Page 72 of Captive Souls

My lips were sealed together tightly so he didn’t see them quiver. Not once had I required or expected anyone close to me to monitor the way they consumed alcohol. Sure, at first, I had to be careful who I spent time with. At the beginning, I couldn’t be around friends who maybe overindulged a little too often. But again, that was my problem, not theirs. Once I got a handle on it—as much as an addict can get a handle on their addiction. They called it ‘in recovery’ as opposed to ‘recovered’ for a reason. It was not a static state, it was a constant, evolving battle. Sometimes you didn’t even realize you were fighting it, other times you were doing it tooth and nail.

Once I felt secure in my sobriety, I was fine watching people enjoy drinking. My sister did it often, and though I was jealous of her being able to have a mimosa with breakfast and then switch to coffee without issue, I was glad she could indulge.

If Knox had sat across from me sipping what I was sure was an expensive bottle of wine, it wouldn’t have changed the way I thought about him. Wouldn’t change my feelings for him.

Though I recognized this as a vaguely toxic behavior, it only served to make me more attracted to him.

It was far too intense, far too codependent. Not healthy. But I found that I didn’t want healthy, stable. Not with Knox.

“I’m in … lust with my kidnapper.” I sucked my teeth. No way was I going to use the other four-letter word. It was too soon to say, to feel. “My therapist is going to have a field day with this.”

“You have a therapist?” Knox tilted his head to regard me, offering his curiosity freely. And I took it greedily like the gift it was.

It was an effort to keep an easy expression on my face, as if we were having some kind of regular conversation and this wasn’t changing the trajectory of my life and rearranging my insides. “I’m a thirty-year-old recovering alcoholic with a fucked-up childhood,” I told him with a smile. “I’m a self-care girlie too. And I know that actual self-care isn’t just bubble baths and face masks; it’s speaking to a professional and getting your head right…”

I inclined my head to regardhim. “You haven’t gone to therapy?”

He gave me a blank look, or what I might’ve seen as a blank look had I not known him. I now knew how to read the smallest of tells. The slight twinkle in his eye, the twitch in his upper lip, the relaxing of his shoulders—all markers of his version of a smile. He was amused.

“Do Ilooklike someone who has gone to therapy?” His tone was the same cool baritone as before, but I sensed only I would hear the lightness in the inflection, the teasing.

It felt like I was the only person who understood a secret language no one else in the world knew.

“Would you be very offended,” I whispered, barely able to fit the words inside the room, “if we didn’t eat the food that you’ve likely outdone yourself with?”

Knox’s eyes flared as he caught on to my meaning, hearing the hungry lilt to my tone.

“I would not be offended in the slightest,” he growled.

A beat thrummed between us.

And then there was a burst, a snapping of that taut tension coiled around the both of us.

Who moved first?

It was me.

It was me who surged forward. If I hadn’t, would he have?

No, I knew the answer to that. If I hadn’t made a move, he would’ve stayed, simmering with a palpable lust but never acting on it. Partly because of his trauma but also because he didn’t want to tarnish me. He wanted to protect me from himself.

It was that knowledge that made him all the more irresistible to me. He thought himself to be beyond redemption, but the darkest of souls would’ve taken me long ago, regardless of whether or not I was willing, uncaring of how they would ruin me.

Though he was resisting me, that didn’t mean he didn’t respond the second my lips crashed onto his.

One of his hands tore into my hair, plastering our mouths tighter together. The other went to my ass, pressing our bodies flush, as if he wanted to meld us together.

His erection pressed into my stomach, large, probing.

I lost myself in the kiss, gasping at the coppery taste of blood entering my mouth that followed a sharp burst of pain as his teeth sank into my lip.

“I’m not going to do this without pain, blood,” he warned, his voice thick. He held me tight enough to hurt to prove his point. “I don’t know how else to be.”

“I don’t want you to be anyone else.” I leaned forward to lick a trickle of my blood that was staining his lip. “I want this to hurt.”

My admission shocked even me. I’d never been into any kind of kink. I was convinced that I wanted tender, soft lovemaking.

Vanilla.

---