Damian laid her down on the king-sized bed. The cool, high-thread-count silk sheets brushed against her feverish skin, and she shivered, a small, unconscious tremor.
He was about to straighten up, to move away, when her eyes fluttered open.
They were a startling, vibrant green, but clouded with a hazy film of confusion. He saw a raw, desperate need in their depths, a primal instinct the drug had stripped bare.
Her arms, slender and surprisingly strong, wound around his neck, drawing him down toward her.
Damian's body went rigid. His ice-blue eyes, usually so controlled, darkened to the color of a stormy sea. He tried to gently pry her hands away.
"You've been drugged," he said, his voice a low rumble. "Calm down, Asha."
The sound of his voice, deep and resonant, didn't soothe her. Instead, it seemed to act like a spark on dry tinder, making her response more urgent.
She buried her face against his neck, her feverish breath warm against his skin. He could feel the heat radiating from her, right over the hammering of his own heart.
A sharp, ragged breath escaped Damian's lips. Every muscle in his body tensed.
He gripped her shoulders, intending to push her away, to hold her at a distance until Corbett arrived. But she clung to him, impossible to dislodge, her body burning with an unnatural fire.
"Help me..." she whispered against his ear, the words a broken, feverish plea. A sob caught in her throat. "It hurts... please..."
That small, desperate sound shattered the last of his restraint.
He was not a saint. And this was not just any woman. This was the woman he had watched from afar, the woman Garrison Morrow had been too foolish to appreciate.
He stopped fighting.
His hand moved from her shoulder to the back of her head, his fingers tangling in her damp hair. He leaned down, close enough that his breath mingled with hers. For a long, suspended moment, the world contracted to the space between them—then it fell away entirely.
What followed was not a sequence of actions, but a single, unbroken wave. There was the weight of his arms around her, the whisper of silk shifting in the dark, the sound of her own heartbeat pounding in her ears like a distant storm. Time lost its shape, dissolving into fragments of warmth and pressure and a strange, consuming ache that she could neither name nor resist.
When awareness returned in fractured pieces, the first light of dawn was bleeding through the curtains. Her body ached with a strange, deep soreness, muscles protesting in ways she had never known. The silk sheets were tangled around her legs, and the duvet had been pulled up to her chin at some point.
Damian was gone from the bed.
The sound of running water came from the master bathroom—the shower, running long and steady.
Asha lay perfectly still, staring at the ceiling. A single tear, cold now, tracked down her temple and disappeared into her hair. She didn't move. She didn't know how.
Minutes later, the water shut off. The bathroom door opened, steam billowing out.
Damian emerged wearing a black silk robe, his dark hair still damp, slicked back from his forehead. He was once again the cool, untouchable Damian Sterling. The predator was sheathed, the control firmly back in place.
He didn't look at her. He crossed the living area and opened the front door.
Dr. Corbett Hurst stood there, medical bag in hand, a look of weary curiosity on his face. His eyes swept over Damian, taking in the robe, the damp hair, the faint flush still on his skin.
"You look like you just survived a category five hurricane," Corbett said dryly.
Damian ignored the jibe, stepping aside to let him in. His voice was flat, devoid of emotion. "The patient is in the bedroom. Check her over. I want to know what they gave her."
As Corbett headed for the bedroom, Damian walked to the wet bar. He poured a generous measure of Macallan 25 into a crystal tumbler and downed it in one go.
The expensive scotch did nothing to quench the fire still burning in his blood.
