Captive Souls Read Online Anne Malcom

Categories Genre: Alpha Male, Crime, Dark, Suspense Tags Authors: Anne Malcom Advertisement1

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Except I felt more on edge than I had since the moment I met Knox. Back then, there was fear, yes. Plenty of that. Anger too. At him for being the omen that signified the end of life as I knew it. He was the villain.

But there was a distance. There was a separation between us.

Now we were closer than I suspected a kidnapper and abductee ever had been. We’d shared our insides, our ugliness. He’d exposed parts of himself I knew had never seen the light of day.

My fingers had been in his flesh, sewing him back together. We slept in the same bed. We spent most of our days together. We ate together.

It was the closest I’d ever been with a man. With a person, for that matter, my sister included. Except the distance between us was wider than ever.

Though we slept in the same bed, we didn’t touch. Didn’t cuddle. Although it had been expressed that Knox wanted to have sex with me, nothing had been acted on. Not even a kiss.

A kiss seemed so pedestrian, so juvenile. Yet my lips burned with an unyielding need for him. To taste him. I didn’t act on it, not with the wall he’d hastily put up, not with the fear of rejection, heartbreak. I had to survive lingering on the sidelines, waiting for him to yank us both onto the proverbial playing field.

We were stuck in a kind of purgatory of our own making. It was utter torture. I was hyperaware of my every movement, every word I said, every gesture. Knox watched me like a hawk, his demeanor locked down tight. He’d gone back to speaking in monosyllabic tones and only when forced. No more admissions came from him. I didn’t think he had any left.

Me, I had a few, though. Secrets and scars still hidden deep.

My need for Knox was a living, hungry thing, desperate to consummate … whatever it was between us.

I had never been afraid to make the first move with men I wanted. Granted, those were never men I really wanted; they were men I talked myself into wanting because they were the appropriate choice.

Not a threat.

Knox was most definitely a threat. What if I reached out to touch him, and he crushed my hand? What if I gave myself over to him, and he crushed my heart?

So we danced awkwardly—or I should say, I danced awkwardly since there was nothing awkward about Knox. He was ever graceful in that predatory way of his. Never unsure. Never afraid.

But I could see it, the added tension he carried in his shoulders, the lines of his eyes. And though we didn’t cuddle in bed, I’d definitely brushed up against the length of him—by accident—and felt the full width and girth of his need.

He was still recovering from the gunshot wound. I had been worried about some kind of infection setting in, since our environment was not sterile, and I was most certainly not a doctor. He let me look at it daily, change the dressing and clean it out. But not with his shirt off. He would unbutton the top of the button-ups he’d now taken to wearing to expose the area to me, but nothing more.

It was as if he was hiding something from me. I didn’t know what. He was a muscular demigod—or devil, if we were going for that kind of metaphor. I knew his torso was carved with muscle because I saw the outline of it. Honed and chiseled to be a weapon, I considered him a work of art even clothed. He definitely didn’t have anything to be ashamed of.

Then again, what he’d told me of his childhood—the one that was stolen from him—it could have been something related to that. To nakedness, feeling dirty or wrong.

I’d chewed over that for a long time. Sex very well could be a complicated thing for him. He’d never found pleasure in it, hadn’t he said that? From his perspective, perhaps there was nowhere for us to go from here. My need for him might not have been the same as his for me, and I wasn’t going to try to sate it if it damaged him even a little.

I’d been mulling over this yet again as I sat in the garden, watching the sun set.

Knox had been on a supply run earlier in the day and had forbade me from helping him with the bags. He’d done it rather meanly, if I was honest. Every interaction we had now had a brutal edge that hadn’t been there before. He’d been cold but never cruel. Now he cared about me enough to be cruel.

He didn’t want to accept help which would communicate that he was weak.

I rolled my eyes.

Men.

Even though he considered himself to be vastly different from the garden variety male, there were a lot of things that weren’t too different at all.


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