My pulse pounds through me so hard that I can’t catch my breath.

Outside, his text said.

Does that mean he’s really here?

I crash out of my bed and stumble to my window, swooshing aside the curtain, and…yes. There he is standing under a streetlight—Cage Bryant, his brown hair combed back, and he’s wearing a suit, and…

And he’s holding a large bouquet of flowers.

Am I dreaming again? But it must be a good dream this time, not a Times Square marquee nightmare in which Cage is turning his back on me as he did every time I thought we’d gotten intimate.

I press my fingertips against the windowpane, just to make sure everything is real.

Cage lowers the flowers as he sees me.

As a rush of warmth swamps me, I give a little cry of pure joy, and I stop thinking and wallowing. I stop telling myself that it’s actually a good thing Cage and I broke up, and then I’m running, running out of my room and bursting out the front door and taking the outside staircase, grasping at the rail, almost falling in my haste.

I speed to the front of my apartment building then to that streetlight, and even as my bare feet hit the pavement and the cool night air chills my skin because I’m only wearing an oversized T-shirt, I don’t care.

I only see Cage lowering the flowers to his side, his eyes shining with emotion as I launch myself at him.

He catches me, and I throw my arms around him, smelling his skin, his everything. Him.

He holds me so tightly that I can’t breathe. Then he murmurs into my ear.

“Karini… God, Karini…”

With my chest crushed to his, I feel our hearts beating together, as if they’re entangled, and even when I let go and drop to the ground, pulling back from him, he doesn’t release me.

He strokes my cheek tenderly, and I can’t stop looking at him, taking him in, feeling our pulses slap the air because they’re pounding so hard.

“I haven’t stopped thinking about you for one second since you left,” he whispers roughly. “Karini, I was so wrong to send you away that night.”

“You didn’t send me away—”

“Yes, I did.” He’s still touching my face, and there’s no trace of darkness in his gaze, not like there was before. His blue eyes are clear, intense against the tan of his skin under the light of the streetlamp. “I basically sent you away after you opened up and told me everything about those pictures and videos from Liam. I shut you out completely.”

I’m crying again. Jeez, I’m a leaking mess with tears running down my face, but they’re happy, cleansing tears, because Cage is here. He’s come to me with flowers and clear eyes and a heart that seems to be bared to me.

And he’s touching me as if I’m the most precious thing imaginable to him.

I shake my head at his confessions. “Cage, I know why you pushed me away.”

“No, you don’t. But I want to tell you. That’s why I came here, Karini, so you could hear me out. I need you to do that.”

He pushes my hair back from my face, and now there’s something different in his eyes. Raw fear.

I slip my hands down his strong arms, bracing myself to finally hear why Cage can get so dark. Whatever it is though, I’m never going anywhere.

No more running…no more hiding.

The light of the full moon shows me everything in his gaze as he looks deeply into me. His low voice echoes off the lonely streets, almost as if we’re the only two people left in this world.

“Remember the night I mentioned my parents to you?” he asks quietly.

“Yes, and you never mentioned them again.” It was the first night we were together, but he shut himself down after that.

“I never brought them up again because I don’t talk about my parents to anyone.” Now his gaze does go dark. “It’s because they were both drug addicts.”

Realization sweeps over me as I remember the last time Cage and I saw each other—in a dim lot behind the Russian restaurant where Igor Vasiliev took us; my phone screen exposing my nude photo and Liam’s threatening text; the story I told Cage about Liam’s drug addiction and the way Cage reacted and then how he said he was sick of all the lies.

But I hadn’t been lying to him. There was something way darker than my past that made him push me away.

He goes on, and it’s almost as if he’s exposing his entire soul to me. “I lived with my parents’ bullshit for seventeen long years, lying to our neighbors about why my mother and father would never come to the door when people knocked, why they always looked so sick during their infrequent appearances outside our disgusting apartment, why I never seemed to have enough to eat. I was good at hiding what was really going on behind those doors, so not even my teachers knew what was going on at home.” He pauses, and his darkness only grows. “My mother overdosed when I was fifteen, and it wasn’t until I was nearly out of high school that I found out that it was my dad who introduced her to heroin.”

I press my hand against his chest. His heart, my heart. My throat swells with emotion, making my voice thick. “I’m so sorry, Cage.”

“It is what it is…or was what it was.” He’s stroking my face again. “After my mother died, I grew so angry with my father. The bastard wouldn’t stop using, even after what happened to her.” He swallows. “But I was sick of the lies and the ugliness, so I moved out and began taking care of myself when I was seventeen. It wasn’t much different than what I’d been doing before, scrapping for meals and money, running a household long before I should’ve been. It’s just that I didn’t have to deal with them anymore. I put my energies toward succeeding in everything I tried, but it turned out that this wasn’t enough.”

Now I see the wounded boy in him—the one who grew up way too soon and hardened himself to the point where he turned that granite soul toward business, eventually becoming a billionaire who never took no for an answer. I see the makings of this cold-blooded titan of industry who never had a real home or family, and I understand why he seemed to doubt my story on the night of Igor’s dinner.

Liam only reminded Cage of his parents, didn’t he? And Cage was so very sick of addicts affecting his life, sick of the people close to him telling him lies, stealing money for drugs, even though that’s not what I was doing. But, in his eyes, I was enabling Liam.

Cage’s eyes weren’t clear that night, not like they are now.

“Your father,” I say. “What happened to him?”

“I have no idea. He could be dead for all I care.”

I can feel that emotional hardness as his arm tightens around me, but he came to me for a reason tonight. I know that he doesn’t want to live the rest of his life as he’s been doing, and I reach up to bring him down for a kiss. A long, I’ve-got-you, I’m-here-for-you kiss that has me swooning until he hauls me against his chest, my cheek against him.

I’m what he needed…he’s what I need, and I close my eyes, listening to the tenor of his voice as it flows into me.

“Can you see why I’ve never allowed myself to truly open up to a woman?” he asks. “To trust, to care for anyone. Not until you came along. Now I can’t stop caring.”

Love explodes in my chest. He’s really saying these things to me.

“I care, too,” I whisper, “and I understand everything.” I rub my face against him and slip my arms around him as I add, “Everything.”

His past, and his most secret, dark desires.

From the way he keeps holding me, I know that we don’t have to say what those dark desires are out loud.

But he speaks anyway. “God, I’ve never understood what it’s like to want a woman so badly that I lose control, but I did with you. Over and over again.”

The thought of being with him again—tied up, blindfolded, trusting him to do what he wants to do with me—makes me tremble. He’s so attuned to me that his breathing gnarls, catching once again as I feel how his body is responding to being so close to me. His cock is getting hard, and my pussy is getting wet.

“My god, Karini,” he says. “If you only knew how you frustrated me, even while I was so damned taken with you. All you had to do was walk through my door, and every second afterward, I was dying to touch you more, taste you, claim you. I wasn’t used to feeling that way, so I fought it off.”

“And I egged those desires on.” But now I have a good idea why he would lose control like that with me: This is about his mother, who was pushed into a dark way of life by his father, a way of life that eventually killed her. His past is as black as sin, and he never outran it until now.

But I think there’s something more that he still has to tell me.

“Every time I was with you,” he says, “all my dark impulses came out, and the last thing I wanted was to be like my old man. I was afraid those urges would engulf anyone I cared about. I thought it was better not to be close to anyone at all than to risk hurting the women I was with, but after you left, I knew better. I knew I couldn’t live without you.”

My heart jars to a stop. “Truly?”

“Truly.” He pulls back from me so that he can cup my face in his big hand.

As he bends to kiss me again, I feel as if I’m floating, but there’s something niggling at me, a question.

“Cage,” I whisper, ending the kiss against his mouth. “Have you heard about what happened to Liam?”

“Yes.”

He kisses the corner of my lips, my jaw, and I press my forehead against his.

“Did you somehow find him and beat him up?” I ask.

Cage exhales then looks fully into my eyes. “I had to make sure you were safe.”

I should be stunned, but I knew it all along, didn’t I? And I wanted it to be true. My savior. My Cage.

My man who’d never see me harmed.

He goes on. “I had a security team monitoring the web, and when they alerted me about the videos and pictures hitting that site, I saw red. I had my team get it taken down immediately, and they scrubbed any trace of those images clean. There’s no record of them, and the originals are destroyed now.”

“I thought that maybe you’d taken care of those pictures and videos because they might hurt your deal with Igor Vasiliev, but…”

“No, Karini. This was about you. All you.”

“And how did Liam end up injured?” I ask.

“He got a personal visit from me that night. Just me. I wanted to have a man-to-man chat with him about how he treated the woman I love.”

“Love,” I say on the edge of ecstatic laughter. He loves me.

“I love you, more than anyone or anything on this earth.”

My head is spinning. “Me, too, Cage. Oh, me, too!”

I gasp as he drops to a knee, offering me those flowers, which I cradle against my chest. New tears run down my face as he pulls a velvet box from the lining of his suit jacket. He opens the box, and a diamond ring sparkles in the moonlight.

“Make me an honest man,” he says in a voice tight with emotion. “Marry me.”

I nod, unable to find my voice, but at the light in his eyes, I get to my knees and fall against him, hugging him, crying more as I whisper yes over and over.

As we kiss again, I think I hear cheers in the background. It’s only when we finally come up for air that I realize there are people whooping it up from the windows of their apartments, fellow students applauding, then telling us to get a room.

I laugh as Cage dips me in his arms, looking down at me with a true, bright smile.

“I’ve already got the room,” he says.

I smile back, my pulse hopping. “And I’ve got all the time in the world for whatever you have waiting there for me.”