Fate had found me and kicked me in the stomach—hell, she’d just tossed me to the wolves.
This was not a stranger.
He’d said my name.
I tore my lips from his, chest heaving. “You . . . but the tattoo . . . hair . . . Dax Blay?”
He grinned with a cockiness that now seemed all too familiar. “You can call me Dax. Or Sex Lord. Or Daddy. Whatever floats your boat.”
I inhaled sharply. How had I been so stupid?
Hurt lodged in my throat; not that I wasn’t used to his smart remarks, but when pointed directly at me, leftover anger and pain from our past came roaring back to the surface like a newly opened wound.
Don’t let him under your skin.
I slapped him on the face. Not as hard as I wanted, but hard enough that my hand stung.
He gritted his teeth, gave me a hard glare, and lifted his hand to touch his cheek. “You were supposed to not be angry.”
“Why aren’t you back in Raleigh where you should be?” My fists clenched.
“Why aren’t you with stuffy old Hartford?” he snapped right back. His eyes flicked to my bare ring finger and then bounced back to my face. “Aren’t you supposed to be married? Why are you running around London kissing random men?”
“Ah! You knew it was me the entire time,” I huffed. “Once again, you’ve proven I’ve always been a game to you.”
And that thought cut so deep not even the tequila could dull it.
“Girls love my games.” His insinuation made a thousand memories bombard my brain.
Me.
Him.
Us.
Seventy-two hours in a small bedroom.
Kisses. Beautiful, wonderful, endless kisses.
Love. Lust.
And then—devastation.
Darkness.
“No snappy comeback, Remi?”
My eyes narrowed and if I could have shot flaming arrows from them, I’d have landed several in his crotch. My eyes touched there and then quickly darted away, but obviously not before he noticed.
His lip curled. “You still like what you see? Once you’ve had Dax, you never go back.”
“As usual, your ego is so big it takes up this entire nightclub.”
He grinned tightly. “Really? I seem to remember you liked how big I was. You couldn’t get enough of my ‘Mr. Argentine Duck’”—he used air quotes—“which you so aptly named after some rare bird with a seventeen-inch cock.”
He remembered that?
Of course, he wasn’t seventeen inches—but he wasn’t shabby either.
My face reddened.
I changed the topic. “Nice. Just great. Do you have any idea the measures I took to make sure I avoided you at Whitman after you dumped me? Which is hard to do considering it’s a small university,” I said. “I’ve dropped two classes just so I didn’t have to sit in the same room as you. I’ve walked out of the cafeteria if you came in. I’ve left the library right in the middle of a group study session. The only place we saw each other was at parties and formals. And here you are tonight . . . not going by the rules of I never want to talk to you again, Dax.”
He grunted. “I don’t know about your rules because you never told me, and I swear by all that is holy, I didn’t know it was you on that barstool. Not until that first kiss. I mean, your voice was familiar and you smelled like you, sugary and sweet, sorta like a cookie—and your body”—he raked his eyes over me—“is still rocking the hot curves—”
“You’re so full of yourself that . . .” I scrambled for a word. “ . . . I—I can’t even describe you.”
He crossed his arms. “I see you still think you’re better than everyone else, but you fell in my lap, and don’t think I didn’t see you checking me out in the mirror. You were practically shagging me with your eyes.”
I cringed. “Only because I didn’t know it was the irreverent self-absorbed waste-of-oxygen-who-expects-all-women-to-worship-at-his-feet that I went to Whitman with. And you’re a Tau.”
“And you’re an Omega little sister,” he retorted distastefully.
The blue-haired guy, who’d been listening intently, took a step closer to us, hands waving. “Wait, wait. So you two have a history—like before this Hartford guy?”
We both glared at him.
He chortled with glee. “This is bloody hilarious.”
“No, it’s not, Spider,” Dax said. “All bets are off.”
The guy snorted. “Never.”
What bet? His name was Spider?
Spider turned to me. “I apologize for my cousin. He’s had a hard summer taking care of me. Moving on, how do you know the bastard?”
I angled my chin. “The girl he was sleeping with at the time caught us together at the frat house. She told her entire sorority I was the reason he broke up with her. Then these—these mean girls proceeded to egg my dorm room door, and the next day my car was covered in sticky notes with slut written on them, not to mention the entire campus gossiped about me for months—”
“What the hell?” Dax whipped his mask off, and I bit back a gasp at the full impact of his face. He slayed me, especially with those mercurial gray eyes with thick, black lashes longer than any girl’s.
He was too gorgeous.
Too dangerous.
Too much of everything.
He was exactly what I needed to avoid.
A muscle ticked in his jaw. His fists clenched. “Eva-Maria did that to you? Why didn’t you tell me?”