Free Facing Fear by Gennita Low

to throw back her head to look up at him.
    “On why you’re doing this research.” His hand reached out and circled her long braid, but instead of pulling it, he slid the length through his closed palm. “Tell me, Nikki, what is it about me they want you to find out?”
    Nikki watched as he started to loosen her hair from its barrette. She should say something to stop him but his expression fascinated her. There was a reverence in the way he handled each thick strand as he unwound the length of it.
    He looked up, hands still busy. “Well?”
    “They want to know whether you’re safe,” she breathed out as he reached the halfway point of her braid. His hands stopped, but only for a moment. He had loosened her hair with the quickness of someone who had done it often. An unskilled pair of hands would have tangled the long hair by now. He resumed this strangely new, yet familiar, action, as if they weren’t two strangers in the middle of a verbal altercation.
    Her hair, a little damp still, came free, already wavy from being twisted. “Am I?” he asked. “Safe?”
    He was a master manipulator. He knew the correct question was what he was supposed to be safe for, what they were afraid he would do. Instead he chose to make it personal, using her words against her. Just as they had suspected all along, he wasn’t that man who played by the rules, choosing his options with dull conservatism by focusing all his energy toward following regulation. It now seemed as if he didn’t care anymore whether they found out.
    “No,” she whispered back as he fanned her hair between his fingers. “You’re not safe.”
    “So what do you suggest to correct this?” Rick taunted. “And how would that help your romance writing? Or am I supposed to help you with that part of your research?”
    So they had sent her to find out whether he was safe, had they? Rick wanted to laugh but he bitterly swallowed the urge. He had spent a decade being safe, and now because of Gorman’s betrayal, they wanted their dullest man declared a danger.
    He looked at Nikki Taylor with her long hair and knowing eyes. Fine. He was tired of playing it their way, anyhow. He would go along with this and in the process expose them for what they were. She was a tool for them, and he would use her as his.
    Why not? He reached out, unable to resist touching her long braid. It was thick and soft, and he knew when it was dry and hanging loose, it would blanket her entire body. She hadn’t moved or objected when he pulled the barrette off.
    For some masochistic reason, he wanted to torture himself. They had sent Nikki Taylor as temptation, and he wasn’t even fighting it. Everything about her was a lure, and he went for the thing that had caught his attention, time and time again. He wanted to see her hair unsecured. He wanted to feel the heavy curtain spilling over his shoulders as he made love to her against that bathroom wall. He wanted to find out if it would slide over his naked back, like cool Chinese silk,as he slowly brought her to a climax on that green and white bed behind him.
    Would she be trained to please him? He looked up from the undone hair in his hands into her raised face and caught that expression in her eyes that kept bothering him. Her fear of him was very real. He had tested it. When he stood across the room, she was able to fence with him. He had moved within five feet of her, and even though she stood her ground and challenged him, her eyes were wary. When he finally came close enough to touch her, her hands had disappeared into her pockets, as if she was trying not to show her nervousness.
    She was right. He wasn’t safe. Not to her. Or to himself.
    “When can we start?”
    Her question jerked him out of his revelry. His eyes narrowed as he tried to determine her frame of mind. Nikki Taylor didn’t strike him as a flirt, but of course, that could be part of her act. Her dark brown eyes looked back at him steadily although her hands