As much as I hate Spider right now, I feel an unexpected rush walking into this place on the arm of this big, tattooed, leather-clad biker everyone else trembles to look at.
I shake it off and turn to him on our way toward an empty table. “I have to use the bathroom before we sit, please.”
He shakes his head in annoyance. “Striker, order me a plate, will you? I’ll be back.” He gestures for me to follow him down a hall at the rear.
At the opening to the hall, Spider’s hand tightens on the back of my nape. “Don’t get any ideas,” he growls in a low voice close to my ear.
“What?” I look up at him.
“You have a nasty habit of getting up to no good given the chance. I’m keeping my eye on you.” He gestures to the door down the hall, which has a sign for a ladies’ bathroom.
His intentions become immediately clear.
My jaw drops and I turn to him. “No way are you doing this here. You’re not coming in there with me, Spider,” I hiss.
There are customers passing by the hall, any one of whom would see him walking into or out of the women’s restroom with me. This isn’t a truck stop, it’s a place where families come to eat. This isn’t going to go over well.
With a glance back at the main room, probably to make sure there’s no one near enough to hear him, he marches me almost to the door to the restroom where the light from the main room doesn’t reach. Then Spider slips his hand around my throat and puts his mouth to my ear. His voice is a dangerous rumble.
“Listen here, you treacherous little thief. I told you, privacy is not a right for you. It’s a privilege, one you haven’t earned. If I want to stand over you watching you take a piss, I will, and you’ll do as your fucking told.”
This is not the first time he’s said something like this to me. His anger pounds into me, hot and scalding. The words, or maybe the feel of his hand around my throat are a devastating reminder of what I’ve lost. I have no privacy, no rights. I’m a prisoner again, exactly as I was in the Colony, and he’s perfectly willing to treat me, if anything, far more like a trapped possession than the pastors ever did.
Not for the first time, I feel myself shutting down, hands dropping, my breathing quickening. Brain trying to retreat to a place where all the fight has gone out of me, rendering me dangerously weak and utterly helpless.
I’m the Colony robot again, without a voice, totally beyond resistance.
His hand around my throat tightens. “Do you understand me?” he hisses.
The threat in his voice ignites a panic and somehow shatters the spell I seem to have fallen under. Breathing hard, I close my eyes and yank myself back to the here and now.
“Yes,” I snap, fighting down the reflexive urge to call him sir.
“Look at me,” he orders.
But my eyes won’t drag to his. I can’t get them to lift from the floor.
He growls and grips my jaw, turns me toward the wall and pushes me up against it hard enough that I gasp.
“Spider, wait—”
Before I can get another word out, his lips claim mine.
Mortification streaks through me. I can’t believe he’s kissing me like this right in the middle of a public restaurant where anyone could walk back here at any moment.
All my life, I’d been taught that this kind of affection is meant only for a husband and wife, but also that even between them, it’s meant to happen strictly behind closed doors. In the Colony, an unmarried woman caught in such wanton acts as this would be paraded naked through the streets, publicly whipped, and branded a whore.
Shocked, knees weak, I grip the front of his cut. A low growl of pleasure rumbles from him. Pressing hard against me, he traps my wrists between our chests with one hand, fisting my hair with the other. He angles my head the way he likes while his mouth pries mine open, demanding.
Fear and shame prick at me, and yet, as Spider’s lips devour mine, a thrill also courses through my veins, making my blood run hot. Never in my life would I have imagined myself, a pastor’s daughter who’s meant to be the pinnacle of purity and virtue, being kissed to insanity in the back hall