“You see what happens when you run?” The soft material of his mask rubbed against my cheek.
I stretched away, bending my neck hard to the side to escape him. He proceeded to draw the tip of his nose down the length of my throat.
“I know you, Amanda,” he promised. “I know what your body wants, and you haven’t been getting it.”
With that, his touch skated up my inner thigh.
I froze. There was nowhere to run, no place to hide. I hated that he was going to find out just how right he was.
“You’re sick!” I hissed. “Twisted! Demented—”
Two fingers swiped under my swimsuit.
The touch was electric, and I had to swallow the groan.
It was fast. There and done. But he held his fingers up, letting the light from the city fall on the black material of his glove and the slick evidence coating it.
“I am,” he breathed. “But so are you, ragazza.”
Horror blazed hot inside me. I wanted to deny it, wanted to scream that he was wrong. But the truth was right there, staring back at me.
“Let’s play a game, shall we?” His hand disappeared, and he shifted his body. “Let’s see how twisted you really are.”
A knife snapped open in front of me.
He was going to kill me! I jerked hard, fighting for my life.
The man in the mask lowered the knife to skim the blade up my thigh. “Don’t move, Amanda. It would be a pity to cut something so beautiful.”
Every muscle locked tight. My heart hammered in my chest, and I couldn’t draw air into my lungs.
“Breathe,” he growled. “I don’t want you passing out on me.”
He slid the blade under the edge of my swimsuit, angled it up, and with a vicious twist of his wrist, cut it open.
I gasped, sagging forward. The humid air hit my exposed sex, sending a rush tingling over the sensitive flesh. I tried to close my legs, but he caught the attempt, placing a boot between my feet and kicking my stance wider. My head and chest fell against the window with an audible clang.
If it hurt, I didn’t notice.
That was what he’d reduced me to. A smoldering heap of need.
“That’s it.” He flipped the knife and caught the blade. “You’re learning your lesson so well.”
Breathing hard, my next attempt at speech was cut off when he pressed the flat side of the handle against my pussy.
Caught in this nightmare, my body turned traitorous. This man effortlessly tapped into the darkest places, discovered my most hidden secrets, and withoutmercy, extracted them. I would die of shame if anyone knew how aroused this scenario made me.
But the handle of the knife rubbing against my clit was enough for me to give in to the pleasure I denied myself. The rush was intensified, flavored with the pounding fear that it was a masked stranger who fed my deranged cravings.
As his touch slipped lower, a strange awareness crept over me. I inhaled deeply, trying to place the familiar scent. It was the same as the venom in his voice. The tickling urge that this was from a long-lost dream. The knife handle pushing into my body shattered the memory I was desperately chasing.
A low, masculine groan rumbled behind me. “Look at you, desperate and needy.”
“Fuck you,” I choked.
“Oh, ragazza mia, not now. You haven’t earned that.”
Italian—my brain scrambled with the piece of information as he began to slide the handle in and out of my sex. This man used Italian like a native speaker. But his English pronunciations were perfect.
