Living in Shadow (Living In…) by Jackie Ashenden Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t know you; well, you don’t know me either. You don’t have the first fucking idea. So why don’t you sit down and let’s actually talk.”
    Then, very deliberately, he let go of her ankle and sat back.
    For a moment she didn’t move, staring down the path. Other people moved past them, a few in groups talking amongst themselves, a few alone with their headphones in, listening to their music players.
    The sun was warm, the tension between them sharp and bright.
    “If we talk,” she said in a voice almost devoid of expression, “will you leave me alone?”
    Luc put his arms around his knees, lacing his fingers together. “No.”
    “Then where’s my incentive?”
    Shit, she wasn’t going to give an inch, was she? He shifted on the grass. “I respect you, Professor, you have to understand that. And I respect the job that you do. So here’s your incentive. While we’re in class, I’ll back the hell off. I’ll be a model student. You’ll have no cause for complaints at school, I promise.”
    Finally she glanced down at him. “If you really respected me, you’d never have approached me in the first place.”
    Fuck, if she thought that look was going to quell him like any other student, she had another think coming. He’d faced down Charles Inza, the warlord who’d recruited him, with the barrel of a Kalashnikov pointed straight at his head. The day his family had been killed and his childhood ripped from him. He’d been twelve.
    One cool, gray-eyed woman was nothing.
    He met her, stare for stare. “Like I said, I’m not apologizing for being honest with you. Perhaps you could respect me by giving me the same honesty.”
    Her jaw hardened. “I did. Or are you one of those guys who thinks no really means yes ?”
    When he’d first been press-ganged into the army, there had been women. Refugees the soldiers had found, any woman really, and they’d been fair game. Those women had said “no”, there was no “yes” about it. They’d screamed the word. And the first time he’d seen what had happened to those women, what the other soldiers had been capable of, he’d puked his guts out. They’d beaten him for that. Beaten him within an inch of his life when he’d tried to stop it, when he’d refused to have any part in it himself.
    By that stage, Inza had grown to value his mind too much to outright kill him. But there were other punishments. Other ways of teaching him that no was a word without meaning in the militia.
    It had meaning now. It was sacred. And it was going to kill him to say it, but he had to. Because he knew down deep in his bones that if he didn’t give this to her, didn’t mean it absolutely, he would never pierce those walls of hers. Not to mention it would kill what was left of his soul.
    He looked into her eyes, looked right into the heart of her. “Tell me no and I’ll leave you alone. I will never speak to you, never look at you, never bother you again.”
    That familiar burning intensity flamed in Luc’s eyes and she knew he meant exactly what he said. Meant every word. And that it was important to him.
    The way it had never been important to Piers.
    No, God, she couldn’t think that. Luc couldn’t be different. Once she started thinking he was, then…
    He wasn’t touching her now but she could feel the imprint of his fingers around her ankle, feel the shock of heat that had rushed through her. Proprietary. Dominant.
    Sit down, Professor May.
    Desire shifted inside her, tight and aching. It had been so long since a man had been able to touch the part of her she’d kept so well protected. Yet with only a hand around her ankle and a note of steel in his voice, Lucien North had shot a hole right through every single one of those protections.
    I won’t hurt you…
    She didn’t know how he’d managed to see her fear, especially when she hadn’t even acknowledged it herself, but he had. And somehow, without her even having to reveal anything, he’d answered