A Dominant Man (62 page)

“You’re a coward,” he growls, and my face flies to his.

“Coward? I’m a coward?”

“Yes. You know what we could be
, and that terrifies you. You’re running just like you always do. That makes you a coward, Elle.”

The elevator stops
, and the doors mercifully open.

“You don’t know anything,” I mumble softly,
tearing my eyes from his magnetic stare, and stride into the white marble lobby. I was hoping I’d find solace, hoping Chase would miraculously be waiting for me, but he isn’t here, and neither is Liam. They must’ve taken off after Dante.

“Then make me understand.” I halt in my tracks, but I don’t turn around. I can’t look at him. “How can you go from accepting a future together to saying it’s over? Explain it to me.”

I remain silent, standing in the middle of the massive lobby, trying to figure out what I could say that would keep him from following me, make him understand. Then it comes to me, and my heart breaks all over again, a queasy wave rushing over me.

I compose myself, stiffing from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. I slowly turn to him with a cold face, glaring at him as he stands just outside the closed elevator, staring back at me with a desperate look on his anxiety-ridden face.

Remember, Ellie girl, you’re doing this for him. This is for his own good.

“I saw who you really are, and I don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t want you,” I frigidly retort, fight
ing the overwhelming urge to cry hysterically.

“Elle, I love you. And whether or not you’ll admit it, you love me, too. I can see it in your eyes, in your body. You want me as I want you,” he vehemently states.

I yearn to run into his arms and tell him everything, but I can’t. I nearly vomit at the next thought that pops into my head, but it has to be said.

“How could I ever love anyone as fucked-up as you?”

The verbal blow seems to knock the wind right out of him, pools of pain forming at the bottom of those endless fields of green. I turn before the tears building in the corners of his eyes trickle out like tiny rivers and I lose my nerve.

As I bolt for the glass doors, thoughts of when we first met flash through my mind. I think about the first time I laid sight on him, the way his piercing eyes bore into me during the meeting debacle, his prediction at our first lunch about us ending in tears. I picture our conversation in my apartment about having respect for myself when it was over, and I feel an intense suffocating burn in my throat, struggling to hold in my inevitable breakdown.

Just as I’m about to escape, as if he could read my thoughts.

“Gabrielle, I won’t let you go. This isn’t over,” he
emphatically declares. “We’ll never be over.”

I can’t resist glancing back at him over my shoulder, spotting the determination written across his face.

“I know,” I whisper to myself, turning my face back toward the street as the smoldering tears finally win the fight and pour out.

I hastily escape through the doors into the pouring rain and an uncertain tomorrow, floundering in the unbearable misery of my self-inflicted torment.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, for reading my first novel and the first book in the series. To all those who enjoyed Elle and Hunt’s story, stay tuned. I leave you with one last song by Barcelona called ‘Please, Don’t Go’.

Lena Black

Lena Black is a former Medical Assistant living in Los Angeles. She is a daughter, sister, and future Mrs. Lena was introduced to books for leisure at a young age by her mother and grandmother’s love of the written word. Lena started out writing short stories, with aspirations of penning a novel someday. She was finally inspired to do so after she read a certain risqué series. Lena is currently working on the next two books in the series, with others in the works.