His hand moved to the ponytail at the back of her head and he tugged gently. “I said what I meant, Kimberly.” He seemed to realize what he was doing and let go of her hair, backing off slightly. “I’m sorry. We’re in a dungeon and I’m acting like a Dom.”
Her heart had started racing the minute his voice had taken on the deep timbre she remembered so vividly. “You were always a Dom. I just didn’t know what to call you.”
She’d been all of twenty-two years old when she’d met him, and he’d been twenty-five. So freaking young, and they hadn’t even truly begun to explore their sexuality. She’d thought she would have decades with him, decades to learn with him, grow with him.
She’d barely gotten two years with him from when they started dating to their divorce. It was funny that she’d been divorced from him for far longer than she’d been married, but those precious months were the most important of her life.
“Yeah, I figured that out, too.” He moved so he was leaning on the table next to her, their hips almost touching. “Big Tag pointed out a lot of things to me. The man’s an ass but he’s an observant ass. He might have pointed out how much Mia looks like you. She was a safe version of you to follow around for a while. I didn’t even realize I was doing it at the time. I thought she was pretty and nice, and I had a job to do. She was also madly in love with Case Taggart. I never touched her. We became friendly, but I wouldn’t even say we were friends.”
Somehow hearing he hadn’t gone to bed with the gorgeous, do-gooder reporter made her feel a bit better. “One of the things I liked about Bliss was that I didn’t get hit on very often. Most of the men around town are married, and the others are super respectful. Being there, it was the most free I’d felt in forever.”
He shook his head. “I would never have said you would be happy in a small town. You like the city too much.”
“I probably wouldn’t have dreamed it either. Then I found one I liked. That’s the funny thing about change. It doesn’t happen until we let it. I took that job because I was worried about you, and I ended up loving the people there. Of course, now they all hate me. That’s the story of my life.” Once they’d figured out she’d lied to them for months, that she’d been watching one of their own, they hadn’t been so welcoming.
“It’s the nature of the job. I had the same problems at first. No one at McKay-Taggart and Knight trusted me with anything until I sacrificed for them. For a long time I was the Agency dude they hated the least.” He sighed and seemed to relax a bit. “They didn’t really trust me until they realized I wasn’t ever going back to the Agency.”
“I don’t know. I think it’s more than that. I’ve felt it all my life—that distance from other people. When your parents are the not-so-kind overlords of all they survey it’s hard.” From an early age she’d realized her playmates were carefully cultivated. It hadn’t been until she’d entered the ultra-exclusive boarding school her parents selected for high school that she realized almost everyone she knew was afraid of her because all it would take was a whisper from her mother to ruin their family in their society.
“Well, that’s how he got to you,” Beck pointed out. “Levi, that is. I’ve been thinking about it all night. You were lonely and he was willing to be your friend. He should have been upfront with you. He should have told you what he wanted and let you make the decision.”
Some memories were sweeter than others. Some pushed out the darkness. A vision of Beck sitting on a barstool beside her, telling her exactly what he wanted, haunted her in the best way possible. “Like you did?”
His smile deepened, finally revealing the dimples that only showed up when he was genuinely amused. “Hey, I was very open and honest that I was trying to get into your pretty panties.”
Their attraction had been out of control. He hadn’t approached her until he was no longer teaching her class, but she’d had some ridiculously over-the-top fantasies about the man. “Yeah, well, I didn’t make you wait long. If I remember correctly we were going at it in a motel because neither of us wanted to wait to get back across town.”
“The Kingsman. I remember that motel fondly.”
She wrinkled her nose. “It was not nice in the cold light of day. There was a definite layer of grime in that bathroom.”
His expression went serious. “There was nothing cold about that day.”
No. It had been a sunny, gorgeous summer day, and they’d laughed as they decided to not use that shower. They’d held hands on the metro and bought bagels and gone back to her place where they’d spent all Saturday in bed. She’d known she was madly in love with him that day.
That day seemed so far away now.
“Are you all right?” Beck asked.
She wanted to break the intimacy between them. The moment felt too warm. It was a falsehood, and she would end up hurting again. “Yeah, you got the exact pressure point. I’ll be fine as long as I move.”
“I wasn’t talking about that. That call from Levi… He’s stalking you.”
He’d been stalking her for years, but no one called it that when the man stalking her used to be a friend, still pretended to be one. She was the bitch who couldn’t see how much he cared about her. “He is.”
“Tell me what he did. Not that sanitized report. I want to know how he made you feel.”
“If I do that, you’ll get angry again.”
He shook his head. “No. I promise I won’t make this about
