Naked & Unleashed Read Free Page B

of his step into a pounding run.
    His breath was hot on the back of her neck. He snarled her name in her ear as he caught her and slammed her against the wall. His cock bulged against her ass, rubbing into the crease as he ground his groin against her. Callista whimpered but couldn’t make her lungs work well enough to scream.
    Mikal jammed his knee between her legs and forced them wide. He held a knife at the back of her neck with one hand and wrenched her pants down with the other, baring her flesh to the cold of the night.
    “If you scream, I’ll cut you,” he warned, digging the knife against her skin to prove he meant it.
    “I won’t,” she gasped. “I swear. Don’t hurt me.”
    But he was going to hurt her. He jammed his free hand between her legs from behind and tore at her panties. The elastic sawed against her skin before it ripped. Mikal shoved the scraps aside and tunneled his fingers through her wetness. He pinched her clit so hard she yelped, then pinched her again as punishment.
    Tears stung her eyes. Callista pressed the side of her face against the brick and bit her lip, trying to muffle another cry as he shoved his fingers into her pussy. He didn’t go in gently to ease the way. Instead he speared her without any care for the pain.
    He—
    Slapped her face. “ Callista .”
    The dark alley vanished, leaving her surrounded by the blindingly white walls of the gallery. She shivered, out of place in her skin and disconnected from her surroundings. When the hell had she started hallucinating?
    Mikal’s long fingers curled around her throat. The pulse at the base of his thumb lined up with her artery and the rapid beat of her blood. Her cheek stung from the smack of his palm…and all she could do was stare.
    Even though she’d seen his naked torso once a week for the last year, she never failed to experience a brief moment of mouthwatering surprise. He didn’t possess a single curl of hair from his Adam’s apple to his groin. The smooth plane of pectoral and abdominal muscle made her fingers curl. Even coming out of her bizarre mental lapse, she wanted to press her nails into his flesh and lick his pale nipples.
    The rational part of her was horrified by her inability to remember traveling from the living room to the gallery. The completely fucked-up part of her wanted to beg him to hit her again.
    She mentally fled both issues and turned away from his speculative gaze. Mikal released her throat. His palm trailed across her shoulder.
    “You need to lay off the espresso lunch,” he said after a moment, his tone perfectly neutral, as if talking to a woman who suffered from a case of the jitters instead of a nearly complete breakdown. “Shall we cancel today’s session and give you time to detox?”
    Giving herself a mental shake, she forced a laugh. “No. No, I’m fine. Sorry about that. I thought I saw a spider.”
    The lie was flimsy but she offered it anyway. Maybe someday, all the denying she did would banish her twisted yearnings. For now, shifting her focus to something benign would have to suffice. “I’ll go get my bag.”
     
    You have a predator’s instincts.
    He’d never forgotten those words, a diagnosis handed down by a psych student he’d once handled at Bondage, the BDSM club where he sporadically worked when he needed a taste of the lifestyle he wouldn’t allow himself to lead.
    It’s actually pretty scary.
    Well, that was the point.
    As Callista edged away from him, his predator instincts heightened. In that moment he possessed her through her own terror. He wasn’t sure what had scared her, but he wanted to tighten the psychological restraints. To cut her deeper by bringing her fear to life.
    Wrestling free from the craving of his flesh, Mikal focused on banishing the impulse from his mind. The stark white paint on his walls and his uncovered windows were supposed to maximize the light and keep him out of the criminal recesses of his brain. Today, they didn’t provide