Page 370 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 1

“Um,” she said. She closed her eyes, dreading having to confess to something this stupid. “Morgan?”

“Yeah, hang on.” He crawled deeper into the bushes.

A branch snapped off to her right and Audrey snapped toward the sound. She shone her flashlight into the trees, freezing when she spotted eight unblinking, beady-black eyes stared back at her. Eight long legs unfurled, and the huge spider came down out of the tall tree branches, venturing out of the shadows and into the flashlight’s glow to touch its front legs to the web.

Her knees almost buckled beneath her, and all of Audrey’s breath whooshed out of her lungs in one gasping exhale. “Oh, sh—”

“Okay, I’ve got it!” Morgan called, climbing back up out of the bushes and onto the road. He held up the clawed tip of a spider’s leg, then saw what loomed at the end of her flashlight’s quaking beam. “Did I or did I not tell you not to touch the web?”

“Please help me.” Audrey shivered and the spider inched closer, plucking and feeling at the glittery rope strands with its front legs.

“Don’t move a muscle,” Morgan said from behind her, but at the same time the spider’s fangs parted and the mouth rubbed together as it made a low hissing noise. As far as Audrey was concerned, that was all, folks!

She dropped her flashlight with a scream and jerked wildly on her arm to either free her finger or remove it from her hand completely.

“Don’t!” Morgan yelled. The spider lunged even as he charging in front of Audrey, waving his arms and the clawed leg and shouting, “Hi-yah! Get out of here! Get!”

But it was too late. The spider jumped on her.

The instant the vacuum dropped them back on the unpaved stretch of road leading to the truck, Audrey started running. Morgan tackled her to the ground, quickly rolling her onto her back, both flattening himself over her and hugging her tight while she became a kicking, shouting, bucking mass of wildly flailing arms and legs.

“Get off me!” Audrey screamed. Gravel dug into her back and the memory of the spider wrapping its legs around her and sinking its fangs into her shoulder tingled in every one of her nerve endings. “Let me go!”

Morgan caught her face in his hands. “Shh, it’s okay. Audrey, honey, calm down.”

She beat her fists against his shoulders and the side of his neck, hitting and shoving, struggling to either knock him off or to scramble out from under his weight. But as determined as she was to get away, Morgan continued to hold her until her strength waned and the edge of her panic wore down.

“It’s okay,” he whispered. “You’re okay.”

Exhaustion and raw fear left her shaking in his arms. She hit his shoulders again, and then began to cry. “You lied to me!”

“No, I didn’t.” He wrapped his arms around her, simply holding her.

“You said we wouldn’t get eaten!”

“I said we wouldn’t get attacked for another couple of scenes.” Morgan raised his head to look at her. He touched her face, smoothing her hair back from her eyes and wiping the tears and dirt from her cheeks. “I also said, don’t touch the web. We weren’t supposed to know that spider was there. If you’d held perfectly still, the scene would have started over again before the spider reached you, but your struggles elicited a feeding response.”

Sobbing, she hit his shoulder one last time, a half-hearted and useless attempt to budge him. “Please, just let me go.”

He touched his forehead to hers. “Don’t cry, honey.”

She shuddered. “I felt its fangs go through me.”

“I know.” He held her face in the cup of his palms. “Believe me, I know.”

“It was going to eat me.”

He lowered his head and his lips gently brushed across hers. She shivered again, tasting the salt of her own tears, but didn’t say anything more. Sniffling, she raised her chin, a shy invitation for him to do that again.

“The timing is all wrong for this,” he murmured, the touch of his breath and the warmth of his body completely different from that of Touch’s.

She turned her cheek into his palm, and against his lips, whispered, “Comfort me.”

The timing might have been wrong, but his body responded to the touch of hers like… well, like a man who’d spent that last fifty years without a partner. And the feel of him, hard as a post as he pressed against her, his hips grinding into the cradle of hers, made her heart pound.

She twined her arms around his shoulders, a soft, throaty moan escaping as his kiss deepened hungrily. Her fingers wove through his hair, and he reached down to catch her bottom. He pulled her hard against him even as she arched into his embrace.

It was entirely the wrong time for this, she thought again as the first hints of an impending scene change filtered in through her consciousness, tickling at her sense of reality and refusing to be ignored.

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