The Billionaire's Beautiful Intruder (Billionaire Knights Book 3) by Nic Saint Page A

he’d decided his brother was right. And like Stu he’d gone through training hoping to do something for his country, to serve a purpose greater than himself, for his life to have meaning and not be the quagmire of drink and drugs and sex it was.
    And he found the clean-living ways he’d sought, and he found the enduring friendships and the comradeship he’d hoped to find, and he changed his ways and made his brothers and his country proud. And then his whole life had turned into an inferno of fire and death, and it had very nearly ended him.
    He couldn’t share his horrors with a woman, and he wasn’t in the market for casual sex either, and neither was Molly, he knew. She simply wasn’t that kind of person. So he told himself to back off from her. The army had taught him self-discipline and self-control. Those qualities were going to come in very handy right now, he thought as he sent the axe crashing into another chunk of wood.

Chapter 8
    T he nights were cool , just like Steve had told her, and the duvet he’d given her came in handy. Molly couldn’t find sleep, however, and kept staring out the window at the full moon as it rose against the night sky. There were so many sounds outside, of animals moving about and claiming the terrain humans had encroached during the daytime, and she kept expecting the wild boar Steve had told her about to suddenly invade this small house and charge inside.
    There was no reason for alarm, of course. They couldn’t get in, or else Steve would have warned her. She closed her eyes, and allowed her fingers to trace beneath the nightshirt she was wearing, deftly covering the whorls and ridges of the tattoo terror had etched across her belly. It was a habit of hers, worrying that deformed and inelastic skin over and over again. She’d discovered that those scars had come to define her, as they had the many people who’d suffered the same burns as she had. She wondered if Steve also lay awake right now, touching his own scars and wishing his life hadn’t turned out the way it had.
    And as she thought about Steve, the same fire that had consumed her that afternoon suddenly came roaring back to life, and she felt her lower belly roil with heat, a different heat than the one that had caused the scars. This heat was life-giving, not life-taking, and involved the hot hands of a man who was shaped like a Greek god, and whose kisses had blazed life into her, a life she hadn’t even known her body possessed. A yearning and a need that was beyond anything she’d ever known. Like everything else on this island Steve Knight was a force of nature, she decided, and not to be trifled with.
    Steve sat up in bed. There was a dull rumble in the air, the clear warning of an impending storm, but all he could think about were Molly Grayson’s warm lips and soft curves. And he knew that she was going to haunt his every dream from now until a long time into the future. The rumble persisted and became more pervasive, as the wind picked up speed outside. He tried to remember if he’d closed Molly’s window. He’d opened it to allow the room to air a little that afternoon, to make sure she would enjoy a pleasant sleep, but now, with the wind starting to howl around the house, he knew that soon rain would come, along with the violence of the storm, and scare her sleep away.
    So he quickly padded to the door and walked across the small corridor into her room, making sure he was quiet. He moved over to her window which, as he’d assumed, was still open, and closed it. And he was just walking back to the door when he bumped into her in the darkness of the room. Automatically he reached out to steady her, and as his hands clamped down on her upper arms, there was a crashing sound, immediately followed by a flash that lit up the room. The thunderous noise had the worst effect on Molly, who cried out in terror and fear and suddenly clung to him, as if her life was in mortal danger.
    Instinctively he clasped