Jackknifing out of bed, she threw off the covers and stood on the cold linoleum. It wasn’t an irrational fear. These men, these hunters, they had one goal.
Less than twelve hours left, and she was utterly unprepared.
“Fuck me.” Staggering through her flat as if the answers were hidden in the cold shadows, she knotted her fingers in her hair.
How could anyone possibly prepare for something so… Unexpected? Wild? Impossible?
It was all of the above, and yet it wasn’t. They told her what to expect. She read every word of that terrifying contract and signed it anyway.
She was freaking out. A totally normal response to such an extraordinary situation, but rationalizing her fear did nothing to calm her nerves.
Drenched in a cool sweat, her eyes squinted at the kitchen clock, trying to make out the hands through the shadows. Only nine hours left.
Yanking open drawers, she frantically rummaged for some sort of solution, desperately searching for answers that weren’t there. Rifling through the sparse contents of mismatched items—rubber bands, boxes of matches, dead batteries she kept meaning to throw away—she growled in frustration and slammed the drawers shut.
Nothing useful. Nothing that could prepare her for tomorrow.
The refrigerator hummed in the corner, and her spastic breathing stilled. She pulled the door open, casting an unnatural glow across the ransacked kitchen. Day-old soup, mustard, half a wilted head of lettuce, and a courgette.
Her gaze locked on the long, green vegetable, thick and firm, a little over seven inches long. Enough to get the job done. Her hand closed around the cold, slender shape and lifted it to eye level, cheeks heating as she considered the girth. Lowering it to her belly, holding it vertically from her navel to her pelvis.
Was this the smartest idea she’d had all week or the craziest?
In the tattered romance novels she read about virgin brides, there were always mentions of blood. The thought made her queasy. If there was going to be bleeding or pain, she wanted it on her own terms. In private.
Daisy knew nothing about actual intimacy, and that scared her more than anything else.
She washed the courgette in the sink and returned to bed.
Twenty-two years old with zero experience and even less knowledge. Was it hard and fast or gentle and patient? These hunters were not the same as fictional heroes.
She shut her eyes as tension built in her skull. “Shit.”
She wished her mother were here, or that she could ask Maryanne without the NDA silencing her.
Countless hours imagining the hunt, she never fully pictured what would happen if she were caught. Until now.
All those conditions in the contract. She’d have no choice but to submit. That, or safeword out. That meant less money. Much less.
How much did she need to change her life?
Not much. But she would never have a chance like this again. If she was doing this, which she was, she wanted to do it right. She was walking away with as much money as she could manage.
“It’s going to be bad.” The whispered warning needed time to fully sink in, so she forced herself to envision the absolute worst.
Blurry memories of her father surfaced from the shadows. Her mother always looked rough when he visited. Moved differently. Carefully. Like her body hurt. Sometimes Daisy heard them fighting, her mother’s protests growing louder and louder until they finally silenced in defeat.
Her mum didn’t have the luxury of a safeword.
She did.
“Timber.” Daisy rose and set the courgette back in the refrigerator. No one was taking anything from her that she didn’t willingly offer. And she wasn’t going to take it from herself, alone, in a cold kitchen, at four in the morning.
Her body was not an obstacle to overcome. It was sacred, her only irrevocable asset the world could take and therefore, worth protecting. And she was the only one willing to protect it.
By six, she gave up on sleep and watched the morning light shift from grey to violet to pink. A strange sense of acceptance washed over her.
A new dawn…
