He paused at my reaction. It was less than a moment, but I could tell my lack of resistance to his touch surprised him. “And who says I’m not gonna hurt you?” he challenged with more menace than before, as if to counteract his small pause.
My stomach curdled with a toxic mixture of fear and… something else.
Fear at the true promise behind his words, his eyes. This man would hurt me. I knew that. It was something even the most naive would see while looking into the abyss that was his eyes. The abyss that roused the intrinsic human fight or flight instinct.
I didn’t fight.
Or take flight.
I just stayed, frozen in his grasp. Because of the something else.
Because of my body’s other intrinsic reaction to his hands on me, eyes on me—gaze inside me.
Arousal.
Something that was insane.
The man grabbing me, without my permission, in the middle of the night, after he’d threatened me, basically ignored all my rather obvious injuries was turning me on.
I didn’t get turned on by men like that. By villains.
I barely even got turned on. But when I did, it was by clean-cut, well-groomed, all-American men who radiated safety, or more accurately, dependability.
This man was not clean-cut. From what the dim light showed me, he had a beard, which looked somehow wild and yet well-groomed at the same time. His hair was long, though I couldn’t tell specifically where it stopped, but it touched his shoulders for sure.
He was big.
Like big.
He towered over me; his sheer size and muscle mass seemed to have the ability to swallow up the night behind him. It was a presence of a man. And not a man who radiated safety and dependability.
No, one who radiated danger and chaos.
Everything I kept my well-ordered life away from.
Yet there I stood, turned the frick on. Finding it hard to speak, to breathe around the man grasping my chin in a borderline brutal grip.
His hand jerked, making my throbbing head move somewhat painfully in whatever dim illumination the moon offered.
I thought for a second—was actually certain—that he’d exposed my neck in order to slit it. Or was preparing to do that movie move where the hero—or the villain—cracked an enemy’s neck in one swift jerk.
And yet I didn’t resist his grip. Scream. Fight.
I didn’t move.
Maybe I was holding onto the old advice that when you found yourself standing in front of a lion, you held your ground, stared it down.
Or maybe I didn’t want out of his grip, even if it meant death.
But this was insane.
And after brushing off the spiky scales of insanity almost a decade ago, I’ve kept away from anything resembling it at all costs.
It soon became apparent he wasn’t jerking my head to kill me in any number of ways I knew he was proficient in. No, he was doing it to inspect the gash on my head.
“Not likely to need stitches,” he grunted, still holding my chin. “Might have a concussion.” A pause. “You’ll live.”
There was no overarching concern in his voice. Nothing to betray the fact that he was overly worried about me bleeding from the head. He’d obviously seen worse. The casual way he handled my bloodied face told me that.
But I also knew my injuries weren’t serious. They hurt, but like this dark man said, I’d live. I wasn’t one to go for dramatics over a little blood. I was all about taking practical measures, keeping calm, and solving problems logically. It was logic that had me walking down the road in the middle of the night—however crazy it sounded—but all logic, and even God himself, abandoned me in the presence of this man.
Then again, God had abandoned me long ago.
When the man let me go, the absence of his grip almost hurt more than the throbbing of my head.
Almost.
But he stepped back from me, snapping me out of whatever kind of sorcery he had control over in the darkness. And my head started throbbing more than the need for him to touch me. My entire body ached, reminding me of why exactly I was there in the first place.
The blisters on my tender feet burned with the evidence of how far I’d walked.
Grabbing hold of my pain meant I got to grab hold of my logic, just before I could topple into the abyss that had nothing to do the inky blackness surrounding us and everything to do with the man in front of me.
“I don’t think I have a concussion. Well, I don’t have any signs of it, at least,” I said, voice scratchy. “Symptoms include headache, confusion, lack of coordination, memory loss, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, ringing in the ear, and excessive fatigue, to name a few.”
“You a doctor?” he demanded.
“No. I just…” I paused. How did I explain that I had no life, so in order to supplement the gaping hole that most people filled with friends and adventures, I read? Anything and everything. I also researched anything and everything regarding injuries and statistics. Sometimes it was fact-checking for a story, but most of the time it was to feed my logical brain.