Serena Blackwood had only come up with the notion a few days earlier—to draw those exquisite, involuntary sounds from Elias Kane—and today she had finally made it reality.
To someone like her, this should have been nothing more than a trivial whim, the same as suddenly craving one of the world's rarest fruits and then dispatching her private jet to have it delivered within hours. A fleeting desire satisfied, nothing to linger over, no real sense of achievement.
Yet the instant Elias's voice broke—soft, reluctant, edged with that faint tremor—she was flooded with a rush of raw, almost deranged fulfillment.
Nothing compared to this: watching a young man so stubbornly proud that even death itself couldn't bend him, his cheeks burning crimson, his teeth sinking into his lower lip only to release a hushed "Slow… down" while his wrists stayed pinned exactly where she had placed them.
