Alone, but the place was public. I didn’t have to say those words aloud. Jonas wouldn’t have missed it.

  He held the door open for me, and this chivalrous gesture sent a surge of anger through me. I didn’t want him to be polite or considerate. I didn’t want the other side of him that I had seen in Paris. He wasn’t that person.

  I headed to my usual spot at the counter. Bad idea. I had sat at this counter listening to other couples’ conversations too many times to think we’d get any privacy there.

  But I stopped too quickly to head for the booths, and Jonas crashed into me from behind. Rough hands grabbed my shoulders before I stumbled, pulling me back to standing. Against him. Against the hard muscles of his chest. I took a quick breath of the delicious scent of his aftershave. And him. His sharp breaths warmed my neck, echoing deep inside me. Heat rose to my cheeks. Shit, shit, shit.

  “Sorry,” he muttered, releasing me. He stepped back.

  This was a really bad idea.

  I didn’t look at him. “We’ll have more privacy in the back.”

  The décor of the place had weathered the years well and was now back in retro style. I slid across the light blue vinyl cushion, and Jonas squeezed in across from me. My heart was still on overdrive from our collision, and my cheeks were on fire, my body echoing from his touch. The pulse at the base of his neck ticked fast, but his expression was blank. Neither of us spoke.

  The waitress came by with coffee and menus. She took one glance at the grim expression on Jonas’s face and left.

  “How could you not tell me?” I hissed.

  “You didn’t want to know.” His voice was hard.

  “You said assault. But wanting to kill a man? Trying to kill a man?” I bit out.

  His eyes were cold. “So there are other kinds of assault you’d prefer?”

  “No,” I snapped.

  But the word assault was a lot less vivid than the ten-page description of his attack on that red-haired woman’s ex-boyfriend. I’d never forget that scene. The knuckles I had stroked had punched someone until he couldn’t stand. The hands that had held me tightly had tightened around someone’s neck. The voice that whispered my darkest fantasies was the same voice that had told a man he’d die.

  I closed my eyes. “You were only in jail for a few years. I just thought…”

  “That I wasn’t so bad?” he finished for me. “No. I am that bad. The shorter sentence is because the Swedish system decided I’m reformed.”

  The last word brought a dark scowl to his face.

  I leaned in. “But you don’t think so?”

  Jonas closed his eyes and said nothing.

  The icy anger that had clouded so much of my day melted a little as I studied his expression. Though he had changed his life, he hadn’t even begun to forgive himself. However mad I was at him was probably nothing compared to his own self-loathing. He had said something dismissive about redemption stories earlier in the conference room. Did it apply to him, too?

  Jonas dropped his head into his hands. His shoulders rose and fell, and he made no effort to defend himself.

  “I went to Paris with you,” I whispered.

  “And now you regret it.” Finally, a glimmer of emotion came through in his voice. Anger. And defeat.

  I said nothing. I wanted to say yes. I wanted to regret that foolish, impulsive trip to Paris with him. But what made me most angry was the truth: that I still hung onto what we had those few days. That I still wanted what we had between us.

  I want to pretend you’re my girlfriend for a little longer. He used the word pretend in Paris. I just hadn’t understood how far from reality our pretend romance had been.

  “Alice, I can’t take back the things I’ve done,” he said softly.

  I looked out the window. “And the other scenes. With the woman. Did you really do those things to her?”

  He didn’t answer. And the longer he waited, the harder it was to sit across the table from him. He had.

  Finally, he looked up at me, and I met his gaze. “I never did anything that she didn’t ask for,” he whispered. “But I shouldn’t have listened to her. I never should have gone so far with her, either.” His voice was heavy, like he was much, much older than the man I had met three months ago.

  Sex that felt like fighting. He had used those words in Paris, and I had asked for it later that evening. How stupid I had been. I had asked for it, as if it were a sexy game. But it wasn’t a game at all to him.

  We sat in silence. The waitress came by to take our order, but neither of us had touched our menus. I ordered the first thing that came to mind, a ham and cheese sandwich. Jonas asked for the same, and the waitress left.

  “How bad, Jonas?”

  He closed his eyes. “Why push this?”

  He had a point. Why was I torturing myself? And yet I couldn’t leave it. This was my last chance to put together this puzzle, to reconcile the man who had gone to jail with the man from Paris.

  We sat in silence.

  “Those things you did together in the book,” I said. “Are those real?”

  He nodded. “Mostly. I changed things that told too much about other people. But whatever you think about that guy – think that about me.”

  More phrases from Paris flooded back. I made him hungry for things he never thought he could have. What things were those? Rougher things in the bedroom, things that didn’t go together with love, as he had put it? Or was he looking for something else?

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, a little too loudly. The waitress glanced in our direction. I lowered my voice. “On the last night in the hotel I asked you to—”

  “And I said no,” he interrupted. “And then you pushed me. You implied you’d do it with someone else.”

  “And you gave in.”

  “No,” he snapped. A couple two booths away turned to look.

  “I didn’t give in,” he said, quieter, but the anger still seeped through. “I had to choose. Give you just a taste of what you were asking for, or risk that you would find some other sick fuck to do it instead. I don’t regret that.”

  “What if I had pushed you the way your ex-girlfriend did? What if I had told you my ex-boyfriend fucked me harder than you did?”

  Jonas looked up at me, surprised and maybe even a little amused. “Neil?”

  I huffed out a breath. “You know what I mean.”

  He massaged his temples.

  “I never would hurt you,” he said, all traces of amusement gone.

  “How do I know that?”

  “You don’t,” he said flatly. “The truth is that I don’t trust myself sometimes, Alice. You have no reason to, either. But that statement is as true as anything I’ve ever said.”

  The problem was I believed him.

  The waitress brought the sandwiches and set them down on the table. A distraction. My stomach turned at the sight of food, but I forced myself to take a few bites, an excuse to look away from Jonas’s deep blue eyes. We ate in silence.

  He finished his sandwich and moved his plate to the side. He rested his elbow on the table and ran his hand through his hair. “I know that I should wear some kind of warning sign around my neck. That’s why I wrote that book in the first place.”

  His voice cracked with emotion, and he ran his hand through his hair again, leaving a few tufts sticking out in different directions. It was almost sweet. But then I caught sight of his hands. Big, rough hands. No matter how far he ran from his former life, he would always have the hands of a fighter. The top joints of his ring finger bent out at an awkward angle, and white scars cut across his knuckles.

  I looked away. It was bad enough that he had a violent past. But what made me want to run the other direction wasn’t what he had done. It was how his damaged hands and all the other remainders of his past made him more appealing, not less.

  I set down my half-eaten sandwich. “Why are you here, Jonas? I know you had offers from other publishers, offers that were probably better than ours.”

  He closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “I couldn’t stop myself,” he muttered. “You have every reason to tell me to stay away from you. But I had to see what this would be like, now that you know.”

  His mouth twisted down. I reached out my hand to touch the deep creases on his forehead. His eyes widened as my fingers brushed against his skin. I froze at the heat radiating from him, then pulled away. I really shouldn’t touch him. Just sitting across from him was setting myself up for another months-long Jonas hangover.

  How easy would it be to take this man back to my apartment right now? Everything about his past said I should be scared of him. If I could digest the brutality in his book, what else would I come to accept?

  My mother probably never thought I’d spend her life pining away for a failed brute of a crook. How many years did it take before my mother realized what her life really was? How many of my father’s jail sentences, each longer than the last?

  The waitress came by with the check, and Jonas handed a few bills to her before I had a chance to see it.

  “Thanks. You didn’t have to pay,” I said.

  His eyes narrowed. He frowned and looked away.

  I stood up and headed for the door. It had started to drizzle while we were eating, and the sidewalk was wet. The cold wind blew through my layers, and I hugged my coat tighter around me. I turned the corner and ducked under a little awning. Jonas followed me, his big body blocking the wind. I leaned against the old brick building.

  The only thing this lunch had made clear was just how messed up I was over him. Jonas said nothing. He just stood in front of me, waiting.

  If I asked him to stay away, he probably would. But I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

  “What time’s your next meeting?” I asked.

  He looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes ago. You ready?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not going back into the office today.”

  He frowned. The rain came down harder, blowing drops on his shoulders, but he didn’t seem to care.

  Finally, he sighed. “So I guess this is goodbye.”

  Then I was back at our last goodbye in Paris. The kiss on the sidewalk had turned reckless and desperate. We had said nothing that last time, and there was nothing to say this time, either.

  Jonas took a step closer, but he didn’t touch me. Aside from the handshake at the office and the collision in the diner, he hadn’t touched me at all. Was staying away just as hard for him as it was for me? One look at his face told me it was worse. His mouth hovered so close, and his breaths warmed me.

  “Once more?” His voice came out rough.

  Just one more kiss. We had come this far. Could I deny myself one last chance to taste his soft, warm lips? Just one more chance to rest my hands on the hard planes of his chest? Just one more time had gotten me into this mess in the first place, but now, faced with the decision again, I couldn’t turn it down.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  Jonas didn’t react right away. He leaned one arm against the building at my back and fixed his intense gaze on me. There was nowhere else to look but into the stormy blue eyes I had tried so hard to forget. I hadn’t forgotten at all. That was the problem.

  Slowly, he raised his hand to my cheek. His thumb caressed my lips, giving me all the time in the world to back away. But I was long past backing away.

  I closed my eyes, and his lips brushed against mine. A groan rose from deep inside his chest, and I answered it with my own desperate sounds. Everything about him felt so raw. So good. He came in for another kiss. His lips stroked mine, coaxing them open for him. As I lost myself in the heady relief of finally touching him, the tone shifted. His hand slipped behind my neck, and his tongue persuaded, begged until I met his every stroke with more and more hunger. I fumbled with his open coat. Just a little closer, a little more. His muscles flexed under my touch. I would never get enough of this man. I gasped for breath and went back for more, caressing his tongue with mine. But all too soon, he slowed me down. He pulled back and kissed my neck. His eyes met mine for a long, hot look, and then he pulled me in again, holding me tight.

  “Why do you have to be so good at that?” I whispered.

  He let me go and straightened up. God, he was big. I had forgotten how it felt to be so close to him, to a man whose presence could be used both as a threat and as a promise.

  He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’m staying at the Hilton on Fifty-Fourth and Sixth. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  Jonas didn’t wait for my response. He turned into the gusts of rain and walked away.

  3

  ONCE I HAD read somewhere that the brain makes a decision long before the conscious mind registers it. Which meant that though I may spend minutes or hours or, in this case, an entire afternoon making a decision, much of the time was wasted. My brain had sealed the deal long before I thought I chose.

  As my taxi headed uptown, I searched for the moment when the scales truly tipped. Surely it wasn’t a half hour ago, when I finally changed out of my sweatpants and slipped on a dress. Was it when I picked up Jonas’s manuscript once more and re-read all the most brutal parts, registering each gut-punch of disgust, and, even worse, each stir of longing for the man tormented by this past? Or was it when I sat down on my bed and opened the little box of photos from my childhood, back when my father was still around? Likely neither of those.

  My brain had probably locked in on an answer hours before that, back on the rainy street, just around the corner from my apartment. In fact, I could probably pinpoint the exact moment my fate was sealed: when Jonas’s warm lips brushed against mine. It had quickly spiraled from goodbye into want and need, but for that first moment, his lips said something else.

  I’m giving myself to you.

  Which was ridiculous. Even if I had read him right, I knew better than to believe it. Men made promises all the time, promises they meant to keep. But far away from the bedroom, promises didn’t hold. No one thought with their heart all the time. Not Jonas, not anyone.

  The rain had stopped somewhere in the afternoon, but the streets were still slick. The sun’s reflection flashed off the windows of the buildings I passed.

  Could Jonas’s past ever really fade, or would it always be present? His book described organized fighting, evenly matched, fully consensual. And the bar fights, provoked, unevenly matched. And the man Jonas had meant to kill.

  The Swedish prison system released him, but what did it mean to be reformed? A prison sentence was meant to be a punishment that ended when he walked out, not a branding that lasted forever. But how many people got out of that life after one sentence? My father never stayed out of trouble for long.

  But that kiss. That kiss on the sidewalk was an all-too-vivid reminder of everything I had let myself want in Paris. It didn’t match the man in his book. The man who would let the dark games with his ex-girlfriend get so far out of hand.

  The taxi pulled into the hotel’s circular entrance. I paid the driver and climbed out. I stared at the glass doors in front of me. Even if I knew his room number, I wasn’t going up there. Hotel rooms meant only one thing. Was I there to spend another night with Jonas, knowing his past?

  Maybe my brain had already decided that, too. The answer couldn’t be yes, could it?

  I took a step and then another, and the doors parted. I walked into the enormous lobby and stopped a few feet in. Not what I expected. I had imagined something more dimly lit, maybe with an intimate little restaurant off to the side where I could gather myself together. Instead the hotel lobby was an open circular room with enormous columns and a large statue in the middle. One side was lined with desks, and the other opened up to hallways. I stood in the doorway as guests jostled their luggage around me.

  “Can I help you?” A man in the hotel’s uniform walked toward me.

  I blinked. This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come.

  “No, thanks,” I said to the man and turned around.

  And there, in front of me on the drive, Jonas walked up the sidewalk. He didn’t see me at first. When he looked up, his eyes widened, as if I were the last person he had expected to see. His movements slowed until, finally, he stopped a few feet away from me.

  “Hi,” I said softly.

  He raised his eyebrows. “You’re here.” He didn’t look so thrilled to see me. More stunned than anything else.

  I crossed my arms. “I’m not sure what I’m doing here.”

  He didn’t react. The guests walked in and out of the hotel, passing us on both sides. One woman slowed as she walked by Jonas, sizing him up appreciatively. Would she give him that same look if she knew he had been to prison?

  Finally, Jonas’s expression softened. He reached up and rested his hand on my cheek. The gesture was meant to be tender, but the scrape of his large fingers on my skin sent a wave of longing through me. His eyes flared with heat, and for a moment I thought he might kiss me.

  But he dropped his hand and frowned. “I need to grab something from my room. If you’re still around when I get back, we can both try to figure out what we’re doing here.”

  A FEW MINUTES later, Jonas appeared from the elevator hallway. He had changed out of his business shirt into jeans and a zip-up hoodie. My heart quickened. He didn’t see me. He slowed as he entered the lobby, coming to a stop not far from me. He looked around, frowning. His heavy shoulders rose and fell.

  What would he do if he thought I’d left? I had been in his shoes back in Paris, when he didn’t show up at the airport. But when I caught a glimpse of the defeated look on his face, I couldn’t hang back any longer.

  “Jonas?”

  He turned to me, and his face opened in a slow smile. He crossed his arms over his chest, emphasizing the size of his biceps, even through his sweatshirt. It was impossible to ignore his overwhelming physicality. There was so much of him to take in.

 

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