Claim Me: A Novel

my palm. The shock of our connection rumbles through me, and my chest feels tight, my breath uneven. Will there ever come a time when I can be near him without yearning for him? Without craving the touch of his skin against my own?
    It’s not even a sexual longing—not entirely, anyway. Instead, it’s a craving. As if my very survival depends on him. As if we are two halves of a whole and neither can survive without the other.
    With Damien, I am happier than I have ever been. But at the same time, I’m more miserable, too. Because now I truly understand fear.
    I force a smile, because the one thing I will not do is let Damien see how scared I am of losing him. “You couldn’t sleep? Are you thinking about the trial?”
    “A bit,” he says, his eyes locked on my face. “Mostly, I’ve been thinking about you.”
    “Oh.” I cannot help the flutter in my chest, and I feel the flicker of a smile tugging at my lips. “What were you thinking?”
    “That I am a selfish man, but nothing that I have done in my life is more selfish than loving you.”
    “Damien, no. I want to be here. I need to be here. You know that.” We’ve had this conversation before. When the German indictment came through, he’d tried to push me away, believing that he was protecting me. But he’d been wrong—and I’d flown all the way to Germany to tell him so.
    “No,” he says with a small shake of his head. “I mean I should never have pursued you in the first place.”
    “Don’t even joke about that,” I say. The thought that Damien never entered my life is worse than the thought of him leaving it.
    “I pissed you off at Evelyn’s,” he says. “Remember? I should have let you stay pissed. I should have simply walked away.”
    My mouth is dry, and my chest feels tight. I do not want to hear these words. I don’t want to believe that there is even some tiny part of him that would prefer to have never met me, not even if that fantasy is borne from a desire to protect me. “No,” I say. It’s the only word I can manage, and it sounds strangled and raw.
    “Oh, Nikki.” His fingertips stroke my cheek, and though his smile is bittersweet, his eyes are filled with so much passion that it takes my breath away. “You can’t possibly know how much I love you.”
    “I do,” I say.
    The small shake of his head is almost playful. “It’s too big, too powerful. There is no start and no end, nothing with which I can measure the length and breadth of what I feel for you. I look at you and wonder how I can possibly survive the riot of emotions within me.”
    “You make it sound almost painful.” My words are soft, gently teasing.
    “You and I know better than anyone how pain and pleasure walk hand in hand. Passion, Nikki, remember? And with you, it fills me.”
    I swallow, undone by both his words and by the intensity with which he is speaking them.
    “I want to hold you close. To cherish and protect you. To draw you in until we are so close that I am lost within you. I want to take you to bed, to watch the way your skin tightens beneath my fingers, the way your body awakens under my touch. I want to trail kisses over you until you are lost in so much pleasure that you don’t know where you end and I begin. I want to tie you up and fuck you until there is no doubt that you are mine. I want to dress you up and take you out, and show you off, this beautiful, vibrant, brilliant woman. Everything I’ve built? All my companies? All my billions? They have no value compared to you.”
    I open my mouth to speak, but he hushes me with a gentle finger to my lips. “So, no, Nikki. I couldn’t have walked away. Selfish, yes. But I cannot wish it otherwise. I need you, and I can’t regret that I have you.”
    “I need you, too,” I say. “You know that I do.”
    “I don’t regret having you,” he repeats. “But I regret very much what that does to you. You’re suffering for it, or you will.” The sadness that fills his eyes is enough to melt me. “You are the one person in all the world I cannot bear to hurt, and yet I’m the one who put fear in your eyes.”
    “No,” I lie. “I’m not scared. If you see fear, it’s only because I was afraid you were going to try to push me away. But about the trial? I’m not afraid at all.”
    “Liar,” he says gently.
    “You forget that I’ve seen you in action, Damien Stark. You’re a goddamn force of nature. They can’t possibly hold you. Maybe they don’t know it yet,