Chapter 6 - The Unraveling
The room was vast and quiet, the only sound the distant rumble of SoHo traffic three stories below.
Lucien walked toward her slowly. The violent menace that had radiated from him moments before hadn't disappeared; it had merely compressed, drawn inward into something tightly coiled and dangerously focused.
“Are you frightened of me, Evelyn?” he asked, stopping inches before her.
Evelyn tilted her chin up. “Should I be?”
“Most people are.”
“Most people don't look past the rumors,” she said, her voice remarkably steady despite the racing pulse in her throat. “You didn't break his jaw. You didn't pull a weapon. You gave him an objective demonstration of power because he refused to accept verbal boundaries.”
Lucien studied her face, his gaze tracing the curve of her cheekbone, down to the corner of her lips where the memory of that first stolen kiss still hung between them like an unresolved chord.
“You analyze everything,” he murmured.
“It keeps me from making catastrophic mistakes.”
“Kissing me was a catastrophic mistake,” he pointed out, stepping closer until the front of his shirt brushed her linen blazer. “It altered your entire trajectory.”
“Did it?”
“You belong to my circle now, Evelyn. Manhattan will never see you as Adrian Cross’s discarded fiancée again. They will see you as the woman Lucien Moretti pulled into his shadow.”
“I don’t exist in shadows,” she said softly, refusing to step back. “I build things. I design spaces that people remember.”
“Then design mine.”
His hand came up, slow and deliberate, giving her every opportunity to pull away. She didn't.
His fingers were warm, calloused against her jawline as his thumb traced the edge of her lip. A shiver tore through her core—not of fear, but of an electric, intoxicating awareness that had been absent from her life for far too long.
“Come with me to the estate in Hudson this weekend,” he said, his voice dropping into that deep, gravelly register that made her breath hitch. “The construction on the private compound is finished. I want your eyes on the interior architecture. I want your mind, Evelyn.”
“Just my mind?” she whispered recklessly.
Lucien’s gray eyes flared with something dark, possessive, and untamed.
May you like
“No,” he said honestly. “Not just your mind. But I will wait until you give me the rest of your own free will.”
***
