"You don't want to lose your virginity like me with someone who fumbles around and doesn't know what he's doing. You want the mystical unicorn who looks like he could make your vagina implode with a look and make you one of those rare lucky as fuck women to orgasm when you lose your virginity. Just go talk to him," she urged, her smile turning reassuring as she studied the panic in my face.
"I can't," I told her, shaking my head. Her eyes filled with disappointment, and I hated knowing that my friend worried so much about the seriousness of my life. Chloe was one of the few people I'd ever told about the accident and how it had unraveled Odina, even though we were too young to understand what it would mean one day.
"I don't think you'll have much choice," she blurted, her tone changing to a sharp excitement. Grabbing my head, she spun me to face the pool. The man stood from the lounge he'd laid on in a graceful unfolding of limbs. He stepped off the lounge ledge and into the shallow end of the pool, making his way up the steps slowly.
His eyes held mine as he moved, and Hugo and Chloe had to use their hands at my shoulders to turn my body to face him as he slowly made his way through the water. Water dripped down his broad shoulders, over the rippling muscles of his torso, and my breath caught as I watched it trail over his olive skin. He smirked when my eyes traveled back up to his face, his gaze knowing as he studied me intently.
His concentration never left my face, something so unnerving about the single-minded focus as he prowled toward me like a predator in the night. With his impossibly beautiful face and striking eyes, he looked like something from another world.
From somewhere meant to tempt women to their deaths.
One of the attendants handed him a towel as he emerged from the pool, but he never even glanced at her as he took it and held it at his side.
"I should have worn a potato sack," I whispered to Chloe. She burst into laughter at my side, stepping away as his long gait closed the distance between us. The faintest hint of stubble covered his face, his dark hair dry and parted to the side in a half-styled, tumbled in bed kind of look. As his face filled my vision, he leaned further into my bubble than was comfortable.
Towering over me, with a thumb and forefinger he caught me beneath the chin and lifted my face up, so he could stare down at me with the same intensity he had when he'd been on the other side of the pool.
One blue eye, one green, those eyes narrowed on me like a panther narrowing in on its dinner.
I knew he'd eat me alive, but I hadn't expected the weird déjà vu I felt when he reached up his other hand and touched the soft skin just under the brown part in my left eye and caressed it with an odd tenderness. His touch burned me as he crowded me, crossing all the acceptable boundaries that should have existed between two people who'd never spoken a word to one another. His minty breath wafted over my face as he loosed a sigh, dropping his forehead against mine and closing his eyes while he sank his teeth into his lush bottom lip.
I stared up at him for a moment, turning my gaze over to where Chloe watched with her mouth parted in shock. She waved a hand at herself, seeming to encourage the crossing of all the boundaries I should’ve had.
But there was nothing about him that made me want to push him away. None of the revulsion I expected to feel that someone would invade my space. Just an odd sense of belonging as I turned my face back to his to find his eyes open and watching me. He pulled his forehead away from mine, tilting his head as he watched me.
I spun back for the bar quickly, grasping my wine in my hand and taking a massive swallow. Chloe elbowed me in the side when he didn’t walk away, giggling at me as I tossed back the rest of my wine. “Otro?” the bartender asked, moving to refill my glass as I nodded. I sucked back more wine with none of the hesitation I’d felt before, knowing he clearly had no intention of taking the hint and leaving me alone, despite my best efforts to ignore him.
“He estado pensando en ti,” he said at my back. The rough, raspy sound of his voice curled around the words, making them his and claiming them in a way that I would never find again. Even if someone said the same words, they’d never be like him.
He left me with no choice but to turn and face him, and I swallowed back my nerves before doing just that. As I pressed my spine into the bar to keep as much distance between us, he eyed the gap as if it was an affront to everything he knew.
“Lo siento. No hablo Español,” I said with a sheepish smile.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” he murmured, the accent of his voice in English somehow just as attractive as when he’d spoken Spanish. I bit my bottom lip as he stepped closer, reaching down to take my hand in his. He ran calloused fingers over my palm, staring down at it as if
