I’m into you, I remember him saying. I steal a look at his profile. He senses it and turns, and when our gazes meet, I feel like he kisses me with his eyes.

This evening in my home feels so monumental all of a sudden. Like he too is giving me something he’s given no one else.

Now my mother is saying I read during the weekends throughout my teens.

“She wasn’t a party girl?”

He asked my mother this, but he’s teasing me. I can tell by the look—and smile—he sends my way.

A smile that no woman on earth could withstand with dry panties.

“Oh, no, though she enjoys having fun,” Mother assures. “Rachel was back from prom at twelve. Her date couldn’t interest her long enough to make her stay, a nice young man one of her friends suggested. She wasn’t really interested in anyone. I used to think she’d need a man so compelling, her stories couldn’t live up to him; he’d make her reality so much more compelling than anything else.”

I feel privately caressed when his gaze intensifies.

“So there was no one,” he says, sounding perfectly greedy.

I hold my breath.

“No one,” mother confirms.

But you, I tell him with my eyes when he smiles at me.

It’s better than sex, the way he’s staring at me now, the clenching of his jaw as if some unnamable emotion has touched him.

“Sin, we really need to find someone able to tell me embarrassing stories about you, so I can get even,” I tease him with a husky, shy voice.

Under the table, he gives my hand another squeeze, his voice dropping an octave just for me. “Give it a Goog. We’ll be more than even.”

“She’d come up with stories about families,” Mom tells him. “Usually very sweet ones. I worried she was a bit too hopeful for the real world, but I’m sure it was the way she coped after we lost Michael.”

After a nod of understanding directed at my mother, Saint’s eyes seek me out again. Caress me again. But the caress doesn’t feel sexual. It feels like so much more. Male eyes, as deep as eternity, seem to simply say, I understand.

“I’m sorry to hear that, for both of you,” he finally murmurs to my mother, and I notice that it takes him an effort to pull his gaze away from me.

The cold flecks that are so common in Malcolm Saint’s eyes . . .

There’s not a single cold fleck in them now.

He’s living, breathing and human and sitting like a calm storm at our dinner table, still so strong and alive and normal despite him being abnormally beautiful, abnormally powerful.

I see my mother blush a little when his full attention is on her. “I know you’ve lost your mother as well. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too,” he says quietly.

“This is your home too, Malcolm. Anytime.”

When my mother walks us to the door shortly thereafter and Malcolm asks me if I’m coming back with him, I blush and nod. I’m not even going to pretend I don’t want to be with him right now.

He says goodbye to my mother, and then he speaks again, without hesitation or apology. “I’m not good at making promises. But I would like you to know I’ve never been serious about a girl until I met your daughter, and now that I know I’m the first man she’s brought home, I’m aiming to be the last.”

I’m red to the roots of my hair.

Oh. My.

Did Saint just say this to my mother?

“No promise needed. Just be good to her,” she whispers, heartfelt to him. Then— “Please. Take dessert with you. I won’t eat it and you two can share it later. It’s Rachel’s favorite,” she adds, bringing over the pie, tightly covered in aluminum foil.

After I hug and thank her and she gives me this huge, huge smile that screams at me how much she likes him, how appeased she is about us having—possibly—a relationship, my heart feels content.

Saint walks me over to his car, opens the door, and when I settle in, he leans over to latch my seat belt. As his fingers graze me, my sexy parts start aching. How can Saint make something as simple as a homey dinner feel like foreplay?

I think he knows I’m burning.

Because the next second, he grabs the back of my head and kisses me.

The kiss is slow and so yummy that my thighs clench. I hazily wonder if I’ll ever grow used to his kisses. Strong and sure, he tongue-fucks my mouth. When he adds gentle sucking motions on my tongue, I tighten my hold on his shoulders.

“What was that for?”

“For me.” He smiles as his thumb strokes the corner of my lips.

He shuts the door, goes around the car with a hot and satisfied look on his face, and then settles behind the wheel. As we head out of the neighborhood, I notice he drives slower than he usually does —probably because of the pie riding at my feet—and I mull out loud, “I wonder what my father would have thought of you. Would he have hated or admired that you’re so powerful?”

He lifts one brow. “Let’s put it this way. My own father can’t stand me. I don’t expect anyone else’s to.”

“Weak men don’t like strong men, they remind them of what they failed to be.”

Now both brows go up, and he shoots me such an admiring look, I almost swell inside. He cups my face and touches his thumb to the corner of my mouth. “My father’s not weak, but he’s stubborn and selfish.” He shifts gears, his thumb ring glinting as he does.

“My dad definitely would have warned me off you, for sure . . . but I don’t know, Sin.” Turning my head dreamily in the seat so I can get a good eyeful of the candy that Saint driving his car is, I sigh. “I think he’d admire you very much.”

“My mother would’ve loved you, baby.” With a tender curving of his lips, he reaches out and tips my chin up. “Who could not love you?”

“You,” I say, then my hands fly up and I cover my mouth. “Ohmigod, don’t say anything.”

His eyes are alight with amusement as he opens his mouth.

“DON’T SAY ANYTHING! IT DOESN’T COUNT!”

Saint just laughs huskily. “Rach—”

“DON’T! DON’T DENY IT, DON’T ACCEPT IT, JUST DON’T. I’m so sorry; I don’t know why I said that. I went fishing for it and it’s not fair to you.”

I start laughing and he pulls over and stops the car, grabs me with both hands and kisses me. Not a peck. A kiss I can feel in my knees and that makes my lungs spread open as I try to breathe.