Page 87 of The ARC Unit: Breach

Every place our bodies touched became impossible to ignore. His palm was warm through the thin linen while rough cargo fabric pressed against my exposed skin, and the rigid hardware at my hip made the closeness feel even less accidental than it was.

My stomach tightened.

Wolf went completely still.

For one impossible beat, so did I. The silence between us changed in a way that had nothing to do with the argument. I turned my head enough to catch the edge of his mask in my peripheral vision.

“What is it, Wolf? Having trouble with your demonstration?”

His grip on the webbing tightened.

“Keep fucking talking, Mercer,” he growled in my ear.

The low answer hit somewhere it had no business hitting, and I hated the way my pulse jumped hard enough that he could probably feel the change in my breathing with his body this close to mine.

“Thought so,” I said breathlessly.

Wolf moved me half a step away from him, controlled and abrupt, and the webbing pulled taut again behind my back.

“You want to know what forty-eight seconds looks like? You want to know the things I could do to you in forty-eight seconds? What they could have fucking done?”

His voice was directly behind me now, low through the mask. He shifted the webbing in one hand and held my wrists in place with the other.

“It looks like this,” he said as he tightened the webbing even more.

I let out a small, involuntary grunt just as his fingers grazed my ass.

“D-does it look like you having a control problem?”

“No. It looks like someone stronger deciding where you stand before the person covering you has time to get through a door.”

“You are not proving what you think you’re proving.”

“No?”

“You’re proving you’re an asshole with a piece of nylon.”

I tried to twist toward him again, more out of anger than strategy. His free hand intercepted the movement before I made it halfway around. Wolf’s fingers slid beneath my hair at the base of my skull, gathered it low at the nape and closed tight.

Everything in me stopped.

He didn’t yank it. He just slowly drew my head back with controlled pressure until my shoulders followed and I was forced upright against him. The motion exposed my throat while the back of my head settled close to his shoulder.

My breath left me.

Wolf’s mask was suddenly beside my cheek, his voice close enough that I felt the vibration of it more than I heard the volume. I blinked up at him, unable to separate the pain from the heat or the need twisting through both.

“Stop. Moving.”

A hot shiver ran from where his fist held my hair straight down to between my legs.

The pressure itself was not pain. It was control, intimate enough that my body answered before my anger could catch up, and that answer made me seethe because I had not asked for his hand in my hair or given him permission to decide that one involuntary reaction made the rest of this his.

“Get your fucking hand out of my hair,” I said slowly.

Wolf went still.

His breathing changed once against the side of my face.