“What do you mean, no?” She’s glaring at me now, a thin thread of anger cutting through the scent of her arousal. “And what just happened to your voice?”

“Nothing.” I take a deep breath and mentally shove the beast away from the controls. “I mean, no man wants to sleep in all his clothes, but I’m happy to serve as your big spoon, even fully dressed.”

Her eyes narrow. “You’re making fun of me.”

“Not in the slightest. I take my big spoon duties very seriously.” I sit on the edge of the bed and take off my shoes, and after a second, she does the same thing. The sinking of the mattress as she sits makes my cock swell even more. My body associates that sequence of sensations—the creak and jostle—with sex, and I want Lilli just as badly as the beast wants her.

But I’m pretty sure that bad things have been done to my Lilliana, by bad people. She needs to know that I’m not like those people. That I will never let them near her again.

“Carson? You okay?”

I don’t realize I’m snarling until I notice that she’s backed away from the bed. From me. She looks nervous. She smells like fear.

The sound I’m making is not human in nature.

I choke it off. Never, in nearly two years of enduring Dr. Brennan’s tests, have I heard or made that sound. Not even during field testing of our abilities.

“Yeah. Sorry. I was thinking about something unpleasant.” I was drowning in the need to literally pull the heads from every single person who’s ever touched her in an intimate way. With or without her consent. I can almost feel the visceral rip of flesh and pop of sinew beneath my hands. I can almost taste the blood…

The beast believes that anyone worthy of Lilliana would still be with her. Which means that all of her former lovers were unfit to touch her and they deserve to die for the offense.

Whoa.

In human culture, the wholesale slaughter of your girlfriend’s exes would be considered psychotic. So I push that urge way, way down, hoping she didn’t see any of it on my face. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Come be my little spoon.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she sits on the edge of the bed again. Then she lies back, and I can hear her heart pounding as that sliver of fear feeds her excitement. Her reaction to the mixture of complementary emotions makes my pulse race.

I lie on my right side, and she rolls to face me with her head resting on her folded left arm. “I…um.” She swallows, then she starts over. “I want to touch you.”

My heart leaps into my throat, and I angle my hips back to keep from brushing her with my unrelenting erection, despite the beast’s insistence that she will be excited and honored by the size I’ve achieved for her pleasure. “By all means.”

“I didn’t say I was going to touch you. I said I want to. But that’s not my fault. It’s you and your damn pheromones.”

“Why does that urge bother you?”

“Because I don’t want to want to touch you. I don’t like my body overruling my head, and I certainly don’t like your body overruling my head.”

“No one’s overruling anything,” I assure her, as uneasiness swells in the pit of my stomach. I want her to feel safe and aroused in my presence, not scared and angry. “I won’t touch you, if you don’t want me to.”

“But I do want you to.” She stares into my eyes from inches away, and I can see the conflict swimming in hers. “I just don’t want to want you to.”

“I’m not sure what to do with that information,” I admit. It seems to cast a bit of a conflict in terms of consent.

“Welcome to the club.” She rolls over, her lips drawn into a tight, unhappy line. “I wish we had pillows.”

“Would you like to use my arm as a pillow? I don’t mind.”

“No,” she snaps, and for a second, anger flares from her scent—the olfactory equivalent of sparks rising from a fresh log thrown on the fire. Then that flare fades, and the scent of her arousal surrounds us again, like a cloud of sweet perfume. Though I don’t think she’s aware of that.

I couldn’t smell arousal before the procedure, could I?

“Yes,” she whispers, and I can’t resist a smile, even though I understand that she’s trapped in a tug-of-war between her mind and her body, helpless while they volley. And that’s my fault.

“Lilliana, I’m not trying to use pheromones against you. In fact, if I knew how to turn them off, I—”

“Just shut up and give me your arm, if your pillow offer was for real,” she says. I chuckle as I slide my right arm beneath her cheek, so that her head rests on my bicep. “And it’s Lilli.”

“Goodnight, Lilli.” We are never more vulnerable than when we sleep, and in this place—on this planet—danger could burst through the door any moment. I could be dangerous. Well, I am dangerous, but I could be dangerous to her. Yet she’s letting me touch her. She’s allowed me to put my body between hers and the only exit in this room, which means that whether she knows it consciously or not, she’s trusting me to protect her from anyone who enters, rather than fearing the possibility that I might not let her leave.

I will not sleep. Not while she’s trusting me to protect her.

Despite the stiff way she’s holding her body, preserving a sliver of space between us, even though there’s little room to spare on this narrow mattress, her scent indicates that she’s more comfortable with me than she’s letting on. I want to pull her closer. I want to remove her clothes and cradle her against my chest, even if I’m not allowed to do anything more than that, all night long. And as I lie here, breathing in her scent, aching to bury my nose in her hair, that sound crawls up from my throat again. That mating sound the beast seems so proud of.

Lilliana groans, and again the scent of her arousal blooms between us. “What is that noise you’re making?”

“I have no idea.” The rumbling stops while I speak, but then it begins again. “I think my beast is feeling…cozy.” In which cozy is a euphemism for really, really horny.

Her ribs expand with a deep breath. “Your…beast? Do I even want to know?”

“There isn’t really a beast. That’s just how I’ve come to think of the foreign abilities, impulses, and…needs that came with the genes Brennan spliced into my DNA.”

“But why call it a beast? Because they’re non-human genes?”

“Because the things he wants—things that were evidently normal in his culture—feel wild in the context of human society. Even on a prison planet.”

“What does he want?” Lilliana rolls over to face me again, her head still resting on my arm.

“You.” I meet her gaze and hold it. “That sound seems to be about making you want me back.”

“Making me want you, or your beast?”

“Two sides of the same coin,” I explain. “And both sides want you. So…does it work? That sound?”

“Why do I get the feeling you already know the answer?”

I give her a heated smile, and the little hellcat sits up and smacks my shoulder, aiming an irritated look down at me. “Well, you’re lying here with your hard-on pressed against—”

“Sorry. I’m trying to angle it—” I roll onto my back and look up at her, and that leaves my erection pointing straight up at the sky.

“—and you smell like sex dipped in chocolate, dangled right in front of my face, and—”

I laugh. “I’m not really sure what to do with that description, but thank you?”

“—I want to touch you so badly that my fingernails are carving up my own palms, from clenching my hands. So is that okay?”

“Is what okay?” I appreciate the fierce nature of her words, but I’m not sure I followed them.

“If I touch you. I mean, it’s not so much that I want to, really. But I feel like I need to. So maybe if I indulge that impulse, it’ll just…go away. Like scratching an itch.”

“You’re welcome to touch me.” Though I desperately hope this doesn’t feel for her like the time-release stimulant felt for me and Dreyer—an artificial and impersonal attraction.

“Can you keep your hands to yourself, if I do?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“Of course it’s not what I want!” Her brows dip, her fiery gaze burning straight into my soul. “But it’s what I’m asking for. Because I just met you.”

I nod, though it takes all the willpower I have. “I won’t touch you unless you ask me to.”

You’re a fool, the beast growls at me. Claim her.

“That’s not good enough.” Her hand finds my chest, though she seems wholly unaware that her own fingers have jumped the gun. “I’m definitely going to ask you to touch me. I may ask for something more than that. But I want you to say no, when I ask. Okay? Because that won’t really be me asking. I’m under the influence of your chocolate sex scent, and that’s not fair. Okay?”

I make myself nod again. “I’ll turn you down no matter what you ask for.” I only pray my willpower is up to the challenge.

“Great. Now take off your shirt. But only your shirt. No matter what else I ask you to take off.”

Growling, I sit up and grab the hem of my prison-issued tee in a cross-armed grip. I am not accustomed to being ordered around. I don’t like it. I want to give an order of my own—a demand that she reciprocate with an article of her own clothing. “I’m confused about how I’m supposed to know which of your requests to grant,” I admit as I pull my shirt over my head.

Lilliana’s eyes widen and she chokes on…nothing. “Good god almighty.” Her heated gaze focuses on my torso. “Have you been walking around looking like that under your clothes all day?”

“No. I looked like your friend Warren for most of the day.”

She snorts. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. Warren doesn’t do it for me.”

I desperately want to do it for her.

Her hands softly skim my pectorals, and my pulse leaps so hard that the flashlight on the floor seems to be…strobing. “You’ve just been walking around all day long,” she murmurs. “Naked as the day you were born, under these clothes.”

I laugh. “You are also naked as the day you were born, beneath your clothes.” The very thought of which makes my cock throb miserably. “That’s the definition of ‘clothed.’”

“Whatever. Lie down,” she orders, but before I can comply, she pushes me onto my back and flops onto her left side next to me, her head propped on one hand. “Were you like this before they…changed you?” Her fingers wander my chest, her touch both blissful and inadequate.

“Like what?”

“Ripped. Bulging.” Her glance darts toward my erection, and I resist the urge to thrust my hips upward and show off what I have to offer her.

My shrug is awkward, because I’m lying flat. “I didn’t exactly spend my days wrapping a tape measure around my biceps.”

“What did you spend your days doing?”

“Fighting. Surviving.” Leading my men.

“Oh yeah. Soldier.” Her hand trails down my arm, and it takes an inhuman amount of self-control not to press into her touch. To demand more. Lilli groans, then she licks her lips. “I’m sorry, but I need…” She leans down, and her sweet little tongue licks the tip of my right nipple.

“Fuck.” My cock jerks, and I nearly shoot into my pants. “Don’t do that. Please.”

“I can’t help it.” She leans down for another taste, and I catch her throat in my hand, my grip loose and open, so I don’t hurt her.

Her pulse flutters beneath my fingers, and I am so fucking hard. “Lilliana—”

“It’s Lilli.”

“Lilli. If you don’t want to be touched, do not do that again.”

“But…I do want to be touched.”

I shift us both, and in a heartbeat, she’s beneath me on the bed, my knee wedged between her thighs. I can feel the heat from her body seeping through both her clothing and mine. She smells so good.

Her gaze is glued to mine, but she looks…confused. Unsure how she wound up beneath me. My hand slides down her side, over her shirt, and she inhales deeply. She arches into my touch—until my fingers find the hem of her shirt and slide beneath the material, indulging in the soft warmth of her bare flesh.

“Wait. Stop. This isn’t what I wanted.” But she’s lying. I can hear that in her voice. I can smell that in her scent. I can feel it in the way her hand clutches my arm, as if she’s anchoring herself with that grip, to keep her fingers from wandering.

“Yes, it is.” That thrumming begins low in my throat again, and the scent of her arousal swells. She wants me as badly as I want her.

“No!” Lilliana shoves me over and rolls off the mattress. Leaving me panting in a dissipating cloud of her arousal. Alone on the bed.

A growl rolls up my throat before I can stop it. I’m on my feet in an instant, stalking toward her. Sniffing the air. Desperate for another whiff of her scent.

“Carson…” There’s warning in her voice. She raises one finger like a teacher scolding a child. “Stay back.”

The room looks different, suddenly. Brighter. Crisper. My focus has sharpened, like it does when I hunt Brennan’s latest challenge on the playground. The beast inside me is a predator, and by backing away from me, she’s established herself as prey.

Fuck.

It’s all I can do to keep from charging her at full speed. From pinning her to the wall, ripping her pants off, and lifting her until her legs settle over my shoulders, so I can lick her until she screams my name. That’s what capturing this prey would mean. Winning her over. Showing her what I can do for her.

Instead, I move slowly, every motion tightly controlled. Yet that seems to make her even more skittish. As if she can’t trust my slow, careful movements.

Smart girl.

“Carson. Please. This isn’t funny. Stay back.”

“I would, if that were really what you want. But it isn’t.” My voice sounds odd. Deeper and more gravelly.

“You don’t know what I want.” She props her hands on her hips, and my gaze snaps into focus on them, instinctively tracking the sudden motion.

“You’re wet, and I can smell it, Lilliana. Like I can smell the fucking rain.”

“I… You’re serious?” Her cheeks are red again, but that hasn’t dampened the scent of her arousal. She likes knowing I can tell. “You can smell…that?”

I nod slowly. “I’ve been smelling it all night. I want to taste it too. Do you want me to taste you?”

She groans—a sound she should be making as I slide deep inside her. Then she shakes her head, but that fib is already crumbling around her.

“Don’t lie to me.”

Her temper flares, a jolt of a sharper heat spiking above the warm scent of her lust. “Don’t tell me what to do!”

I smile as I steal closer, on alert for any sign that she might bolt. “So you admit you were lying?”

“It’s none of your business what I say. Or what I’m feeling.”

But that’s not true either. She belongs with me, whether she understands that yet or not. And the beast is thrilled by her insistence upon being caught. Being won over…

I’m willing to play that game, because I know that in the end she will be mine. And I desperately want to be hers.

“Just breathe,” I whisper, hoping to calm her.

“I don’t want to breathe! Because then I smell you, and I want other things!” Her gaze flicks over my shoulder, toward the door, and a growl rolls up from my chest. She’s overwhelmed and looking for a way out. I understand. But I can’t let—

She darts to the right, and I lunge into her path, my arms out, my pulse racing. This is fucked up. She’s frightened, and all I want to do is set her at ease, so she’ll give me a chance. Yet the scent of her fear only makes my cock harder.

The beast glories in the chase. He thinks this is normal. That he’s supposed to catch her to prove he can. To prove himself worthy of her attention.

“Carson, stop!” The sour scent of fear overwhelms the warm musk of her lust, and my mouth starts to water. My hands twitch, eager to clutch at tender handfuls of her soft flesh.

Lilliana glances at the door again, and my growl swells into a snarl. She jumps, uneasy gaze glued to me.

I take a deep breath, forcing my pulse to slow. Then I speak clearly and slowly, hoping she can hear the urgency in my voice. “Lilliana. Do not run.”