Slowly, I turned my head to look over my shoulder and spotted a dark smudge moving down the street toward me from the other side of the road.
I picked up my pace, ducking around a corner.
Minutes later, thinking I’d lost whoever it was or that I was just being a silly paranoid girl, I considered an intercom at the end of the street. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something dark split off from the shadows and come toward me.
I hesitated, trying to decide if running was better than asking for help. Finally, I decided to do both. The intercom buzzed under my finger as I took out an earbud to hear the response.
The dark figure drew closer, only a block and a half away now.
“Good evening,” someone finally answered. “We aren’t expecting a delivery at this time.”
“Please, my name is Bianca Belcante and I just moved to the area. I’m lost and I think someone may be following me.”
A pause. “We don’t want any trouble here. Please move along.”
I gaped, heart racing as the figure started to move quicker, cutting down the distance to one block. “I’m seventeen. I go to Sacred Heart Academy and live here in Bishop’s Landing. Please let me in, even just beyond the gates so I can get away from the person following me.”
“You should call the police.”
“I don’t have a phone!” I cried in frustration.
The line went dead.
“Fuck!” I hit the wall beside the intercom, then sucked in a deep breath and forced my aching body to run.
I darted down the street toward the ocean because I knew at some point along the peninsula, Lion Court roosted at the top of the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic.
Acid filled my chest as I ran hard, legs and arms pumping, torso angled to cut through the wind. My entire right side blazed with pain, but panic muted the sensation.
It was the fight-or-flight response.
Behind me, ears straining, I could hear the telltale thump of feet against asphalt.
Someone was chasing me.
The cold ocean air cut through my lungs, piercing my throat as I gulped it down. My feet hit sand along the public access beach, slowing me for one unsteady moment.
I could hear the whistle of wind over another body behind me. The harsh spit of air through a working chest.
I pushed harder, but there was a sinking in my belly, a heavy foreboding that told me I wouldn’t be able to outrun this predator.
Ezra and Henrik had been teaching me to fight though. I knew the dynamics of a punch, the basic mechanics of defending myself if I was caught from behind or approached straight on. Too bad they hadn’t taught me how to evade a pursuer on foot.
For a moment, I thought about taking cover, hiding so that they passed me by, but I didn’t want to be cornered.
I shouldn’t have worried.
Seconds later, I could hear them just behind me, breath churning, air displaced at my back by their impressive speed. My blood rushed through my ears, so loud I thought I might drown in it. Music pounded through the earbud still lodged in my left ear, taunting me appropriately to run.
Before they could reach for me, I stopped abruptly. In the lapse it took for them to stop, I swung up and around, using all my weight to throw a punch where I imagined their stomach might be.
A large, calloused hand caught my swinging fist by my wrist and wrenched me forward, off-balance. I crushed into a hard chest, but I was already fighting, stomping my heel down on their foot, crashing my head into their chin.
I could tell by the size and heft of the body that it was a man, but it was too dark, even the moon obscured, to see his face. I didn’t even think to look. Sheer panic held me by the throat. I was thrown back to being a girl again, cornered by one of the Morelli thugs in the parking lot of my elementary school, his dark eyes wicked as he dragged me into the car.
A wail left my lips, something like a battle cry and I threw my weight into the heavy torso hard enough to rock him off-balance. There was a muffled curse as he fell, taking me with him. I landed on his chest, the air expelling from his chest in a hot plume over my right ear. Before I could scramble away, he was rolling us, pinning me beneath his considerable bulk.
Fear clawed at my insides, tearing me up.
I struggled so hard, I thought my heart might burst.
In the squirmish, the earbud fell from my left ear and a familiar voice cut through the dense night like a blade. “Bianca, enough!”
My body understood before my mind could compute it, freezing immediately. A second later, realization broke through the haze in my skull.
Tiernan.
I opened my mouth to yell at him, to demand to know why he was chasing me, why he’d scared me like that, but the only thing that came out was a long, low whimper.
“Bianca,” he said again, this time almost gentle, the tone rusty with disuse.
His hands softened around my wrists as he pinned them over my head.
“W-why?” I whispered as tears pushed to the front of my eyes. “You scared me.”
He made a noise in the back of his throat, part frustration, part sympathy. “I’ve been saying your name for the last five minutes. You were obviously too panicked to hear me.”
That was possible, maybe, but it didn’t explain why he’d chased me at all.
“I was out looking for your idiot self,” he growled, fingers tightening around my wrists again, his narrow hips and wide chest pinning me to the cold, damp sand. “Then you started running and I didn’t want to fucking lose you again. Ezra, Walcott, and Henrik are all out looking for you too.”
“But Brando?” I protested automatically.
“Chef Patsy stayed late to watch over him.”
A long sigh unspooled from my lips, faintly white in the cold air, fanning across Tiernan’s looming face. “You scared me,” I repeated softly.
“Good,” he grunted, not moving off me, instead, crushing his hips even tighter to my groin. “You need a good scare.”
“I can run by myself without needing your permission,” I countered, even though there was enough evidence to support the contrary.
“You are a stubborn, silly little girl. You don’t know a thing about Bishop’s Landing or the monsters that live in these streets. You want a run-in with Bryant fucking Morelli? You want to run into a man like me who’d see a pretty little thing like you lost and alone, and think he’d take his chances on hunting you down for himself?”
I noticed suddenly the thick, obvious length of Tiernan’s erection grinding into my core. Chasing me had aroused the predator in him. I could tell by the tension in his body that he was barely hanging on to his control. He wanted to rut into me on the public beach like an animal claiming his mate.
Despite the cold, my bones began to melt, my body growing pliant against his tautness, eager for the contrast. Eager for him.
He read the change in my posture correctly and a low growl rumbled through his chest straight into mine. “You like being hunted, little thing?” he hummed. “You like knowing you bring out the animal in me? That I get hard as steel imagining ripping a hole in these tight little shorts big enough for my cock to slot through straight into your wet cunt? I wouldn’t even have to prep you. You’re probably soaking wet for me already.”
God, he was right.
It should have been embarrassing, but I was beyond that. Maybe I couldn’t own my feelings for Tiernan, but I could own my body’s response to him. To his cruelty. It yearned for it.