Overture

by Skye Warren

  She blinks at me, her mouth open. That’s when I realize that I still have my arm across her neck. She can’t breathe. I’m hurting her. I swore I’d never hurt her.

  I pull back enough to let her breathe, but something strange happens. I can’t stop touching her. I’m clutching her, feeling her, making sure she’s not broken or bruised. My hands are rough. I’m probably making it worse, but I need to feel her solid and warm and alive.

  A ragged breath. Another. Her slender body shakes underneath me, her eyes watering. “I’m fine,” she says even though it’s clearly a lie. “Fine.”

  “Fine,” I repeat, grim and sick with it. “You’re the furthest fucking thing from fine. I could have killed you, Samantha. Do you understand that? I could have crushed your windpipe in a second.”

  A shiver takes her body. She’s scared of me.

  As she should be.

  It’s not a regular man who got custody of her six years ago. I hide the feral part of me, but it’s inside, waiting to get out. “Don’t ever do that again—Jesus, don’t. Don’t cry.”

  Tears slip from her eyes, but she doesn’t make a sound. That hurts almost more than if she’d sobbed in my arms. I learned violence in my childhood. She learned to hide her pain.

  “I’m not hurt,” she whispers.

  “You are,” I say, insistent. She’s hurt in so many ways she can’t even count them all. She came to me shattered. The bastard of a father had neglected her in a thousand ways for the first twelve years of her life. And then he’d died. My fault. It was my fault he was gone, and the worst part is that I’d never once regretted it. Not when it brought her to me.

  Her palm cups my face, rubbing gently. Her skin is so soft, impossibly fragile as it rasps against a day’s growth on my jaw. “What were you dreaming about?”

  My entire body reacts to that—a sudden jerk, as if she slapped me instead of caressed me.

  What was I dreaming about? I don’t want that near her. Not even the description of it. Not even the thoughts. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Her eyebrows draw together. “Was it from when you were overseas?”

  From my time as a soldier. Yes, there were some dark moments. Blood and death. That’s probably what I should be having nightmares about. I’ll send my brain a fucking memo, because it can’t seem to get over what happened years before that. “No.”

  “You sounded…” She swallows. “Afraid.”

  Afraid. Yeah, I’d been afraid. It had buried itself deep in my skin, and all these years later, even knowing that no one can hurt me, it hasn’t left. The irony is that it made me a beast on the battlefield. I wasn’t afraid of a goddamn IED blast. Nothing in that godforsaken desert could scare me. There’d been a time in my life it would have been a blessing.

  Another tear rolls down her face, and I realize she isn’t crying because I hurt her. She’s crying because I’m hurt. Something strange tightens in my chest. I basically attacked her like an animal, like a fucking animal, and she’s worried about me.

  “It doesn’t matter what I dream about. The important thing is that you never do that again. Why did you come here?” But for some reason I can’t make myself let go of her.

  She’s still underneath me, her body warm and quivering.

  My cock is hard. The warmth of her, the sweet scent of her. She must feel my erection where I’m straddling her. Does she know what it means? Of course she does, you bastard.

  “It does matter,” she says, squirming a little in ways that make my cock flex against her flat little stomach. “It matters what you’re dreaming about.”

  My body doesn’t feel like it’s under my control. I want to blame the nightmare, but this isn’t something I ever thought about when I was five years old in a goddamn well. I dip my head to breathe her in. Maybe the scent, one deep breath—it might be enough. It’s not. I need more. I press my face against her neck. The bristles on my jaw rasp against her. My lips follow to soothe away the sting. Her breath catches, and I can’t make myself stop.

  “I’ll prove it to you,” I mutter, my voice almost a growl.

  Her eyes widen, dark pools that I could drown in, but she doesn’t look afraid.

  She looks curious.

  How can I send her out into the world like this? So damn innocent. So trusting, when she has no idea all the ways I want to use her. I close my fist hard, pulling her hair taut, exposing her neck, a pale column against the wild shadows of her hair.

  A squeak escapes her, but that’s not enough to make me stop. She’ll be alone on that tour, at the mercy of men like Harry March, men who don’t have any morals. Men like me.

  I press my hips down, rubbing my erection against her small body. She has to know what she’s up against. She has to know what I want.

  She wriggles underneath me, probably trying to escape. All it does is make me harder. I’m so much bigger than she is, so much stronger.

  “Tell me no,” I say, my words hard and cold. “Fight me.”

  “What?” she gasps.

  “You have to be safe.” It’s become a prayer. A promise. “If a man tries to touch you… You have to protect yourself from people like me.”

  That’s the part I didn’t say during our sex talk. The part I couldn’t bring myself to say. Couldn’t bring myself to think about. Samantha, hurt. Samantha, afraid. Until I was twenty thousand feet above the ground, watching her sneak out on the goddamn video camera, ice in my veins.

  And still she blinks up at me. There’s an entire universe inside her. Creation and destruction. A million stars lighting up the night.

  “What happens if I don’t say no?” she asks. “What if I say yes?”

  Oh God, she’s testing me. Tempting me. She has no idea what she’s asking for, what I could do to her before she has a chance to object. Show her, the devil inside me whispers.

  It sounds like my voice, that devil. It’s me.

  I lean down, my lips an inch from hers. But I don’t do anything as sweet or ordinary as kiss her. That would be too much like romance, too much like love, and those impulses were beaten out of me a long time ago. Instead I bite her lip, tugging her tender flesh between my teeth.

  It’s a threat, the way I give her a little pressure, only enough to hurt. I won’t leave bruises, but I want to. That’s how fucked up I am. I want to leave my mark on her body, on her soul.

  I’ve never let those impulses out of their godforsaken cages, but it’s happening now. I trail my lips to her jaw and scrape her velvet-soft skin with the edge of my teeth. If this is what it takes for her to understand the threats, for her to protect herself from the dangers out there in the world… if this is what it takes to keep her safe…

  That’s the excuse I tell myself as I grasp her earlobe between my teeth.

  Peaches. Vanilla. Sweetness and cream.

  Her scent reaches inside my lungs, imprinting on me the way I want to imprint my will on her. Something feral takes over my body. I’m acting on pure instinct as I burrow closer to her. Down the smooth line of her neck, where it meets her shoulder. That’s where I bite her.

  She jolts beneath me, making a sound that’s every bit as animal, a sound of submission and pleasure. It would be so easy to pull her nightshirt up, to rip her panties to shreds. To push my aching cock inside her little cunt and finally have relief.

  “Yes,” she whispers as if she can read my thoughts. “Please.”

  Her small hands grasp my shoulders, my chest, my abs. She rocks herself up, thrusting her flat belly against my erection, and I grunt at the terrible pleasure. God.

  Even more than I want to fuck her, I want to eat her. To bite my way down her lithe body, to sink my teeth into her hips, her thighs. To lave my tongue right between her—

  “No,” I choke out, pushing back from the bed. There’s physical pain, removing myself from her clumsy embrace, as if I cut off a limb. My cock throbs in my briefs. It knows how close it came to heaven.

  “Tell me what the money was for.”
r />   SAMANTHA

  I’m panting in the erotic haze he left me in. This is probably some kind of military interrogation technique, to make someone writhe and shudder. And then ask her a question. My brain is too muddled to come up with a lie. And worse than that, my defenses are down.

  Slowly I sit up on the bed and grab a pillow to clutch in my lap, but it’s not much of a wall. It doesn’t protect me from his harsh breathing or the broad silhouette from the moon in the window.

  “Okay,” I say, my voice trembling only slightly. “I’ll tell you.”

  There may as well be a marble statue in the room with me for how still he is, except that he’s emanating heat at approximately ten thousand degrees. It radiates from him in furious demand.

  “There’s a new coach at Kingston High.” There are really only two high schools in the city, the public high school with its large football stadium and massive prom nights. And St. Agnes, which is where Laney and I attend. “Cody told us that he’s… that he’s watching them. Touching them.”

  My cheeks flame at the words.

  A low growl fills the room, raising the hair on the back of my neck. “Touching them?”

  “Not like that,” I say quickly. “At least not yet.” I heard this only secondhand. Cody confided in Laney, who broke his confidence enough to share it with me.

  “Then what is it like?” Liam bites off the words.

  “He gives them a hug if they lose a game. Or he’ll give a player a massage if he has a tight muscle. Things like that.” I shake my head, struggling to explain. We couldn’t go to the authorities with something like that, couldn’t risk everything on a bad feeling. What if no one believed us? What if Coach Price retaliated against Cody for saying something? The boys already started pairing off when they go to the locker room, but it’s only a matter of time.

  “What was the money for?” Liam asks, his voice strangely calm. Gone is the panting, raging man who hovered over me only a few minutes ago. This is the high-paid security operative. “Were you trying to pay him to leave?”

  “Kind of. It was for a video.”

  “A video of what?”

  “I don’t know,” I confess, my cheeks burning in the dark. “Laney did some digging at the school in Austin where he worked last. Apparently there was some scandal that they hushed up. And this guy had some kind of incriminating video file.”

  “So you were going to buy the video. And then what?”

  I blink. “What do you mean?”

  His voice goes subzero. “What were you going to do with the file, Samantha?”

  That was the easy part, wasn’t it? Only we never got that far. “We’d blackmail him, make him leave the boys alone, make him resign his position.”

  A low growl. “Did it occur to you that he might have bought your silence a different way? By hurting you? Threatening you? Killing you?”

  My stomach turns over. “We would have been careful.”

  The long pause that follows makes me think of every bad thing that could have happened to Laney or Cody. If anything would happen to me, I know that Liam North would blame himself.

  “Careful,” he says, his voice hollow. “There is no amount of careful that would be good enough. How dare you risk your life like that? Do you know what I would do if you—”

  Shock makes me breathless. “You risk your life all the time. You send men and women to risk their lives for North Security. But I can’t do the same thing?”

  “No, goddamn you.”

  I flinch from the venom in his voice. “That’s not fair.”

  “Life isn’t fair, Samantha. That’s something Cody and his teammates already learned, and it’s something you’re going to have to learn, too.”

  “So you aren’t going to do anything to help?”

  “It’s not my business.”

  Acid rises in my throat. “What if you had said that about me?”

  Something dark moves through the forest of his eyes. “I didn’t.”

  “What’s so different between me and Cody? Why would you help me but not him?”

  “Don’t ask me that, Samantha.”

  “No! I’ve had enough of being quiet, of being the good little girl who does what she’s told. If you won’t help him, I’m going to.”

  A harsh laugh. “Don’t push me. I’m about two seconds away from locking you up.”

  Indignation and a strange secret desire rise inside me. The indignation wins. “You can’t lock me up. I’m an adult now.”

  “Almost an adult. And as I said before, almost doesn’t count.”

  He makes me so angry, there may as well be steam rising from my ears. I clutch the pillow tighter, wondering about whether I should throw it at him. But then I would lose my shield.

  I don’t know why a twelve-year-old girl he’d never met mattered to him when a boy who lives in the same city doesn’t, but I’m not above using that to my advantage. “What if I ask you to?”

  He freezes. “Ask me to what?”

  I stand up from the bed and take a step closer to him—and almost, almost touch him. “You can use my violin money. If you buy the video, he won’t be able to hurt you.”

  “You want this from me?”

  A solemn nod.

  The closet light flicks on, blinding me. His body blocks it, and then he’s getting dressed right in front of me. Worn jeans pulled on over his briefs. A T-shirt covering his abs. I’ve never watched him get dressed before, but there’s something studiously casual about his movements.

  As if he’s hiding a black hole of emotion.

  I’m wearing a tank top and panties, the same as I do every night. The same as I was when I walked in here, but I feel more exposed now that he’s wearing regular clothes.

  The closet light casts his face in sharp contrast, the stark handsomeness of his features abutted against pure dark. “I’m not going to give that man a single goddamn cent, but if I did, it sure as hell wouldn’t be your violin money.”

  There’s a boulder in my chest, crashing left and right. “You’re going to do it?”

  “I’m going to do it,” he says, his tone grim, and I can’t shake the feeling that something powerful is in play, more than a guardian doing a favor for his ward.

  “Tomorrow?” I ask.

  He gives a low growl of assent. “Tomorrow.”

  “You’re not… mad. Are you? About what happened?” I can’t quite look back at the bed where we were. I have only the fleeting impression of rumpled sheets. Sheets that had held Liam’s muscled body.

  “At you? No.”

  Acid rises in my throat. Oh, he’s going to blame himself. “Liam.”

  He ties a knot with hard, efficient movements and stands. “You’ll stay here where it’s safe until I have the video. I’ll have Josh watch you. No sneaking out again.”

  Such a parental thing to say. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” I tell him, earnest, desperate to save what I’ve already lost. I can feel the grains of sand between my fingers. “You didn’t hurt me. You only—”

  You only bit me.

  A humorless laugh is my answer. “The coach is abusing his power. You were the one telling me how wrong it is, how I should stop him. How is what I did on that bed any different?”

  “Because I wanted it.”

  He shakes his head, turning away from me. “That doesn’t matter.”

  His broad back will be the last thing I see of him, on the one night he sees me as more than a child. I can’t let him leave this way. I’m done letting him tell me what to do. “It matters.”

  I’m standing in his bedroom, my bare feet rooted to the ground. He’s in the doorway, his whole body tense as if he needs to flee. Well, maybe he does. Maybe he can’t handle what he wants or what I want. Maybe he can’t handle me, but I’ll be damned if I let him think he’s doing this for my own good.

  “What did you say?” he asks, his voice soft.

  Anyone else would be wary to hear that tone. Anyone else would be terrified
, but he had his chance to hurt me. He could have done so on the bed. And he could have hurt me worse, so much worse, if he hadn’t agreed to help me with Coach Price.

  My voice still quavers as I stand my ground. “Rebels took the embassy in Jakarta. I was five years old, and I hid in the cabinets until they found me the next day.”

  He makes a low sound of protest. “What’s your point?”

  “The motorcade left me behind outside Moscow. It took my father two days to realize I wasn’t there. I hiked to the nearest village and begged them to let me stay in broken Russian.”

  “So your father was a bastard,” he says, his voice flat. “I already knew that.”

  “I grew up faster than anyone at St. Agnes, and you know it. I may not be experienced with… sex things, but I know what I want. And that’s you.”

  He looks so alone standing there, a fortress that will never be torn down, self-contained and isolated. I let myself think that he might let me in, that he might trust me the way I’d brought myself to trust him. It’s enough to make my breath quicken, this hope. This longing.

  When he turns away from me, it shouldn’t be a surprise. The weight of it shouldn’t crush me. I’ve had a brick wall around me since I was a child.

  Only Liam has the power to tear it down.

  “Let me stay,” I say softly.

  “Why?” he asks, his broad back still and dark like a statue in the room.

  “Because I have nightmares, too.”

  He’ll leave now. That’s the only thing he can do. The only thing he’ll allow himself to do. I’m not the only one with a brick wall around me. He has his own, and I’ve never been able to breach it. Which is why I’m not expecting it when he pulls me into his arms. He carries me to bed, holding me tight through my tremors of shock and years-long relief.

  That’s how I fall asleep—with him protecting me in the most elemental way, blocking out the bad thoughts with his body. I use him as a shield, but I do more than that. I shield him, too. When he’s holding me, the darkness can’t reach us.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Violin strings were originally made from dried sheep intestines.