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I didn’t know what he was looking at until his hand came up and took hold of mine. Then he turned it over and held it there between us where we could both see it shaking.

And his jaw went tight.

His other hand went into his pocket, and I knew what was coming before he even had it out. Although this time it was something that worked considerably faster than candy.

It was a glucose chew, the same brand I kept in the bottom of my bag, which he had never once seen me take. And I stood there and understood that at some point in the last two months, this man had gone and done his homework. That he had found out what a person actually needs when their sugar bottoms out, and had been carrying it on him ever since, waiting for a night just like this one.

I couldn’t breathe.

“Open,” he ordered bringing it to my lips.

“I’m fine,” I told him, like I always did, despite being anything but.

“Anna,” he scolded but I turned my head away, because I was angry and frightened and out of my mind with all of it. And because this was the only piece of defiance I had left.

So, he took my jaw.

Two fingers and a thumb at the hinge of it, firm and not gentle at all. Which meant my mouth came open whether I wanted it to or not. Then he put it on my tongue and closed my jaw with the flat of his hand.

“Swallow it,” he ordered firmly and I shook my head. I actually shook my head, with a killer’s hand under my chin and a few armed men still standing on the grass behind him.

He leaned down until there was nothing at all between us.

“Do not make me force you, little bird,” he said quietly.

“Because I will. And you will not enjoy learning how.” I swallowed it after this, because I was too afraid not to after the dangerous manner of his threat.

Then he simply waited. That was the part I didn’t expect. He stood there in the cold with his hand still under my jaw and he waited, watching my face, until whatever he was looking for started coming back into it.

Only when he was satisfied did his hard expression change. His thumb came up and brushed a piece of my hair back, tucking it behind my ear with the kind of gentleness that was making me dizzy. The backs of his knuckles went down the side of my face again, caressing my bruised skin.

And then his hand slid into the back of my hair and closed around the strands. He then used this hold on me to tip my head back, and his voice dropped into something I had never heard before.

“I cannot wait any longer.”

I didn’t have a chance to ask what he meant as his lips descended and at last…

He kissed me.

A kiss he had never given me before, and so far it felt like the most dangerous thing he had ever done to me. A kiss he had held back even in the shower block with his fingers inside me. Not even in the seclusion room with my legs around his head. And afterward, through a hatch in a door, he had confessed how he had wanted to but wouldn’t tell me why he hadn’t. Two months of shamefully wanting it. Two months of thinking there was something wrong with me that he never had.

And now… now the second we were beyond those walls he took my mouth in the dark on a wet lawn and with an army standing less than forty feet away.

He kissed me like he needed it as much as his next breath.

It wasn’t gentle.

It wasn’t careful and it was nothing at all like the hands that had dressed me an hour ago. He kissed me like a man who had been starving. His hand was fisted in my hair, and his other arm banded around my back and kept me anchored against him. He bent me into it and claimed every second of it. He didn’t ask…

He simply took.

All of it, my mouth, my breath and whatever was left of the part of me that had been running. And as for me, I didn’t fight him for a single second of it.

No, instead… I kissed him back.

God help me, I got my hands around his waist and pulled him closer. I kissed a murderer back like I had been waiting my whole life to do it, and somewhere in the middle of it, I made a sound against his mouth. The kind of sound I should be ashamed of for the rest of my life. And maybe later, when I have processed it, I might be. But right in that moment, I moaned in the type of pleasure that I thought could drown me.

He groaned at that.