Excerpt of Close Contact by Katherine Allred

"You are a pretty one," he murmured. Then his voice hardened. "Too pretty to be such a good liar."

Before I could blink twice, he had my skirt up and my knife in his hand, the tip pressed against my throat. "Helpless females like you're pretending to be do not carry such weapons. Now I'll have the truth." The Alien Affairs' instructors drilled us to react to a threat first and think later. With no conscious decision on my part, my training took over and I was moving before he finished speaking. My left hand went over his arm and slammed it downward. The move shifted the knife from my throat and numbed his muscles so he loosed his grip. I caught the knife and swung it up in an underhand arc. Suddenly I stopped. Both Reynard and I stood frozen in place, staring down at the knife pressed to his stomach, him in surprise, me in horror. It's one think to theoretically practice killing a human during training. It's another thing entirely to realize you'd almost done it for real, and involuntarily at that. Especially when the human in question was one I'd been lusting after not a second before.