Page 127 of The Piece You Stole

I shake my head because he’s wrong. There’s nothing special about me at all.

“Take. Take. Take,” his words are a soft chant.

I stare up at him, wanting to push him away, but not making another attempt to get up. If I truly wanted to leave, I know Aden wouldn’t stop me.

“They take from you, drain you dry, and still go back looking for more. What did they ever give you, Saige?”

Pain. That’s what Rylan and the others gave me, a lifetime of pain.

Even Dad, for all he didn’t deserve to die, looked at me and saw a way to fill his belly with more booze so he could blind himself to the pain of Mom being gone. I stopped being his daughter then and instead became a reminder of all the good he’d lost and could never get back.

A moment passes, and then another. When I don’t push him away, he leans toward me, his next kiss landing on my throat.

His mouth touches me, and I hold my breath, the thump of my heart beating loud in my head.

He feathers his lips across my scars, marks I will wear forever. “A word, Saige,” he breathes against my throat before pressing soft kisses that draw the tension from my body.

What word does he mean?

I shake my head as my eyes flutter closed. That feels so good.

“To stop.” His fingers stroke my hip. “Give me one.”

How can he expect me to think when he has his lips on my throat and his hand brushing my bare hip?

“I…” His hand whispers under my shirt and skims over my belly, before his fingers halt less than an inch from the underside of my right breast. I release the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding when he strokes his hand back down to my hip.

“You?” he murmurs, as he rakes his teeth gently over my throat before he soothes the slight burn with a languid stroke of his tongue.

“Why not just no?” I whisper as he trails more kisses along my jaw and up to the corner of my mouth. “Or stop? What’s wrong with those words?”

He pauses, so I peel my eyelids open to find him studying me. “Those could work,” he tells me. “And if you were to say them, I would stop.”

“But?”

“It’s about trust, and it’s about you feeling safe, Saige. This word is yours, and only yours. If I push you too far, I will know when you say it.” His eyes are so serious that my arousal dims. “It has to be a word you wouldn’t ordinarily say, but not one you can easily forget.”

Control. That’s what he’s giving me. Of him, this situation, everything that happens in this bed.

He leans closer. “Do you understand?”

I nod.

He waits for me to give him this word, and I scrabble around in my mind for a word I wouldn’t ordinarily say, but one I will not forget.

It takes longer than it should. But eventually, I find one that feels right. Unexpected, but right. “Dariel.”

Amusement flickers in his eyes. “Dariel?” he repeats.

“Yes.”

I don’t like Dariel, and I don’t feel safe around him, so why shouldn’t my safe word be the name of a man who I don’t like when Aden does something that I want him to stop doing?

“Dariel, it is,” he says as he shifts his focus to my lips.

A slow thrum of anticipation whispers over my skin.

But his next kiss is the sort you might give a friend, not a woman you study with the hunger I see filling Aden’s eyes when he looks at me.

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