Violet.
Kat.
It’s all tangled up inside my head.
I feel desire stirring in my veins, laced thick with a dose of self-loathing and a strong helping of anger. At him. At this situation. But mainly at myself.
Surely you are not this foolish.
Surely, you are not still vulnerable to him after everything he’s done.
“That’s great!” Sloan calls. “One more pose and we should be finished.”
Grayson sets me back on my feet and I take a hurried step away from him, hauling a relieved breath into my lungs as soon as we break contact. I feel overheated, overwrought by this entire experience. Thankfully, before I can keel over, Harper appears and silently passes me a bottle of water. Her expression reveals she’s more worried about my wellbeing than ever.
“Are you okay?” she whispers, voice hushed so no one else can hear.
“Nope,” I clip shortly, chugging down the water.
“It’s almost over.” With a reassuring squeeze of my hand, she flies back to the sidelines so Sloan can capture our final pose. I glance at Grayson as I walk to the center of the set, skirting around a large driftwood log, my bare toes squishing against the warm sand. When I reach the middle, I find him studying me with a look I’ve never seen on his face before.
“What?” I snap, need and fury churning through me in tandem.
“Nothing,” he murmurs. “Nothing at all.”
There’s no time to wonder about it, because then I’m in his arms again, and every ounce of energy is spent trying to keep myself in check.
It’s infuriating that this man who put me through the emotional wringer still has the ability to make my heart beat a bit faster when his knuckles graze the hollow beneath my ear, when his callused fingertips stroke the fragile skin inside my wrist. It’s downright alarming how good it feels to be back in his arms, his hands asking a lustful question my curves ache to answer.
I try to stay aloof and unaffected at his nearness, but after an hour of his hands on my skin, I’m flushed and having trouble focusing. Keeping my eyes trained solely on the camera, I shut out the set and the man wrapped around me as best I can.
Just part of the job.
I’m filled with desire, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do to stop it. Our bodies recognize each other at a chemical level, down to our indivisible parts — we’ve done this dance before, too many times to act convincingly like strangers.
For our last pose, Sloan orders me to lean back slightly against Grayson’s chest while he stands behind me with his hands on my hips. I try not to react as our bodies align, my ass nestling into his crotch where his cock pulses like a barely-caged animal. Grayson makes no such attempt at composure — he groans into my ear as his hips rub against me.
“You are fuckingkilling me, Kat.”
His fingers dig a little too tightly into my hips. I make a breathy sound — half protest, half longing — as he presses harder against my curves while the shutter clicks down, again and again and again.
I am consumed by contradiction. Hate and want and hurt and longing. A tornado of masochism and misery, in his arms.
I feel him, long and hard, throbbing through the thin barrier of fabric between us. My body has betrayed me. My skin is burning up, every inch of me on fire, which makes no sense at all when the heart inside my chest is still a deadened block of ice.
How is it possible to be so equally consumed by passion and repugnance?
They are two vastly different animals, I suppose — lust and affection. I’ve heard the termhate sexand never really understood it until this moment. It’s not simply sleeping with someone you can’t stand; it’s wanting someone so much, you’d let them strip you down to a shivering, self-abhorring mess just to feel their hands on your skin. It’s desire so strong, it leaves you weak and whimpering and hatingyourselfalmost as much as you hate them for wielding such indiscriminate power.
Just when I think I can’t take another moment without combusting in front of the entire production crew, Sloan’s voice calls out the blessed words I’ve been waiting for.
“All right, that should do it! Good work, you two.”
I rocket away from Grayson. I need a cold shower and possibly a licensed shrink. My eyes search the crowd for Harper as I practically run off set, feet kicking up sand, arms wrapping around my body to hold the tumultuous emotions tightly in check. I don’t want to look anyone in the eye, positive they can see straight through my flushed cheeks and rapid breaths to the emotional wreckage below.
“Kat! Wait—”
I pretend not to hear Grayson calling me as my gaze scans the perimeter for my best friend, flitting past a cluster of tech crew in all-black getups, a still-pouting Annabelle, a note-scribbling Trey. I don’t see Harper anywhere, but abruptly my eyes halt on a heart-stopping figure in jeans and a fitted white v-neck, standing in the shadows like Hades waiting to drag Persephone down to hell. He’s looking at me and I’m looking at him and there’s nothing else. No air or time or other insignificant humans occupying space and sound around us.