Page 93 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

"No." He said it flatly. "You looked terrified."

"I wasn't."

"You stopped breathing."

"I was concentrating." It came out thin, even to me.

He looked at me a long moment, then he looked like a light went on. His eyes widened almost imperceptibly.

"Please," I said. "Do it again."

I put my hands out in front of me, palms down.

He looked at my hands, my face. He tensed, and I remembered Janice's warning. Then he took a deep breath. "No. Drop it. You don't even know what you're asking for." And just like that, dismissed.

He was right, I couldn't argue because I didn't know what I was asking for, I didn't know what he would do. My body knew what it wanted. It wanted the hand back, and it was not going to be talked out of it.

His fingers started moving, like he was counting. As soon as I looked at his hand, he stopped.

39 - THE UNWANTED SPARK

Derek

Bonds was shivering. My blood was hot. She smelled like sex, like the promise of hunger sated. Soft, vulnerable, beautiful. I could hear the distant roar in my ears.

No, not here, not her. I clamped down hard.

I let her wrists go and stayed close enough to catch her if her knees quit. They almost did.

She looked up in confusion, then disappointment. Fuck, she really wanted it. I pushed down harder.

The arms first. When I took both her wrists in the one hand, her arms had gone heavy. A frightened person locks up or pulls, the arms going hard, the whole body leaning back toward the door. Hers had done the opposite. They'd gone soft and handed me their weight, the way a sleeping kid's arm gives you its weight when you move it, and they'd gotten heavier the longer I held her.

That wasn't fear. That was surrender.

The breathing, then. She'd stopped. Ten seconds, maybe twelve, the kind of breath-hold that isn't voluntary. Pupils blown wide. The color up high in her face and across her throat, and it was the wrong color. It was blood coming up to the surface instead of draining out of it.

Idiot. It wasn't fear. Lacey Bonds had been horny as hell. I should have stopped then.

Then she'd asked me to do it again.

Her wrists in my hand. Small. The pulse going hard against my fingers. The weight of her arms settling into my grip, given over.

Fuck. I've got a fucking hard-on.

This was a problem.

I hadn't been hard like that since Pamela.

This woman cares for my daughter. Plus she’s clueless about this shit.

There is not a worse woman in the state of Kentucky for me to react to like this.

Lock it down. Be a host. Get her home.

I told her she didn't know what she was asking for, and she didn't. Sheltered suburbanite divorcee, reading badly written naughty books, constructing fantasies.

Fuck, I had wanted her.