Page 47 of Wraith: Lethal Impact

His eyes widen. The operator freezes, derailed. "I would never take you to a place like that."

"Being a virgin doesn't mean I'm ignorant." I slide my hands up his chest. "If it were up to me, a place like that sounds like what I want. We don't have a dungeon. We have this place, and we have now."

He stares down at me, the shock morphing into heat. "A bed. A rusted sink. My entire team on the other side of a wooden door." His hands flex at his sides, reaching for me and refusing to, both at once. "You've had the worst forty-eight hours of your life. You watched men die. You found out your father—" He stops himself. "You should have candles. A real bed. Someone who isn't—" He gestures at himself, at the scars, the holstered pistol, all of it. "This."

"I don't want candles." I take his hand and flatten it over my sternum, letting him feel my heart slamming against my ribs. "Feel that? That's not shock. That's not trauma. That's me, wanting you. I've been half alive for twenty-three years. Perfect posture. Perfect grades. Perfect daughter." The word tastes like ash now, and I let him hear it. "The one thing the Consortium can't take and my father never touched is this choice. Let me make it."

"Tomorrow you could regret it." But his thumb has started moving against my sternum, a slow stroke he doesn't seem to notice.

"Tomorrow I could be dead. So could you." I hold his stare. "I refuse to die a museum piece."

Something shifts behind his gray eyes—the argument dying, the hunger rising to take its place.

I look around the barren room—the rusted sink, the cold concrete, the sagging bed. A genuine laugh escapes my throat.

"If this is going to be my first time, who better than the man of my dreams?" I pull my wrists free and wrap my arms around the back of his neck, drawing his face down to mine. "Dax, please stop being a gentleman and fuck me already."

The gentleman wages a losing war against the predator.

"Make me useless to them," I whisper against the rapid pulse at the base of his throat. "Take my virginity, so the Consortium can't have it."

The professional distance shatters.

The operator vanishes, consumed by hunger.

His hands drop from my shoulders to my waist, gripping hard. He lifts me off the concrete floor and pins my back against the cold, damp wall.

The impact knocks a gasp from my lungs.

His mouth crashes down on mine. Nothing gentle in it. A violent claiming—a clash of teeth and need. He tastes like danger.

I wrap my legs around his waist and drag my fingernails down the muscles of his back, leaning into the friction. I want the heat. I want to obliterate the untouchable ballerina.

He tears his mouth from mine, breathing ragged, and buries his face in the crook of my neck, his lips searing the skin below my jawline.

"You're destroying my control." A harsh rasp against my collarbone.

"Good." I arch my back, pressing flush against him. "I don't want control. I want you to fuck me. Break me. Destroy the ballerina so I can finally be free."

He carries me across the room in three strides and drops me onto the bed. The rusted springs groan in protest.

He stands over me, staring down, focused and hungry. The dim tactical light casts jagged shadows across the scars on his face. A weapon, aimed entirely at me.

He grabs the hem of his damp shirt and yanks it over his head.

His chest is a wall of scarred muscle. Bullet wounds. Knife slashes. The fresh red line along his ribs I glued shut in the motel bathroom. The topography of a man who lives in the shadows.

Before I can trace the violence mapped on his skin, he drops onto the bed and covers my body with his.

I grab the hem of my shirt to drag it off—fast, greedy—but his hand closes over mine, stilling it.

"Slow." Half command, half plea.

"We don't have time for slow." I arch beneath him, impatient to burn.

"Then we'll steal it." His gray eyes pin me to the canvas. "You made your demand. You'll get it. But first I'm going to learn you."

Something in his voice—low, certain, reverent—empties the argument out of me.