Page 34 of Hunt Me, Daddy

I didn’t like that.

I wanted to change it.

I wanted to see her sleeping across the whole bed, warm and exhausted and too well-satisfied to think about threats for once in her life.

The thought sent a surge of need right through me.

My hand went again to the pen inside my jacket, pressing it through the fabric against my chest like an anchor. A ridiculous anchor. A stolen twelve-cent pen with teeth marks.

I sat on the edge of her bed, which I knew, undoubtedly, crossed another line. The mattress dipped beneath my weight. Her sheet brushed my knuckles. I stayed perfectly still, listening for the building’s ordinary noises, for footsteps in the hall, for any indication that the time window had narrowed.

I heard nothing.

Only the faint tick of the radiator and the city beyond her glass.

I touched her pillow.

One hand. Two fingers first. Then my whole palm. It was soft. Slightly wrinkled. Still shaped by her head.

I should leave, I told myself again.

Instead, I pulled the pillow to my chest and lay back on her bed, eyes on the ceiling. For several seconds, I did not breathe properly. The wrongness of it was clear. I did not need anyone to name it for me. I was not a confused man. I was not some boy convincing himself obsession was romance because the word sounded prettier. I knew exactly what I was doing. I knew she would be furious. I knew she would consider this a violation, and she would be right.

That did not make me move.

Her pillow was against my chest. Her scent rose from the cotton with each breath, quiet and devastating. The stolen pen pressed against my ribs from inside my jacket. The apartment held me in its careful silence, and for the first time in years, I felt something in myself come loose without permission.

Kit Calloway had been a problem.

Then a file.

Then a woman.

Now she was everywhere in my life.

I saw her at the café window, hair twisted up, eyes on the screen, mouth tightening when a problem resisted her. I saw her on the sidewalk, checking reflections without turning her head. I saw her standing in this apartment after finding my answers in her crossword, furious enough to shake and too disciplined to let the shaking reach her hands. I saw her over my knee and in my bed, her bare ass red, her legs splayed wide, her pussy ripe for the taking.

My cock hardened with an inevitability that made me close my eyes.

“Enough,” I said quietly.

It wasn’t.

The pillow smelled like her.

Her bed was under my back.

The silence pressed down around me, intimate and merciless, and my body did not care what moral argument my mind constructed. It wanted with a clarity that stripped every respectable lie from the room.

I told myself I would not.

I lasted perhaps ten seconds.

Then my hand moved to my belt. I kept my eyes on the ceiling at first, as if refusing to look at her pillow, her sheets, her nightstand somehow preserved some final line. It was a stupid distinction. I knew that. I made it anyway because even monsters liked rituals when control began slipping through their fingers.

The first touch of my fingers against my naked cock made me exhale through my teeth.

I was harder than I wanted to admit, aching with need, and when my hand closed around it, a relief so intense it felt almost like anger surged through me.