It’s wrong to tie her, but it’s my job to protect her.
We trace along a ridge above a stream. From here you can see the streams split off and flow, and then split off again, like veins in leaves. I spent a lot of time pulling apart leaves as a kid. Not like I had much else to do out here.
I point it out to her. She grits her teeth and averts her eyes, but I know she’s listening.
With horror, I remember how I was with the professor, how I’d soak up his words, how I’d love when he read to me because it cut the boredom, but I’d never let him know it.
A sick feeling comes over me as I think again of her bitter words—You would trick me and take my freedom? Can you get how fucked up that is? You of all people should understand how wrong that is.
I tell myself I’m not like the professor. I remind myself how she betrayed me, how she wants to use me. But the sick feeling just grows.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ann
Savage Adonis leadsme by my tied wrists, deeper and deeper into uncharted wilderness. He carries a canoe on his head. He’ll carry me, too, if I misbehave. Yesterday morning he pinned me down and made me come in a shopping mall dressing room. Today he informed me that I’m to be his mate. He pauses and points out how the streams fork and split apart. He tells me rivers are the same as blood veins, and that blood veins are the same as veins in leaves. He seems to see the forest as a body, a system. Needless to say, leaves and streams and forest systems are the furthest things from my mind.
Would that be a fuck of a hook or what? It sounds like an honest hook, but it hides what’s really going on for me. Sure, we’re journeying deeper and deeper into the wilderness where I may never find my way out. But I feel like I’m moving deeper and deeper into a kind of forbidden craving for him, with his king stuff and the way he handles me. The way he makes me come with impunity. There’s the rush of pleasure I get when I think about him holding me down and fucking me.
Kiro is beautiful and powerful, and he takes what he wants. And I’m the one he wants. It’s wrong. It’s scary. It’s intoxicating.
I tell myself I’m just weak right now, that’s all. I’ve been tired for so long and so fucked up about the kitten. So the peace of this place and his hot dominance and his intelligence and beautiful inner strength, of course it’s powerful. Of course I feel conflicted.
We stop at midday. Maybe it’s later. I suppose it doesn’t matter. Another reason I seriously have to get away.
This man could suck away my soul.
“I’m going to catch some fish,” he says.
“Okay.”
He looks down at the stream, maybe ten feet down a rocky gulley. “Trout down there.”
“Knock yourself out.”
He grabs the rope that binds my wrists. “Are you going to run, then?”
My pulse races. “That’s for me to know you and you to find out.” In truth I don’t plan to. Him being down at the stream doesn’t give me that big of a head start. He would catch me. And my hands are bound. Bound hands will slow me down and mess up my balance. I don’t want to go deeper, but I don’t want to be stupid.
But I smile at him just to make him nervous. I like it, even as I realize what I’m doing—taking the power of the powerless. Meaningless little rebellions.
He pulls me to him. “It would be foolish, even without your hands bound.”
I put on my most defiant smile, just to make him feel out of control. Because he makesmefeel out of control. “Maybe you should’ve thought of that before you decided to adopt me as your forced mate.”
The air between us seems to crackle as he shoves me down, making me sit on a boulder next to a tree. He backs up and lays my leash along the ground in a line some seven feet long, eyes on mine the whole time.
“The ol’ leash doesn’t quite reach down to the trout stream, does it?”
He twists his lips.
“Whatever will he do?” I ask playfully.
His lips twitch. Sooner or later he has to see this whole scheme of his is crazy. He crouches down and grasps either side of a boulder.
What is he doing? He’ll never lift that thing. It’s so caveman.
I snort. “It’s called lever and fulcrum. Look into it, dude.”