Free Perception by Nicole Edwards

voice low, her anger apparent. “Let me go.”
    “No. Not
until we hash this out.”
    “Hash what out?” she asked as she tried to push him away unsuccessfully. Albeit, she
hadn’t been using as much force as she should have, not to mention Xander Boone
wasn’t going to budge unless he absolutely wanted to.
    Xander
gripped her hips gently, holding her in place with relative ease. He wasn’t
going to hurt her; she knew that. And she wasn’t at all scared of him. She just
wasn’t sure she could hold out being this close to him. Not after everything
she’d been feeling since last night.
    The man,
despite all of the warnings that she’d always given herself where he was
concerned, drew her in, made her want things she shouldn’t want, and he’d
proven that effortlessly at Devotion. But she still had time to turn things
around, to ignore everything that had happened between them and move on with
life as normal.
    When she
stopped pushing against him, he loosened his grip, and she surprised herself
when she stopped putting up a fight.
    “So
talk,” she said after a long, deafening silence.
    Xander
moved, and Mercedes glanced down as he reached for her hands, linking his
fingers with hers before lifting her arms up over her head and pinning them
against the glass.
    Ok, this
was not good.
    When she
looked back up into his eyes, Mercedes knew he would see more than she wanted
him to. She couldn’t deny the fact that her body was humming. Being this close
to him, his hands holding her so easily in place, was doing funny things to her
insides. Sort of the way things went last night.
    Again,
there was the problem. She had to remind herself of the most important thing.
    She. Was.
Not. A. Submissive.
    Not at
all.
    And
that’s what Xander wanted.
    Her
entire life revolved around her hard earned control – in and out of the
bedroom. There was no room in her life for a man who wanted to order her
around, to insist that she do what would please him. As the pathetic tale goes:
been there, done that.
    “Young
lady, you will not be leaving this house.” “I don’t recall approving you to
wear that.” “Get off the goddamn phone.” “You won’t get a penny from me. If you
want it, work for it.” “Dammit, Priscilla, I didn’t give you permission to buy
her that.”  
    Her father’s
words rang inside of her head, the constant orders and restrictions, his
infallible ability to ensure she never got what she requested. He’d rode her
hard from the time she was little, never giving her an ounce of freedom because
he had preferred to keep her and her mother under his thumb.
    She damn
sure wouldn’t let any man control her like that again. It was the very reason
she left home as soon as she graduated from high school even though her father
had moved out the day she turned eighteen.
    “Please
don’t,” she whispered to Xander now, the words more a plea than a command. She
did not want to fight with him, and she found that her resistance to him wasn’t
nearly as fortified as she’d once believed.
    “Don’t
what?” he asked, sounding way too curious.
    “I don’t
want to do this,” she told him.
    She didn’t want to do this, no matter what her traitorous body was projecting.
    Shit, who
was she kidding? She did want this. She wanted him up against her, wanted to
feel the warmth of his body the way she had last night. Even while she had
slept alone in her bed, she’d ached for this man although she knew there was no
chance in hell that she would ever cross over to the dark side.
    “I’m not
asking you to do anything.”
    “No?”
Mercedes glared at him.
    Infuriating
Dom.
    He was
asking for everything, and he very well knew it. They’d been friends for too
long. She knew how he operated. And what that said about her, because she’d
allowed him to manipulate her to this point, she didn’t want to think about.
    “Fine.
Then how about this? I can’t do this,” she told him. “You know I can’t,
X. It’s not