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.