Whispered Temptations

Chapter Five

「 ✦ Halsey's POV ✦ 」

At first, all I saw was movement.

Bodies parting near the entrance. A cluster of girls shifting aside with bright, hungry smiles. Shadows crossing the foyer beneath the spill of gold light from the porch.

Then he stepped fully inside.

And the world stopped.

Not metaphorically.

Not in the dramatic, overblown way romance novels had always promised and reality had always failed to deliver.

I mean it actually stopped.

The music seemed to dull beneath a sudden rush of silence in my ears. The crowd blurred at the edges. Even the pulse in my veins changed rhythm, turning heavy and slow and thunderous all at once.

He was tall in the way cathedrals are tall - not merely bigger than everyone around him, but built to make you feel it.

Six-foot-five, maybe six-six, with broad shoulders tapering into a narrow waist and the kind of physique that looked less earned and more forged. His black short-sleeved button-up strained lightly across his chest and upper arms, the first few buttons undone at the throat. Dark ink crawled over one forearm and disappeared beneath his sleeve, only to reappear in fragments at his neck, glimpses of something intricate and dangerous beneath golden-bronze skin.

His face...

God.

His face looked unreal.

Sharp, masculine, almost offensively beautiful - a brutal jaw softened only slightly by the shadow of stubble, high cheekbones, a straight nose, and a mouth full enough to belong to someone gentler than the rest of him suggested.

Black curls crowned his head in deliberate disorder, longer on top, shorter at the sides, like he had run his hands through it once and left the damage there for everyone's benefit.

And then there were his eyes.

Even from across the room, they hit me.

Blue.

Not one easy shade of blue, but several - arctic and cobalt and something bright enough to look silver where the light found it. They moved through the room with detached ease, dismissing one face after another in a glide so casual it bordered on predatory.

Then they landed on me.

Everything inside me went still.

I forgot how to breathe.

Forgot where I was.

Forgot Halo at my side and Hazel's hand still clamped to my arm and the existence of every other living person in the room.

His gaze held mine with a kind of finality I had never experienced before, as if something had clicked into place for him in the exact same brutal instant it had for me.

No uncertainty.

No polite interest.

Recognition.

It made no sense.

I had never seen him before in my life.

And yet every nerve in my body reacted like it had been waiting.

Beside me, Hazel's voice emerged in a stunned whisper.

"That," she said faintly, "is not a man. That is a national emergency."

Normally I would have laughed.

I couldn't even blink.

The stranger's head tilted, barely perceptible.

His expression didn't change much, but something sharpened in it - some minute shift around the eyes, a darkening focus, as if he had looked up expecting a room and found a singularity instead.

I became violently aware of everything at once.

The heat collecting at the base of my throat.

The thin silk of my halter top against suddenly oversensitive skin.

The weight of my hair down my back.

The bare stretch of cleavage I had spent the last hour trying not to think about.

The fact that I was standing under too much light.

The fact that he was still looking at me.

No one had ever looked at me like that before.

Not Tyler, with all his counterfeit tenderness.

Not the boys at school who had laughed too loudly when teachers forced us into group projects.

Not even the men who'd noticed me differently these past few months, after the weight loss, after the contacts, after Hazel and Halo's relentless campaign to drag me back into the visible world.

This was not appreciation.

It was not flirtation.

It was something heavier.

Something that slid beneath my skin and settled in places I had no defense for.

My pulse kicked painfully hard.

And because fear and desire are sisters with the same face, I panicked.

I broke eye contact first.

The instant I did, the room came crashing back into place around me.

Music. Voices. Laughter. The slap of cards against a table somewhere behind us. Halo saying something to Niko that I couldn't parse because blood had rushed too loudly through my head.

I looked down, furious to find my hands trembling.

Hazel turned to me so fast I could feel her hair brush my arm.

"Did you see that?"

I swallowed. "See what?"

She stared at me.

"Are you actually insane?"

I forced a shrug I did not feel. "He's just some guy."

Hazel barked out one disbelieving laugh. "That is not just some guy."

Niko, who had been watching the doorway with an expression of resigned amusement, glanced back toward us.

"Hero made an entrance, I take it."

The name landed strangely in my chest.

Hero.

Of course it would be something absurd like that.

Hazel made a sound halfway between a gasp and a squeal. "That's Hero James?"

Carter looked offended. "You say that like you expected less."

"I expected a human man," Hazel shot back. "Not... that."

Ashton raised his cup. "Fair."

I should not have looked again.

I knew that even before I did it.

But curiosity - no, not curiosity, something far more primitive - dragged my gaze back toward the foyer.

He was still there.

Still watching me.

Or rather, watching the exact place where I stood as though he did not entirely believe I'd disappear if he blinked.

My stomach flipped so hard it almost hurt.

Up close would be worse, I realized suddenly.

Far worse.

Because distance was the only thing making this survivable.

Hero James stood near the doorway with three other men, all good-looking enough to warrant second glances under normal circumstances. Beside him, they might as well have been decorative furniture.

One of the girls lingering closest to him touched his arm when she said something.

He didn't look at her.

Didn't seem to notice her at all.

His attention remained fixed where I stood.

A flush climbed my chest.

This was ridiculous.

He didn't know me.

He couldn't possibly be looking at me like that with any meaning behind it.

I was projecting. Overreacting. Letting my body confuse beautiful with important.

That had cost me once already.

Never again.

"Halsey?"

Halo's voice cut gently through the frenzy in my skull.

I looked at her.

Her expression had changed. Soft concern threaded through the excitement on her face, and I knew instantly that whatever had just passed between me and the stranger had not gone unnoticed by my sisters.

"I'm fine," I said too quickly.

Hazel snorted.

Niko's brows rose.

Carter muttered, "Sure."

I ignored all of them.

"I need air."

Before anyone could stop me, I set my untouched cup on the nearest side table and moved.

Not running.

Absolutely not running.

Just... moving with urgency.

Through the edge of the living room. Past the beer pong table. Around a laughing couple pressed too close together near the archway. Toward the back of the house where I had noticed, earlier, a dark set of French doors standing open to the yard.

My heartbeat followed me like an alarm.

I could feel it everywhere - in my wrists, behind my knees, low in my stomach, high in my throat.

By the time I reached the kitchen, I was breathing too fast.

What the hell was wrong with me?

He was just attractive.

Very attractive.

Unfairly attractive.

The kind of beautiful that made common sense limp away and die.

But attraction was not destiny.

And I was not sixteen anymore, ready to mistake intensity for sincerity because a handsome boy pointed his attention at me.

The kitchen was half empty now. A couple made out by the sink. Someone laughed too loudly near the fridge. I slipped past them all and pushed through the open back door into the night.

Cool air hit my flushed skin like a slap.

I inhaled hard.

Then again.

The backyard was quieter than the inside of the house, though music still drifted out through the open windows in a heavy pulse. Groups of people dotted the lawn and patio, talking in clusters beneath strings of lights, smoke curling through the dark here and there.

At the far edge of the yard, half hidden in shadow, an old wooden swing hung from the branch of a sprawling oak tree.

Without thinking, I headed for it.

Each step across the grass eased me incrementally back into myself.

By the time I reached the swing, my breathing had evened out.

Mostly.

I sat down carefully, the wood cool beneath my thighs, and leaned back just enough for the chains to creak above me.

Then I stared up at the night sky through the branches and pressed one hand flat over my pounding heart.

This was insane.

A stranger walked into a room, looked at me for all of five seconds, and now I was hiding in a backyard like a Victorian woman with an overactive imagination.

Humiliating.

Worse, some treacherous part of me wanted to go back in.

Wanted to see if he would still be looking.

Wanted to know what would happen if I let him get close enough for those eyes to stop being a phenomenon and become a person.

I closed mine.

No.

Beautiful men were not safe.

Beautiful men made sport of women like me.

Beautiful men taught lessons that took months to bleed out of you.

A soft laugh slipped from my mouth, humorless and small.

"What is wrong with you, Halsey?" I murmured to myself.

"That depends," said a deep voice from the shadows, smooth as dark liquor and twice as dangerous. "Why did you run from me?"

My entire body snapped upright.

There, at the edge of the dim yard where the patio light thinned into shadow, stood Hero James

And somehow, impossibly, he looked even more devastating beneath the moon.