“He isn’t much of a teacher, if you don’t know what happened to me,” she inally grinds out between clenched teeth.

I lick a look at Tristan. “I know he did this to you.” I don’t wait for his reaction or hers, watching Amber as I clarify as if she doesn’t understand when she does. “I didn’t ask how this happened to you. I askedwhat happened to you.” What horrible something she was hiding from inside her pain.

Her glare is a mix of ire and ice that would intimidate someone else, but not me. Not someone who understands burying pain as damn well as I do. “Chris happened to me,” she hisses between her teeth, and yanks her arm back.

Chris happened to her? Tilting my head to study her, I try to read what’s deeper than the surface.

“Sara.”

Chris’s voice surprises me, and I guiltily jump to my feet as if I’ve just delved into some sort of secret territory. And maybe I have. I don’t know.

He’s standing to the left of Tristan, by what must be a back entryway. Did he hear the exchange? I think he must have.

All I know for certain is how completely he has stolen every ounce of energy in the room, how the air crackles around him, and I’m struck by how easily this occurred. Casually dressed in his standard faded jeans and a T-shirt, he owns the room, where Tristan needs his leather and tats, and Mark his custom suits.

“Chris,” I say because, well, it’s all I seem to be able to think to say.

“Let’s go,” he orders, and the room pulses with the push of power behind the softly spoken command and, yes, the anger.

Tristan says something in French, and I’m not sure if he’s speaking to Chris or Amber. I think Amber.

Chris’s stare lingers on me several seconds before he casts a hard look on Tristan. Tristan gives him a nod. “Long time, man.”

“Maybe not long enough.”

Tristan smirks. “You say that every time you come home.”

“Because you’re always here.”

Holding his hands up, Tristan laughs. “You’re the one who keeps coming back.”

They begin speaking in French, and a subtle tension builds.

They don’t hate each other, but Chris simply doesn’t want me around Tristan. I have the sense that he’s making sure Tristan is just as clear as I am on that point.

Hating that I can’t understand what’s being said, I reach down to grab my bags. Chris is there to help before I have time to gather them. Our hands collide, warmth climbing up my arm, and my eyes meet his. His stare is a pure, possessive demand that once would have set my defenses into overdrive.

Now I see beyond his surface to the acid I’ve stirred to life with my actions. If I could turn back the clock ifteen minutes and change my decision to come here, I would.

“Chris—” Amber starts.

“You’ve said enough, Amber,” he snaps, not even looking at her. I realize he hasn’t looked at her since he arrived and I wonder what that means, but, honestly, I don’t care. I shouldn’t have come here. There’s plenty about Amber I have to learn, and as impatient as I feel to know those things, Chris needs to decide when to tell me.

Still watching me, Chris bends and claims my last bag, leaving me with my purse to hold. “Anything else?” he asks.

I shake my head, unable to speak for the guilt eating me alive. I did this. I made him feel whatever bad thing he’s feeling. I don’t care about anything Tristan and Amber could show or tell me, but he doesn’t know that. So I haven’t done a good enough job of showing him how much I love him, or he would.

I step to his side and we head for the back door, and he motions me in front of him to exit down a long, narrow hallway. He reaches around me to open the door, and for a moment his hand lingers on the surface, his body close to mine but not touching me. I want him to touch me. Seconds tick by and I hold my breath, waiting for what he will say, but there’s only silence. He opens the door, and disappointment ills me at the lingering tension between us. But this isn’t the place to clear the air—not with a potential audience.

Outside I ind a parking lot that holds only six cars, and Chris’s silver 911 is one of the three present. I quickly head for the passenger door, eager to be alone with him and explain myself. Impatiently, I wait while Chris places my bags in the backseat.

He turns to me, his jaw set hard and a reserved look in his eyes. “Get in the car, Sara.”

I decide now isn’t the time to get through to him. “All right, Chris—but not because you bark a command at me. Because I want to be far away from here when I make you hear me out.” I fold myself into the leather seat.

He just stands there, staring down at me, but I don’t look at him. Sometimes, I’m not sure he knows how to digest my responses to his demands. Sometimes I don’t, either, but this time I do. No matter how much I might deserve his anger, he isn’t my Master. So my snapping back at his orders shouldn’t surprise him.

He joins me in the car and we are closed in the darkness and his wrist settles on the steering wheel, but he doesn’t look at me. I sense him struggling with himself and I think he’s going to say something, but he doesn’t. And I don’t. He starts the engine and puts the car in gear. I’m pretty certain the next few blocks are going to feel eternal, and I’m right. They do.

Feeling the stuiness of both the car heater and our pent-up emotions, I’ve taken my jacket of by the time we pull into the garage at our house, and Chris is out of the 911 almost instantly. He rounds the car and opens my door, but he doesn’t look at me. I grind my teeth. One incident, this easily, and he’s shutting me out. It cuts like splintering little pieces of glass in my heart.

I step back to allow him to retrieve my bags, and ight the instinct to emotionally withdraw myself as well, to protect myself. I’m still ighting that feeling when we head toward the elevator entrance, neither of us looking at each other, still locked in a silence I can barely stand.

He punches the elevator button and I stare at his proile, wisps of blond hair framing his handsome face, and I watch the pulse of a muscle in his jaw. I sense his distance, his withdrawal, and suddenly I’m angry all over again.

I’ve traveled across the world for Chris. I came here to ight for us, and I intend to do just that. He is notshutting me out and tearing us apart over one stupid mistake. I won’t let him do this to me or us. Never again.

The elevator opens and he waits for me to enter, and I do. I rush inside and whirl around to confront him. He stalks forward and this time he doesn’t avoid looking at me, his expression etched with pure determination and some raw, dark emotion I can’t fully name. I don’t get the chance to try.

Before a word is out of my mouth, the bags he’s holding hit the loor and Chris has pressed me back against the wall.

My purse tumbles from my arm and his powerful thighs encase mine; his h*ps mold my hips. I gasp with the rough tangle of his ingers in my hair and the blaze of his eyes as they capture mine.

I am angry with him. I am aroused. And when his mouth claims my mouth, his tongue slicing past my lips with a delicious lick followed by another, demanding my response, I am at his mercy.

My ingers curl around his T-shirt and I press away the tiny space between us, molding myself against him. He owns me and, considering how the past thirty minutes have gone, this terriies me, but I’m all in with Chris. I decided that long before Paris. I am his to command, moaning with the taste of him, sultry and male, on my tongue.

His hand sweeps up my side, ingers lexing over my ribs, palm covering my breast. My nipple tightens in anticipation of the tug that follows and I moan, my need to touch him almost unbearable. I reach for his shirt, intending to push beneath, but he doesn’t let me.

Chris’s ingers close around my wrist and I know he is in that dark place, where he doesn’t let me touch him—but I am in a dark place, too, on edge, ripe with my anger and unwilling to be submissive to him. Challenging his silent message of control, I reach for his shirt with my free hand. He shackles that wrist as well and tears his mouth from mine. Our eyes lock, the sound of our heavy breathing illing the air and the motion of the elevator swaying our bodies. The loor vibrates slightly beneath our feet and I sense, rather than see, the doors behind Chris slide open, but still we stand there, still we stare at each other.

“They don’t get to tell you who I am.” His voice is a rough growl, low and tight. “I do. I tell you and I show you, so you get the truth—not their fabrication of it.” A muscle in his jaw lexes. “Understand?”

My anger and fear dissolve instantly. He’s not pulling away from me. He’s angry that Amber and Tristan might taint my view of him, when he’s already convinced I’ll hate him before this discovery process is over.

“Do you understand?” he demands when I apparently don’t answer fast enough.

This time I don’t ight the bark of his order, understanding the desperateness beneath its surface. “Yes. Yes, Chris. I—”

His ingers tangle in my hair again, tugging my head back in that deliciously rough way he does. Dark Chris calls to me and I no longer ight answering. “Do not go there without me again.” His voice is raw, like the emotion I’ve seen in his face and tasted on his lips.

“It wasn’t what you think it was, Chris.”

His eyes lash with disapproval. He isn’t pleased, or accepting, of what I’ve said, and his mouth closes down on mine, punishing, controlling. His tongue thrusting and tasting before he repeats his words, his ingers stroking my breasts, teasing my nipple. “Do not go there again without me, Sara.”

“I won’t.” The words come out a hoarse groan as his hand strokes a path up and down my side, and back over my breast.

His touch is heavy, the air thick, and I’m certain he isn’t convinced. “I won’t go back without you.”

His ingers curl around my neck and he stares down at me, searching my face with such intensity it feels as if he’s seeing straight to my soul. And I welcome the invasion. I welcome him. Seconds tick by, and I have no idea what he sees or doesn’t see in me, but he drags my mouth to his and kisses me.

The silky hot stroke of his tongue is a shot of adrenaline and desire that spikes through my body and creates a tingling sensation from head to toe. I shudder with pleasure and drink him in, tasting the bittersweet hunger in him, the anger and torment. I burn to touch him beyond where my ingers rest on his chest, to feel hard muscle lex beneath my ingers.

But control is his outlet of choice when there is no whip, no pain. And I’m no longer angry, no longer rebelling against his demands. No longer ighting his need for an outlet I have long ached for him to know that he has with me, in me.

I tremble with the caress of his hand over my waist, traveling to my hip, and curving around my backside to irmly pull me hard against his thick erection. His palm skims upward to the small of my back and lattens, molding me even closer. I moan into his mouth and he groans in response, his tongue delving deeply, hot with growing demand, with a palpable urgency. And his hands are everywhere, touching me, stroking me, caressing me, driving me wild and, before I know what’s happening, he’s shoving my jeans down my legs. I blink and my boots are gone, and I’m half na**d in an elevator with the doors locked open.

Chris turns me to the wall and his hands slide, slow and irm, possessively down my waist and over my hips. Feeling his gaze rake over my body, I am wet and weak in the knees. He cups my cheeks from behind and steps forward, pressing his lips to my ear. “Tonight I want to spank you, but I won’t. Not when it would be punishment. I won’t ever do that to you. But don’t think that means I won’t want to.”

I understand Chris. I don’t know how or why, but deep in our souls we connect, and I know what he is doing. He’s showing me a hard exterior, but all I see is vulnerability, a need that tonight has sparked to show me a darker, more dangerous side of himself, and have me not run for cover.

“You can’t scare me away, Chris. So throw all the words you want at me. I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere. And in case you forgot, I liked it when you spanked me.”

His hand inds my stomach and then presses deeper between my legs, until his ingers tease my clit. “Maybe this time I’ll tie you up and log you.”

“Do it.” His ingers stroke into the silky wet V of my body, and I am panting, barely able to speak, but I swallow and somehow inish my challenge. “The more you push me, the more I push back, Chris.”

He nips my earlobe and I can feel him unzipping his pants.

“So you say,” he murmurs.

“So I know.” Throwing caution to the wind, I press onward, trying to unleash the pent-up energy in him he always bottles up until it explodes. “Only one of us is running. Only one of us is afraid of what I have yet to discover, Chris.”

The air crackles and his hand goes to my waist, ingers lexing into my lesh, and I revel in the certainty I’ve succeeded in taking him to the edge. “You think I’m running?” he demands.

“No. I think you’re trying to make me run, so you can blame me if we fail.”

His c**k presses between my legs. “Does that feel like I want you to run?” He enters me, driving hard inside me without any prelude. “Does that?” And then he is thrusting, reaching around me to meld his hand to my breast, holding on to it, and me. He thrusts again, burying himself, with a ieriness that out-reaches pure physical need.

Oh yes, I have made him angry and I’m glad. I want this side of him; I want all of him. And damn it, he keeps trying to deny me. He keeps trying to hold back and, yes, he keeps trying to make me run.