by Sykes, Julia
Finally, she capitulated, her eyes dropping in order to break from my implacable gaze. Although she threw up her hands and made a little exasperated noise, I was flooded with triumphant pleasure at just that small indication of my power over her. She might be strong, but I was stronger.
All of her attention turned to her task as she attempted to ignore her reaction to me by clinging to her primary sense of identity, that of the haughty, cold doctor whose authority was assured by her knowledge and intelligence. But her fingers shook slightly as she reached for her first aid kit and wiped down her hands with antiseptic. I didn’t fail to notice that she took a deep breath to brace herself before turning back to me.
Bradley had returned with the items she had requested, and she couldn’t justifiably keep her distance from me any longer. She shot me a sharp look that demanded my cooperation. “If I hear one more disgusting word out of you, I’ll stop. Then it’ll be up to Nurse Bradley to take care of you,” she threatened.
I shuddered. “No, thank you. I promise I’ll be good.” My lopsided smile communicated that I didn’t mean that in the slightest.
I continued to study her as she removed the gauze that covered my wound, and I relished the way that she kept her eyes downcast. When she began to gently wipe the dried blood from my chest with a soapy cloth, her expression slipped from being guarded to mesmerized. And I couldn’t help being equally as entranced by her as she became transfixed by my body. The tension left her muscles and her face softened. The sight of it mingled with the tenderness of her touch called to something deep within me. Despite her hard protective walls, at her core she was compassionate and vulnerable. And I had tapped into that part of her, even if she was unwitting of what she was revealing to me. The realization awoke a warm glow in my chest.
The cloth slipped, and her fingertips brushed lightly over my flesh. Even through the barrier of the latex gloves that she wore, her touch sent a jolt through my body. It was the first time she had willingly had direct contact with me; every other time that we had touched, she had either been drawn to me in her sleep or I had been ensnaring her wrist in my hand. And although the feel of her in my grip had stoked my desire, this evoked something more powerful. It was something more than lust; it was yearning. I hissed in a sharp breath that had nothing to do with the throbbing ache in my shoulder.
At the sound, her eyes were drawn to mine, and the sweet hesitancy, the hint of innocent uncertainty, that I saw there made me long to wrap my arms around her and hold her soft body tightly against mine.
She trembled ever so slightly and then tore herself from my gaze once again. This time it gave me no sense of satisfaction. I much preferred the intensity of the storm clouds in her grey eyes to her shy deference.
I watched her in silence as she began to work more quickly; she was obviously unsettled. My urge to tease her and toy with her mind had melted in the wake of what had just passed between us. I still wanted her fiercely, but now I was off-kilter as well. She was throwing me for a loop as no woman had before, and I found myself disturbed again by my utter loss of control. I had seen the goodness in her, and I had never felt more unworthy of a woman’s touch. It would be inexcusably selfish of me to taint her purity with my depravities. No matter how intensely I craved to do just that.
It was a bittersweet relief when she finally withdrew her hands from me.
“Ummm….” I began, only slightly chagrined at the hesitancy in my tone. She looked up at me, her expression curious and appraising. Her eyes were so open and honest in that moment that it brought my own guard down. “Would it be alright if I took a shower?” I barely noticed that I was actually asking her permission.
She blinked, evidently as surprised by my show of contrition as I was. “Sure,” she said, her voice kind and slightly breathy. “That should be fine. Just be careful not to touch the wound. Can you stand on your own?”
Despite my resolution not to dominate her body, I wasn’t about to let her think me weak. Because that was exactly how I had been acting: pathetic, unable to govern my own thoughts and actions. It was time for me to pull away from my ridiculous fantasies and regain my usual iron control.
I rolled my eyes at her, drawing up my cocky mask. “I’ll be fine, doc.” I intentionally used the disparaging nickname as I pushed myself up on one elbow, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed. But my show of bravado was ruined when I couldn’t hold back my wince of pain at the jarring movement. Bradley instantly placed a supporting arm behind my shoulders and helped me stand.
This sucked. I had shown Claudia more than enough vulnerability. That stopped now.
“I can walk on my own,” I snapped, resolutely ignoring the way that my head spun.
But Bradley still looked concerned, and I could practically feel Claudia’s eyes appraising me clinically.
I swear, if she utters one bossy word right now…
Honestly, I didn’t know what I would do. Would I bristle at her domineering attitude? Or would I be touched by her concern? I didn’t want to find out.
“Are you sure?” Bradley asked. “At least let me help you-”
“Uh-uh,” I said firmly. I wasn’t going to allow either of them to regard me as incapable of taking care of myself. “You and I are not having shower time together,” I teased Bradley to knock him down a peg. “Not to break your heart or anything, but I’m just not that into you.”
Bradley scoffed at me but mercifully backed off. I hated the way that I swayed on my feet as my head pounded, and I was forced to walk more slowly and carefully than I would have liked as I made my way toward the bathroom. I shut the door firmly in Bradley’s face, silently communicating that his concern was not appreciated. I knew that I was acting like a dick, but I had never allowed anyone to see me vulnerable, not even my best friend. In my world, the weak were culled from the pack. My father had demonstrated that to me time and again. And although I trusted Bradley, his recent cruelty and aggression made me unwilling to reveal my weakness even to him.
Once I was alone, the urge to slake my aching desire arose once again. I focused on the searing pain in my shoulder in an effort to ignore it.
She didn’t have any power over me. I wouldn’t allow her to.
I am not weak.
Chapter 5
When I awoke the next morning, she was inflicting that sweet agony on me once again. Her warmth seeped into me where her body had shaped itself around mine. Her breasts pressed against my shoulder, and her leg was hooked over my thigh. I could feel the heat of her pussy where it sat flush with my hip. My dick strained against my sweatpants, instinct urging me to flip her onto her back and drive myself into that heat.
I wish I could say that it was my conscience that stopped me from acting on the impulse, but that wasn’t what prevented me from taking her. It was the feel of her slender fingers gripping my forearm, holding onto me. The rush of pleasure that flowed through me had nothing to do with lust. Apparently she wasn’t afraid of me after all. I could understand if our undeniable mutual lust pulled us together in our sleep, but the fact that her unconscious mind had allowed to her reach out to me in this way…
Despite my uncontrollable physical reaction to her, the effects of her touch didn’t make me feel at all weak in that moment. Even though the pain in my shoulder should be incapacitating, I had never felt stronger than I did with her clinging to me like that. I had put her in a shitty situation, but somehow, impossibly, she trusted me not to hurt her. Deep down, she knew that I would keep her safe.
Yeah, you’re protecting her from your best friend. She’s beginning to trust the friendlier captor. Pretty sure that’s called Stockholm Syndrome.
I told the castigating voice to fuck off. Being held by her was headier than flogging a woman into submission, and I wasn’t going to abandon that feeling for anything.
Breathing her in, I realized that her scent had changed subtly. The soft, floral notes now had a musky undertone; she smelled like me. My cock hardened further as I w
as flooded with primal, masculine satisfaction.
I’m not sure how long I laid there with my eyes closed, my contentment at holding her overriding my insistent, painfully acute desire. I pressed my palm against her lower back, my fingers curling around her softly flaring waist as I pulled her closer.
She jerked as she awoke in my arms, and she scrambled away from me. The loss of the heat of her made something twist in my chest, but I couldn’t help my smile when I looked up at her. Her eyes were wide and slightly wild, her mind working to wake up and comprehend what she had done. When she caught sight of me studying her, she flushed slightly and dropped her gaze. My sense of satisfaction only increased when she saw my erection; her eyes practically bulged and her full lips parted. She stilled, riveted by the sight of me.
How I longed to feel those lips wrapped around my cock…
I shoved the thought away. I no longer felt anger towards her for making me weak, but I still fully intended to stick to my resolution not to molest her. Her shocked expression as she stared at me only served to remind me of her sexual innocence. When she was acting haughty, it brought out the Dominant in me, spurring me to win our battle of wills. But when she looked like this, sweet and vulnerable, it wasn’t hard to remember why it would be utterly wrong of me to unleash that side of myself on her.
Still, I wasn’t completely successful in keeping the cocky amusement from my tone when I spoke to her. “You’re staring again,” I pointed out.
With a little gasp, she tore her eyes away. The shade of scarlet that colored her cheeks and the sight of her teeth sinking into her lower lip only further endeared her to me. Even if her conscious mind hadn’t realized it, she had identified me as her protector, and I fully intended to embrace that role. Resisting the urge to fuck her every day was going to be hell, but the desire to keep her safe, to win her trust, was stronger.
We sat in silence for a long time as she held her tense stance, the taut lines of her body betraying her consternation. I focused on getting my dick under control, and watching her wasn’t helping. Trying to ignore the pain that flared in my shoulder when I moved, I scooped up my copy of the Mistborn series that I had left on the floor beside my bed. Had it really only been a few days since I last picked it up? I felt like Claudia had been with me for… hell I didn’t know for how long. My whole world had changed as soon as I had awoken to find her cuffed to my bed. I had just been existing for so long: going through the motions, doing what I was told, fucking to find a flash of pleasure. I didn’t have to think when I lived like that. I didn’t have to feel. But now I felt everything, and my thoughts spun so madly that my head ached from more than just blood loss.
I couldn’t smother my pleased grin when she finally sighed and reached for my battered copy of A Game of Thrones. From where she had dog-eared the page, I could tell that she was almost a third of the way into the book. A Song of Ice and Fire was my favorite series. There were no purely “good” or “evil” characters, just people trying to survive as best they could. Even though the world was fantasy, the way that everyone existed in a grey area where morals were warped by circumstance and upbringing was deeply relatable for me. The most important thing that I had taken away from the stories: the characters who tried hardest to be “good” in an every-man-for-himself world never survived long. My world might not be populated by zombies or dragons, but I had learned a long time ago that rebelling against the hand that life had dealt me was a sure way to end up dead. Or worse, to see the people I loved get hurt because of my actions.
I pushed down the burning desire to talk to her about the books. Not that I wanted to confess my deep-seated reasons for loving the series, but discussing the stories would give me the rush of reading them for the first time again as I experienced them through her. I wanted to share that with her, the excitement and relief that came with escaping your own harsh reality by losing yourself in a fictional world. She had told me that she never indulged in any such acts of escapism, and I had no idea how she had survived without doing so. I was pretty sure that I would have gone crazy if I hadn’t been able to immerse myself in fantasy for hours at a time in order to forget about my own problems for a while.
No wonder she was so hard and cold. I had been impressed by her strength of will, but now I understood that her efforts to keep her walls up and protect her heart had left her isolated and devoid of any joy. In the brief moments when those walls did come down, the stark vulnerability that I saw in her made me realize just how breakable she really was. If she let her pain touch that unguarded part of herself, she would be consumed by it. Her soul hadn’t been strengthened through being tempered by pain; her denial of it would only leave her more defenseless if her walls ever did crumble.
The recognition of this same vulnerability in myself made me distinctly uncomfortable. And more drawn to her than ever.
Even though our forced isolation had been brief, I realized that I was becoming unhealthily obsessed with her. We had barely shared an hour of conversation, but I had never felt this intimate with any woman. Hell, if I totaled it up, I had probably never spent this much time with any one woman.
Who’s the victim of Stockholm Syndrome now? I thought wryly.
Determined to shake off the urge to reach out to her, I threw myself into my book. But the overly-familiar words didn’t hold the same comfort for me that they usually did, and I found myself mechanically turning pages.
The next five days passed at an excruciatingly slow pace. I couldn’t help watching her out of the corner of my eye as she devoured A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings before moving on to A Storm of Swords. Every little twitch of her brows and small intake of breath fascinated me, and I hoped that she would finally break her long silence. She no longer glared daggers at me, but I would have preferred to see fiery indignation in her eyes than the bland smile that she had adopted.
I stopped taking painkillers. I told myself that it was because I despised drugs of any kind, but if I was honest with myself, the true reason was that I didn’t want to sleep too deeply. I wanted to be fully aware of the warmth of her body in the night, the only time that she had any form of contact with me.
Every morning, I relished the sight of her wide eyes and flushed cheeks as she realized what she had done. And although I was determined not to seduce her, I made no effort to hide my arousal. Her embarrassment was too delicious to deny myself. The consternation in her eyes as she struggled with her irrepressible attraction to me was mouthwatering.
On the fifth day, her loud gasp cut through the silence between us. Okay, so she hadn’t actually spoken to me, but the sound was just the excuse to talk to her that I had been waiting for.
“I know what part of the book you’re on,” I said, fighting to keep the excitement at the prospect of a conversation out of my tone.
“Oh my god,” she exclaimed breathlessly. “Did that seriously just happen?”
I couldn’t suppress a triumphant grin. “Yep. The series is pretty amazing, right?”
Her guarded expression finally slipped; she was really looking at me for the first time in days. She nodded her agreement, but it wasn’t enough for me. I fully intended to exploit her moment of weakness and keep her talking. Even if that entailed pissing her off.
“See?” I said smugly. “I knew you weren’t a robot. We just needed to expose you to some quality literature. Spending some time with me will be good for you. You can join the human race again.”
My gentle teasing was supposed to make her bristle, and I anticipated her snappy retort. But her eyes darkened, her creased brow communicating her desperation.
“Can I?” Those two softly-spoken words pierced me like a knife to the heart.
“You know I can’t let you go, Claudia,” I said, trying to keep the anger from my tone. I wasn’t sure if it was directed at her for shattering my moment of hope or at myself for fucking up again.
Some of my fury must have been evident in my expression, because she dropped her eyes, he
r head bowed and shoulders slumped in defeat. Despite my best efforts and intentions, I had frightened her again after barely uttering two sentences.
I pressed on, refusing to let her retreat back into herself.
“You should read Harry Potter next,” I said lightly, as though the bitter exchange hadn’t occurred. “They’re supposed to be kids’ books, but they’re really addicting. Besides, we need to catch you up on your pop culture knowledge.”
I wasn’t sure if her slightly mocking grin was real or forced, but I decided that I didn’t care either way. Seeing that little dimple in her cheek when she smiled was enough to take my breath away, regardless of whether or not it was genuine.
“How did you become such a nerd?” She asked. “It doesn’t really go with the rest of your tough-guy, ladies’ man persona.” Was that a hint of true curiosity intermingled with her flippancy?
“I’ll have you know that nerdy is the new sexy.” My wounded expression was overly-dramatic, both in an effort to engage her and to smother the pain of the true reason that I sought the escapism of fantasy novels.
“Besides,” I continued more seriously, “I also do some work-related reading. You’re not the only one who’s committed to their job.”
She glanced over at my bookshelf, and I was satisfied to see a flash of real interest in her expression. “You’re a carpenter?” She asked.
I grinned, probably more pleased at the respect in her eyes than was healthy. “Yep,” I said with pride. “A damn good one, too.”
But then a disturbing thought struck me. Even though carpentry was a profession that my father had chosen for me – the Westies actually controlled the carpenters’ union – I truly did love my job. I was able to lose myself in the joy of creating something beautiful; it was another way that I escaped from my problems. Losing my abilities would deprive me of the one aspect of my life that I took pride in.
