Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 88960 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88960 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Devyn is standing in the doorway.
Watching.
His expression gives absolutely nothing away. Not amusement. Not concern. Not even mild curiosity about why his future bride is currently attempting to strangle herself with bedsheets.
One eyebrow lifts. Maybe a millimeter. Maybe less.
I scramble upright with as much dignity as I can muster.
Which is none. Zero dignity. Negative dignity.
"I wasn't—" I gesture vaguely at the bed, the sheets, my own treasonous limbs. "That wasn't—"
He says nothing.
"Gravity," I inform him. "It was a gravity issue."
Still nothing. Just those golden eyes, watching me like I'm a particularly confusing math problem he's been asked to solve.
"Also you should knock," I add, because apparently my mouth has decided to keep going without permission from my brain. "That's a thing people do. Knocking. Before entering rooms. Especially bedrooms. Especially the bedrooms of people they've kidnapped."
His lips twitch.
It's barely there. The ghost of almost-amusement, gone so fast I might have imagined it. But I didn't imagine it. I saw it. I saw it.
Devyn Chaleur, mafia king, legendary temper, banked-coals anger—almost smiled.
At me.
Because I was being ridiculous.
Oh no. Oh no no no.
"The wedding will take place in three days." His tone is clipped now, all business, like the almost-smile never happened. "There's paperwork to complete. Legal formalities."
He's changed out of his wedding suit. Now he's in something simpler: dark trousers, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms, the collar open at the throat. The late afternoon light catches the hard line of his jaw, the sharp angles of his face.
He fills the doorframe the way he fills every space he enters. Not just physically, though he is tall, broad-shouldered, built like someone who knows exactly what his body can do. It's more than that. It's presence. It's the absolute certainty that everything around him exists because he allows it to.
Those golden eyes find mine.
My pulse jumps. My breath catches. My whole body goes tight in a way I don't want to examine too closely.
No. Absolutely not.
I am not going to be attracted to the man who literally picked me up and carried me out of a building because I wasn't walking fast enough. The man who just watched me nearly strangle myself with bedsheets and didn't even offer to help. That would be insane. That would be—
He takes a step into the room, and my thoughts scatter like startled birds.
I find my voice somewhere in the wreckage of my composure. "You can't just marry someone. There are laws. You need consent—"
"I need to understand what you are."
The interruption is sharp, efficient. He cuts through my protests like they're inconveniences.
"What I am?"
"You appeared in my chapel." Another step closer. I can smell him now—cedar and smoke and that warmth underneath—and my knees feel suddenly unreliable. "At the exact moment my bride vanished. You refused to tell me where she went. You gave me nothing but silence and defiance."
I want to back away, but I'm standing by the bed. There's nowhere to go. "That doesn't mean—"
"I don't believe in coincidence."
His gaze drops to my mouth.
Again.
Second time. I'm counting now.
Just for a second. Just like before, in the car. And just like before, my breath catches, and my heart does something complicated, and I hate—I hate—that he can see what he does to me.
When his eyes meet mine again, there's something sharp in them. Searching.
"You will stay where I can see you until I understand what you are. Coincidence or conspiracy. I don't yet know which."
"I'm not a conspiracy." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. Small miracle. "I'm a photography assistant from Providence. I don't know how I got here. I don't know why the date on my phone is wrong. I don't know anything."
He tilts his head slightly. Studying me. Like I'm a puzzle he can't solve, and it's making him impatient.
"The date on your phone," he repeats.
I shouldn't have said that. I should have kept my mouth shut, given him nothing, the way I did in the chapel.
But I'm tired. I'm confused. And some reckless part of me wants him to know that I'm just as lost as he thinks I am.
"It says it's three weeks ago," I tell him. "Except I remember those three weeks. I lived them. And now they haven't happened yet."
Something happens to his face.
It's not much. A flicker in those golden eyes. A tightening at the corner of his jaw. If I weren't trained to notice micro-expressions, I might have missed it entirely.
But I am trained. And I don't miss it.
He recognizes what I'm describing. I don't know how, I don't know why, but something in my words has landed. Something has struck a nerve.
For a long moment, he just looks at me. The impatience is gone. In its place is something I can't name—something almost like uncertainty, though that doesn't seem like a word that belongs anywhere near this man.