Page 78 of The Guru: Shadow
You must fight him.
She tried to remove his arm around her throat, but he was simply too strong. She even tried pinching and pressing her fingernails with all her force into his forearm, but he was utterly unimpressed. It even made him chuckle.
“I needed the files to confirm my theory.”
“What theory?”
“You are different.”
She snorted.
“That’s not hard to figure out, no need for medical records and tapping my phone.”
“I don’t mean the obvious different,” he whispered in her ear so darkly it made a shudder run down her back.
Why does what he does make me so fucking aroused?
“And what did you find in them?” She tried to focus on her anger about him violating her privacy to keep her mind clear.
“All I needed to know.”
“And why did you need to know it?”
There was a pause before he answered, “Your choice of question is quite interesting,” he finally said. “Any other would have asked what I learned, even insisted on it. But you don’t. You ask why. That means, you already know what I found, don’t you?”
Yes, she knew. She knew all the markers in there. The past that fucked her up every day. And as thorough as he was, he’d know too. But what she wanted to know was one single, specific thing. And she needed to hear it.
“I do. Now you tell me why,” she demanded.
“Your honesty is positively refreshing.”
Gods, can’t he just answer one question straight?
“Honesty is a two-way street, so tell me why, and it better be honest.”
“I have a better idea,” he said, quite elated.
“And what would that be?”
He fumbled her phone out of his pocket, unlocked it by holding it in front of her face, and opened the front-facing camera.
“Where did you get that? What the hell are you doing?”
“You know exactly where, as you purposefully turned it back on.”
Yes. But damn.
“Relax into me, let them see that you enjoy yourself.”
She had no clue why she did it, but she gave in to his pull and relaxed into him. His arm around her throat loosened, and he let his hand glide up from her throat to her jaw, which he grasped and pushed towards his face.
And then he leaned in on her and kissed her. Not as heated as before, it wassoft as his lips almost caressed over hers, only the tip of his tongue searching sweetly for hers. Funny how a man so dark and dangerous could kiss so sweetly.
“Now, you’ll post it,” he breathed against her lips as their kiss found an end.
He put her phone into her hand, and there they were – at least a dozen photos he had taken during their kiss. Swiping through, one of them blew her away. Seeing herself, it was as if she were a different person.
There were photos of Chris and her kissing, but they were normal ones. A normal couple making silly, normal selfies. The pictures she now had with Deis were different. They consumed the onlooker with core-melting perfectionism and a radiating feeling of lightness.