I wanted to tell him I didn’t curl up or tremble for anyone. But I was doing both now, hunching and shaking and gasping for breath in the painful collar of his hand.

Bending over me, he pressed every inch of his body against every inch of mine. His impressive height and latitude of shoulders consumed my field of view and suffocated my senses. And his scent… Dear lord, he smelled clean. The soap he used to bathe, the aromatic mint on his lips, the cedar oil on his skin—the concoction was an aphrodisiac flooding what little air trickled in through my nose.

The sight of his powerful physique before without a shirt had struck me with sizzling awareness of his beauty. And now, with the blue coat stretching across the solid expanse of his chest, his nearness had the same effect.

I bit down on my tongue, but I couldn’t quell my shaking.

How many times had I faced down a cruel, attractive man and came out on top? I was more brazen than any titled lady, physically stronger than the average woman. Priest was the only person who’d managed to knock my knees out from under me. Because I’d let him. And I’d learned.

But I was no match for a man who dangled me over the bellowing sea without a hint of pity or slack. As tightly as he was squeezing my airway, his face should have been on fire with fury. Yet he maintained his usual phlegmatic expression. Chillingly calm. Self-possessed.

“Ashley…” My lips moved without sound or breath. Please, release me.

He shifted, trapping one of my knees between the rail and his hips. Maintaining his hold on my neck, he lifted my other leg and tossed it off the balcony.

Panic surged, and I flailed, trying to adjust my weight to straddle the balustrade. But the rope didn’t reach, and he allowed me no space to move. The position suspended me in the air with one leg hooked over the rail and the other kicking into the darkness.

Fighting gravity and fatigue, I couldn’t close my thighs. I twisted uselessly, spread wide open with the warm wind smiting my feminine flesh. “Ashley, stop! What are you—?”

He slammed his palm between my legs with unholy force.

Pain exploded, and I cried out soundlessly, gulping and flinching through a stunned spasm. He loosened his grip on my throat as if he wanted to hear me scream. Then he struck my cunt again, forcefully, brutally, with his open hand, unleashing hell on my tender nub of nerves.

The shirt blocked his view of my nudity, but his strokes aimed true. He hit me over and over, bending into each blow and targeting my clitoris.

His breathing shortened into bursts of grunts, and his pelvis smashed against my trapped leg, grinding his erection as he swung.