Someone was chasing me.
The cold ocean air cut through my lungs, piercing my throat as I gulped it down. My feet hit sand along the public access beach, slowing me for one unsteady moment.
I could hear the whistle of wind over another body behind me. The harsh spit of air through a working chest.
I pushed harder, but there was a sinking in my belly, a heavy foreboding that told me I wouldn’t be able to outrun this predator.
Ezra and Henrik had been teaching me to fight though. I knew the dynamics of a punch, the basic mechanics of defending myself if I was caught from behind or approached straight on. Too bad they hadn’t taught me how to evade a pursuer on foot.
For a moment, I thought about taking cover, hiding so that they passed me by, but I didn’t want to be cornered.
I shouldn’t have worried.
Seconds later, I could hear them just behind me, breath churning, air displaced at my back by their impressive speed. My blood rushed through my ears, so loud I thought I might drown in it. Music pounded through the earbud still lodged in my left ear, taunting me appropriately to run.
Before they could reach for me, I stopped abruptly. In the lapse it took for them to stop, I swung up and around, using all my weight to throw a punch where I imagined their stomach might be.
A large, calloused hand caught my swinging fist by my wrist and wrenched me forward, off-balance. I crushed into a hard chest, but I was already fighting, stomping my heel down on their foot, crashing my head into their chin.
I could tell by the size and heft of the body that it was a man, but it was too dark, even the moon obscured, to see his face. I didn’t even think to look. Sheer panic held me by the throat. I was thrown back to being a girl again, cornered by one of the Morelli thugs in the parking lot of my elementary school, his dark eyes wicked as he dragged me into the car.
A wail left my lips, something like a battle cry and I threw my weight into the heavy torso hard enough to rock him off-balance. There was a muffled curse as he fell, taking me with him. I landed on his chest, the air expelling from his chest in a hot plume over my right ear. Before I could scramble away, he was rolling us, pinning me beneath his considerable bulk.
Fear clawed at my insides, tearing me up.
I struggled so hard, I thought my heart might burst.
In the squirmish, the earbud fell from my left ear and a familiar voice cut through the dense night like a blade. “Bianca, enough!”
My body understood before my mind could compute it, freezing immediately. A second later, realization broke through the haze in my skull.
Tiernan.
I opened my mouth to yell at him, to demand to know why he was chasing me, why he’d scared me like that, but the only thing that came out was a long, low whimper.
“Bianca,” he said again, this time almost gentle, the tone rusty with disuse.
His hands softened around my wrists as he pinned them over my head.
“W-why?” I whispered as tears pushed to the front of my eyes. “You scared me.”
He made a noise in the back of his throat, part frustration, part sympathy. “I’ve been saying your name for the last five minutes. You were obviously too panicked to hear me.”
That was possible, maybe, but it didn’t explain why he’d chased me at all.
“I was out looking for your idiot self,” he growled, fingers tightening around my wrists again, his narrow hips and wide chest pinning me to the cold, damp sand. “Then you started running and I didn’t want to fucking lose you again. Ezra, Walcott, and Henrik are all out looking for you too.”
“But Brando?” I protested automatically.
“Chef Patsy stayed late to watch over him.”
A long sigh unspooled from my lips, faintly white in the cold air, fanning across Tiernan’s looming face. “You scared me,” I repeated softly.
“Good,” he grunted, not moving off me, instead, crushing his hips even tighter to my groin. “You need a good scare.”
“I can run by myself without needing your permission,” I countered, even though there was enough evidence to support the contrary.
“You are a stubborn, silly little girl. You don’t know a thing about Bishop’s Landing or the monsters that live in these streets. You want a run-in with Bryant fucking Morelli? You want to run into a man like me who’d see a pretty little thing like you lost and alone, and think he’d take his chances on hunting you down for himself?”
I noticed suddenly the thick, obvious length of Tiernan’s erection grinding into my core. Chasing me had aroused the predator in him. I could tell by the tension in his body that he was barely hanging on to his control. He wanted to rut into me on the public beach like an animal claiming his mate.