I felt his other hand sear hot against my cheek. He bent his head, and in a voice that Jack couldn’t hear, said, “When you came down the stairs, and fell into me, that was the moment.” Then his lips pressed against mine.

He kept his eyes on mine, his gaze unblinking, and I stared right back into the blue. He moved almost imperceptibly and in the space between a heartbeat his lips touched mine.

So we have twenty-four hours to keep out of trouble,’ he says to me.I slide a glance in his direction. Judging from the way he’s now grimacing at the sidewalk and the fact that I met him in a police station where he was being booked for stealing a car, I’m guessing that staying out of trouble is not his forte.

Trust me,’ he says with a touch of impatience.‘Stop asking me to do that,’ I say, equally as impatiently.

I need a favour.’I raise my eyebrows at him in disbelief. What makes him think I’m about to do him a favour? He’s a stranger. And he’s wearing handcuffs.

In his arms I’ve finally found the place I’ve been looking for, where fear can’t touch me, where memories can’t reach, where the past is forgotten and the present is enough. Where the present is, in fact, all that matters.

I breathed in the memory of his lips, the softness of them, and how they felt tracing across my skin, leaving ripples of goosebumps in their wake.

. ‘Because off-duty cops walk around the city wearing sweatshirts advertising they’re cops all the time, never mind it’s a hundred degrees outside. And never mind you look like the youngest cop ever recruited in the history of policing.’He tsks at me. ‘Have you never seen 21 Jump Street?

When I make love to you,’ he said in a low whisper right by my ear, ‘I want to be able to give you one hundred percent of my attention. Right now, with the Unit on our tail, I’m going to be giving you less than fifty percent. I’ve got one eye on the door and one on you, not to mention a gun under the pillow. Not exactly the accessory I imagined.

I nodded. I was ready. In fact I was so ready that if he didn’t do something soon, if he didn’t touch me in the next five seconds, it was very possible I might die. Right there on the bed. Still a virgin.

Look,’ said Cyrus, raising his knife again and pointing it at her. ‘Give me one reason why we shouldn’t kill your boyfriend over there. Come on. The dark scowling face is reason enough in my book.’She could have sworn she heard the sound of Lucas’s eyes narrowing to slits.‘Come on, just one reason,’ Cyrus repeated, ‘and it better not include the words love, eternal or soul.

I couldn't bear the thought of Alex looking at me like I was a freak. It was bad enough that the looked at me as Jack's sister.