Morning light kissed Iris’s closed eyelids. Without opening her eyes, she knew exactly where she was. As out of it as she’d been, she remembered everything that had happened yesterday with startling clarity. She could rewind any part of it back and watch it in high definition in her mind.

The only thing she didn’t know was where that man had slept. The FBI agent. She felt like she was alone in the bed, but she refused to move to find out. She prayed that he wasn’t lying next to her. She couldn’t handle it if he were. She winced, eyes still closed, when she remembered how he’d washed her last night. Thank god he hadn’t undressed her. Or actually bathed her. The washcloth thing had been intimate enough. Pretty much the most intimate thing she’d ever done with a man. And she hadn’t even seen his face yet. The thought made her feel like a little crab dragged out of its shell. She wasn’t a closed off person by nature, but she’d been so completely destroyed yesterday that she just didn’t think she could handle another second of vulnerability.

Iris cracked her eyes and was immensely relieved when the first thing she saw was a pair of socked feet propped up on the desk across the room. He hadn’t gotten in the bed with her. The relief was immediately swamped with guilt as she realized that he’d slept the night with his head leaned back against the wall, his ass on the crappy little desk chair and his feet propped up.

As uncomfortable as the position must have been, he appeared to be sleeping peacefully. Without moving so much as a hair, Iris let her eyes sweep over him. She started at his large feet, clad in crisp white socks. Up his long, muscular legs, the dark stylish jeans cupping him in all the right places. And then at his chest she blinked. He wore just an undershirt, his tan skin exposed from his shoulders to his fingertips. His hands were clasped over his stomach and dark chest hair peeked out under the startling white of the undershirt.

Finally, she brought her eyes to his face. He looked softer than she’d thought he would. Almost teddy bearish. He had a wide, sort of flat nose, as if it had been broken at some point, and an equally wide, serious mouth. His brow was dark and prominent. His heavily lashed eyes were closed and had an appealing slightly lavender tint to the skin, it was lovely against the toasty tan of the rest of his face. And then that haircut. Severe and perfect, short at the sides and just a touch longer at the top, Iris realized that there was a bit of a wave to his midnight black hair.

He was really just…Ha man. It was almost as if he sucked all the oxygen out of that half of the room. Did she feel safe with him? Iris had no idea. She felt the hairs on her arm rising up as she laid completely still in the bed. She didn’t know if she was getting goosebumps because of him or in spite of him. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.

Her eyes on his face as if he were a sleeping bear in the corner, Iris began to slowly stretch and test her body. Her shoulders hurt even worse than yesterday, but her hands were much better, thank god. The rest of her body was achy, but not terribly. She felt vaguely as if she were getting over the flu. She realized that it must be all the adrenaline and fear that had pumped through her body on full blast for the last 24 hours.

Slowly, pillowing her hands under her, Iris pushed herself up to sitting. The blankets barely made any sound as they slithered off her shoulders to pool around her waist, but suddenly, without even looking, she knew that the agent had awoken. She could feel his gaze on the side of her face the same way that she had felt it the night before. The intensity of it burned her, exposed her. Even though she’d just been looking at him, studying him, she found that she couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. So she watched her own feet as she slid out of the bed. Something forest green fluttered into her line of sight and she eyed her clothes with confusion. She realized that she was wearing the man’s button-down shirt that he’d worn last night. She remembered shivering in the bathroom, remembered an item of clothing being put over her shoulders, but she hadn’t realized that it was his shirt.

Slowly, as if she didn’t want to startle the wild animal in the corner, Iris slid the shirt off of herself, folded it very neatly and set it on the corner of the bed. Still, she avoided his eyes as she walked around the bed and into the bathroom.

The second she closed the door behind her, Iris breathed out a deep sigh of relief. She’d cut off the line of his vision and it was like having a bright light clicked off. She avoided her reflection as she stripped out of her clothes. Her shoulders practically screamed but besides that, she was able to slide out of all of it. Thank god.

The hot shower she stepped into was the truest heaven she’d ever experienced in her entire life. She scrubbed and scrubbed at her skin and hair, using the little travel bottles that he’d bought last night. The water began to run cold before she convinced herself to get out.

Iris got dressed, finger brushing her hair and braiding it back off her high forehead before she convinced herself to look in her reflection.

She winced. She looked terrible. The black eye was a deep purple. She tested it with her fingers. It was sore, but not sharp, so she was confident that nothing was broken. Her eyes were big and baffled. Like she was just barely understanding what the hell had happened over the last 24 hours. She brushed her teeth but her lips were dry. She basically looked like she could use a few days at a restorative spa. Not that she’d ever indulged in something like that before, but she’d seen Owen when he’d come back from the retreats that the record label treated him to and he’d always looked like he’d backwards aged.

Iris took another deep breath. She was going to have to go back out into the room with the grizzly bear. Knowing she was being rude with hogging the bathroom was pretty much the only thing that had her gently opening the door and slipping back out into the main room.

She instantly felt the heat of his gaze, but her eyes were on the floor. She heard him rise up from the chair.

“Stay here,” his gruff voice said. “Shout, loud, if you need me. I won’t be a few minutes.”

Iris nodded and sat on the bed quietly while he showered and got ready in the bathroom. He came back out and picked up his green shirt from the corner of the bed, buttoned it back on.

“We need to get going,” he said as he toed into his shoes. “We can talk on the road.”

“Alright,” Iris agreed. She rose and followed the man out toward his truck. She stiffened and almost tripped when his hand came to her elbow at the passenger side door. He practically lifted her right into the high truck.

It wasn’t until he’d slammed into the driver’s side that Iris realized that she’d slid all the way over to the middle seat of the truck again. She considered sliding back over to window, but when he didn’t say anything about it, Iris decided to stay where she was. If she was sitting this close, she would have an excuse not to look right at his face.

So she buckled in and he brought the truck roaring to life.

“It worries me that you’re not asking questions,” he finally said as a few minutes later he merged onto the highway.

Iris cleared her throat, one hand found its way to the tail of her braid. “I don’t know where to start.”

The agent made a humming noise. “Alright. Well. My name is Agent Marcus Marinos. I’ve been assigned to protect you. You were on your way into my custody last night when you were abducted by a faction of the Kutros family.”

Iris furrowed her brow. Kutros. She knew that name. But she didn’t say anything about that. Not yet. “How did you find me?”

Her brain flashed to the freezing cold basement, the warehouse that the masked men had dragged her into.

“The agents who collected you from your home slipped a tracking device into one of your pockets.”

She frowned and brought her hands to the pockets of her jeans, lifting her hips to dig through them.

He cleared his throat. “I took it out and destroyed it last night.”

Iris frowned. She didn’t remember him reaching into her pocket.

“Right before I washed your hands. You were pretty out of it. I didn’t want to freak you out.”

She could feel his gaze on the side of her face again, but she still didn’t look.  She really didn’t have a thing to say about how out of it she was. Or the fact that he’d gone through her pockets without her knowing. “Where are we going?”

“We’re going to a prearranged pick-up point. My handler at the FBI left supplies for us there. Everything we’ll need to go dark for a little while.”

Iris’s mind blanked for a second. “What?”

The agent shifted in his seat, the hard line of his thigh pressed against Iris’s for just a second before he shifted again. “You’re supposed to be in FBI custody right now, but the fact that you were intercepted so easily yesterday implies that Kutros might have a man on the inside. So my handler and I decided that we’re going dark while she figures out how to keep you safe from them.”

“What does,” she cleared her throat when the words came out far softer than she’d wanted them to, “what does going dark mean?”

“It means that we are off the grid completely. We’re going to disappear for a little while. Just use cash, not be seen anywhere.”

“Like, what, a cabin in the woods or something?” Iris suddenly had a picture in her head of some dilapidated horror show of a wooden shack.

The agent chuckled. “Not quite.”

“Where can we go that’ll be safe enough?”

“You’ll see.” His voice was as gruff as before. But somehow, this time, Iris felt soothed by it instead of alarmed.

She was quiet for a minute. Very quiet. Clearing her throat, Iris turned just enough to look at the buttons of his shirt. “Have you… have you ever done something like this before?”

She felt his gaze on the side of her face again and she instantly slanted her eyes down and away from him. “I’ve been an agent for a decade.”

She furrowed her brow. “That’s not what I asked.”

He was quiet, and she wondered if she’d pushed too hard. Either he didn’t want to talk about this or he couldn’t talk about it.

“You’re asking if I’ve ever been assigned to protect one person in particular?”

She nodded, her bottom teeth between her lips.

“No. I haven’t. I’ve been in the field for years. Working cases.”

“So why now? Why me?”

The agent stiffened, infinitesimally. But Iris felt it. There was something that he didn’t want to talk about and Iris had the feeling that it caused him pain. He said nothing.

“Alright,” Iris cleared her throat and tugged at the end of her braid. “I guess there’s some things you can’t tell me, Agent Marinos.”

She turned her head in time to see the bottom half of his face, just a blink of pearl white teeth and that wide mouth as he grinned, just for half a second, smile lines flashing.

“If I’m calling you Iris then you’re calling me Marcus.”

Iris immediately faced forward, her hands pressed flat over her thighs. She tried to calm her racing heartbeat. That smile. Damn. That smile.

A tempo started behind her temple, a tightening in her chest that had her swallowing hard. Not now! Iris thought to herself as a frantic, insistent melody tried to work its way out of her. Her entire life music had been this way for her. Persistent, in her face, working its way to the surface when she least expected it. The only thing that Iris knew was that this was not the time. She swallowed against the song and tried as hard as she could to forget that smile. That burning white smile that had made her feel like she was on the last part of a boat going down fast.              

“Stay in the car,” the agent said as he pulled the truck through a residential neighborhood about an hour from where they’d started. This was the secret pick-up point that he’d arranged with his handler? It just looked like a subdivision. He paused as he opened his door, like he was about to say more, but then he just slid out and closed the door firmly.

Iris watched his back as he jogged down a sidewalk and tipped through a yard, ducking behind a hedge.

He moved like a bear. Inexorable, unstoppable, not graceful per se, but natural. He moved exactly like he was supposed to. The song swelled inside Iris, pulsing at her temple. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. And then she jumped damn near out of her skin when she heard the door open beside her again.

“Oh!” she clutched at her chest and simultaneously out at the agent’s arm as he slid into the seat next to her. “You scared me!”

She stared at the steering wheel as she said it and she could feel his eyes again. If anything the intensity behind the stare was growing, not waning like she wished it would.

“It’s just me,” he said as he tossed a black backpack over her lap and onto the seat next to her. He paused, and she could feel something large behind it. Those tan fingers floated through the air, rested firmly on the back of her hand for just one, blazing second. “I’m going to keep you safe, Iris.”

She nodded, unable to tear her gaze away from where he touched her. Even after he took his hand away, pulled the truck back on the highway, she stared at that spot on her hand that burned, burned, burned.

“It’s only a couple of hours or so until we’re there,” he told her a few minutes later, when the cloudy February day started to give way to the sun. They were driving south and Iris could tell by the greening of the landscape that when they got out of the car, it was going to be considerably warmer than it had been before. Where had they spent the night again? All she knew was that she’d started in Pennsylvania, where she lived. Then she’d been driven by the FBI agents, and then abducted and then… rescued? She realized that she didn’t even know what state she was in.

Maybe that was why she outright gasped when the sparkling, silvery ribbon of ocean first revealed itself out of the driver side window. She hadn’t realized they were that close to the ocean! She craned her neck to the side, but relaxed her body back.

“That’s nice,” Marcus said, startling her a little bit. It wasn’t until her body stiffened that she realized that she’d been leaning her shoulder against his. She straightened up and the absence of his heat against her made her feel awkward.

“What’s nice?” she asked, her eyes firmly on the ocean out the window.

“What you’re humming. It’s pretty. What song is it?”

“Oh.” Heat flooded her face, a hard stripe of embarrassment swallowed her. She couldn’t tell him that she’d been accidentally humming a song that had hatched inside of her the second she’d first seen his smile. He’d think she was nuts. “I hadn’t realized I’d been humming,” she answered truthfully and evasively.

She felt his eyes on her again but he didn’t press her. They didn’t speak again on the drive. Not even when her pulse began to race as they left the populated highway and started swinging through backcountry. Big, graceful trees lazed overtop of the road, some of them with branches long enough to drag along the windshield of the car. The sun blazed through the canopy, turning the light into a dozy, deep sea green. Her stomach flipped as she shifted in her seat.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, out of the blue, and had her jumping in her seat again.

Iris cleared her throat. Her voice was small, but she was proud of herself for saying what was on her mind even so. “It, uh, it occurs to me that I should have asked you for identification of some kind.”

She watched as the trees thickened and pavement on the road they were driving gave way to gravel. He slowed the truck accordingly.

“Ah.” His voice was deep and understanding. Iris watched from the corner of her eye as he lifted his hand from the steering wheel. She heard the raspy scritch of his hand over what she assumed must be his five o’clock shadow. “Here.”

He lifted his ass up from the seat and fished his phone out of his back pocket. He opened it with his fingerprint and handed it over to her.

Iris took the phone and stared at it blankly. What was this all about?
“Call somebody in there. Ask them about me. Don’t give any information about our whereabouts, of course, but you know, use somebody as a character reference.”

Iris, perplexed but in need of reassurance, opened up his most recent calls. As far as she could scroll, there were only the same four names over and over again. Eli, Jay, Mama Kat, and Ryan. Those were the only people he called. Iris tapped one at random and held the phone up to her ear while it rang.

“Hey man,” a deep, friendly voice answered on the third ring. “You alright? You left so fast last night I didn’t get a chance to say bye. I assume it was for work?”

Iris paused. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Marcus? Hello?”

She cleared her throat. “Hi.”

“Oh,” the man’s voice said, obviously a little confused as to why a woman was calling him from Marcus’s phone. “Hello. Who’s this?”

“I, uh, don’t think I can tell you. But I’m with Marcus.”

“Is he alright?” Anxiety creased the man’s tone and Iris suddenly felt terrible for making him worry.

“Yes, he’s sitting right here next to me. He told me I could call you as a character reference.”

There was a slight pause on the other end, but when the man spoke again, Iris could swear he was smiling. “Considering I’ve known him since we were four years old, yeah. I can attest to his character.”

Iris found herself smiling as well. “Alright. Is he a nice man?”

“Yeah. He’s nice enough, when he’s not being a grumpy asshole.” The man paused. “Are you pretty?”

“Excuse me?” Iris’s eyes bugged a little bit.

“I’m just wondering if you’re pretty or not. Because if you are, then he’s probably gonna be extra nice to you.”

“Oh.” Iris had no idea what to say to that. But she had more questions. “Would you send your sister alone someplace with him?”

The man paused. “I don’t have a sister.”

“If you did?”

“Well, that depends. In this scenario, is my hypothetical sister pretty?”

Iris couldn’t help but laugh. “Sure.”

“If you’re asking me if Marcus is gonna be respectful of you, then yes. He will be.”

Iris bit her lip and swallowed the song in her throat down. For the first time since she’d met the agent sitting next to her, she found herself resisting the urge to look at him. This entire time her eyes had been avoiding him of their own accord. “Alright. One last question. Can you confirm what his job is?”

“He’s a federal agent. Wait. Crap. Maybe I’m not supposed to tell people that. Shoot. Will you put him on the phone?”

“Sure.”

“Nice to talk to you, honey.”

“You too.”

Iris handed over the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”

“Hey,” the agent’s deep voice rumbled over her. “Oh, hey Eli. I wasn’t sure if she called you or Jay. I should have known it was you from the way she was smiling.” He paused and grunted for a second. Iris felt his eyes on the side of her face, he was looking at her again. “Yeah. You made her blush. What’d you ask her?” His gaze became even more intense and he shifted against the seat, his hard thigh brushing up against hers again. “Oh. Yeah. She is. Shut the fuck up.”

And then the agent did something that had every nerve in Iris’s body pulling wire tight. He laughed. A deep, rich laugh. Like melted dark chocolate. Iris felt something melt in her gut.

“Look, man. I can’t tell you exactly where we’re going. But, ah, don’t call the cops if any of your alarms go off, alright? Uh huh. Thanks. Love to Tia. Bye.”

He hung up the phone and lifted up to slide it back into his pocket. Silence hung heavy in the car for a moment.

“Feel better?” the agent asked her as he turned off onto another, smaller dirt road that opened up into a grassy field on either side. The ocean grinned cheekily from directly in front of him. On the other side of the field, Iris watched two other cars race in opposite directions down another road.

“Yeah,” she said in a whisper that accidentally turned right into a hum. She couldn’t stop the song now. It was coming out one way or another. So instead of swallowing it down, she kept it low and in the back of her throat, hoping that he wouldn’t hear too much of it.

She felt his eyes on her but she turned her head away and just a short minute later, they were pulling into a dirt parking lot that dead ended into a set of craggy bluffs that gave way into an ocean inlet. Iris could see a few other cars parked haphazardly in the lot and when she squinted, she saw that there were four or five fisherman, hip deep in the water, some of them with fishing lines and others dragging traps.

She expected him to park, but instead, he drove straight onto a dock and toward the tiniest little single car ferry she’d ever seen. In fact, she wasn’t sure it could be called a ferry. She thought it was much more likely filed under the category of pontoon. She crossed her hands in her lap and white knuckled them together.

He pulled the car up, almost onto the ferry, and idled it right next to a man in a folding chair, who had a newspaper resting over his face and his legs crossed at the ankle.

“Beau!” the agent leaned out of his window toward the man.

The newspaper fluttered to the ground as the man was up and out of his chair like a shot. Iris got a sudden eyeful of a nearly naked 70-year-old man. He was tan and leathery as a baseball glove. He wore not much more than a faded, European-style bathing suit that must, at one point, have been red. His chest was hairless and so was his head. His teeth shone out of his mouth like stars in the night sky. Shading his eyes with one hand, the man squinted at the truck.

“Well, if it ain’t Marcus the marvelous. Eli didn’t tell me you—” He sauntered up and leaned into the cab of the truck, his eyes widened as his words trailed off. “My, my, my. Introduce me to your lady friend.”

“I’m not giving you any advantages here, Beau, you’ve stolen enough ladies from me,” the agent evaded smoothly.

Beau grinned that toothy smile across the cab at Iris and she found herself grinning back.

“Can’t argue with that,” the older man said. “If I had a lady as pretty as you, I’d wanna keep her to myself.” He turned back to the agent. “Eli know you’re headed this way?”

The agent nodded. “Got the green light not ten minutes ago over the phone.”

“Yeah, I s’pose that’s alright then. I’ll take you over.” He squinted into the cab of the truck and then into the bed. “You ain’t got no damn groceries.”

“We’re in a hurry.”

The older man gave an exaggerated roll of his head. “Young men always in a rush.” He leaned even further into the cab and waggled his eyebrows at Iris. “You’re wasted on a young buck like him, darlin’. You want a man who knows how to take his time—”

“Alright, alright.” The agent gently elbowed the older man back out of the cab.

Beau grinned even more. “I’ll make the trip back over to the island around 4:00 this afternoon. Maybe I’ll leave a bag of groceries at the ferry launch on the other side.”

The agent nodded. “That would be much appreciated.”

“Y’all know how long you’re gonna be on the island?” Beau asked.

The agent cleared his throat. “Not sure yet.” He went to pull the truck forward onto the ferry but pumped the brake again. “And Beau? You get any strangers out here asking for a ride over to the island, you call the house phone fast, alright?”

Beau squinted at Iris and then his eyes flicked back out to the little green island floating in the not too far distance. Iris followed his eyes. It didn’t look barely populated. She wondered if this was the only way over to the island.

“Anything I should know about that?” Beau asked, bringing his attention back to the truck. “You know I don’t like trouble on my island.”

“No trouble,” the agent shrugged. And Iris felt his eyes flick over to her again. “Just the smallest matter of a jealous ex-husband.”

Beau puffed up at that, his eyes flicking back toward the parking lot. “Ah. I understand. I’ll let you know if we get anybody I don’t know out here.”

The agent pulled the truck forward onto the ferry then, and it was a good thing, because Iris couldn’t help but drop her mouth flat open. Jealous ex-husband? She had nobody jealous, no husband’s, and not even any exes. Except for Jet. Iris internally winced as she thought of the man. He didn’t count as an ex. You had to be an established thing in order to turn into an ex.

The agent didn’t turn to her, but she could have sworn he had half a smile on his face. “I had to think of something that would keep Beau from asking too many questions. Besides, he’s got a soft spot for love drama. He’ll be pulling for you now. And probably mean-mugging any man under fifty that comes this way for years.”

Iris hummed understanding in the back of her throat and was slightly dismayed when the hum dissolved into the melody she was fruitlessly trying to restrain.

A few minutes later, the ferry pulled jerkily away from the dock and headed for the small island in the distance.

Iris stayed where she was in the cab of the truck as she watched the land in front of her get bigger and bigger as they approached. The agent stayed right next to her, his thick, hot arm pressing into her side where they sat.

“What’s it called?” Iris asked, nodding toward the island.

“Lotus Island.”

Iris cleared her throat. “And, uh, what state is it in?”

She felt his eyes again. “We’re off the coast of South Carolina right now. A little south of Emerald Isle.”

She let out a long low breath. “Alright.”

The ferry stopped with a light jolt as Beau docked it on the little metal dock on the almost uninhabited island.

“Welcome to Lotus!” Beau shouted to her as he came to the passenger side and helped her down out of the car. The older man’s hand tightened on hers for just a second when he saw her black eye. He must not have noticed it before. Iris resisted the urge to bring her hand up and cover it. Beau cleared his throat. “I won’t let anybody come over, honey.”

He must think her “ex-husband” had given her the black eye. Uncomfortable with lying, even tacitly, Iris simply ducked her head and looked at the floor. Seconds later, the agent was coming up behind her and tossing his keys to Beau. “You mind parking her for me? We’re gonna start the hike.”

Beau nodded, with one last look at Iris, and started around to the truck.

The agent placed a hand on the small of her back and led her forward down an overgrown path, the backpack he’d collected slung over his back. “Usually we could drive up to the house,” he explained. “But it’s gotten overgrown this year, and since we don’t have any stuff, we might as well just walk it. It’s not far.”

“How many people live here?” Iris asked the agent as she walked side by side with him down the thin gravel road that was, indeed, very overgrown. She could hear the water lapping at the side of the island not far from them, and she wondered idly about what kind of wildlife she should be worrying about right now.

“There’s a few houses on the other side of the island, including Beau’s. But we’ll be the only ones on this side.” She could see the outline of a weathered cedar shake house through the ivy-draped trees. “This is my friend Eli’s vacation house. You talked to him on the phone. We’ll stay here for a minute while we figure out what to do next. It’s safe because there’s only one way on or off the island.”

“The ferry.”

“Yeah. Even boats can’t moor here because of the rocks that surround it. The ferry takes the only path possible. We can’t get snuck up on out here.”

Iris made a small noise, to show she was listening, but most of her attention was on the two-story house that was slowly being revealed as they walked around the curve of the road. It was humble in that it wasn’t particularly fancy. But the house was sturdy and impressive. It looked large enough to have a few different bedrooms and there was a spilling, overflowing garden in the front of the house that made Iris think of Ireland for some reason. Even with all the trees in the front of the house, she could see that the back of the house opened up right onto the ocean.

The agent stepped into the garden and kicked a rock aside, fishing a house key out from under it. When they stepped into the house, it was extremely dark and very musty.

“I’ll open up the shutters,” the agent muttered, dropping his backpack on the floor of the house.

Iris closed and locked the front door after her and ducked into the first bathroom she found. When she came out, she blinked against the sudden, bright light that flooded the house. She wasn’t sure where he’d gone, but she didn’t bother looking. She was momentarily stunned by what she saw. He had thrown open all the shutters on the back of the house and revealed floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the sparkling, jewel bright ocean.

Iris’s mouth dropped right open as she gasped and rushed forward toward the windows. Now that Owen was getting pretty famous as a musician, she’d stayed in a lot more fancy places. Views of the city and of the mountains. But still, her bare upbringing with coupon clipping and hand-me-down clothes often reared its head in moments like this. She still couldn’t believe that she’d ever be lucky enough to see the early afternoon sun over the sparkling ocean.

Every wave that rolled into the beach was frothy and tipped with white. She could see pearl white birds catching buffets of wind over the water, and she realized that the weather was slightly agitated, kicking up a fuss. She sucked in a breath of pure amazement and delight as the sun glinted off the perfectly turquoise water. Grass as green as turf on a golf course tumbled down toward the golden sand. Perfect. It was absolutely perfect.

She felt all the tension of her last two days dissolve away for just a perfect second as she absorbed the view in front of her. The smile on her face spread of its own accord, swallowing her and lifting her up all at once. Iris, without thinking, turned back to look behind her. The smile still fierce and consuming across her face, she saw that the agent, Marcus, was standing across the room, looking at her. And for the first time since she’d met him, her gaze clashed with his. She looked directly into his eyes. His eyes like the inky black of the ocean at night. His eyes that pinned her in one place. And when he didn’t look away from her face, she felt the slow impact of his eyes over every inch of her body.

His eyes. Holy god. Iris felt a new melody rise up through her, pounding at her temple. She wanted to look away, hide her face, hide her whole self. But she found she couldn’t. His face, handsome and soft when he’d slept in the hotel room that morning, was elevated to a whole other level when you added in those dark eyes. The man in front of her was dangerous, sexual. The man in front of her was primal. Every inch an animal.