As I pulled my car into the narrow space in front of my apartment, part of me wished I’d just stayed back at Jacen’s hotel like he’d offered. Aside from the fact that it would’ve meant I could count on waking up at least once to those sinfully strong fingers making me come, it also meant that I’d have something to think about other than Daytin and my failure.

“Stop thinking about it,” I muttered as I climbed out of the car.

I was exhausted. Emotionally, physically, mentally. All I wanted to do was take a shower and lay down. As soon as I stepped inside my place, I took a step toward the bathroom so I could go and do just that.

And then my foot crunched down on glass, and I instinctively froze.

I still had the keys in my hand, and as I swung my head around from left to right, I dropped my purse by the door. I knew plenty of women who’d die before letting go of something like their purse, but one of the times when I’d been jumped, a guy had used my purse strap to damn near strangle me. No, I wasn’t walking around with that thing around my neck.

I could see the busted frames from prints I’d drawn and hung on the wall all lying broken on the floor. A knife had been taken to the couch and pillows. Everything in my refrigerator had been dumped onto the floor.

Fuck.

Somebody seriously pissed off at me had broken into my apartment and spent a good ten minutes trashing whatever they could get their hands on.

Tears burned my eyes, because I had a bad feeling I knew who it was.

Daytin.

Why would she do this? Why would she break into my apartment when all I’d done was try to help her?

I didn’t understand it.

Except I didn’t have to understand it. It was done.

Of course, the logical thing to do would be call the police.

But this wasn’t the time for logic.

Grabbing my hair, I twisted it into a knot and found a couple of hair sticks in the cup of pens I always left lying on the breakfast bar. That was where I did most of the drawing since the light was better. After securing my hair, I got a trash bag out from under the sink and got to work.

So what if I wanted to sleep? I could sleep when I was dead.

It was sometime between cleaning up the mess in the kitchen and trudging back upstairs from the dumpster that I realized something crucial.

Daytin might have had something to do with the break-in at the clinic.

I didn’t know how. Security was tight there. Everybody who had a key had one with a specific number, one that went into their file. The only personnel kept on staff twenty-four hours a day were the ones needed to run the residential area of the clinic, and I worked in a different area.

That was where the break-in happened.

How Daytin knew where I worked, much less how to get a key...I had no idea, but my gut told me I was on to something.

But I would keep my suspicions to myself.

I felt terrible about it, but if I told the cops, they’d probably just arrest Daytin and throw away the key. She didn’t need to go to jail. She needed rehab. Even if she’d stolen things and trashed my place, she wasn’t a violent person. She’d never hurt anyone. Not like I had. She deserved a chance.

So I wouldn’t tell anybody. At least not yet.

No matter what the cost would be to me.

I wasn’t foolish enough to think there wouldn’t be consequences to the things that’d happened. I might lose my job. Even though I had an alibi, Kaleb thought I was using again, and no doubt he’d told Piety. Piety would think the same thing, and she’d maybe tell others at the clinic.

No, she wouldn’t do that. She wasn’t a gossip. But she’d feel obligated to tell Dash. Hell, she wouldn’t be the woman I knew her to be if she didn’t report someone who put the clinic at risk.

And once I lost my job, everything else would come crumbling down, possibly even my probation.

“Don’t think about it,” I said for what felt like the hundredth time that day. Trudging into the living room, I studied the trash collected there and then got to work.

It was going to be a couple of hours before I had a chance to sleep.

Ninety minutes to be exact. Well, ninety minutes and the time needed for a long, hot shower. Fortunately, my bedroom and bathroom had been left alone. It was a relief because if I’d had to clean up anything else, or if I’d found out she’d trashed my bedroom, I might have lost the slim grasp I was holding on everything right now.

After a quick, but thorough shower, I stretched out on the bed, eyes closed, and I willed myself not to think about the past few hours, the past day.

There was only one part of the day that had been tolerable, and that had been all the parts with Jacen in it.

So that was what I’d think about now.

I wondered what it would be like to watch him dance. I mean, I’d had that very, very brief demonstration when he’d pulled me onto the stage, but that hadn’t been the full show.

And I very much wanted to see all of it.

* * *

Music pulsed all around me. The lights, crazy as the music and just as alive, played across my skin as I sat in a chair in the middle of a darkened room.

Then, suddenly, he was there, tall and lean in a spotlight. He wore black leather. Tight black leather that showed off the body I was still getting to know.

When he stopped in front of me, I had to swallow just to be able to speak.

“Am I dreaming?” I asked him.

“Do you want to be?”

“I…I don’t know.”

Jacen took my hands and placed them on his hips before he reached up and began to unbutton his shirt. “Maybe you just sit back and enjoy the show…and other things.”

“What other things?” I whispered, staring at his washboard abs as he sent the shirt flying.

“Me.”

“It’s hard to think about anything else.” I leaned in, but he caught my hair and pulled me back before my lips could touch his skin.

Then, just as slowly as he’d moved me, just as lazily, he bent over me and brushed my lips with his. “Maybe you should think only about me. Stop thinking about everything, everybody else. Daytin, your brother, the clinic. You can’t change how people think or feel about you, but you can change how you feel about you.”

“I feel fine about myself. I’d feel even better if you would…” I sucked in a breath as he spun around and grabbed me from behind, his hands palming my breasts over my thin shirt.

And then the lights went up...and I realized we were center stage in front of a massive crowd. They cried out for him to touch me, to strip me bare so they could see my body’s reaction to him.

“Stop,” I moaned just as he pinched my nipples.

“Is that really…really…what you want?” he murmured in my ear.

And then I felt bare skin.

He was naked now.

I was naked now.

Oh, hell yes I had to be dreaming because there was no way I’d ever be naked in front of people, much less letting someone touch me like this.

People screamed louder as he trailed his fingers over my skin, drawing attention to how hard my nipples became as he played with them.

When he came back around to stand in front of me, shadows and lighting playing over that amazing body of his, I curled my fingers into my palms until my nails bit into my skin. It hurt, but at the same time, it gave me the clarity I needed.

“They aren’t here,” I said.

“Damn right.” Jacen straddled my legs as the room went dark, closing out everything but the two of us. “It’s just you and me. What do you want to do about that?”

His cock was a breath away, thick and hard as it curved up toward his stomach. My fingers itched to draw him like this, an Adonis to be worshipped. He was the sort of man whose likeness would send sculptors into paroxysms.

And he was all mine to do with as I pleased.

I didn’t even have to think about what it was I wanted. Reaching up, I closed my fist around his cock and did something I’d always hated.

I took him in my mouth.

Fuck.

The weight of him on my tongue. The way his girth stretched my lips and his length made my jaw ache. The taste of salt and him. The soft silk of his skin wrapped around something so hard.

All of it made my head spin, and I wondered if it would be this good in the real world. If I’d be able to give up control as easily as I did here.

His hands gripped my head, holding me steady as he pumped his cock in and out, slowly at first, then picking up speed. I felt each stroke straight through me, as if his movements were happening to a place lower and tighter. Groaning in frustration, I squirmed, but it didn’t do anything to ease the ache or to free myself. I was torn between wanting him to come in my mouth and needing him between my legs, and giving up the choice somehow made it hotter.

As I lifted my eyes to look at him, the scene changed.

I was back in the tiny little closet of a room I’d had in Las Vegas with Stefano. The mattress in the corner was bare save a single sheet balled up at one end and a flat pillow at the other. The floor was littered with drug paraphernalia, and the walls were plastered with pictures I’d torn from magazines. My few clothes were piled to one side. I could almost smell the rank air I’d breathed for two years and I flushed with shame.

I would have cringed away the second he reached for me, but Jacen didn’t let me. He picked me up and held me against the wall so we were eye to eye. Right there in that terrible little room, without flinching away from what he saw, he buried himself inside me.

“I want all of you. Even your past. Stop hiding,” he demanded.

“I…no. Nobody wants that.” I shook my head. “I don’t want it.”

“It’s part of you.” He drove into me harder, harder, harder… “And I want you. Say you want me, too.”

“I want you.”

I had always wanted him. I’d never wanted anyone else.

“What else do you want from me?” he whispered just before he leaned forward and bit my bottom lip, sending a little spark of pain into the pleasure.

“I…” He drove into me again, ripped a climax out of me. “I lo-”

The phone rang, jerking me awake just before I said something that I would’ve regretted. It wouldn’t have mattered if it’d been said only in a dream, and Jacen never would’ve known. I would have known, and it would have changed everything.

The phone rang again, but I ignored it, lying there with my heart racing, my breathing coming in short bursts. My body was so hot, so on edge despite the fact that I was pretty sure I’d actually come in my sleep.

I wanted more—needed more.

But what I needed was downtown, taking off his clothes for strangers.