Page 120 of The Vigilant

“I won’t break,” I said low.

My big, boorish Daddy held my gaze as he released my arm and started to slide his belt from the loops of his pants.

Shit.His hand was one thing, but taking a belt to my ass…I shivered.

“Yes, you will,” he rumbled, slowly folding the leather strip in his big hands. The look in his eyes was wild. Like a lion with claws and teeth bared, ready to protect his pride. Ready to protect me. “You’ll break for me, little wasp, because you know I’ll put you back together.”

Air snagged in my lungs. The idea should be repulsive—abhorrent—but it wasn’t. I felt so full—so clogged and weighted with guilt and anger and despair, stacking them inside my chest for years like the world’s largest Jenga tower.

And now he wanted to make it all crumble.

And he was right, I wanted to let him.

The knife clattered onto the ground at the same moment he grabbed my throat and hauled my mouth to his.

I’d dropped my weapon, foolishly thinking that he was unarmed, too, but the second his tongue speared into my mouth, I realized I was wrong.

He was armed. Weaponized by the way I wanted him.

And our kiss became a battlefield. The lash of tongues, the bite of teeth. I fought the wave of heat rising in the base of my stomach. I didn’t want to give in—didn’t want to go under. But I did want him.

God, how I wanted him.

“You undo me,” he said, his tone ravaged, pulling his face back to look at me.

My heart hiccuped.

For a nanosecond, his gaze was split open and searching, and then it was gone with his next words. “You know what it felt like when I couldn’t get to you? When you disappeared into the stairs with that fucker?”

My chin jutted forward even though it pressed my throat tighter to his hand. “I couldn’t let him get away.”

“Not the fucking point,” he swore and pushed me back, his arm falling to his side as he instructed, “Take off your clothes and bend over the bed.”

I jerked, defiance always my first instinct.

But then I saw the whole of him—the wide spread of his stance, the deep, dragging breaths that inflated his chest. I saw his knuckles were white where he held his belt and the beat of his pulse drumming into the side of his neck.

“I didn’t know he had a gun,” I argued, my heartbeat stampeding through my chest.

“I don’t care.” His jaw twitched. “Clothes. Off.”

My spine straightened and my chin lifted, but there was no part of me, even furious, that would deny the promise in his eyes.To put me back together.

My nipples pebbled under the heat of his stare. My core clenched painfully at the way he licked his lips.

“Why are you doing this?” I demanded as he stepped closer. “We should be up there waiting for them…”

“Because you’re wild and dangerous and defiant, and I wouldn’t change a goddamn thing. I will put you in the sky every goddamn time, even though every moment you’re in danger makes me feel like I’m dying.”

My heart stopped like a timer running out of sand. “Tynan.”

His hand claimed my throat, and I felt a rush of heat between my thighs. His head came close to my ear.

“You really want to go back up there, little wasp, then fight me for it.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Tynan

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