Waylon stares down at me with that scary look I’ve become all too familiar with over the last forty-eight hours—like Violence and Crazy have lit a bonfire behind his eyes.

“What did I tell you about backtalk, angel?”

The memory of him lying across my bed, handcuffed and wounded but not truly subdued, flashes inside my head.

But somehow, I manage to swallow again and tell him, “That rule no longer counts. It was from a long time ago. When you had consent and weren’t keeping me imprisoned against my will.”

The truck's overhead light chooses that moment to blink off as if it's tired of waiting for us to finish our argument.

I can no longer see Waylon, but I can feel him in the darkness. Crazed and ticking like a bomb.

His lethal voice sounds like an explosion in the pitch black when he says, “You’re lying to me. And you’re for damn sure lying to yourself. This is where we’re supposed to be.”

The memory of the last time he said that sears through my brain. Right after he pushed inside of me and implanted himself so deep. So deep, my body didn’t know what to do.

He grinds himself against my core now as if to remind me how deep he got back then. The heat of his long thick erection burns into my skin as if the denim of his jeans and the polyester of my scrub top don’t exist. And this shouldn’t be my body’s reaction, but the gas stove spark igniter starts clicking again.

“You feel this,” he growls as if he can hear that clicking too. His breath is hot on the side of my face, and his beard prickles over the sensitive skin on my neck, raising goosebumps.

“No, no…” I want to say the words, but they come out on a breathy gasp. “You’re crazy.”

“Yeah, I’m crazy,” he agrees. “I’m a crazy devil, but I want your hands on me, little angel—that’s what I said in Spanish to you that one day with the sponge bath. But you were too afraid even back then. Afraid of me. Afraid of yourself. You couldn’t work up the courage to ask me for a translation.”

“I should have been afraid,” I answer with a tremble in my voice. “I mean, look where I am now because of my poor decisions. Stuck with a psycho who won’t let me go.”

He chuckles like I just told a joke for the sole purpose of amusing him.

“Yeah, you’re probably wishing right now, you ain’t never met me. You want to go back to your safe little world—keep pretending you don’t belong to me, keep denying it. But there is no denying me, denying this. You feel this thing between us. You feel it.”