Harlequin Dare May 2021 Box Set

by Jackie Ashenden

  This is what’s missing from what you give to people—this feeling. And you can never give it to them. Because you don’t feel this way with any of them and you never will.

  He was so warm around me, his weight heavy and reassuring, and yet a cold thread wound through me.

  He’d made everything different. He’d made sex different. And that was a problem because, now I knew how different it could be, how could I do my job? How could I be with clients when I knew how amazing it was to be with someone who mattered? With someone to whom I mattered? How could I do a good job for them when I knew how much better it could be?

  I always wanted to provide the best experience for them, especially the loneliest ones. The ones who were desperate for what I’d just experienced with Trajan. I’d always felt as if I was giving them something real and that, apart from the money, was one of the reasons I did what I did. But it wasn’t real, was it? It was closeness, but only physical. A human connection, but not an intimate one, and certainly not an emotional one. It was half measures. Second best.

  You were right. He did ruin you.

  ‘Hey.’ Trajan’s voice was soft and rumbling, the weight of him on me shifting, easing. ‘Are you okay?’ He stroked back a curl from my face, his blue gaze roaming over me, his mouth curving in a smile that looked a lot like tenderness.

  Did he feel this too? Or was it just me? He’d wanted real, and I’d given it to him, but had he given me the same in return?

  Does it matter? It’s only a night.

  The cold feeling tightened in my stomach. But that was all it took. Just a night.

  A night to understand what I was missing out on. A night to realise that everything I’d told myself about what I gave to my clients was a lie. A night to finally understand that the emotional component to sex wasn’t something I could ever give them.

  It was something I could only give to Trajan.

  Because you’re falling for him.

  My mouth dried, my throat tightening. This was going to ruin everything.

  ‘Maggie?’ His hands stroked the side of my face, his dark brows drawing down. ‘What is it?’

  I pushed at his shoulders, suddenly feeling as though I was suffocating. ‘Please...let me up.’

  His frown deepened but he shifted anyway, rolling off me and onto his side. His hand reached for me, but instantly I was up and off the couch, moving to the doorway that led to the kitchen, needing some space.

  Only a couple of recessed lights were on in the kitchen, but it was enough light for me to go to one of the cupboards where I knew he kept the glasses and take one out. Then I went to the sink and turned on the tap, filling up my glass, desperate for some moisture in my dry mouth and throat.

  Trajan appeared in the doorway a couple of seconds later, tall and gloriously naked. He moved around the counter, coming over to where I stood by the sink, then stopped not far away, folding his arms across his broad, bare chest.

  God, he was beautiful—even more so when he looked concerned.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked quietly, his gaze fixed on my face.

  ‘I needed some water.’ How could I tell him the truth? When a night was all we had? Turning back to the sink, I filled up the glass again. ‘You want some?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I put the glass down on the counter near where he stood and tried to pull myself together.

  Okay, so I needed this feeling inside me to mean nothing. Nothing at all. It might end up with the next few months being difficult when it came to clients, but time would get rid of it. Eventually it would fade. It did—all the time, if what my clients talked about was true.

  ‘Want to tell me what’s going on?’ Trajan asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ My mouth still felt dry. I reached for the glass I’d poured him and drank it thirstily.

  He dropped his arms, one hand making a grasping motion at the counter.

  I noticed, but didn’t take it in at first.

  He made another motion, as if he was trying to take something that wasn’t there. After a second, he laid his hand flat on the counter, unmoving.

  I frowned. It looked as if he was grasping at the glass of water I’d poured for him, but that couldn’t be right. He’d been looking right at me and would have seen me pick it up.

  I stared at him, my heart beating very fast all of a sudden.

  His gaze was dark and fathomless, staring into mine. ‘“Nothing” is not the correct answer,’ he said. ‘Not after sex.’

  Hardly aware of what I was doing, I took a slow, silent step to the side, away from the counter.

  He didn’t turn his head and his gaze didn’t track me. He continued to stare straight ahead, at the space where I’d been.

  ‘Come on, Maggie,’ he said softly. ‘Talk to me. Did I do something wrong?’

  My heartbeat was so loud, my pulse rocketing everywhere, little things I’d noticed but had dismissed slowly coming together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

  The meticulous way he picked things up and put them down, everything very precise. The lack of clutter. The careful way he cut up vegetables. The way he cocked his head when pouring a glass of wine, as if listening for something. All the lights in the living room tonight. The intense, focused way he studied my face...

  I stepped back to my position in front of him and put the glass down carefully. ‘When were you going to tell me that you’re blind, Trajan?’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Trajan

  I DIDN’T TAKE in what she’d said for a second. ‘What?’

  ‘I think you heard me.’ Her voice was low, and full of something that wasn’t anger precisely, but something akin to it.

  A cold feeling washed over me. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m holding a glass of water out to you, but you’re not taking it. It’s because you can’t see it, can you?’

  The cold became ice.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ I reached for her and felt my hand brush something on the counter. Maggie made a soft noise and then came the sound of breaking glass, as if something had shattered on the kitchen’s tiled floor.

  ‘It wasn’t in my hand,’ Maggie said after a second. ‘I put it on the counter and you knocked it off.’

  Shock surged inside me along with a fury so intense I could barely breathe. Fury at myself and how I’d exposed what I’d been so good at keeping secret for so long. Fury at my own distraction, too busy thinking of her to pay attention to where I was and my surroundings.

  Fury at this fucking disease that wouldn’t let me ignore it no matter how hard I tried.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she went on. ‘There’s glass everywhere. I’ll clean it up.’

  I hadn’t touched the lights in the kitchen; they were still on dim. Not that I could see. My night blindness was total. And now she knew, because I hadn’t been thinking. I hadn’t even thought not to follow her. Something had distressed her out there on the couch and I’d wanted to know what it was, so I’d come after her.

  The kitchen wasn’t uncharted territory—I knew every inch of it—so I hadn’t even paused as the darkness had closed around me. I’d been with her like this for months after all, cooking for her while she sat at the counter drinking wine and chatting. She hadn’t figured it out then, so there’d been no reason for me to think she’d figure it out now.

  But I hadn’t been thinking. I should have been aware of the movement of the air as she’d reached for the glass. I should have heard her drinking. Yet I hadn’t. I’d just wanted to know what was wrong.

  What will she think of you now she knows?

  A wave of ice went through me and I’d turned before I knew what I was doing, heading for the doorway of the living room, not giving a shit about the glass on the floor.

  ‘Trajan.’ Maggie’s voice was full of concern. ‘Don’t, you’l
l...’

  I ignored her.

  The light from the living room momentarily disoriented me and I stumbled against the coffee table. Fuck. The shock of running into something froze me in place, the ice winding tighter, the cold rising higher, my heartbeat pounding.

  Who the fuck moved the coffee table? I’d never run into it before. She must have shifted it out of place. Perhaps it was a test...

  She didn’t move it and you need to get a fucking grip.

  I stilled, breathing hard, fighting the wave of panic that had gripped me, trying to find my control. It was a familiar panic.

  A thud of impact. The sound of smashing glass and tearing metal. The stunning silence, the complete and utter blackness. That was what I remembered most after the accident: not being able to see a thing. Feeling disorientated and dazed, hearing Susannah’s whimpers of pain and not being able to help her because I was blind.

  Blind and helpless.

  I shoved the memories away hard. I wasn’t helpless now, I was in complete control, and fuck, what did it matter if Maggie knew I was visually impaired? Why did I care?

  When the car accident had resulted in my retinitis pigmentosa diagnosis, my father had greeted the news the same way he greeted all news he didn’t like: he simply ignored it. And, following his lead, so had my mother. There was no cure for it anyway, so why bother making a fuss?

  It was never mentioned again.

  I’d tried once or twice, as my vision had deteriorated, to talk to them about it, but they’d refused to engage. Mom had patted me on the hand as if I were a child and told me that it would be fine, that I just had to think positively. And Dad had quietly dropped all his plans for me, giving the position at his firm to some other bright young spark who wasn’t blind.

  I had no support. No one to talk to. No one to help. I felt the same way I had the night of the accident—terrified and panicking, and no one coming to save me.

  So I’d saved myself, using anger in the end. A clear and cold and utterly certain fury. I’d lost my peripheral vision entirely by that stage and, when I’d tried to update Dad about it, he’d simply changed the subject.

  He didn’t care. He didn’t care about me. All my life he’d told me how proud he was of me, and how I was going to be such a big success; that together we would conquer the world. But it had all been a lie. It wasn’t about me at all. It was only about him. And if I couldn’t help him achieve that success then he’d find someone else to do it.

  So I’d decided that day, fuck him, I’d be an even bigger success than he’d ever dreamed, and I would do it on my own, blindness or not.

  But he’d taught me one thing: if you had enough will you could ignore the things that didn’t fit your vision of what you wanted for yourself. So, while I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was losing my sight, I didn’t let it get in the way of what I wanted either.

  I managed it. I controlled it. I used my anger to get me where I wanted to go—a cold, controlled kind of anger. Because panic changed nothing. Fear changed nothing. Only focus and strength of will managed the situation, as did disregarding that my lack of sight made any difference to anything. Because if you treated it like nothing, it became nothing.

  Yeah, so you’re letting it becoming something now.

  Fuck, yes, that was exactly what I was doing. I was letting myself get into panic mode and I couldn’t do that.

  Forcing away the steadily rising cold, I took a moment to breathe, to orient myself in the room. Coffee table on my left, couch on my right. I could only see the angled light over the couch—everything around it was a blur—so I shifted my foot slightly and encountered fabric. Denim, from the feel of it. My jeans. I bent and picked them up, breathing steadily as I pulled them on, finding my cool control once again.

  Shit, that panic had been unnecessary. The whole reason I’d hired Maggie in the first place was to figure out how to handle social situations without my blindness getting in the way, and I’d done that. I’d successfully managed it for months without her being any the wiser, so really, I should be considering this a success, not a failure.

  ‘Trajan?’ Maggie’s voice came from the direction of the doorway.

  The concern in it scraped over my nerves, setting my teeth on edge. I hated the pity that came with people knowing. The sympathy. The not knowing what to do or what to say. The clumsy attempts to help that always ended up making things worse.

  And she’d pity me, wouldn’t she? Yeah, of course she would. She’d already told me how she viewed what she did as helping people, providing comfort to sad fucks who couldn’t get it in their real lives. And, now she knew about my sight loss, no doubt she’d see me in the same way: a poor, lonely blind man desperate for a screw.

  That was the one good thing about my father. There had been no pity in him. Because to pity me, he’d have to acknowledge what was happening to me, and he hadn’t in any way. Which was all good from my perspective. I wasn’t going to be that panicky, weepy boy he’d visited in hospital after the accident, afraid and desperate for reassurance.

  My father didn’t do reassurance, which made things a fuck load easier.

  ‘Yes?’ I kept my tone cool, my back to her as I tugged up the zipper on my jeans. My hands were still shaking. I steadied them.

  ‘Are...we going to talk about this?’

  ‘Talk about what?’ I turned to face her.

  She was leaning in the doorway to the kitchen, one of the spotlights above revealing her face. Her golden brows were drawn together, her dark eyes fixed on mine. The rest of her body was a blur, which irritated me. Because she was naked and I wanted to see that nakedness...

  Jesus, why had I walked out of the kitchen? What I should have done was grab her and fuck her up against the counter or on the floor. Show her that my sight or lack of it didn’t matter; that I wasn’t like the other men she saw, desperate for some female attention. Why would I be when I had the power to make her scream my name the way she’d screamed it out on the couch earlier?

  ‘Oh, I dunno... Maybe about the fact that you can’t see?’

  I left the button on my jeans undone because why the hell not? I shouldn’t have put them back on again anyway. This night wasn’t done, sight or not.

  ‘Why should that matter?’ I said coldly. ‘I don’t need sight to fuck you.’

  ‘Can I ask—?’

  ‘Do we really need to go through all of this? I don’t have any peripheral vision and I’m night blind. That’s all.’

  ‘That’s all? I think it’s a little more than that.’

  ‘It’s whatever I say it is,’ I said flatly. ‘Come here. We have unfinished business.’

  She ignored me. ‘Sounds like retinitis pigmentosa. Is that right?’

  I didn’t want to have this discussion. I didn’t want to sit around talking about my sight loss, not when there were better things to be doing.

  ‘Yes,’ I bit out. ‘But you’re not my doctor or my ophthalmologist or my therapist, and I’m not paying you for heart-to-heart chats about my sight. I’m paying you so I can fuck you. The end.’

  Hurt rippled over her face and she looked down at the floor abruptly, her curls falling over her face like a curtain.

  You asshole. So much for giving her something real. You just treated her exactly like a whore.

  Fuck.

  Shame threaded through me, along with guilt and regret. It was a shitty way to repay her for what she’d given me on the couch just before, with her body and her passion, with her pleasure and her trust. That had been a precious gift, not a sand castle I could kick over in a fit of petulance, like an angry little boy. And all because my pride had been threatened.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I forced out. ‘That was uncalled for.’

  She was silent a moment. ‘It’s the truth, though, isn’t it?’

  There was a kind of weary accep
tance in the words that made me ache, as if she’d had that flung at her too many times to count and so it had lost its power to hurt. Except, no, that wasn’t true. It had hurt her. I’d seen it, and then she’d hid her face...

  She has feelings for you, remember? Coming from you, it’s always going to hurt worse.

  The ache inside me, the ache that I didn’t want to be there, tugged harder.

  ‘No,’ I said before I could think better of it. ‘No, it’s not true. Look, you want to know the reason I hired you? It wasn’t for friendship or company. It was for practice. It was an experiment. I wanted to spend time with a woman to see if I could operate in a social situation without relying on my sight, and without anyone noticing I was blind.’

  ‘Oh.’ The word came out on a breath. ‘You had to hire someone for that?’

  ‘Those closest to me already know I have sight loss. I needed someone who didn’t know. And, since I wasn’t willing to deceive someone I met in a bar or anywhere else—not to mention that I wanted discretion—I thought hiring someone was the ideal solution.’

  ‘I see.’ Her tone was stripped bare of emotion. ‘And was that why you kept the lighting in here dim?’

  ‘Yes. I’m effectively blind in low light.’

  She stayed quiet for a long moment. ‘You hid it very well.’

  Irritation rippled through me. ‘The purpose wasn’t to hide it. It was to see how well I could operate with no sight.’

  ‘Right.’ She didn’t sound convinced.

  ‘What?’ I couldn’t keep the annoyance from my voice. ‘I’m not one of your usual clients, Maggie. I’m not some pitiful, lonely fuck so desperate for company he has to pay for it.’

  Aren’t you, though? Aren’t you just like those pitiful, lonely fucks?

  The snide thought whispered through me but I shoved it away. Hard.

  ‘Some of my clients are pitiful, yes,’ she said quietly. ‘But not all of them. And I’ve never seen you as one of them anyway.’

  I liked that. I liked that far too much. Because I hadn’t realised until now how different I wanted to be for her. It was her desire and her passion that I wanted, not her pity. Not for her to heal me, give me comfort or save me.