Under Covers

twenty-two | paris

A tight cast of restraint stiffens his neck. I would love to be the reason his careful, controlled armour shrivels to nothingness and see what kind of unhinged beast lurks beneath it.

I tilt my throat to the side and let my legs drift apart invitingly. My boots splay wide against the muffled rug. A tiny spasm rocks his cheekbone. "Set me loose, Jake," I say sweetly. My eyelashes flitter. "Let's make this a fair fight."

Those stone-grey eyes regard me, hot and cold, ice and fire all sworling into chaos. He knows if he frees me I will peel his stupid, gorgeous fucking face off.

He steps towards my chair and looms over me, and instantly it's obvious that even with the promise of homicidal retribution written across every inch of my wired body, he's gonna let me go anyways. Not in spite of the rabid, torrid carnage he's about to unleash, but because of it.

Our gazes clash, roiling, as he reaches behind me to unlock my shackles. His broad shoulders are squared, ready for a fight. Asking for it.

I poise myself onto the tips of my toes, a grenade on the verge of detonating. With a twist of his fingers and a faint, husky pill of breath, he pulls the pin.

I explode.

Punching and smacking and kicking and clawing and ripping and jabbing and biting. He dodges each attack with agile precision. My foot clobbers his thigh but he knocks it swiftly away. My fingernails impale his arm but he mangles my wrist, yanking me by the hair. My elbow cuffs the lean metal of his gut but he locks me by the shoulder, cranking my forearm so far back it creaks and burns.

"Is that all you've got?" I goad, jamming my boot against his shin and drawing a strangled grunt from him.

He cages me against him so my ass hits his crotch and husks into my ear, "I'm a gentleman. If I wasn't going easy on you, darling, you'd already be dead." I head-butt him straight in the nose and he swears crudely, a real gentleman. I break myself from his grasp and watch with a glib thrill as his fingers come away from his nostrils dark with blood.

From the mercury glint circling his pupils, silver and caustic, it's clear I'm succeeding in unraveling him.

With a fluid whip of his wrist, so brisk I don't even see it coming, he snaps me across the face with a large, open palm. My cheek prickles hot, my eyes watering. Low in my tummy, a wave of arousal crashes onto a scraggling, rocky shore.

A pleased smile sneers my smarting mouth.

Looks like he's on the brink of exploding, too.

His oozing nose drips a trail of blood onto the beige carpet as he stalks towards me, his hulking form thrumming with wrath. He swings a blinding punch at my head but I duck, jerking a knee at his groin. He bats my leg away before it lands, striking my stomach with a hurtling fist. It knocks every last wisp of air from my lungs and yet the sheer surge of febrile adrenaline has me buzzing.

Our panting, grunting, hissing clamor erupts through the hotel room. I tear at his t-shirt, scratching a splintery clawful down his neck while he pummels his shoe into the buckling fold at the back of my knee. I pinch a pleated scrap of skin at the junction of his shoulder so viciously it flares purple, and he sprains my hair into a knotted rope, shredding it from my scalp with a deep growl.

His body is lithe and huge and powerful. He's undoubtedly stronger, but I'm faster and more spry. He attacks with brute force, slugging and whamming so that my bones rattle and my muscles splatter. I aim for pressure-points and weak-spots, using my nails and elbows and knees to bruise and shock and dig.

I don't even remember what we're fighting about. I just know that the rush of it is so addicting that I can't stop.

"Had enough yet?" he huffs. His knuckles ricochet into my ear and the world starts ringing.