Holding my breath, I spin on my heel. The sight of him immediately steals my breath away, and I feel as it evaporates in an instant from my lungs.
If Archie looked like a J. Crew model, Ian looks like he stepped out of the pages of a Saint Laurent catalog with long legs made even longer by the tailored slacks he wears with a bomber jacket and a ribbed tee. From head-to-toe, he is dressed in black. The only color on him is a line of silver stitching on the wrists of his jacket and the sheen of metal on his belt buckle.
Ian glares at me like I have offended every moral he holds dear, held a good-riddance party on the graves of his ancestors, and castrated him in one day. The vein at his temple bulges, throbbing as his nostrils flare.
A fire burns beneath the furnaces of silver in his gaze. He could murder me if he wanted, and he looks like he is contemplating it. I should say something, try to smooth the churning waters, but pride is a cruel bitch, and she won’t let me bow as long as I can stand.
Ian raises a lone eyebrow at me. He is a dark angel sent to earth for the sole purpose of making me sin.
“What’s your answer then, Stormy?” He steps forward, erasing the distance between us, and runs his thumb over my bottom lip. Heat explodes in my belly as a throbbing beats to life between my legs. “Are you going to kiss Archie like you did me?”
“That’s none of your business!” I snap.
He smiles because I never snap. I always have a smart-ass comeback. Only this time he has hit a nerve, and he knows it.
His fingers leave my lip to play with the black lock of hair near my temple again.
“You’re going to get us in trouble with the librarian.”
His steely gaze locks with mine. “You afraid of a demerit, sweetness?”
“You’re not?”
He scoffs. “They aren’t kicking anyone out of this place. They make a fortune off us.” He winks at me. “Plus, I’ll take all the demerits I can get if it means tasting you.”
Where’s a good comeback when I need one? Because the only thing I can think right now is Me Too.
“Remember that favor you owe me?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say reluctantly, although I never really agreed to it, but he did help Molly with Finn when she needed it most, and I am grateful.
“Time to pay up.” He takes a step closer, and it’s like he sucks all the air out of the room. Why. Can’t. I. Breathe. “You are devouring me, Stormy. I can’t go five fucking minutes without thinking about you. I’m going to fail all my classes and lose all my friends. My parents will probably disown me, but I don’t care. All I can think about is burying myself inside you and fucking you until you beg me to stop.”
Holy. Crackers.
“And would you stop?” I breathe. I already know the answer from the smile that plays upon his lips.
“No, sweetness.” He nuzzles my hair, his naughty words kissing the shell of my ear. “I’d make you come again and again and again until you’re just as obsessed with me as I am you, until you’re in class and you can’t even hear the professor’s words because all you can think about is riding my cock.”
His tongue darts out to lave over my neck. I moan as a jolt of electricity shoots straight down between my thighs.
I should run—I want to want to run—but I can’t. And what’s the old librarian—I think her name is Ms. Ephrem—going to do? Swat at him with her cane? Throw chunks of black licorice from the front desk? God knows, they are hard enough to take an eye out—I’ve never seen anyone eat them, and I’m pretty sure I saw her dust them once—but her thick, tortoise-shell glasses tell me her aim is certainly shit.
“Freak.” There’s no bite to my word. I’m getting used to his depravity.
Fuck me.
Ian continues playing with my hair. “I want to bury my cock so deep inside you, all you taste is my cum.”
I swallow, my mind reeling for something, anything, to say.
“Sounds...illogical.”
His hand trails down my throat to caress my breast, pinching my nipple through the fabric. It hardens instantly, and I want to shear it from my body as penance for its betrayal.
“I am going to taste your lips until the day I die, Harlow Weathersby. I am going to fuck you until I am ripped from this earth. I am going to own you, body and soul, for life. You are mine, and I am yours.”
He could be a poet if he wasn’t my poison.
Hold up…It’s always been I want or I need. Now he’s talking like we are a foregone conclusion.
My head swims with the promises carried by his words. He dips his head so that our foreheads touch. My eyes drift shut. I am unmoored, awash in the solid feel of his body, the warmth of his breath, and the aroma of wet earth and the hint of cardamom he carries with him.
“You are going to be my downfall,” he whispers, “but I never much cared for being at the top anyway.”
I don’t reply. I am too busy trying to remember how to breathe.
“We don’t have to be enemies, Stormy.”
“You made us enemies.” Tears threaten to drown my words.
“I protected you.” His words are gruff, choked.
“You made me a target!” I rush past him out of the stacks and stumble to the exit. As I slam the door open, I scream, letting it all out—frustration, rage, grief—but the sound is ripped from my
