Page 83

ONE

Lenore

He’s always been the shadow on the other side of my letters. A dangerous but distant enigma, wrapped in a shield of ink and paper. But now he is flesh and bone, an imposing reality standing before me.

And now, as I step into the sterile, dimly lit medical ward of the prison, reality slams into me.

He’s here. He’s real.

The moment I step through the heavy steel door, the air shifts, the last of what is fresh and alive in the spring turns stale, tinged with the sterile bite of antiseptic and something faintly metallic—like old blood soaked too deep into the grout to ever be scrubbed clean. The fluorescents flicker overhead, casting sickly yellow light across the cracked linoleum floor. My footsteps echo in the cavernous silence, a steady rhythm of hesitation and anticipation.

Why am I here?

I can almost hear my mother’s voice. Her sharp, exasperated sigh crackling through the phone just hours ago. You attract trouble like a damn lightning rod, sweetheart. She isn’t wrong. From the time I was sixteen, sneaking out to meet boys on motorcycles, to now—standing in a prison, of all places, to meet a man I’ve only ever known through ink and longing—I’ve always been drawn to the things I shouldn’t want. The dangerous, the impossible. And if my mother knew exactly who I was meeting today? She’d fly across the country just to drag me out of here by my hair.

He’s in prison, for God’s sake! What are you thinking?

But the thing is, I wasn’t thinking. Not when it came to him. Not when I traced the edges of his letters with my fingertips at night. Not when I breathed in the words he wrote me, soaking them up like sunlight through my skin.

Not when I agreed to come here.

No, I’m not thinking, but one thing I am is wet.

God, there are no panties in the world that could withstand this deluge.

The walls, once white, are now a dull shade of gray, marked with scuffs and shadowed handprints, as though the ghosts of past inmates still linger. A single steel examination table sits in the center of the room, a thin paper sheet crinkled and torn along its edges. There is no clock, no window, no evidence that time exists in this place at all.

My pulse stutters as my brain puts together the shape in the shadows to form something human.

A man.

Jesus, a big friggin’ man.

He stands like a mountain carved by war, his presence swallowing the surrounding space. His gray prison-issued shirt clings to his torso as he steps forward into the horrible light, stretched taut over a chest that looks like it was built to withstand bullets.

The short sleeves barely contain his biceps, the fabric threatening to tear at the seams as his muscles twitch. Broad shoulders block the dim overhead florescents, casting deep shadows that seem to bow to his command. His forearms, lined with veins and ink, flex as he crosses them, the motion slow, deliberate, like a predator conserving energy before the kill. Even the simple act of breathing makes his chest expand in a way that demands attention, as if the room itself must adjust to accommodate him.

“About time,” he rasps, his voice a jagged, sour thing, like whiskey over gravel. It slides into my veins, warming me from the inside out. His mouth twitches, not quite a smirk, more like a slow, predatory claim that thickens the air, turning it from crisp and sterile to something molten and suffocating, like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks—charged, expectant, on the verge of ruin.

I swallow. What am I doing here again? I gather the bundle of letters against my chest like armor, though I know nothing could protect me from the way he’s unraveling me with his metallic blue eyes.

“Traffic was murder,” I quip, but my voice betrays me. It’s breathy and weak, crushed beneath the weight of him.

His eyes flicker from sky into storm, and my stomach cinches into a knot. “You know the rules, sweetheart. You don’t talk back. You are not too old to have that ass turned bright red.”

The words are a live wire down my spine, my nerve endings snapping awake, my body hyperaware of every charged inch between us. He steps forward, and suddenly I’m drowning in his scent—dark spice and cedar, mixed with something distinctly male, something that makes my skin tingle and my lungs tighten.

“Those my letters?” he asks, his sandpaper voice wrapping around me like a vise.

“Of course,” I breathe, barely recognizing my own voice as I lift the bundle I’ve guarded like a secret. “I wouldn’t forget those.”

His fingers brush mine as he takes them, and the contact is incendiary. A spark that ignites something reckless in my bloodstream, a fire that has been smoldering since the first stroke of ink on paper.