Rafe kept his hand over Ella’s mouth, her breath hot against his palm. Her head was thrown back, her eyes closed, tears glittering on the ends of her lashes. His own heart was thundering in his head and he knew he was going to have to move, to distract himself again, or else he’d pull her down onto the floor, bury his face in that delicious little pussy of hers and eat her right up all over again.

So, very purposefully, he lifted his hand from her mouth then eased her thighs from off his shoulders, laying them carefully back down on the chair.

Her breathing was fast and ragged in the silence of the room and she remained unmoving as he gently eased the crotch of her panties back into place, covering all that pretty pink flesh right back up again.

Then he got to his feet, shoving back the hair she’d tangled her fingers in with one hand, struggling to get his own breathing back under control.

The taste of her was thick in his mouth, making his cock ache, but for some reason he felt calm. Maybe it had been a stupid thing to do to give her pleasure like that and maybe, once she came back to herself, she’d never want him to touch her again. Because he’d taken more than a kiss. More than simply undressing her, too. But he just . . . hadn’t been able to help himself.

Her legs had been trembling as he’d sat her down in the chair and when he’d taken off her ballet shoes, he’d felt the muscles of her calves cramping. Then he’d held her poor bruised little feet in his hands, and his chest had gotten tight, and it had been pure instinct to run his hands over her, massaging to ease her tight muscles.

He’d watched her face as he did so, seeing the relief unfurl over it as he touched her, the tight lines around her mouth fading. And it had struck him then that he’d never wanted to take care of someone like this before. Never wanted to ease their pain. Not when pain meant a very specific thing to him.

Yet he’d wanted to ease hers. And it made him feel good that something he’d done had helped her. Of course that had led to him wanting to do more for her than simply give her relief from pain.

It had been a strange thing to touch her, to concentrate on her and not himself. To direct all his focus into what he was doing so he could give her the maximum amount of pleasure. And oddly enough, it had eased the urgency in him too. As if he could have knelt in front of her all day, giving her every pleasure imaginable and being perfectly content to take nothing for himself.

In fact, even now, there was a part of him that wanted to forgo the undressing she’d promised him. Leave her to dress herself privately and then take her home without demanding anything further of her.

But there was another more primitive part that wanted to gather her into his arms and take her back to his apartment, tuck her into his bed. Keep her close. Shatter completely the distance between them once and for all.

Yet he wasn’t going to do either of those things. He was going to take what she’d promised him and yes, then he’d leave her to go home alone. And hope that she remembered what he’d done here in this room. Remember and be hungry for more.

He stepped forward, bending to gather her up into his arms, setting her on her feet. She made a protesting sound, swaying against him, her head resting on his chest, which pleased him. It made it awkward to untie the cloak and let it fall, not to mention undo the tiny fastenings at the back of her costume that held the fabric of her bodice and skirt together.

She shivered as the fabric fell away, the boned bodice falling with a thump onto the floor, the tutu in a cloud of tulle, leaving her wearing nothing but her panties. Her skin was very pale and very soft, and he wanted to run his hands over her, up the delicate arch of her spine and over her narrow shoulders, cup her small, pretty breasts in his hands, stroke the flat plane of her stomach. But he kept his hands to himself as he collected her clothes and began to dress her.

She said nothing as he hooked her bra and drew the straps up, then held out her jeans for her to step into. As she did so, she rested her hands lightly on his shoulders, though she kept her attention down as if she didn’t want to meet his gaze.

He let her keep the distance as he pulled down a soft black woolen thermal over her head, following it with a thick, dark blue sweater. Even when he sat her back gently onto the chair as he covered her cold feet with some thick socks and the heavy, black boots she seemed to like to wear.

It was only once he’d finished tying her laces that he straightened and reached forward, gathering her into his arms again. She pressed her hands against his chest, trying to hold him away, but keeping one arm around her waist, he slid his other hand into her hair and tipped her head back, kissing her. Not hard, only soft, gently coaxing her lips apart so he could dip into her mouth, taste her sweetness, keep that connection between them a second longer.

There was a moment of resistance and then she relaxed against him, touching her tongue to his in a hesitant response that had him catching his breath, suddenly as desperate as he had been the moment he’d first kissed her.

It took all the strength he had to lift his head and take his mouth from hers, to release her and let her go.

She stared at him, her eyes dark. “Why did you do that?”

He didn’t know whether she meant just that kiss or all of it, not that his answer would change. “Because you’re beautiful. Because you danced like a dream tonight and you tasted even better. And because sometimes, Little Red, you need someone to take care of you, no matter how badly you don’t want them to.”

Her gaze flickered, color rising under her skin. “It doesn’t mean anything. What you . . . did just then. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to sleep with you. That I’m going to do anything more with you.”

She could think that if she liked, if she thought it kept her safe from him a while longer. But she was lying. Of course it meant something.

He smiled at her, to let her know he knew exactly what she was doing. “Fine. I’m sure you spread your legs and let me eat you out purely because it was all part of the kiss you promised me. All part of ensuring that money gets into your account.”

The color in her cheeks deepened and she turned away, going over to where her black leather purse sat next to the makeup table. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to go home yet. I’m going to go to the opening night party. So, feel free to leave whenever you like.”

He stared at her for a long moment, debating whether or not to force the issue, to show her exactly what her spreading her legs for him had meant, what that kiss she’d let him take meant. But his instincts told him that now would be a good time to leave. She could go to the party and pretend that nothing that had happened in this dressing room had mattered. But that didn’t change the way she’d moaned in relief as he’d massaged the cramp from her calves. Or how she’d buried her hands in his hair and gasped his name as he’d put his mouth between her legs. Or even the way she’d kissed him back afterward.

It meant something. It meant that the distance between them was crumbling whether she liked it or not, and that everything he was trying to achieve was all going according to plan.

“Would you like me to come to the party with you?” he asked, purely to mess with her because of course she would say no. “I don’t mind. If you want the company . . .”

“No,” she snapped and moved to the door. “I don’t need the company.”

The temptation to insist was strong, but he resisted it. Better to leave it. Better to leave her thinking about him, about his hands on her, about his mouth, about the pleasure he’d given her. Yes, far better to let her think about that.

“In that case”—he moved over to the door himself and pulled it open for her—“have a good evening, Little Red.”

And he smiled, showing teeth.

This wasn’t over and they both knew it.

* * *

The party—at a local bar—was loud, as Ella knew it would be. But that was fine. Loud was what she wanted. Loud would cover the sound of her own voice gasping Rafael’s name over and over, make her forget the feel of his mouth on her wet flesh, bury the memory of how swept away she’d been by the intense, impossible pleasure he’d given her.

Yeah, she especially didn’t want to remember that.

Yet somehow it didn’t matter how loud the music was or how many conversations she flung herself into, nothing was going to get the memory of Rafael de Santis and the things he’d done to her out of her head.

Even attempting to mask them with alcohol didn’t work. She wasn’t a big drinker to start with, and the two margaritas she had only ended up making her feel sick.

It wasn’t fair. She didn’t want to think about him or what he’d done. She didn’t want to think about how he’d kissed her right at the end either, gathering her close to his chest and taking her mouth with such sweetness she hadn’t been able to do anything but respond.

She didn’t want it to mean anything either, or acknowledge the way her heart had constricted when he’d told her the reasons why he’d kissed her.

“Because sometimes, Little Red, you need someone to take care of you, no matter how badly you don’t want them to . . .”

No, he was wrong. She didn’t need any of those things, still less from him. He was . . . manipulative. She’d promised him just a kiss and he’d pushed and pushed, and ended up taking so much more than that, the bastard.

The righteous anger lasted through the moment she finally conceded defeat and decided to go home. Lasted through the cab ride back to her parents’ house. It powered her steps up to the front door and through it, and made her stride down the hallway, totally forgetting to put her head around Aurora’s door to check on her the way she liked to do.

It wasn’t until she was lying in bed, sleepless, that she had to admit to herself that her anger was hollow. Sure, he’d pushed and taken more than she’d promised him, but she’d agreed to let him undress her. And when he’d put his hands on her and touched her, she hadn’t pushed him away. She hadn’t told him no.

She’d closed her hands in his hair, shut her eyes, spread her legs, and let him do whatever he wanted to her. And she’d liked it.

You didn’t just like it. You loved it.

Ella groaned and rolled over, burying her hot face in her pillow, trying to find a cool spot.

Okay, so her anger was probably more to do with the fact that she didn’t know how to deal with her feelings than about what Rafael had or hadn’t done. She hadn’t expected him to take off her ballet shoes and massage her calves. She hadn’t expected him to say all those things about how she didn’t have anyone to take care of her. And she certainly hadn’t expected him to uncover a whole lot of needs and desires that she’d thought she’d buried so far down she never thought of them.

But like he’d stripped her off her clothes, he’d somehow stripped off the warm, protective layer of self-denial she’d kept firmly drawn around herself, leaving her painfully aware of how much she’d been lying to herself.

“Bastard,” she whispered into the darkness.

She thought briefly about seeing if Aurora was awake and, if she was, whether she might want to talk. But then talking to Aurora would probably involve confessing that Rafael had done far more than kiss her and there was no way she wanted to talk to her grandmother about that.

It was at times like this where she missed her mother acutely. She’d been only thirteen when her mother had slipped on icy pavement crossing a street and hit her head on a curb. She’d been rushed to the hospital immediately, but the damage to her brain had been too severe and she’d ended up dying an hour later.

Such a stupid accident. One moment she was alive and telling Ella to look where she was going, an hour later she was dead from a massive brain bleed.

Even now, even seven years later, Ella hadn’t gotten over the suddenness of it. The complete randomness of the accident. Of course, her mind kept telling her that if she hadn’t dashed across the street without looking, her mother would perhaps have been paying more attention when she’d stepped off the sidewalk, but she tried not to think too hard about that. Not when it would lead into a spiral of guilt she wasn’t sure she’d ever get herself out of.

Then there was her father, who had been so busy grieving over the abrupt loss of his beloved wife that he’d ignored some persistent symptoms of his own. Too busy being strong for his little girl to notice that he was slowly being eaten alive by cancer.

He’d died a mere month after his wife, leaving Ella completely alone, with his own mother her only relative.

Yeah, thinking about it now, perhaps it was better that her parents weren’t here. Her mother would have been horrified if Ella had talked to her about Rafael, because neither she nor Ella’s father had wanted Ella to have anything to do with him.

It felt like hours later that she fell into a fitful sleep, dreaming of running through woods and being chased by a large animal—and not being quite as scared as she should have been.

She woke the next morning feeling gritty eyed and sick from lack of sleep, moving through the day like an automaton. Aurora asked her several times if there was anything wrong, but Ella didn’t want to talk about it so she said no.

Instead, she got herself ready for the matinee she was due to perform at that afternoon.

She didn’t hear from Rafael that day, and she was glad since she had no idea what she would have said to him. The money appeared in her account just as he’d promised and for a long time she stared at the amount on the screen, feeling inexplicable anxiousness gather in the pit of her stomach yet again.

Which was strange because it was exactly what she’d wanted. The money to go to Paris, attend the summer intensive, and be hopefully accepted into the prestigious ballet company. So there was nothing to be anxious about. Perhaps what she was feeling was excitement. Not that there was any time to think about it anyway, not when she had a schedule of performances to get through.

She didn’t sleep well the subsequent nights either, and on the third night was reprimanded by the artistic director for missing a couple of cues. It came as a shock, since she almost never made mistakes like that, but she was aware enough not to argue with the woman, knowing that she wasn’t dancing as well as she should, and that there was a reason for that.

Getting home that night, she checked on Aurora, then went to bed, hoping to get a good night’s sleep, only to wake up the next morning feeling like she hadn’t slept a wink.

Forcing herself to get up, she dragged on some clothes and then went into Aurora’s room to help her grandmother do her hair and get dressed.

But when she came in, it looked like Aurora was still asleep.

Moving to the curtains, Ella pulled them open. The sound usually woke the older woman if she was still sleeping, but today the small form in the bed didn’t move. Frowning, Ella went around the side of the bed and bent over her grandmother’s sleeping figure.

“Gran? It’s time to wake up. Do you need anything?”

Aurora didn’t move.

A cold thread wound through Ella. “Gran?” she tried again. “Are you awake?”

But there was no movement from her grandmother, not even when Ella shook her gently. Trying not to panic, Ella took Aurora’s thin, bony wrist in shaking fingers, attempting to find a pulse and failing.

No. No, this couldn’t be happening. She couldn’t lose the only person she had left in the world. She couldn’t. She wasn’t ready.

Stumbling back from the side of her grandmother’s bed, Ella did the only thing she could think of, which was to call 9-1-1.

She was proud that she managed to hold it together when the paramedics came and shocked Aurora’s heart back to life again before loading her into the ambulance. She even managed to stay collected as she held Aurora’s hand on the way to the hospital.

But it wasn’t until Aurora was taken away by the doctors into the mysterious depths of the hospital and Ella was left in the waiting room by herself that it suddenly hit her.

She’d been so caught up in what was happening with Rafael that she hadn’t been checking on her grandmother as assiduously as she should have been. Perhaps she’d missed some vital sign that would have prevented her heart attack? Perhaps she hadn’t done something she should have?

God, the cigarettes. She should never have let her grandmother keep smoking. What a terrible person she was to let that keep happening.

She got up from the chair she’d been sitting in and started pacing around, unable to keep still, restless and terrified and exhausted all at once. Trying to outrun the terrible knowledge that was trying to get inside her head.

The knowledge that if Aurora died, she would lose the one person in all the world who knew her. Who cared about her. Who loved her. And without her, Ella would be alone.

Completely and utterly alone.

The thought was so terrifying, that she found herself fumbling for her phone, wanting to call someone—anyone—just to talk. And then realizing that she had no one to call. She’d kept herself deliberately distant from her dancer friends because her father had told her she needed to protect herself and so she had. But that had also meant that when she needed someone, like now, there was no one she knew well enough to talk to.

There is one person.

Ella’s chest felt tight.

“Poor Little Red . . . perhaps there are days when you’d like it if someone else took care of you?”

She didn’t want to call him. She didn’t want to, not when she was vulnerable and scared and hurting. Then again, informing him about Aurora’s health was probably something he should know, especially as her guardian. So maybe she’d send him a quick text letting him know her grandmother was in the hospital. Hell, she didn’t even have to speak to him.

Swallowing, she typed in a quick text and pressed send. A second later, her phone began to ring.

Her hand was shaking as she hit the accept button, though she had no idea why she did since she didn’t actually want to speak to him. And then she was lifting her phone to her ear and his rich, dark-honey voice was flowing right through her.

“Don’t move,” he said. “I’m coming.”