hate me. He said it himself: the one dealbreaker he has is a partner who lies. Who keeps things from him. He’s a fucked-up guy and he doesn’t ask for much, just honesty. But even now, I don’t know if I’ve got the guts to tell him everything.

“Well, that escalated quickly,” Damien finally says with a slightly upturned grin, breaking the silence.

We stop walking as we come to a grove with really thick trees and a small clearing. The canopy of trees makes it hard to see the sky above.

It’s hot, and I’ve only got my denim shorts and swimsuit top on. Damien doesn’t even have a shirt. I feel like I’m about to be much more exposed. I turn my body so I’m in front of Damien, and raise my eyes to meet his.

Damien’s brow is furrowed, and my heart hammers hard as he examines me with squinted eyes. For a moment I see him as a stranger, and think that if I didn’t know he was on my side, I’d be damn scared of him. He’s downright intimidating. But I still have to tell him what’s on my mind.

“Damien,” I croak, looking him in the eye. “I need to tell you something.”

“I know.”

“Y-You do?”

“Yes. You’re all clammed up. You look like you’re about to explode.”

“Promise you won’t get mad?” I beg.

He lets out a frustrated exhale. “I can’t promise anything. I promise I won’t judge you. But get mad? If it’s something that makes me angry, that’s just an instinctual reaction.”

“Okay,” I say lightly, exhaling softly. Here goes nothing.

“My biggest regret was a lie. Yeah, I regret my relationship with Nick. But there’s more to it than that.”

He tightens his jaw. I sense him tensing up. “Go on,” he says, his voice gruff. His eyes narrow, not leaving mine.

“Nick had me make a porno,” I manage to croak.

I feel Damien shudder as his hands slips out of mine. He blinks a few times, running his hands through his hair. “You what?”

I swallow, taking a big breath. “I made a porno...with Nick. And someone else.”

His eyes are so wide they look ready to jump out of his head. He opens his mouth like he’s about to speak, but in the end he says nothing. Closing his eyes, he pinches the bridge of his nose.

“You had... a threesome.”

I gulp and nod, searching his face for a sign of what he’s thinking.

My adrenaline spikes as I wonder what’s going through my head. Weirdly, though, I feel better already. No matter what he says now, I’ve said my truth. If he turns and walks away and judges me like he said he wouldn’t—our love wasn’t meant to be. But if he stays—

“Okay,” Damien growls in a low voice. He puts a hand out onto my shoulder and takes a deep breath. “Tell me everything. Don’t spare me any details.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” Damien nods.

“All right.” I breath out. “When I first moved to Chicago from Detroit, Nick was my boyfriend. And I thought we would be together forever, you know? I was like nineteen. We were young and in love, and I couldn’t see my future with anyone else but him. I had blinders on.”

“Go on.”

“Well, like I said we were young and trying to make ends meet. Nick had some bad habits that needed money. He liked to spend time at the casino, and he did a few drugs that I’d rather not name. So one night we got this crazy idea to broadcast ourselves on one of those video sites where people pay to watch you. So we did. And we made a lot of money that night.”

Damien rubs his face as he attempts to process this news. It’s so surreal to be in the middle of all of this beauty and be confessing this.

Suddenly, I realize Damien is the only one who knows this, outside of me and the people involved.

“So where does the threesome come in?”

“Well, we made so much money with our first video that we decided to try a second one. Except this time Nick surprised me. He brought a girl in.”

Damien’s jaw drops. “And…?”

“And...that’s when I discovered I like girls too,” I say, my breath hitching.

“Ho-ly fuck,” Damien exclaims. “Holy fuck.” His grip on my shoulder tightens, and he’s massaging me nervously. It feels good, but still, I can’t tell what’s going on in his head. I want so badly to know what he’s thinking.

Closing my eyes, I grab hold of his forearm and massage it. “So there’s a video out there,” I say in a hushed voice. “Where a girl is going down on me and Nick is recording…”

I open my eyes again to Damien’s chest heaving, expanding and collapsing rapidly. I feel like he might have a heart attack. My knees get weak and I quiver.

Damien pulls my body into his, and the warmth of our flesh-on-flesh torso contact takes me by surprise. Tears well up in my eyes and I sniffle and start to cry.

“Damien—”

“It’s okay,” he hushes into my ear. “It’s going to be okay.”

“You don’t care?”

“My honest answer is—so what? Everybody does dumb shit at some point.”

Sniffling into his shoulder, I feel dizzy and horrible and amazing all at once. I have a flashback to the last time Nick tried to blackmail me in the grocery store, and I love the fact that he’s finally losing his power over me.

“So what?”

“Yeah, so what. I’ve done fucked-up shit too. You know this. I’m not going to sit here and throw rocks at you from my glass house. Like I said, we’re a couple of misfits.”

I pull back a little bit, still in his arms. “Wow. That makes me feel a lot better. Still, there’s one thing you need to know.”

He raises an eyebrow. “What’s that?”

“We took the video and we put it on a sugar baby website to advertise my services. Remember how I said Nick had a habit? Well I started going on dates with a few guys every now and then just to make some extra money. I’d make one-thousand just for a date! It was crazy. I’d date these guys with a lot of money…”

“Hold up. You went on dates with guys for money?!” His tone is calm, but somehow searing at the same time.

This is something he didn’t expect.

“Yes,” I admit. “A few. But it wasn’t anything...sexual, or anything like that. They just wanted to talk. They were lonely. They…”

Damien grabs hold of my hip and pushes me into a nearby tree. He runs his fingertips along my jawline, his mouth hovering near mine. His dark eyes sear into me, and he’s so close I can almost taste his lips.

“Stop,” Damien growls. “I don’t want to hear anymore about you and these other guys and what you did. You did some crazy shit. I get it. So did I, and I’m not going to judge you.”

Damien rubs the side of my neck with his hand, and I’m reminded of his strength. I grip his wrist, feeling the veins of his forearm muscles. He squints off into the distance and I can tell his mind is going a mile a minute.

“What are you thinking about?” I ask.

He takes a deep breath and refocuses his eyes on me, drops them to my body, and brings them back up.

“I’m thinking about you. And all the things I would do for you. And how on one hand it makes no fucking sense how much I care about you after so short of a time. But it’s true. You’re a sweet girl, Krista. And the world hasn’t been nice to you. But now that I’m here, that’s fucking over. I care about you. And you know shit about me that you’ve accepted. I feel like I can finally be my own damn self with you. And you don’t give a shit.”

“It’s not that I don’t give a shit,” I chime in. “It’s that I know if you didn’t have all those crazy experiences, I wouldn’t have met you. We wouldn’t have connected like we have. Ohh,” I mutter as Damien wraps his hand around my neck. He doesn’t squeeze at all, but I know what he can do with that hand.

He presses his lips to mine, pulling my head to his. I grind my hips against the front of his body. Fuck he’s hard. In all the ways.

He’s hard to figure out.

His abs, which I run my hands along, are rock hard.

His cock, which presses into my stomach through his shorts, is so damn hard, too.

He rips his lips away from mine for a moment, and we’re both breathing hard.

“I want you to know what I’d do for you, Krista. What I will do for you.” He threads his hand through my hair as he growls the words in a low voice.

“What’s that?” I chirp, almost afraid of where he’s going with this.

“If I see that fucker Nick come close to you again, I’m going to kill him. That’s not a fucking threat, or a brag. That’s just a fact. He’s toxic, he’s using you as a prop for his own insecurity, and if he calls you. If he comes to your house again? I will fucking kill him with my bare hands.”

I swallow hard. “You shouldn’t talk like that,” I whisper. “You’ll get in trouble…”

“Ask me if I give a shit.” He arches his eyebrow, daring me to ask him.

As I feel his rough hand fall to my hip and rest just above my ass, I don’t want to know the answer. He’s a savage, and a civilized voice in my head says I should hate the fact that he’s saying he’d kill for me.

But the truth is it’s the hottest fucking thing anyone has ever said to me.

“Fuck, Damien,” are the only words I manage to mutter as I grab hold of the back of my head and pull him back into me. He sprinkles kisses on my neck, gently at first. Then he bites in and sucks hard on my skin for a moment, almost like a vampire would.

It’s a little painful.

I respond by digging my fingers farther into his hair, and this spurs him on. He lets out a loud growl like a feral animal, and brings his face back level with mine.

“How many dates has it been?” He demands.

“This is date number seven.”

“Lucky number seven...what happens on date seven?”

“Damien,” I mutter. “We agreed we needed time to get to know each other a little more. And we put the ten dates out there as a benchmark. But I think we know each other pretty well.”

He narrows his eyes and slides his hand down my stomach and into my shorts. I lean back against the tree for footing.

I pant a little as he dips his fingertips lower until they’re at my opening. I purr as he fingers my clit.

“Wow,” he smirks. “Someone is already pretty damn wet.”

I breathe hard as he hooks the finger further into me, his smirk positively devilish. Running his other hand down my back, he grips my waist and steadies me as I shake.

The first waves of pleasure run through me, and I float away. I’m in paradise. The air is fresh around me, and Damien is making sure only good things happen to me.

I twist my head down and bite gently into his neck, letting out a soft purr.

“Fuck it,” Damien says in a gravelly voice. “I’m tasting you.”

He pulls my shorts and swimsuit down in one motion. With his fingers still inside me, he trails kisses down my breasts, stomach, and kisses my pussy ever so gently.

“You have a beautiful cunt, you know that?”

My skin tingles with shock at Damien using that word.

Or maybe it’s tingling from the endorphins of the strongest man I’ve ever met kneeling before me, treating me like a queen. The same hands he could use to kill a man, he’s using to take me to the next level of…

“Oh, God,” I mutter as I let out a loud moan in the middle of the woods. It feels so fucking good to scream, to let it all out in the middle of nowhere here. His tongue slides across my pussy as he works his hands as deftly as he does his mouth.

He grunts, a low pitched, animalistic noise, and uses his free hand to steady my body as I quake and quiver.

“I’m coming, Damien,” I mewl.

My legs tremble and I’m so damn light-headed as I come, quivering in Damien’s steady grip.

“Krista!” I hear him yell through the haze of my orgasm.

Wait...yell? How could Damien yell when he’s…

I look down, and Damien’s mouth is still all over me.

Uh oh. What the hell?

“Krista! Are you alright!”

I come back to reality and realize it’s not Damien’s voice at all. It’s Amelia. And she’s really damn close to us.

Damien glances up at me from his knees, a silly smirk on his face. He wipes his mouth of my juices and stands back up.

I pull my shorts up and spin around, and just then Axel and Amelia appear around a thicket of trees.

“Krista! There you are!” Axel says loudly.

“We were getting fucking worried about you. What were you do—? Oh.”

Damien and I stand there holding hands, our faces flushed.

“I mean, shit. We’re all friends here,” Damien shrugs. “What the hell did you think we were doing?”

Amelia shuts her eyes and shakes her head. “I don’t...I don’t want to say. Something weird flashed through my mind. Probably just a bad memory. Never mind.”

Damien squints at Amelia, looks at me, then glances back at Amelia. “Say it. What did you think it was?”

Axel shrugs, but doesn’t say much. Damien doesn’t stop staring at Amelia for an answer.

“Just tell us,” I chime in. “It’s okay.”

“It’s stupid, though. It’s totally ridiculous. I don’t even know why a thing like that would cross my mind.”

“Now you really have to tell me,” I say as we cross out of the area with trees and back into the clearing.

She looks at Axel, who gives her a ‘go ahead’ nod.

Amelia takes a deep breath. “I...had this weird feeling Nick came out of nowhere and was after you.”

I clam up, clenching Damien’s hand hard at the mention of Nick.

“Why would you think that?” I react.

Amelia shakes her head. “I’m not sure.”

We walk in silence for a few beats. Amelia’s always had a good intuition, so it is a little disconcerting to me that she’d think that. Still, it’s probably just her mind getting crazy since we’re in a weird place.

Damien, who hasn’t said much in a few minutes, speaks.

“Amelia, don’t worry about Nick. He’s not going to hurt Krista or come near her again.”

“How do you know?” Amelia chirps back.

Damien chuckles a little, unfazed. “Because if he does, I’ll fucking kill him.”