The Captain’s Obsession

CHAPTER 4: SAVIOUR

I knew she was behind the curtain before she even stepped on the brass weight.

The air in my room had changed the second I pushed the double doors open. It smelled of rain, cheap campus laundry detergent, and the faint, sweet scent of vanilla. Her scent. I had stood behind her in the lecture hall line enough times over the last semester to recognize it blindfolded.

I set my keys down on the mahogany dresser, the metal clinking softly, and pulled my knit sweater over my head. My skin was still hot from the afternoon skate, my muscles tight, but every nerve ending in my body was suddenly firing, drawing a direct line to the heavy velvet drapes by the window.

My lips pulled into a slow, dark curve.

Lorain Hart.

The stubborn scholarship girl with the razor-sharp gaze and the pride that belonged to a queen, not a maid’s daughter. The girl who had looked at me in the courtyard like I was the villain, even after I silenced a crowd of four hundred people for her.

She thought she was hiding. She thought she was invisible.

“You can come out, Lorain,” my voice sounded lower, thicker in the quiet room. “I know you’re behind there.”

A tense, suffocating second passed. Then, the velvet curtain parted.

She stepped into the light of my room, holding her battered canvas bag against her chest like a shield. Her dark hair was slightly messy, her cheeks flushed, and her eyes, god, those eyes were wild with a mixture of terror and defiance. She looked so small in the middle of my space, yet she was radiating a fierce, trembling heat that made my blood run hot.

“How did you know?” she whispered, her voice shaking but her chin still tilted up. Always so stubborn.

I didn't answer her. I walked toward her instead, my steps slow, deliberate, and entirely predatory. The space between us shrank, and I watched her pupils dilate, her chest rising and falling in shallow, rapid breaths. She wanted to back up, but the glass window was already pressed against her spine.

I stopped when I was inches away. Close enough to feel the warmth radiating off her skin. Close enough to see the tiny, frantic pulse point fluttering at the base of her throat.

“You’re loud, sweetheart,” I murmured, leaning down so my breath brushed the shell of her ear. I watched a shiver rip through her entire body. “And you don't belong in my room.”

“I didn’t want to be here,” she spat, trying to press herself flat against the glass to escape my proximity. But there was nowhere for her to go. I loomed over her, trapping her completely within my shadow. “My parents… they pushed me in here. Your father is downstairs. If he finds me…”

“He’ll destroy you,” I finished for her.

My gaze dropped to her lips. They were parted, dry, and trembling. An insane, dark urge flared in my chest, a sudden, violent need to lean down and crush my mouth against hers, to taste the panic and the anger and tame the wildness in her. I had spent months watching her from a distance, keeping my distance. But now she was in my room. Trapped.

I reached out, my fingers brushing the damp skin of her neck. She gasped, a soft, helpless sound that went straight to my groin. I let my thumb rest right over her racing pulse, feeling the frantic rhythm of her heart.

“If my father walks through those doors and sees you,” I whispered, my voice dropping to a gravelly, dangerous pitch, “he will have you thrown off this estate in handcuffs. He will strip your scholarship. He will make sure you and your parents are blacklisted from every estate in this country. Do you understand what he does to pests, Lorain?”

She swallowed hard, her eyes locking onto mine, searching for mercy and finding none. “Then let me go. Let me run back down the stairs.”

“Too late,” I muttered, my fingers tightening slightly on her jaw, tilting her face up to force her to look at me. “I just heard his car door close. The welcome staff is lining up. He’ll be in the foyer in thirty seconds.”

“Saviour, please..”

Hearing my name on her lips the breathy, desperate way she said it sent a jolt of pure, territorial fire through my veins.

“Quiet,” I commanded, my thumb tracing the line of her lower lip, pressing just hard enough to feel the soft, wet heat of her inner lip. “You’re staying right here. In my bed. In my space.”

Her eyes went wide. “What?”

“If you want to survive my father, you belong to me now,” I whispered, the possessive truth of it settling heavily in my chest. I didn't care about the contract her parents signed. I didn't care about the rules of this house.

I wanted her. And now that she was in my palace, I was never letting her leave.