EMBER’S POV

My stomach drops, flips, and catches fire simultaneously.

I KNOW those words.

I know them in my body before my brain catches up, and the memory hits me with the force of a freight train.

The hotel room, the black lace, the garter belt I’d never worn before, Knox on his knees between my legs with the styling team locked on the other side of the door and my back against the wall and the count falling apart in my mouth because his tongue was doing things that made numbers feel like a foreign language.

I was a different woman then. Terrified, exhilarated, wearing borrowed confidence and someone...