Dangerously Off Limits by noranmesomachukwu at Inkitt

Story Notes

This book started as a dare.

Not the kind Gianna takes in a dark room — though if you have made it this far you already know how that one ends. This dare was quieter. The kind you give yourself at midnight when you are tired of writing safe stories and you decide, once and for all, to write the one that has been living in the back of your head keeping you up at night.

Dangerously Off Limits is that book.

Gianna Bellamy is the woman I wrote for every reader who has ever been told to be sensible. To be careful. To want things in a manageable, reasonable way that never costs you anything. She is the woman who followed every rule and then walked through a door in the dark and discovered that the most honest version of herself had been waiting on the other side of it the whole time.

Elias Voss is the man who was already there.

This story is slow burn and it is steamy and it is the kind of forbidden that makes your chest tight because you want it for them even when you know you shouldn’t. It is about desire and secrets and what happens when the thing you were running from turns out to be the thing you were always running toward.

It is also about friendship. About the people who see you before you see yourself. About the specific courage it takes to stop being careful and start being real.

A few things before you begin:

This book is intended for readers 18 and older. It contains explicit sexual content, significant age gap romance, and situations that will make you want to throw this book across the room and immediately pick it back up. You have been warned. You are welcome.

Every chapter ends on a hook because I believe you deserve to be kept up at night.

The steam does not apologize for itself. Neither does Gianna. Neither do I.

Now put your phone on charge because you are going to be here for a while.

Welcome to Dangerously Off Limits.

Try not to fall in love.

You will anyway.

With love and zero apologies,

EN.STEPH.NORA.

Summary

She knelt in the dark for a stranger. No names. No lights. No turning back. One dare. One dark room. One man whose hands she still thinks about at midnight when she should be sleeping. The problem? He is sitting across from her at dinner the very next night. Older. Commanding. The kind of man who looks at a woman like he already knows exactly what she sounds like when she falls apart. She should walk away. She cannot make herself move. Now they have a secret. Tuesday evenings that run past midnight. A library where things get said that cannot be unsaid. And a tension so thick between them that every room they share feels like a lit match looking for something to burn. He is patient. She is done waiting. Dangerously Off Limits — for readers who like their romance forbidden, their heroes commanding, and their slow burn hot enough to leave marks.

Genre: Romance

Author: noranmesomachukwu

Status: Ongoing

Chapters: 5

Rating: n/a

Age Rating: 18+

DANGEROUSLY OFF LIMITS

No parts of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations in book reviews and certain other noncommercial used permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

Any resemblance to actual person, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

DANGEROUSLY OFF LIMITS

~~~~~~~

DEDICATION?

For every woman who was told to be sensible. Sensible never felt like this.

~~~~~~~

UPDATES SCHEDULE!

I aim to post two chapters every couple of days, though sometimes a day might slip by. Life can get busy, especially as I’m balancing this story alongside my responsibilities as a nursing student and Digital marketer.

I will do my best to keep the updates coming while managing exams, hospital rotations, and everything else on my plate.

Please try and be patience and give me all the support you can— it will really means a lot to me.

~~~~~~~

DANGEROUSLY OFF LIMITS

PROLOGUE

Before She Knew His Name

The room was dark.

Not the comfortable dark of a bedroom with the curtains drawn or the soft dark of a cinema before the screen comes alive. This was complete — the kind of dark that swallowed everything whole and gave nothing back. No shapes. No outlines. Just the muffled pulse of music through the wall like a second heartbeat, and the sound of her own breathing, which had gone shallow in a way she was choosing not to examine.

Gianna pressed her back against the closed door and waited for her eyes to adjust.

They did not adjust. There was nothing to adjust to.

It's just a dare, she told herself. Five minutes. You walk in, you walk out, you go back to the table and Zoe stops looking at you like you've never done anything interesting in your life.

Except her heart was doing something completely outside her control and the air in this room was warmer than the air outside it—closer, somehow, heavier—and she could feel, with the particular awareness of someone standing in the dark with a stranger, that she was not alone.

She had known that before she opened the door.

She had opened it anyway.

"You can breathe."

The voice came from her left — low, unhurried, carrying the specific quality of a man who had never once needed to raise it to be heard. It moved through the dark like something with weight. Like something that had been waiting.

Gianna breathed.

"Good." A pause. Then: "Come here."

Not a question. Not quite a command. Something in between that her body responded to before her mind had finished processing the words. Two steps forward into nothing she could see. Then two more. The music through the wall shifted into something slower, heavier, all bass and no apology.

She stopped.

"Closer."

"I can't see anything," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt, which was the one small victory available to her in this room.

"You don't need to see." Another pause — the kind that had intention living inside it. "That's the point."

She took one more step and the heat of him reached her before anything else did. Close. He was close, and tall, and completely still in the way of someone who had been waiting for exactly this and was in no hurry now that it had finally, inevitably, arrived.

His hand found her jaw in the dark.

Unhurried. Certain. Like he had been thinking about doing this since the moment she walked through the door and had finally, simply, decided.

This doesn't count, she thought. It's dark. There are no names. Nobody knows.

She believed this completely.

She stopped believing it the moment his mouth found hers.

What happened in that room stayed in that room.

That was what she told herself on the walk home—heels in her hand, coat pulled tight against the pre-dawn cold, the city empty and generous around her in the way it only ever was at four in the morning, when it belonged entirely to the people with somewhere to be and nowhere to go.

She did not think about his hands.

She thought about his hands constantly.

She did not think about the way he had said come here like it was the simplest, most inevitable thing — like she had always been going to end up exactly there, in that dark room, closing that particular distance. She did not think about the last thing he said before she found the door handle and let the light back in.

Next time I see you, I'm not letting you walk away.

She had not turned around.

She had kept walking and she had not turned around and that was the right decision, the sensible decision, the decision of a woman who color-coded her calendar and packed her lunch the night before and did not kneel in dark rooms for strangers whose faces she had never seen.

Except she had.

She had, and it had been the least sensible and most alive she had felt in longer than she could name. The city was going pale at the edges with early morning. She was walking home with her shoes in her hand.

She was not sorry.

She was not sorry at all.

That was the part she couldn't file anywhere.

She did not know his name.

She did not know his face.

She did not know, as she turned the key in her front door and stepped into the quiet of her apartment and stood in her own hallway with her back against the door and her eyes closed—she didn’t know that she had already met him. That she would see him in less than twenty-four hours. That he would be sitting across a candlelit dinner table with dark eyes that found hers like he had been expecting her —

like of course,

like there you are —

and that nothing, not one single color-coded square on her carefully managed calendar, had prepared her for a single second of what came next.

She went to bed.

She did not sleep.

She lay in the dark and did not think about his hands and thought about his hands and told herself, very firmly, that it was finished.

It was just a dare, she said to the ceiling.

The ceiling, wisely, said nothing back.