Finding My Dream Man

Prologue

“Oh my God,” I breathed as I came, my mind going completely, blissfully blank. Every inch of my body tightened, a pleasure so sharp and overwhelming it was almost painful, a feeling I had never, ever felt before, coursing through me.

When the last tremor finally subsided, and I could breathe again, my neck righted, and my eyes slowly, heavily, fluttered open. I saw him, still moving over me, still deep inside me. God, he was beautiful. And he felt incredible. Amazing.

His gorgeous, silvery-gray eyes were locked on mine—heated, intense, glittering, searing right into me in a way he’d never looked at me before. Not once in the four months we’d been together.

And I knew, feeling the burn of his gaze deep in my soul, what that look meant. I knew this man, this fantastic, striking, wild man, was finally mine.

Mine.

I felt it in my blood, in my bones, in every cell of my body.

“Cole,” I whispered, my limbs growing even tighter around him, one of my hands sifting up into his thick, dark, unruly hair.

His eyes closed at the sound of his name, a pained expression flickering across his handsome face.

Um… what?

Then he shoved his face into the curve of my neck, his movements suddenly faster, his thrusts harder, his breath a labored, ragged sound against my sensitive skin. My mind, confused for a split second, turned back to his body. My hands glided across his slick skin, my legs gripped him harder as I clenched around his driving cock.

“Fuck, Emilia,” he growled against my neck. Then I heard him groan, a low, guttural sound, as he kept thrusting, and then he came, a hot, pulsing flood deep inside me.

I held him tight.

He gave me his full, heavy weight.

I held on even tighter.

Then he pulled out and rolled off me, falling to his back. The instant he did, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, he lifted the heels of his palms and pressed them hard against his forehead, covering his eyes.

Um. Not good.

“Cole?” I called softly.

“Yeah?” he grunted, his voice not soft at all. He didn’t open his eyes or move his hands.

Okay, uh, what was going on?

Just moments before, I had felt like I’d finally, finally found my dream man. He was here, in my bed, inside me, and the pure, unadulterated joy that had brought me had been overwhelming. Now, that joy was evaporating like steam, replaced by a cold, creeping dread. Feeling suddenly exposed and vulnerable, I moved quickly. I nabbed the throw from the bottom of the bed and pulled it over my naked body.

“Is everything okay?” I whispered.

“Fuck no,” he answered, and I felt my entire body go completely, utterly still.

He dropped his hands, and his head turned to look at me. The look in his eyes was no longer heated, or glittering, or intense. It was conflicted and… I stared, not believing it but seeing it with my own two eyes… it was filled with a deep, profound regret.

Oh, no. Oh, God. Oh, shit. Oh, no.

I pulled the blanket closer to me, thinking my friend Martha had been right all along. Damn. She’d been right.

His eyes dropped to my hand, which was clutching the blanket to my chest in a white-knuckled grip. Then I watched them melt, turning from hard stone to quicksilver as they lifted back to my face. His own expression gentled, his body turning my way, his hand coming out toward me, and then… his phone rang, a shrill, ugly sound that shattered the tense silence.

His hand stilled, and he muttered a pissed-off, “Fuck.”

Then he rolled the other way and reached out with a long arm, grabbing his jeans from the floor. I stared at the beautiful, defined muscles of his back, thinking, That isn't for me. It was never for me. None of it.

I knew it. I’d always known it.

From the instant, four months ago, when his silver eyes had first met mine across the crowded bakery, when they had traveled the length of my torso, all he could see of me behind the display case, and when they had finally, finally met mine again, and he’d smiled, a slow, lazy, impossibly sexy smile… I knew it then.

He wasn't for me. There was no dream man for me.

But he was so beautiful, so incredibly, breathtakingly beautiful, that I’d gone for it anyway.

“Yeah?” he asked into the phone. Then I felt his mood shift, a wave of pure, cold fury that hit the room and grated against my skin like sandpaper.

In the four months we’d been together, Cole had never hidden his moods. Ever. Not even in the beginning. And Cole had a lot of moods. If he was pissed, you knew he was pissed. If he was happy, you definitely knew he was happy. If he was feeling playful, or annoyed, or frustrated, or amused, you knew it. You sensed it. It was like he controlled the atmosphere of the room.

And whoever was on the other end of that phone was pissing him off and frustrating him. Royally.

“Give me an hour,” he said into the phone. He paused, listening. “No, man, I’m tellin’ you, I need an hour.” Another pause, then, “Fuck, you’ve got to be fuckin’ kidding me.” A pause. “This can’t happen now.” A very short pause, then, “I’m tellin’ you, this cannot fuckin’ happen fuckin’ now.”

He shifted his powerful body to sit on the edge of my bed, his back to me, his elbows on his knees, the phone still pressed to his ear. He growled, his voice a low, dangerous sound, “Alright, motherfucker, but you fuck this up, you fuck her over, you mark my words, you answer to me.”

Then he flipped his phone shut and bent forward to grab his boots. He announced to the other side of the room, his voice now flat and devoid of any emotion, “Babe, gotta go.”

I closed my eyes. Okay. Okay. Cole had to go.

Cole also, I knew, didn’t miss much.

I forced my body to come unstuck. I rolled as I kept the blanket pressed to me, nabbed my glasses off the nightstand, and slid them on. Then I rolled back to face him.

Seeing him clearly now, I saw his eyes were no longer conflicted and remorseful. They were quicksilver still, but affectionate, gazing at me the way he gazed at me when I fancied he was thinking I was cute. Or at least I hoped it was that. He liked me in my glasses. He’d told me that flat out. Said he’d never had a woman who wore glasses. He told me it was like going out with a sweet, sexy schoolteacher.

I’d never felt sexy, not in my life. Not until Cole.

“We’ll talk later, yeah?” he said quietly.

“Yeah,” I answered, a tiny, stupid bud of hope blooming in my heart at his look, his tone, his words.

“We’ll talk later, Emilia. Yeah?” he repeated, his voice more insistent. I blinked.

“Yeah,” I repeated too.

“Promise me, babe.”

I stared at him, not sure why he needed that. I didn’t play games with him, not at all, not even when Martha told me I should, repeatedly. Test the waters. Test him. Don’t be so available. Don’t let on how much you like him.

But I was too old for that shit, and I’d never had a man like Cole. There was no way I was going to fuck it up with games. So I didn’t get where he was going with his need for a promise. But still, he asked. And I’d give him anything he asked. Anything. Even from the very beginning.

“Promise,” I whispered.

He nodded, the tension in his shoulders seeming to ease just a little. Then he asked, “You sleep naked?”

A shiver I couldn’t quite read slithered over my skin. It wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t good. “No,” I answered.

“Don’t start tonight,” he ordered. I stared at him, and while doing so, I saw his eyes move over my face, a slow, deliberate scan.

Then he leaned in. His free hand came up to cup the back of my head, and he pulled me to him, kissing me hard and wet and deep.

His mouth released mine, but he only allowed me to pull back an inch before his hand, still at the back of my head, put pressure on to stop my retreat. His eyes locked with mine.

“We’ll talk later,” he whispered, a solemn vow.

Then his hand disappeared because he disappeared. Gone.

I heard my front door close with a soft click.

Then I collapsed back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. One could not say that Cole was not a complicated man. He was. And although I knew him, I had no freaking clue what was really going on. But that whole scene was wild.

Then again, Cole—with his motorcycle boots, his beat-up pickup truck, his old t-shirts that fit way too well, his faded jeans that fit even better, his dark brown, longish, unruly hair, and his silvery-gray eyes that told a million stories without giving a single one away—was wild.

Being with Cole was like the ride I once took on a mechanical bull. You could not even begin to guess which way that thing would buck. All you could do was hold on as tight as you could and enjoy the ride for as long as you had it.

So I needed to cool it. It would all be okay. It would be okay.

I got up, put on a pair of panties and a nightie, got back into my rumpled bed, and turned off the light.

It took a while for me to find sleep, even after having a very, very sweet orgasm, one given to me by a man I’d waited a long, long time for. Even after him leaving after kissing me like it was the last moment on earth. Even after him telling me there was more to us because we were going to talk.

But after I finally drifted off, I was jolted awake by the sound of my front door being busted open, the wood of the frame splintering with a sound like a gunshot. A large group of men in bulletproof vests surged into my house, their heavy boots thudding on my hardwood floors, their voices shouting commands. Minutes later, my bedroom door was kicked in, and I was being hauled, screaming and confused, out of my bed and toward the police station for questioning.

The silence in the interrogation room was so absolute you could hear the blood pumping in your own ears. It was a dead, sterile quiet, broken only by the low-frequency hum of a hidden ventilation system. I’d been parked on this brutally uncomfortable metal chair for what felt like an eternity, staring at my own faint reflection in the polished steel table, when the door finally opened with a soft, definitive hiss of hydraulics.

A man stepped inside, and my eyes immediately locked onto him. He was a cliché in a cheap suit. His slacks were a sad, indeterminate shade of brown, his white dress shirt looked like it had been slept in, and the tie knotted loosely at his collar was a crime against fashion. He topped off the look with an ill-fitting sports jacket that screamed "bargain bin." His entire presence felt rumpled and secondhand, but his eyes were sharp. They were small, beady, and they hadn't left me since the moment he entered, zeroed in like little laser pointers. He clutc