The man's voice was coldly detached, laced with an arrogant, almost manic edge.
Was he trying to intimidate her?
She bristled at the implication that she had made a grave mistake. It wasn't the first time she'd been threatened in her line of work as a paparazzo.
"What photos?" Lily asked, her expression a mask of wide-eyed innocence. She had no intention of admitting to anything. Raising the camera equipment in her hands, she added, "I'm just here to take some landscape shots."
She had to find a way to escape, to protect the exclusive scoop she'd just captured.
Her eyes darted from side to side, weighing her options - the lake to her right, the chain-link fence to her left.
Lily took a slow, measured step back, trying to calculate her odds of making a successful run for it...
"Hand them over!" The man's patience had clearly run out. He lunged forward, seizing her wrist in a bruising grip as his other hand began to roam over her body in a invasive search.
The searing heat of his fingertips against her skin made Lily tense, her breath catching in her throat.
Was he seriously going to frisk her like some common criminal? The man had clearly lost his mind!
Acting on pure instinct, she yanked the memory card from her sweater pocket and tossed it over the fence without a second thought.
...
The man's eyes tracked the path of the memory card as it arced through the air, landing on the narrow path beyond the fence. His gaze darkened with malevolent fury.
Perfect. Her little stunt had just sealed her fate!
Even now, with the evidence of her transgression lying just out of reach, she still refused to surrender the illicit photos.
The woman clearly had no sense of self-preservation.
"I despise those who refuse to see reason until they're staring into the open jaws of their own coffin." Ethan shoved her roughly against the chain-link, crowding into her space until she was enveloped by the overwhelming scent of him, the sheer masculine power of his presence.
One hand slammed into the metal near her head, caging her in, while the other delved beneath the v-neck of her sweater to close around the soft swell of her breast.
He squeezed once, assessed, and huffed out a derisive laugh.
Pitiful. She couldn't even begin to compare to Lana's voluptuous curves.
Lily's eyes flew wide with shock, her mind reeling as it tried to process the enormity of what was happening. What was he doing? Why was his hand there?!
"You pervert!" The words burst from her lips in an outraged shout as she came back to herself, shoving ineffectually at his chest in a desperate bid to dislodge him.
A pervert?
Oh, this was only the beginning...
At a mere five-foot-five, Lily's slender frame was no match for Ethan's imposing stature. Her small fists beating against his chest were little more than a mild annoyance, a negligible itch.
It took next to no effort to subdue her thrashing limbs, pinning her in place with the weight of his body. He reached up and removed the cumbersome DSLR that hung around her neck, tossing it carelessly aside, before lowering his face to hover a scant inch from her own, his lips curling in a cruel smile. "I'll stoop to your level just this once, to teach you the true cost of your voyeurism."
His voice was like something out of the deepest pits of hell, a sinister promise.
"Ah—!" A sharp hiss of pain slipped past Lily's clenched teeth as the blade of a Swiss Army knife traced a delicate line along the sensitive skin of her inner thigh, leaving a thin trail of crimson in its wake.
The sting of the shallow cut made her flinch, her body instinctively trying to shy away from the source of the pain.
With a single, brutal yank, Ethan ripped the hem of her white maxi dress, shredding the fabric until it barely covered the pert globes of her rear.