The fine hairs at the back of her neck rose. Every nerve ending from her scalp to the base of her spine came violently, excruciatingly alive.

His nose grazed the curve where her neck met her shoulder. It wasn’t a kiss. Not even a touch. Just the faintest contact of warm skin against hers, so light it could have been imagined, so deliberate it could not have been.

The scent of cigarette smoke clung to him. She had always smelled it on him numerous times. In the nightclub, in the car, on the contract papers, he had touched with those long, elegant fingers. But now, with his mouth inches from her throat, the scent was different. Stronger.... Deeper.... with the warm, woody undertone of his cologne and the dark, smoky fragrance that she had failed to wash out of her clothes for three days.

It filled her lungs, flooded her senses, and wrapped around her brain until she could not think of anything except the man pressed against her back and the arm locked around her waist.

Her heart hammered so hard she could feel it in her teeth.

’What was he doing?’

"W-what are you doing?" Her voice came out thin, shaky, and at least two octaves higher than anything she had ever produced in her life.

She tried to move. Her hands came up and gripped his forearm, pulling, twisting, trying to peel his arm away from her waist.

His arm did not budge. He held her with the effortless, immovable strength of a man who could have crushed her ribcage with that same arm and was choosing not to.

"Let me go." The words left her mouth, but the conviction did not follow them. Her voice came out breathy, unsteady, stripped of every ounce of the defiance she had wielded ten minutes ago when she had threatened to expose his existence to his family.

Cassian’s lips hovered at the shell of her ear. Close enough that when he spoke, she felt the vibration of each syllable against her skin before she heard the words.

"I am craving for a kiss."

Cixi’s heart did not skip one beat. It skipped five...

Lord help her!

Her cheeks erupted in a flush so violent the heat reached her earlobes. Crimson spread from her cheekbones to her jawline to the column of her throat, staining her skin beet red in seconds.

Her fingers, still gripping his forearm, went slack. Her mind went blank. Utterly, catastrophically blank. Every retort, every sarcastic comeback, every defensive quip she had stockpiled over twenty years of surviving difficult conversations evaporated from her brain and left behind nothing but static and the noisy percussion of her own heartbeat.

She could not speak.

She could not form a single word. Her lips parted, but no sound came. Then she closed her lips. She swallowed. She tried again and failed again. Cassian Crown had done something that threats, kidnappings, fake pregnancies, and surveillance footage had failed to achieve.

He had rendered Cixi McLore speechless. He always did!

They stayed like that. His arm around her waist. His chest against her back. His breath warmed the sensitive skin behind her ear. Her body was rigid, flushed, and trembling at a frequency so fine it looked like stillness but felt like an earthquake.

The city lights pulsed and shifted beyond the windows, painting slow-moving patterns of gold and white across the dark floor of the suite, and neither of them moved.

Ten seconds. Twenty. Then thirty...Fifty... One minute...

Cixi finally found her voice somewhere at the bottom of her lungs. She dragged it upward with the effort of a woman hauling a bucket from a deep well.

"Is this a punishment?"

What else could she think? He had just laughed at her threat. She had just blackmailed him with the one secret that could destroy his entire operation. And now, seconds later, he had her locked against his chest, breathing against her neck, whispering that he wanted to kiss her. If that was not retaliation, she did not know what retaliation looked like.

Cassian’s grip on her waist shifted. His thumb traced a slow circle against her hip bone through the fabric, and that small, precise motion sent a tremor through her stomach that she could not suppress.

"No." His voice dropped into a register so low it vibrated against the base of her skull. "This is the moment you understand exactly what kind of deal you signed with the Devil." His thumb stopped moving. His arm tightened by a fraction. His lips brushed the very edge of her earlobe, and the contact was so light, so fleeting, that it left a burn on her skin that she would still feel hours from now. "You threatened me, Lousy Kisser. Nobody threatens me and walks away without learning the cost."

"You can’t have your way all the time." Cixi almost whispered it. Her stomach fluttered in an uneven rhythm, like rain hitting the ground but falling everywhere at once, and that restless feeling only worsened when his hand moved from her waist to her chest, stopping just above her breasts as he pulled her closer.

An involuntary gasp escaped her lips, and the fine hairs at the back of her neck rose.

"You would be surprised, Cixi," he said, his voice low. "You have already given me my way... willingly."

That made her frown at once.

What way? What did he mean by that?

She quickly went over the clauses they had signed, trying to understand what he meant. She found nothing.

"You are trying to manipulate me." She forced the words through her teeth, clinging to the accusation the way a drowning person clings to driftwood.

"Am I?"

His voice came out husky. The word scraped against the hollow behind her ear with the slow, rough texture of warm velvet dragged across bare skin. It was neither a denial nor a confession. It was an invitation to doubt her own accusation while he did exactly what she had accused him of doing.

Then he pressed his lips to the nape of her neck. His mouth landed on the exposed skin at the base of her hairline, and he held it there for three full seconds.

Cixi’s body detonated.

Her knees buckled.... Both of them.... At the same time. Her legs lost every trace of structural integrity, and her full weight dropped backwards into his chest. Her spine arched involuntarily, pressing her shoulder blades into the hard wall of muscle behind her.

A sharp gasp ripped from her throat involuntarily, the kind of sound she had never made in front of another human being and would have denied producing under oath. Her fingers, still resting on his forearm, curled inward, and her nails dug into his skin through his shirt sleeve, hard enough that the fabric stretched between her knuckles.

Heat exploded from the point where his lips touched her nape. It raced down her spine in a molten line, splitting at the small of her back and shooting outward through her ribs and her hips and her thighs until every inch of her skin burned with a temperature that had nothing to do with the hot summer.

Goosebumps erupted across her arms, her collarbones, the back of her hands, spreading so fast they arrived before her brain could process what had caused them.

Her heart did not beat. It detonated. Each thud slammed against her sternum with the force of a fist hitting a locked door, and she could feel the pulse in her wrists, her throat, the tips of her ears, the soles of her feet.

"W-what are you tryin..."

The sentence collapsed halfway through her mouth when Cassian’s lips left her nape and began to move.

His mouth traced a path along the side of her neck, following the tendon that ran from below her ear to the curve of her shoulder. They hovered, ghosted, grazed, each contact so featherlight it drove her nerve endings into a frenzy of anticipation, her body straining toward his mouth even as her mind screamed at her to pull away.

She felt his lower lip drag against the hammering pulse point on the side of her throat. He lingered there. She knew he could feel her heartbeat against his mouth. She knew he was counting the beats. She knew he was memorising the exact speed of her panic and filing it away for future use.

His lips continued upward. Along the line of her jaw. Past the hinge. Over the soft skin below her ear. And when he reached her earlobe, he placed a second kiss there, pressing his mouth against the delicate curve of flesh with a tenderness so intentional it felt like cruelty.

Cixi’s eyes squeezed shut. Her teeth sank into her lower lip so hard she tasted copper. A tremor ran through her entire body, starting at the crown of her skull and travelling downward in a continuous wave that shook her shoulders, her ribcage, her hips, and left her legs trembling beneath her own weight.

"Kissing you." Cassian’s voice purred against her earlobe. "Lousy Kisser."