He'd surely been spawned by some cataclysmic event of nature, not born.

If he was winter, I was summer. If I was sunshine, he was night. A dark and stormy one.

His face was in my neck and he was breathing hard. Was he grieving me? Already? Would he miss me? Had I, in some tiny way, come to matter to this enigmatic, hard, brilliant, obsessed man? I realised he'd come to matter to me. Good or evil, right or wrong, he mattered to me.

Since the moment I laid eyes on Jericho Barrons, I wanted him. I wanted him to do things to me that pink and clueless MacKayla Lane was shocked and appalled and ... okay, yeah, well, utterly fascinated to find herself thinking about.

I'd vowed years ago to go to the grave the same way I'd been born, just a lot more wrinkly.

Barrons has something the rest of us don't have. I don't know what it is, but I feel it all the time, especially when we're standing close. Beneath the expensive clothes, unplaceable accent, and cultured veneer, there's something that never crawled all the way out of the swamp. It didn't want to. It likes it there.

The illusions it had woven for me had taken place only in my head. The battle had been invisible to the naked eye, but the hard ones are.