I had settled into ignoring him when he left.

Which was hours ago. Just after the doors opened and the band started up, Bates went over and whispered something in Jack’s ear, and Jack and another guy headed toward the side door.

At that moment, Jack’s face had not been carefully blank. He’d been scowling. His cheeks red with what looked like anger. He’d looked… terrifying. A well-dressed wild man.

But just before he walked out the door he turned around and found me in the crowd, staring at him.

And he stared right back. For one long, hot second. He pinned me in place with his eyes. With his attention. I couldn’t move. I could barely breathe.

He shouldn’t go, I thought with something that felt like panic. Whatever he was leaving for… it wasn’t going to be good.

I took a step toward him, and he shook his head at me. Just once. A short sharp don’t.

And then he was gone.

I wanted to not give a shit. But he walked out of the club and he took something with him. That delicious chemical in the air, the glitter and the foreplay of his eyes watching me.

And now, despite the killer band and the money I was making, I was off my game. I poured shots and I smiled and I delivered bottles to the VIP’s, but my head was distracted.

Stop, I told myself. Stop. He’s… too intense. I am not made for intensity. I am made for good times. For parties and fun. Casual and flirty.

He was like midnight in the middle of the day. A dark cloud that sucked in everything.

So I told myself I was relieved he was gone, with his constant watching and his warnings, but I kept checking the doors waiting for him to come back.

Because really what I was, was worried.

Around midnight I was circling the edge of the dance floor, where people were standing, listening to the band, mopping off sweaty foreheads, guzzling booze like it was water when behind me the side door suddenly opened.

A blast of wet cold San Francisco air rippled over us and we all turned.

Jack.

He stormed in, smelling like rain and metal, his face a thundercloud, his body an electric current as he walked past me, so close I could feel the damp on his overcoat. He bypassed the coat check and the bar, walking through the club while the guy who came in with him ran up the stairs to the second floor like someone was chasing him.

Jack’s blue eyes found me in the dark and restless crowd and it was like tripping, but catching myself before I fell, like hitting the brakes just in time. A panic and a relief all at once.

Jack wasn’t that big, but walking across the bar, he was huge. He was larger than life. People instinctively got out of his way and as he passed them they followed him with their eyes. Worried almost that having been that close to him was a bad thing. Like he was a shadow they could not shake off.

The Grim Reaper.

A horseman of the apocalypse.

And I wanted him so badly I had to lock my knees.

He slammed through the doors that led back to the dressing rooms and a staff bathroom. I glanced up at Sun, who with one look at my face rolled her eyes and mouthed “go” at me.

That was all the encouragement I needed. I shoved my way through the crush around the dance floor, and once the staff door closed behind me the band was muffled and the sound of the crowd was distant. But the silence of these private rooms—it was ominous and it pounded in my ears, along with my hard-beating heart. I set down my drink tray and walked down the long hallway, past the band’s greenroom toward the bathroom.

I could hear running water. The consistent and persistent mutter of someone talking under their breath.

“Hello?” My voice was some shaky nervous thing and I wondered where all my bravado from earlier today had gone. To say nothing of my resolve not to care about this guy.

I was here. And I was nervous. And I cared.

The door to the bathroom was open and there was Jack, at the sink, his sleeves rolled up his forearms.

The tattoos on his arms were beautiful. Bright and colorful, but full of terrible horrible images of bloody deaths and avenging angels. His tattoos looked like stained glass windows from church, heavy on bloody swords and crying women.

So incredible were the tattoos that it took me a second to realize most of them were splattered in blood. Real blood. It was across his chest and a wide arc of it was dotting his face.

And he was the one talking under his breath. I caught the words: Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

Oh Jesus.

He was praying.

Mistake, this is a mistake.

Even as I thought it, even as I knew it, I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I wasn’t sure if it was the blood or the prayers that kept me there. Or just the magnet at his core that I could not resist.

Perhaps I made a noise, some raw sound from my throat, or maybe he saw me from the corner of his eye. I didn’t know but he turned and his eyes, the blue of them, they burned and I was pinned to the spot. My knees suddenly shaking.

“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice a growl. He stepped out of the bathroom, looking up and down the empty hallway. “Why are you here?”

“You’re… I was worried.”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“You… You’re praying.” It was the wrong thing to say. So the wrong thing. But everything was upside down. He stepped toward me and too late I realized what a mistake I’d made. Everything I’d done with him was a mistake. When he looked up from that bar yesterday I should have looked away. I should have turned around and ignored him. I should have listened to every instinct that said he wasn’t for me.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

I turned as if to leave, wanting to leave, but he grabbed my arm, his touch so searing I gasped.

“Do you think this is a joke?” he asked, and I shook my head so fast my earrings slapped my face. “A game maybe?”

“No.”

“You’re lying. I’m just a thing you want because I don’t want you.”

I found some feeble bravery left in my shaking body and I turned to look at him, his eyes the color of night, his face flushed and splattered with blood.

Oh my god, what am I doing, I thought even as I said:

“Now who is lying?”

He wanted me as much as I wanted him. His desire was in his face. His eyes. His voice. It was in the way he touched me. I tasted it across my tongue every time I inhaled.

His thumb stroked the inside of my elbow and a sound came out of my throat I could not control. He heard it and the rough timbre of his laughter tickled down my spine, across the nape of my neck, sending goose bumps over my entire body.

“This is why you watch me? Why you came back here? You want to be scared?” he asked. “Hurt?”

“No,” I said.

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not.”

He scoffed and pushed me away. “Get out of here.”

And because I wasn’t smart like my sister, and because he was so much of all my favorite things, and because the chemistry in my body responding to the chemistry in his was literally the most powerful thing I’d ever felt for another person, I didn’t run.

I turned toward him.

He was breathing hard and his cheeks were flushed like it was everything he could do to keep himself under control.

And all I wanted was for him to break.

I put my hand against his chest, the fine white fabric of his shirt, the skin beneath it hotter even than I had imagined it to be.

At my touch he hissed.

I found a whole lot of courage in that reaction.

So I lifted my shaking hand and my fingertip, the long edge of my nail, touched a spot of blood on his chin and another on his cheek. And another near his eye. Connecting the dots like cities on a map.

“Are you hurt?” I whispered.

“No.”

“The blood—”

“Not mine.”

Later I would think about it, wonder how I’d been so brave. So bold, but I cupped his face in my hand, the rough scrape of his day-old beard against my palm echoing around my body. Like I was a bell for him to ring.

“What do you want?” he asked, baffled.

“You.”

“Like this?” His voice broke like the idea was impossible, that a woman would want him blood-splattered and praying in a club bathroom.

“Like this.”

“You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”

“So,” I breathed, “show me.”

And he broke.

He broke so hard. So perfectly. He put his hands at my waist and took one step forward, pushing me back against the hallway, lifting me up off my feet. I was hung there suspended by his strength, and then the hard press of his body against mine.

And then his mouth. His kiss.

Whatever I expected from this man’s kiss… it was not what I got. It was not punishing or mean. He was not stamping me or claiming me. It was not the kiss of a man with something to prove.

It was gentle. Soft.

It was the kiss of a man with something he needed forgiven.

He kissed me like absolution was in my body.

And that—in my long life of kissing—was completely new. Totally different.

I melted against him. My arms around his neck, my legs coming up around his waist.

I felt him hard against me and I was soft and wet in welcome. My edges loose, my boundaries gone, dissolved into nothing under this man’s cautious kiss.

A surprise. What a fucking surprise he was.

We kissed like that, softly, sweetly, for minutes and I could have done it for hours. Days.

“Jack.” Bates’s voice rang out and Jack jerked against me as if a shot had gone off. For one second I felt this incredible tension in his body, and I wondered, slightly hysterically, if he was about to take off running down the hallway away from Bates. With me in his arms.

Yes, I wanted to whisper in his ear.

Do it, I wanted to say against his skin.

Take us away from here.

But I kept my mouth shut, because that would be fucking crazy and I’d already slipped in over my head with this man. Finally, as if forcing his muscles back under his control, Jack stepped back. Away from me. My legs fell from around his waist and my hands from around his neck. Until all that connected us was his hand at my stomach, as if to be sure I wouldn’t fall over. I was grateful for that, happy for that, because I wasn’t sure of my own knees. Or my ankles in my shoes.

Or my heart inside my skin.

“You’re needed upstairs,” Bates said, his voice the coldest thing I’d ever heard, so cold I actually flinched. I glanced over Jack’s shoulder and saw Bates’s perfect face staring back at me. He appeared no different than he always did—he even managed to give me a slight, tight-lipped smile edged in ice.

And I had the very real fear that I’d gotten Jack in trouble.

Serious trouble.

“One second, Bates,” Jack said, his face still turned toward me but his eyes cast down, away like he knew better than to look at me.

After a long terrifying moment Bates left and I exhaled a breath, leaning back against the wall. Jack’s hand left my stomach but I could still feel the imprint of it there. I put my hand where his had been as if I could hold the feeling there. Cup it against me. Protect it from the chill.

“Is he your boss or something?” I asked.

“Something,” he said, and then he ran his hands over his face, rubbing at his eyes. “Look… this was a mistake.”

“You don’t believe that.” He’d been hard against me; I still felt him on my body. I would, undoubtedly, for days. If I were to reach forward and touch the zipper of his black dress pants, I was sure he’d still be hard.

This time when he looked at me it was with terrible scorn. So much scorn I flinched.

“Look at you,” he sneered. “All you have to do is snap your fingers and the world is brought to your heels—”

“That’s not—”

“I’m not a prize.”

“I am,” I said, my chin up.

For a moment I thought he might smile. I even smiled at him to encourage it, but then he shook his head.

“Forget what happened here,” he said.

“Impossible,” I said. “And I don’t think you’re going to forget about me, either. I think you’re going to go home tonight and think about me until you can’t stand—”

He leaned forward, pressing his forehead against mine, hard, like he wanted to push his words into my skull.

“Do you know who I am?” he groaned. “Do you know what I do here?”

I was silent, because I couldn’t pretend anymore that he just dressed the part.

He was still covered in blood.

Oh God.

I leaned back suddenly, realizing that I would have blood on my skin now too. I touched my face as if I could feel it and my face… my face must have told him something about my horror.

His thumb brushed over my cheek. The edge of my nose.

“You’re fine,” he said. “Clean.”

He was a bad man. A bad, bad man. And he did bad things. And I would be a fool to still want him.

An idiot.

“Stay away from me,” he said. “Please.”

And then he was down the hallway, unrolling the sleeves of his white shirt. The bloody biblical tattoos vanishing under the fine fabric.

And I still wanted him.