How did I want this to end? Could I allow that innocence to be taken brutally, roughly, by a man like Torres? Or could I bring myself to ease her into it with kindness and a gentle hand?
No, I couldn’t do it. Every time I even allowed myself to think about it, all I saw was the little girl she had been. It felt wrong on every level to violate her in such a way.
Surely, there had to be someone else.
My father’s words came back to me. No one else could be trusted. That was why he left it to me. He knew I’d never lose control with her, that I’d never take her innocence and leave her worthless.
There must be others I could trust with this task, though. I had friends—or maybe they were more of acquaintances—I could call upon. Wouldn’t they be trustworthy enough that they could show her how to go down on a man or give a hand job? I was sure any one of them would jump at the chance for a little free action with one of the women here.
The idea of standing outside of a room, listening to that happening, made my stomach clench. I’d have to stay near, in case something happened. If whoever I decided was right for the job tried to take things too far, I could step into the room and push the barrel of my gun into the back of his head, and that should stop things pretty quickly. But I wouldn’t be able to do that if I was in a different part of the house, trying to pretend it wasn’t happening.
There was another option, of course, and that was lying to my father about it being done, and leaving her the hell alone. She was going to suffer men pawing all over her for the rest of her life, so why not allow her these last few days of her body being her own?
I let out a growl and slammed my fist down on the desk in frustration. I knew why I couldn’t just leave her be. What if Torres pushed her to go down on him, and she bit him or couldn’t take him deep enough? I knew exactly how that would end—with a slap, or worse. If I didn’t somehow get her to learn how to do those things, I would be the one who had failed her. If she did well, she’d be cherished and praised, and I’d rather that than her getting beaten.
My thoughts went back to the women who lived here. Surely there would be someone who could show her how to do these things. I thought for a moment. I would speak with Yolanda and see what she thought. Perhaps there was some trick she could show Catalina that would help.
I knew I was only sheltering her for a tiny fraction of time.
Was I doing it for her, or was I actually doing it to protect myself?
The house felt strange with my father not in it. Several of his men walked the grounds, their guns in clear sight at their hips. Had they been told to report back on how well I did here? I never wanted to let my father down. All my life had been about pleasing him, about making him proud of me, but this was the one thing he’d told me to do where I was actually considering going against his orders.
I left the office and made my way through the house to step outside into the warm sunshine. There were no clients visiting now, and the women had some time off. The tinkle of their laughter floated through the air toward me, taking me back to so many moments of my childhood. I’d been fascinated by the women as a boy. Some were more like mother figures, but other, younger women were darkly intriguing in ways I knew to be completely wrong. Even as a boy, I’d understood that they exuded sex.
The door of one of the rooms opened, and Catalina stepped out, still carrying the basket of laundry. I sucked in a breath and moved back, pressing myself against the side of the house in the hope she wouldn’t see me. This was crazy. Why was I hiding from her? And if I couldn’t even bring myself to have her see me, how the hell was I going to do what my father had asked of me?
A rush of blood flowed to my cock, and I pressed my hand against the front of my pants as it stiffened. I closed my eyes and screwed up my face, willing the sensation away. I couldn’t think of her like that. Even though she was only a few days off being a grown woman, she was still little Kitty-cat in my head. Every fiber of my body rebelled against it.
Six years age difference wasn’t much when you were an adult, but it had always felt like a huge gap when we’d been children. Not that I hadn’t been happy to play with her. She’d been cute and funny, and often annoying, but she’d been another child in my otherwise lonely world. I’d have done anything to make her smile, and I knew she worshipped me. And that had been fine when she’d been small, but then she’d started to grow up, and I knew things couldn’t stay the way they were. It was very different as a ten-year-old boy when a cute four-year-old ran to give you a hug, compared to being an eighteen-year-old when a long-limbed twelve-year-old who seemed to have developed hips and breasts overnight went to do the same thing.
I waited until Catalina had worked her way a couple of rooms along, and then slipped toward the bedroom I’d heard the laughter coming from. This was Yolanda’s room, and it was her I wanted to talk to. Yolanda was the mother of the group. She was the one who took care of the new girls when they were brought to the compound. She taught them that it was better to wipe their tears and accept their new life than it was to fight against it and most likely end up dead. Yes, the women here no longer owned their own bodies, but they were treated well. They each had their own rooms with private bathrooms. They were provided with good meals every day. And they had each other. They were never allowed access to the outside world, which included phones and computers. Their only entertainment was each other and the books they were allowed to read, and the men who paid huge amounts of money to visit them, of course.
When I’d been younger, I hadn’t known where the women had come from. I hadn’t given much thought to it—they’d just appear, sometimes in the middle of the night. Sometimes they’d stay, and sometimes they wouldn’t. It was all I’d ever known, and I hadn’t thought to question it. Now, however, I was older, and my father wanted me to continue with the business should something happen to him. So now I knew the women were often taken from the street. They’d had nothing but drug and alcohol problems, and they were brought here where they were able to get clean. They’d had no roof over their heads to start with, no food in their bellies, and my father provided them with that. Maybe the situation wasn’t perfect, and sometimes it didn’t work out, but here they were given a home and companionship.
But they were expected to provide something in return.
Their bodies.
Quickly, I rapped my knuckles on the door of Yolanda’s room. I didn’t bother to wait for her to say “come in,” but opened the door and stepped inside. The women’s chatter fell away at my arrival, and they all jumped to their feet, heads down, not meeting my eye. I stood to one side as they scurried out through the door, careful not to touch me. Only one of the women—a newer arrival with blonde hair and the body of a porn star—got too close, brushing up against me as she passed. She flicked her gaze up to me and looked at me briefly through mascara-heavy lashes, before glancing away and following the others.
I frowned. That one could cause me trouble.
Yolanda had known me since I was a small boy, and she didn’t avert her gaze from me as normally would be expected. I didn’t want her to, either. My father would expect it, but things were different between the two of us. I respected Yolanda more than most other people here.
“Angelo,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
“I have a problem. I wondered if you might be able to help me with it.”
Her afro black hair was streaked with white at the temples, and there were fine lines across her brow and feathering out from the corners of her brown eyes. She was approaching forty, but she was still a beautiful woman.
“My father has gone away for a few days and left me in charge.”
She nodded. “Of course.”
“He gave me a job to do while he was gone.”
She remained silent, waiting for me to fill in the details.
“As you know, Catalina will be leaving us in a few days.”
“Yes. The day after her eighteenth birthday.”
I cleared my throat, suddenly self-conscious. I shouldn’t be embarrassed talking about this with her. It was only sex, and that was what she did every day. “My father is worried that Catalina won’t know how to... be with a man.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “She’s grown up here. I don’t think that is a secret.”
“No, what I mean is that she won’t know how to do everything that is involved in a way that will keep Mr. Torres happy.”
“I see. Your father thinks she won’t pleasure him.”
“Exactly. He’s asked me to teach her. He wants her to know the... tricks to making a man satisfied, so she won’t be punished when the time comes and she’s unable to do it purely because she’s never been given the knowledge.”
“If the master has asked you to do it, why have you come to me? You’re a man. You’re also a man who grew up here, and I’m sure you know what men enjoy.”
I cleared my throat again. “Yes, of course. But it’s Catalina...”
“Ah, I see. You don’t like the idea of taking her innocence from her.”
“In part, perhaps. But it just feels wrong to me. She was always the little girl I grew up with.”
Her voice softened. “She’s not a little girl anymore, Angelo. I’m sure you can see that. And her innocence won’t last for much longer. As long as she remains intact for Torres, the knowledge of how men like to be stroked and licked and kissed would only be doing her a service.”
“I thought perhaps you would be able to show her for me.”
She stared at me and then burst out laughing. “I do not have a cock, Angelo.”
My face burned, and I glanced away, suddenly shameful, that boy again. “I know that. I thought you could improvise.”
“She needs to know what she is dealing with. An erection can be a delicate thing to handle.”
I exhaled a reluctant sigh. It would need to be a man, then.
“You’re right. Can you tell Catalina to come and see me in my office as soon as she’s finished with her chores?”
Yolanda nodded. “Yes, sir.”
I would need to make some calls and see who was available to come and spend time with Catalina. The compound was located in a spot in the middle of nowhere, with no big towns or cities surrounding it, only forests, which made it harder for the authorities to find. Whichever of my acquaintances I decided upon would also need to be able to get here for long enough to make it worth both our whiles. I guessed Catalina would need a number of sessions, so having someone here who could only stay for a matter of hours wouldn’t be of any use. Like my father had suggested, I would give them use of the house, and of Catalina, for a few days, so that by the end of it she would come out with far more experience than she currently had. I had a couple of ideas about who to ask. They were all professional businessmen, and each of them had always been more than happy to pay a high class stripper or call girl for what they’d wanted in the past. I was sure knowing they’d have access to a girl in training for free would ensure they’d be in the first flight out here, even if it meant clearing their schedule for a couple of days. They would have to be happy about the strict no penetrative sex policy, however. Everything else would be on the table—they could take her orally, or get her to do whatever they wanted to them, so long as they didn’t cause her any physical damage, and that should be enough to keep them satisfied.
I didn’t want to think about Catalina with a man, but that was just how things worked in our world. In a few days, she’d be taken by Elliot Torres anyway, so I needed to face up to what she was.
She was never just a girl growing up here. She never had a future other than the one approaching her now.
It was about time I faced up to that.
Chapter Seven
Seven Years Earlier
THE DAYS ALWAYS DRAGGED by when Angel was away at school.
I’d preferred how things had been when we were both younger, and he hadn’t gone to a proper school. Instead, he’d had a tutor who came to the house—a tutor who now taught me all the things I guessed I would have learned if I’d gone to a real school, too.
But then, as he’d gotten older, he went away to school, and only came back during the holidays. I missed him desperately when he was away. My world was a far lonelier, emptier place without him. I counted down the days and weeks until his return, knowing that at least I had that to look forward to. I could deal with the loneliness as long as I knew he was always coming back to me. He’d bring me gifts upon his return—small items he’d stored away during the term time, notebooks, and pens, and chocolates.
When he’d first gone away to school, he seemed to do this unthinkingly, happy to see my excitement and enthusiasm about his return, but as we’d both gotten older, I sensed his self-consciousness each time he gave me something, how his cheeks would grow pink, and he stopped meeting my eye, thrusting the gifts at me awkwardly.
He still brought them, though, and that was all that mattered. While I adored the little trinkets, or the chocolate, or the new pencils and notepads, it wasn’t only because I didn’t have much, and they were a treat. No, it was the knowing he’d been thinking about me while he’d been away that really mattered to me.
I’d woken up early that morning, knowing today was the day he’d be coming home for a couple of weeks. The last six weeks of him being at school had felt like the longest of my life. Yes, I was an eleven-year-old girl now, and I knew Angel was almost an adult, but we still had things we could talk about. He told me all about what life was like in the outside world—though to me it sounded like school wasn’t much different than the compound, only with more people—and we discussed the books he’d read and the movies he’d seen.
I put on my best outfit then went and lurked in the courtyard, my ears pricked for any sign of an approaching car.
Yolanda spotted me. “Angelo is coming home today, I take it.”
I nodded, but heat rose to my cheeks. “Yes. It feels like he’s been away for ages.”
She offered me a kind smile. “That’s because he has. You can’t live your life through him, though, Catalina. He’s almost a man now, and then his schooling will be finished, and he’ll go on to do other things.”
My stomach twisted with a dark, sickening feeling. “You mean he’ll stop coming home.”
She must have seen my face, as she reached out and squeezed my hands. “I’m sure he won’t stop completely. This is still his home. I just hate seeing you putting your life on hold every time he’s away. It’s like you have this light inside you that goes out each time he leaves.”
I nodded, understanding every word she was saying. That was exactly how I felt, like I came alive again when he was around. “Okay.”
She glanced back toward her room. “I need to get ready for work. Are you going to be all right?”
I forced a smile. “Of course.”
“Good.”
She turned and left me waiting there.
Moments later, I heard the low hum of a car engine approaching, and my heart leaped in my chest. It might not be him, of course—there were plenty of other people who came to the compound—but instinctively, I knew it was.
The gates opened, and the car drove through and parked in the courtyard. I could barely contain my excitement, wanting to jump up and down and clap, but also not wanting to look like a silly little girl. I was eleven now, with my twelfth birthday coming up. This time next year, I’d practically be a teenager. I knew I’d never catch up to Angel, not completely, but us both being teenagers together made me feel like we were just that little bit closer in age.
The passenger door opened, and his long legs folded out of the car, and Angel climbed out. It had only been six weeks, but he looked older, the stubble on his chin already showing the potential to become a thick beard one day.
A smile broke across my face, and I ran up to him. “Angel!”
I flung myself against him, my arms wrapped around his waist, squeezing him tight. His body went stiff for
a moment, and then he hugged me back quickly and gave me an awkward pat on the shoulder.
“Catalina. Hi.” I noticed he hadn’t called me Kitty. “Did you miss me?”
“Of course,” I pouted. “It’s sooo boring here without you.”
“Nah, I’m not that much fun.”
The driver had gone to the trunk to take out Angel’s suitcase, and Angel turned from me to take it from him.
“Right,” he said to me, giving me a strange restrained smile. “I’d better go and unpack. I’ll catch up with you later, yeah?”
“Oh, sure. Okay.”
He gave me one final smile before walking away, dragging his suitcase along with him. I stood, watching him go, the horrible sickly feeling back in my stomach again. Normally, he’d have picked me up and swung me around and pressed his gifts into my hands, as though he was as eager to give them to me as I was to receive them.
I told myself that he’d give them to me after he’d settled in and unpacked—maybe my presents were in his case—but that never happened.
I knew then that things had changed between us.
I cried myself to sleep that night, not because I was disappointed that I didn’t receive a gift, but because I knew then that he hadn’t thought of me while he’d been gone.
Chapter Eight
Present Day
I STOOD OUTSIDE THE office door, my heart lodged in a painful lump in the base of my throat, making it hard to swallow.
Angelo wanted to see me, and I was terrified. Had I done something to displease him? He hadn’t given me any sign that he was happy to see me at all, and nothing made me think this was going to be a pleasant encounter. Despite knowing all of this, my traitorous little heart still wanted to be in his company. The idea of being alone in his presence made my legs weak and my stomach watery. It was stupid, but I kept thinking of the women in some of the old-fashioned books he used to bring home for me after he’d been away at school, how they would swoon in the presence of certain men. That was how I felt now, as though I was about to faint like a woman in an old-fashioned romance novel. How dumb of me.
For Him: The Complete Series: A Dark Romance Page 4
