Page 55 of Shielded Heart

Those words deflated her. She knew he was talking about what he could do for her, about what he wanted to dotoher, but she couldn’t ignore the darker implication of what he’d said—of course he’d had other women here. A man like Arcanthus could’ve had almost anyone he wanted, and he’d likely slept with many females. She wasn’t naïve enough to believe he hadn’t.

Her chest tightened with disappointment and jealousy. Was she just another name on his list of trophies? An exotic lay to brag about after he was done?

She looked down at his tail. “Did…did you choose the others the way you chose me?”

Arcanthus stiffened, and his tail twitched. “No, Samantha.”

He curled his finger beneath her chin and turned her face toward him, forcing her eyes to meet his; there was a new intensity in his gaze. “Nothingabout you—or how you’ve come to be here—is like anything I’ve ever done. You are the first I sought out personally. The first I’ve taken anywhere. The first I’ve fought for. You’re also the first to know my true name and the first to have slept in my bed. And you will be theonly.”

Her stomach fluttered and her chest heated, but she furrowed her brow. “Why? Why me?”

Arcanthus stroked her jaw with his thumb and leaned his face closer, his lips nearly touching her ear. “Because one look at you was all it took to know that you’re mine, Samantha.”

Samantha stilled. Her breath quickened, her heart raced, and her vision dimmed.

You are mine,James growled in her head.You exist only for my pleasure.

She could feel James’s breath, hot against her face, could feel his rough hands around her throat as he pounded into her again and again, could feel the burning, tearing pain of his assault.

“Samantha!”

Sam’s eyes snapped open; she hadn’t realized she’d closed them. Arcanthus was kneeling in front of her, his hands cupping her cheeks, his torso between her legs. She searched his face for something to focus on as despair threatened to overwhelm her.

Not James. He’s not James. He’snotJames.

“Someone hurt you,” Arcanthus said, his voice lower and deeper than it had been a few moments before. His center eye was narrowed to a slit. “Someone isstillhurting you.”

Faint tremors coursed through his hands; she wouldn’t have thought it possible, considering his arms were cybernetic, but she couldn’t deny it was happening. His dark brows were angled down harshly, his nostrils flared, and his lips peeled back to reveal his fangs.

For an instant, cold fear crystallized in her chest; she’d made him angry, just like she’d so often made James angry. But Arcanthus was much larger and infinitely stronger than James. She had no hope of defending herself against him.

It was the gleam in Arc’s eyes that gave her pause and brought her to her senses. It was tinged with a helplessness that she knew all too well. She realized suddenly that he was not angry at her, butforher, angry for what had been done to her.

“Tell me, Samantha.”

There was a pleading note in his voice, a hint of desperation; she guessed that few people, if any, had ever heard it.

“He was my fiancé,” she said quietly.

Arc smoothed his hands down her arms to caress her elbows. “What did he do, little terran?”

Samantha held his gaze and took in a deep, shuddering breath. “My father died three days after my eighteenth birthday. It was a construction site accident. I was at work when I got the call. He was just…gone, without any chance to say goodbye. He was the only family I had left after my grandmother passed away two years prior. It was…too much. Too soon. I mean, there’snevera good time to lose someone you love, but…”

Arc raised a hand and wiped a tear from her cheek. She hadn’t realized she was crying.

“Go on, little one,” he said.

“I fell into a deep depression. And no matter how much I worked—and I worked hours and hours just to keep my mind busy, just so I didn’t have tothink—I couldn’t keep up with the debts his death passed on to me. I was losing the only home I’d ever known. I was losing…everything.

“And then he came. James. He was…good. So good. He treated me nicely, said all the right things. So when the house was finally taken away, I…I wasn’t too upset because I had him. He gave me a place to stay, a place to call home—with him. He even asked me to marry him, and I said yes.”

She felt something brush her leg and glanced down to find Arc’s tail curling around her ankle. The gesture seemed…possessive.

“After that, things changed.Hechanged. It wasn’t subtle either. But I…I had no experience, no knowledge of how things were supposed to be. My mom died when I was just a baby, and my grandmother was elderly. My father was too embarrassed to talk to me about things like that, and I was so insecure throughout my adolescence that I didn’t have any friends to confide in. How…how was I toknow?”

She sniffled, and more tears spilled down her cheeks. “It started that first night I moved in. We were getting ready for bed and he was touching me. I was…excited. I was going to-to lose my vir-virginity to—” The words caught in her throat, blocked by the burning tightness brought on by her crying.

Arcanthus’s thumbs, so gentle despite being made of metal, could not staunch the flow of her tears, which blurred her vision. He was reduced to a gray and purple blotch as he moved to sit beside her. When one of his arms slipped around her waist and the other beneath her legs, she didn’t fight. She couldn’t.

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