Facing Fear by Gennita Low Page A

his life. What, he hadn’t figured out yet, but he was determined to get to the bottom of it. For some reason, she challenged him, just by the sheer fact that she hadn’t come to him. He wanted to see her face-to-face, test her strength. He wanted to understand why she invaded his dreams.
    She was smaller than he had thought. On her bare feet, the top of her head cleared his shoulders by only a couple of inches. Yet everything about her overwhelmed his senses. Hehad grabbed her to see how she would react. Someone trained wouldn’t have been so easy to trap. This close, her damp hair smelled of flowers and vanilla. Her body exuded an elusive scent—a mixture of woman and something else, and it filled his lungs and invaded every pore in him as his body became aware of her state of undress.
    Good. He wanted her vulnerable, just as he felt vulnerable in his dreams, incapable of escape. She couldn’t run with a towel on. He tangled his hand in her hair, forcing her face up toward the bedroom light. Her eyes were large, doelike, and her mouth was parted, and it suddenly dawned on him that what he smelled was the combination of heat and fear. The woman’s eyes were terrified. He gazed into them, and briefly felt shame and revulsion at putting that look there.
    He should let her go. The woman was no danger to him.
    Without planning to, he pushed his body against her soft one. That scent surrounded him, the thick, sweet smell of clean woman and fear. But she hadn’t made another sound after the initial gasp. Her tongue flicked out, nervously wetting her upper lip. His gaze lowered and studied the pearly glow of her tempting flesh above her towel, heaving nervously and slipping slowly out of its protection. No, he wasn’t going to let her go yet.
    Nikki watched as Rick’s nostrils flared. Something dark and unfathomable entered his green eyes, and without warning he trapped her body with his own, arching her up against him by putting pressure to her locked arms behind her.
    Her heart roared in her head as panic bubbled up. She had reacted out of instinct to defend herself with the first move, but the moment he had touched her, the moment her brain had started to assimilate the fact that a man was holding her, all thought had fled. In its place was just the knowledge that she was powerless. Her speeding heart made her faint, and she tried to slow down her breathing. This was Rick Harden. It wasn’t…them.
    Before she could think of something to say, he did the unthinkable. The lower half of his tall, hard body pinned her against the corner of the wall and doorframe, and the handimprisoning hers behind her back was like manacles, yanking her to her toes.
    She was helpless in this position. She couldn’t fight back without exposing her nakedness. There were things she had been trained to do but it had been so long, and she had never allowed anyone close enough to harm her before. She resisted by digging down on her heels and gasped again when he inserted his leg between hers and lifted her off the floor, bracing his knee against the doorframe.
    She felt every tense and contracting muscle in his thigh. The heat from his body blanketed her. For a strange moment, she caught herself imagining him running in his shorts, those muscles moving and flexing with each step. Be careful what one wished for. She had wanted to see him run, had gone looking for him today; instead he had come looking for her.
    His hot skin against hers. She didn’t know why she was imagining that. She should loathe what he was doing to her but her naked body wasn’t pulling away from his clothed one. What she was feeling wasn’t revulsion. She didn’t like what Rick Harden was doing to her. Her mind rebelled at the thought of giving in.
    Her eyes met his. Pleading. Desperate. But of course he would never understand. He was a man. And she was in his power.
    “Let me go,” she finally managed a whisper. She had to escape before her body betrayed her