Page 2 of Roped

“But maybe we can meet up some other time, okay?” I say in a breezy tone before I reach up and pat his cheek.

As expected, it enrages him more and he takes a step toward me. He leans down, and his alcohol breath that I’ve been breathing for the past however many minutes makes me want to vomit. “You fuckin’ with me right now?”

I shake my head, giving him a small, cocky smile, my first real one. “Not even a little bit.”

“Are you seriously tellin’ me I wasted my time and my money for absolutely nothing?”

Typical.

“I think you need to back off now,” I tell him, my voice almost bored.

“And I think”—he bends down even more—“you need to stop fuckin’ around and pay up.”

“This is your last warning. Move the fuck away or I’ll start screaming.”

Again, as expected, he doesn’t. “Oh, you’re gonna be screaming, all right.”

With that, he grabs my arms and hauls me into his body before descending over me and pressing his mouth to mine. I bite his lip as soon as he makes contact, making him howl and rear back, and then I do as I told him I would: I start screaming. I start struggling against his hold, trying to get free. But apparently, Jensen is more determined than I thought because his grip barely loosens. If anything, my resistance is making him stronger and rougher. He pushes back with his larger—much larger—body before fisting my dress at my thigh, hauling the fabric up. For the first time tonight, my body clenches in fear. Terror, pure and unadulterated, washes through my system and my screams get louder, more panicked.

Where is he? Where the fuck is he?

He’s supposed to come for me. He’s supposed to rescue me from this. Like he’s been doing for months now. This plan is supposed to work. It’s supposed to fucking work because I don’t know what I’ll do if it doesn’t. I have no other options. Absolutely nothing else to go on and…

Just then, the pressure on my lungs eases and the suffocating weight on my body goes away. My relief is so big that it’s a shock to my system. It leaves me dizzy and wheezing. Even so, I try to focus, to keep my wits about me. But what I see happening in front of me makes it hard. A few feet away, Jensen stands with a hand wrapped around his neck. And that hand is squeezing Jensen’s throat with such violent force that his eyes bug out and his mouth hangs open as he makes choking, pained noises. The color is quickly draining from his face as he struggles to dislodge the fingers strangling him. To no avail. And I’m not surprised. Not even a little bit. Because that hand is large with thick and long fingers, and it covers Jensen’s entire throat. From top to bottom and from side to side. That hand, so masculine and scraped at the knuckles, can do anything. Move mountains, crack the ground open.

Rip someone’s head off their body.

I open my mouth to say something, to put a stop to this, but in the next second, Jensen’s eyes fall closed and he drops to the ground with a thud. For a second I think he’s dead, but then I notice his chest moving up and down and I let out a shaky breath. My plan didn’t include dead bodies. My plan only involved drawing him out, baiting him out of the shadows. The man who watches me. Who watches my every move, who followed me to this bar and watched me flirt with another man before almost choking him to death to come to my rescue.

My stalker.

Slowly, I look away from Jensen and up to the man for whom I did all this. Now that Jensen isn’t blocking the way, I can see him. Finally. I can stare into the greenest pair of eyes. Green like the grass, the leaves. Green like what I imagine moss must look like underneath the sea, all pure and pristine. I see those eyes in my dreams, and up until this moment, I thought I’d imagined it all. I thought I was exaggerating their sharp color, but I wasn’t. I was right.

My stalker has the most beautiful pair of eyes I’ve ever seen.

And they’re angry.

I can clearly see that. They’re narrowed and glinting, flashing with fury. Not to mention the deep frown between his dark and thick brows. I mean, what the hell? Why the fuck is he angry? I should be the one furious in this situation. He almost let me get raped because he couldn’t be bothered to come to my rescue on time. What kind of a stalker is he?

“What…” I begin, my heart stuck in my throat, but I try to sound stern. “What took you so long?”

In response, he takes a step toward me.

I press myself against the truck. “I could’ve been rap—”

A growl cuts me off, sounding as angry as the look in those stunning eyes. As if he didn’t want me to even utter the r-word. Despite my anger at him, my belly flutters and a rush goes through my skin. I tamp it down, though. That’s not what this is about. There’s a reason why I lured him out, and I need to see it through. Lives are depending on it.

Steeling my spine and raising my chin, I command, “Don’t come any closer.”

He keeps advancing, though, his boots hitting the concrete with determined, threatening thuds. I creep my right hand down my pocket—another reason why I chose this dress tonight; it has pockets—and fist my fingers around the familiar object I brought for just this occasion.

“I mean it,” I say, my voice stern. “Stop now or this is going to turn out very bad for you.”

Of course, he doesn’t listen. His eyes, as hard and pretty as ever, are locked on me as he keeps doing the exact opposite of what I want him to do. Just when he’s within arm’s reach, I whip out my weapon—a pocketknife—and point it at him, at his abs. The tip poking into his flesh. Fuck, it’s hard. And muscled and a million different things I don’t want to think about right now. Not when he’s finally come to a halt. He doesn’t break our gaze, however. And I don’t either. Not only because I don’t want to show any weakness but also because for the first time in months, I get to see him from this close. I get to smell him, hear his breaths.

I get to see the scar on his face.

Like his green eyes, I’ve seen his scar in my dreams. It starts at the top of his forehead, on the left side, and runs through his thick eyebrow, bisecting it, leaving a sliver of a gap in its wake—before dragging along his eyelid all the way down to his high cheekbone. I’ve wondered about it. About where he got it. How he got it. How old is it? But most importantly, I’ve wondered about how far down his face the scar goes.