Overture (North Security 1)

How can I send her out into the world like this? So damn innocent. So trusting, when she has no idea all the ways I want to use her. I close my fist hard, pulling her hair taut, exposing her neck, a pale column against the wild shadows of her hair.

A squeak escapes her, but that’s not enough to make me stop. She’ll be alone on that tour, at the mercy of men like Harry March, men who don’t have any morals. Men like me.

I press my hips down, rubbing my erection against her small body. She has to know what she’s up against. She has to know what I want.

She wriggles underneath me, probably trying to escape. All it does is make me harder. I’m so much bigger than she is, so much stronger.

“Tell me no,” I say, my words hard and cold. “Fight me.”

“What?” she gasps.

“You have to be safe.” It’s become a prayer. A promise. “If a man tries to touch you… You have to protect yourself from people like me.”

That’s the part I didn’t say during our sex talk. The part I couldn’t bring myself to say. Couldn’t bring myself to think about. Samantha, hurt. Samantha, afraid. Until I was twenty thousand feet above the ground, watching her sneak out on the goddamn video camera, ice in my veins.

And still she blinks up at me. There’s an entire universe inside her. Creation and destruction. A million stars lighting up the night.

“What happens if I don’t say no?” she asks. “What if I say yes?”

Oh God, she’s testing me. Tempting me. She has no idea what she’s asking for, what I could do to her before she has a chance to object. Show her, the devil inside me whispers.

It sounds like my voice, that devil. It’s me.

I lean down, my lips an inch from hers. But I don’t do anything as sweet or ordinary as kiss her. That would be too much like romance, too much like love, and those impulses were beaten out of me a long time ago. Instead I bite her lip, tugging her tender flesh between my teeth.

It’s a threat, the way I give her a little pressure, only enough to hurt. I won’t leave bruises, but I want to. That’s how fucked up I am. I want to leave my mark on her body, on her soul.

I’ve never let those impulses out of their godforsaken cages, but it’s happening now. I trail my lips to her jaw and scrape her velvet-soft skin with the edge of my teeth. If this is what it takes for her to understand the threats, for her to protect herself from the dangers out there in the world… if this is what it takes to keep her safe…

That’s the excuse I tell myself as I grasp her earlobe between my teeth.

Peaches. Vanilla. Sweetness and cream.

Her scent reaches inside my lungs, imprinting on me the way I want to imprint my will on her. Something feral takes over my body. I’m acting on pure instinct as I burrow closer to her. Down the smooth line of her neck, where it meets her shoulder. That’s where I bite her.

She jolts beneath me, making a sound that’s every bit as animal, a sound of submission and pleasure. It would be so easy to pull her nightshirt up, to rip her panties to shreds. To push my aching cock inside her little cunt and finally have relief.

“Yes,” she whispers as if she can read my thoughts. “Please.”

Her small hands grasp my shoulders, my chest, my abs. She rocks herself up, thrusting her flat belly against my erection, and I grunt at the terrible pleasure. God.

Even more than I want to fuck her, I want to eat her. To bite my way down her lithe body, to sink my teeth into her hips, her thighs. To lave my tongue right between her—

“No,” I choke out, pushing back from the bed. There’s physical pain, removing myself from her clumsy embrace, as if I cut off a limb. My cock throbs in my briefs. It knows how close it came to heaven.

“Tell me what the money was for.”

r /> SAMANTHA

I’m panting in the erotic haze he left me in. This is probably some kind of military interrogation technique, to make someone writhe and shudder. And then ask her a question. My brain is too muddled to come up with a lie. And worse than that, my defenses are down.

Slowly I sit up on the bed and grab a pillow to clutch in my lap, but it’s not much of a wall. It doesn’t protect me from his harsh breathing or the broad silhouette from the moon in the window.

“Okay,” I say, my voice trembling only slightly. “I’ll tell you.”

There may as well be a marble statue in the room with me for how still he is, except that he’s emanating heat at approximately ten thousand degrees. It radiates from him in furious demand.

“There’s a new coach at Kingston High.” There are really only two high schools in the city, the public high school with its large football stadium and massive prom nights. And St. Agnes, which is where Laney and I attend. “Cody told us that he’s… that he’s watching them. Touching them.”