Page 11 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

The cold gets serious as the day dies and I have more information. It is now night.

I wrap myself in both blankets and stop pretending about the smell. They rode here through his arms and they smell of him, coffee under wool.

I have the edge of one pulled up to my face like a child. It works.

My pulse comes down for the first time since the traffic light. The man whose job is keeping me in a box is the only thing in the box that calms me.

The hothouse prince out of his glass greenhouse and stuck in a box of another kind.

My hands are starting to become a problem. The little fingers of both hands are dead to the touch and the skin under the metal has opened.

This is no longer about comfort. I need my hands; they are the only part of me that has ever been allowed to do anything.

Another couple of hours and I hear the padlocks. One. Two. The bolt.

I am on my feet before the door moves, hands presented at the exact angle of a man presenting gloves to a valet. I have my words prepared.

The door swings, and my words die in my mouth.

The scent comes off him in a wall. It was strong before. It is worse now — richer, darker, everywhere at once, coffee and warmth.

The scent of alpha rolls into the box ahead of him like the air off a stove. My knees go loose and I lock them. I am no longer cold.

Now I am burning.

The patches behind my ears are a day and a half old. The spray is long gone.

Whatever effect he is having on me, it is overriding my blockers.

He is walking into it undiluted. I watch it hit him. He stops dead in the doorway with the water under one arm, and for a full breath the only thing moving in the room is the boat.

Startled again. Twice now. So much for the professional.

“My hands,” I say, and my voice comes out steady.

I lift them into the light, wrists turned up, so he can see what the metal has done. “The cuffs are too tight. My fingers are dying.”

He doesn’t move. The mask looks at me and I look back at the mask, straight into the dark eyes, the thing I have never once been permitted to do with an alpha.

A hot shiver sets my body quivering and wet hot slick runs down my thighs.

He sets down the water. Straightens.

“Hold still.”

I hold still. It is the one thing I have trained for since before I could read.

He comes close. He comes so close.

The heat off him crosses the space between us before he does, and the rich coffee is everywhere, in my mouth, under my tongue.

His enormous hands come up under mine without touching them. I see a small key pinched in fingers that could break every bone I have.

He is careful. He works the key into the lock and turns it slowly, and not once does he touch my skin.

He is close enough that I can hear him breathing through the wool. He draws the chain away from me, and steps back with the cuffs swallowed in one fist.

I shake my hands, feeling coming back into them in sharp spikes. I hear the sound I make and bite it in half. His head comes up immediately and for half a second neither of us is breathing right.