Free Naked & Unleashed by Emily Ryan-Davis Page A

walk away were many. No matter how many times she rolled those reasons over in her head, she always came back to the certainty that she had to protect herself from him. When sleep finally came, it was uneasy and fitful.
    Sometime in the night, she startled awake. Heart racing, she lay in the dark listening to the window-unit air conditioner. The heat wave that had begun two weeks earlier wasn’t showing any signs of ending. Even with the AC, she felt too hot in her skin. And she missed Mikal. The urge to hear his voice overcame her willpower. She reached for her phone but found the nightstand empty of anything besides her alarm clock.
    Sighing, Callista climbed from the bed and felt her way through the dark apartment. She tripped over something just inside the living room and caught herself on a bookshelf. Cursing softly, she stooped to move the obstacle out of the way. Her fingertips touched corduroy and a chill slid down her spine, only to turn into heat between her legs.
    Throat dry, she wrapped the long strap of her Fossil purse around her hand and slowly pulled it toward her. “Mikal?” she asked softly.
    The AC hummed and rattled. Callista stared into the dark at the familiar shapes of her furniture, alternately trying to pick out anything—anybody—that didn’t belong and praying she would find nothing out of the ordinary. She wasn’t sure how long she crouched in the dark before her aching calves compelled her to move. Easing onto her hands and knees, she crept around the end of the futon and fumbled on the low coffee table in search of her phone—which she was not going to turn off ever again.
    She huddled on the floor until a rectangle of light alerted her to twenty-seven messages, all from Mikal. Easing up onto the futon, she bypassed the messages and went straight to dialing his number. As she lifted the phone to her ear, she caught movement in her peripheral vision. A scream rose in her throat but a large, strong hand clamped across her mouth from behind, cutting her off before she made a sound.
    A powerful arm banded across her ribs, hauling her backward and over the futon’s low back. Adrenaline spiked, racing through her veins and roaring in her ears. Callista clawed at the arm across her chest and kicked her feet, but her bare soles didn’t elicit so much as a grunt from the man behind her.
    He was silent through her struggles, even when she raked her fingernails across the back of his hand so hard she felt the wetness of his blood on her fingers. In her bedroom, he dropped her facedown on the narrow bed and quickly straddled her hips, holding her down with his weight on her thighs and his hand on the back of her head.
    She finally got her scream but the mattress muffled her cry. Above her, her assailant grasped the waist of her panties and wrenched them down over her ass. He plunged his hand between her legs and roughly spread the lips of her pussy. Wetness eased the way as he sawed his fingers back and forth, spreading her juices up between the cheeks of her ass.
    Callista flexed her hands in the sheets and whimpered, squirming beneath him. Her clit jumped every time he caught it between his fingers and her tight nipples jabbed the mattress below but some sane part of her told her she should be fighting, not enjoying. Digging in with her knees, she tried to gain enough purchase to buck him off. He delivered a hard slap to her hip. The crack of flesh on flesh rang in her ears, lingering as he bent over her back and rocked his erection against her ass.
    “Go ahead and fight, lover,” he whispered, kissing her ear. “Scream too. Your squirmy little ass makes me hard. Before we’re done tonight, I’m going to fuck you there, good and deep, and I want you crying and telling me how much it hurts.”
    She strained to hear Mikal’s voice in the rough words but the whisper could have belonged to anybody. When she heard his zipper open, reality struck hard. Fear swelled in her chest, giving her