by Ruby Laska
The interior of the house was as lovely and cozy as the outside. Worn tile and burnished gold plaster walls served as a backdrop for antique pieces in heavy dark wood. A hacienda style curved fireplace was set for a fire, despite the warmth of the evening. A bottle of wine and a pair of earthenware tumblers sat on the stone kitchen counter, and on a scarred mission table was a vase of fresh flowers. Someone had been here recently if only to air out the place and add welcoming touches.
“Is this your real house?” Chelsea asked as Ricardo set her down gently on a comfortable brick-red sofa. He touched a keypad installed in the wall and the sounds of classical guitar drifted in.
“I suppose that depends on what you mean by ‘real,’” Ricardo said. “Would you care for a glass of wine?”
“I—I suppose.” Already she was feeling much better, calmed by putting distance between her and the party, and by Ricardo’s nearness, his scent, his touch. It was ridiculous that a man who had done the things Ricardo had done—to her body, to her mind—should make her feel so at ease, but Chelsea didn’t feel like examining those thoughts now. A part of her—the part that served as guardian, who kept up the invisible walls between the past and the present, who kept other people at bay—was exhausted, and yet another part of her—so new and unexplored that she couldn’t yet name it—felt fully alive. Ignited and ready to burn.
“What I mean is, is this house where you actually live?” she said, accepting the glass of deep red wine. She tasted it: earthy, almost smoky. Delicious.
“Sometimes.” Ricardo paused at the rough-hewn table, moving his glass on its surface in the gesture that had become familiar to her. Noticing thrilled her—it was the sort of lovers’ shorthand that she so rarely allowed herself to feel. “Due to the nature of my work, I must make my home wherever I find myself. But yes, I own this house. It was my first, in fact, in California. Now, circumstances dictate…but you cannot be interested in this, querida. So boring.”
He sat down next to her on the sofa, leaving several inches between them. Absently he set down his glass and picked up her foot, the one that lost its shoe, and gently rubbed the sole. Sensations rocketed through her—pure comfort and blissful decadence battling with sensual urgency. How was it that a man’s touch could provoke so many different emotions in her? Especially when she’d worked so hard to drain all emotions from her encounters with her past lovers.
Ricardo watched her expectantly. He’d made it clear that he didn’t want to talk about himself—now he was waiting for her. But there was no way she was going to unload all her secrets, not after what had happened, not when her heart was still slowing raggedly from its full-on panic.
“I hate being photographed,” she whispered. Where had that come from? The confession slipped from her like beads spilled from a broken necklace. She glanced up at him, head bowed, and saw that he was watching her with concern. Tenderness, even.
He reached for her hand and held it between both of his. She could feel her pulse against his warm skin, skittering and elusive, and then she could feel herself calming. Easing. It was safe here—Ricardo was safe. She believed it against all logic, in spite of the drama and danger that seemed to pursue him wherever he went. And suddenly she longed to put herself in his hands—her heart as well as her body.
“I—when my father died, we were living near where the gallery is now, in what used to be a pretty bad part of town. My mother took a job as a cocktail waitress. She left me with neighbors, sitters when she could find one. She started dating…”
Her voice caught. She hadn’t said the name out loud in so long. But he had had too much power over her: it was time for her to overcome the pain. “She started dating a photographer named Roy Huber. He wanted to be taken seriously as an art photographer but mostly he did portraits, weddings, that kind of thing. And he dealt drugs on the side, too.
“My mother was…well, she wasn’t the same after Dad died. She was weak. Frightened. There was never enough money, and I think…I know that what Roy offered was a distraction, an escape. Soon she was using drugs with him. When she wasn’t at work, she was high. She lost that job, but she got another one, a place Roy knew about, but by then she was helping him with the drugs. I mean, I was only seven, I didn’t really understand everything that was going on, but…”
She took a deep, shuddering breath. She had told the next part to only one other person. Stone Everson, a man who said he could help. A man who had tried hard, but in the end, hadn’t been able to do a thing. Could she bear to trust again?
“Roy had another business, on the side, in addition to the drugs. He—he took photographs of children. Posed pictures…sexually explicit pictures. He—I became his main subject.”
Ricardo’s hands tightened reflexively around hers. She glanced at his face and saw fury and shock in the tightness of his mouth, his narrowed eyes. But all he said was, “Malparido.”
“He never touched me,” Chelsea said. “I know I should be grateful for that. And he acted like what we were doing was normal. He gave me presents, stuffed animals, and dress-up clothes. He told me he put makeup on me because I was such a pretty little girl. It was confusing. I missed my dad so much, and I was so lonely because I could never play with friends like the other kids at school. When he asked me to do things that seemed wrong, I was afraid that if I didn’t, he would get mad at me. That he would tell my mother I was a bad girl. And I’d already lost so much of her. By then she was mostly sleeping all day, or she was so high I couldn’t reach her. I was…I didn’t fight back. It just went on and on. Until I was finally old enough to run away on my own.”
“My God,” Ricardo said. His voice was tight, cold steel. “Was this man, this monster, was he caught? Was he punished?”
Chelsea felt the familiar heat in her face, the fear that came rushing back whenever she allowed herself to think about Roy. The leering threat of the Fiend. “No. I—when I was nineteen I finally told someone. I hadn’t talked to my mother in years by then. I had no idea if she was still with Roy, or where they were living, but I read in the paper about a special FBI unit here in Los Angeles that prosecutes crimes against children. I went there and I…reported what had happened. The agent who talked to me…he did his best. He really did. He worked on that case long past when it made sense, but Roy had simply disappeared.” She didn’t add that Stone Everson still called her once a year to tell her that he hadn’t forgotten, that he would never stop trying to find her abuser. “It was my fault. I waited too long, and Roy got away. He got away with it all.”
“It was not your fault,” Ricardo said. “He was a devil, not worthy of excrement on the bottom of a shoe. What he did to you was evil.”
He drew her toward him, pulling gently—but Chelsea resisted. Here was what she had always feared—the pity, the weakness that others would see in her if they knew. She did not want to be comforted. She did not want to spend one more second in that victim place than she had to.
She yanked her hands back, almost violently, then looked up to see that Ricardo was startled…and something else. The dark fury on his face was sparked with intense concentration.
“What he did was evil,” he said slowly, thoughtfully, not trying to touch her again. She had retreated to her corner of the couch and was sitting rigidly, the memory of pain and shame and fury turning her blood to raging poison. She wanted to break something—she had wanted to break something since the day she left that miserable house where her mother abandoned her and the man who was supposed to care for her betrayed her.
There was a crash. The wine glass she had been holding shattered in her hand, the pieces falling to the floor, the red liquid splashing on her legs and the sofa and the tile.
She had been squeezing it so tightly that she broke it. Chelsea’s mouth opened in astonishment. She hadn’t even been aware that she was holding it so hard.
“I’m sorry,” she said, jumping up to look for rags, cleaner, something to get the stain off the couch fabric. “I didn’t me
an—”
“No.” A command. “Sit. Someone will take care of it tomorrow.”
He rose and went to the kitchen, coming back with a damp towel. He sat closer to her and slowly moved the fabric along her leg where the wine dripped in red rivulets. He didn’t bother with the floor, the broken glass, concentrating only on her skin, going slowly, making small circles.
Some of the tension shifted inside her, melting into other, needful feelings. She still wanted to unleash her powerful rage at Roy, to crush his sneering face, to break him the way he had broken her. But even more, she wanted an end to the seemingly infinite pain. Walking around with invisible wounds, and the bilious poison of the past, was too much to bear.
“I just want…to feel…something else,” she whispered. “I don’t want anyone to tell me it will be all right. I just want someone to make it stop.”
There were the words she had never said, the need that she had never voiced. All the men she’d had through her bed—she had incited them and wrestled them and taunted them, had done everything she could to drive the memories away by overpowering them, by proving that she could have sex on her own terms, that no one would ever take advantage of her vulnerability again.
And it had never been enough.
Ricardo tossed the cloth aside. He stood and regarded her for a long time, his jaw set, his eyes shimmering with a thousand thoughts.
“Come,” he finally said and offered her his hand.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ricardo stood in the narrow passage that had been turned into a butler’s pantry when he had had the house remodeled some years ago. He busied himself getting the things he planned to use to give Chelsea what she needed, what she so clearly had never experienced before. A salve for her pain that would take it away and not just cover over its surface temporarily.
But what if he was wrong? Thoughts swirled in his head, spurred on by memories of his own, and most of all by the powerful need that had built inside him from the moment he laid eyes on her tonight.
It…wasn’t what he had expected. When she’d broken down at the party, he knew that the key to her deepest secrets was within reach, but he didn’t push her. Couldn’t. Her vulnerability opened some new part of her that was as gorgeous as the rest of her, that invited him closer while inspiring a powerful need to possess her.
Ricardo had been with innumerable women, each with her own story, her own complex tapestry of needs and responses born from her life experiences. Ricardo was generous with the gift he had been given, the ability to read and respond, to sate and please his lovers.
Never had he met a woman like Chelsea. Hearing her tell the story of what had happened to her, the pieces clicked into place. He’d recognized that she had scars, but now that he knew what they were—and who had made them—he was moved to act. At some point, he already knew, he would take revenge, a gift to the woman sitting uncertainly at the edge of the bed in the next room, the woman who had no idea of her own beauty and depth, who saw damage when she looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the strength that had built around it.
She needed pain to find her pleasure.
She needed to be dominated to find her strength.
She needed to be owned by someone strong enough to lead her.
Only when she finally surrendered would the hold on her be broken.
Yes. He was sure. He piled the objects on a lacquered tray, illuminated by one fat candle, and went to the bedroom. He stood in the doorway, watching her; she turned to him, her lips parted, her hands clasped tightly in her lap.
“On the floor,” he ordered her, barely able to contain his own hunger. “On your knees.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Chelsea slid down the side of the bed, burying her face in the cool, fragrant linen of the coverlet. She knew that she had heard him right, and the confusion that his words initially brought had quickly receded, taking with them her preoccupation with the past, the painful shards of her confession. Getting the words out was enough for one night, and she was grateful that Ricardo understood, that he gave her the space to retreat.
At least, maybe, her words had been enough to explain away her behavior at the party. Maybe Ricardo was satisfied with her explanation, or at least satisfied enough that he could accept her as she was. Maybe he could forgive the ruined dress, the lost shoe. Maybe he could still want her, despite the damage that was as much a part of her now as her DNA.
She felt his hand on her hair, gently smoothing the tousled strands. The sleek style that Donny had given her was ruined. She could only imagine the state of her makeup.
But most of all she concentrated on the feel of the rough wool rug beneath her knees. The textured fabric of the bed linens on her face.
His hand tightened in her hair. He wrapped a section of it around his fingers and pulled. Not hard enough to hurt, but enough to lift her face off the bed.
“Chelsea.” His voice was hard, insistent.
“Y-yes.” The word came out in a whispered groan. The tension along her scalp ignited a firestorm of sensation all through her body. She was aware of him towering above her, behind her, his body so close.
His hand tightened, twisting her hair. It stung, enough to bring tears to her eyes.
“You remember your safe word.”
“Yes.”
“Think hard before you use it.”
Chelsea swallowed, trembling. As he pulled harder, her body was forced upward; her breasts brushed against the bed, her nipples hardening and her fingertips tightening on the linen.
“You think you must control everything at all times, because of what happened to you,” Ricardo went on, holding her there, suspended between pain and surrender. “But true strength is when you allow yourself to trust again, is that not so?”
“I…can’t,” Chelsea mumbled. Why would he bring trust into this moment, when she wanted only to lose herself to sensation? How could he expect her to give more than she already had—more than telling what she’d been through? “I won’t.”
His hand tightened hard, yanking her chin up, bringing tears to her eyes. He was not gentle now.
“You will. Look at me. Look at me, putita.”
Chelsea’s breath came in a sharp gasp. She knew enough Spanish to know that he had just called her a little whore, but when he’d used the word in the past she’d thought it was just part of the game he was playing with her, a nuance of their sexual role play. But now she understood that she was not playing a role…and neither was he.
She was his little whore. His alone, to do whatever he wanted with. Her body ground involuntarily against the bed in response, abrading her nipples, rubbing herself against the bed rail. She stared upward into his eyes, the vantage point as impossible as the position in which he held her.
She could stop this. All she had to do was whisper the word.
“Tonight, I will use you. For my pleasure. I will take from you whatever I like and you will give it. Do you understand?”
When she didn’t answer he used his grip on her hair to force her to nod.
“You’re beautiful with your makeup smeared all over that pretty little face,” Ricardo muttered, and then he abruptly relaxed his grip on her. He pushed her face into the bed and crouched next to her, whispering in her ear as she struggled to breathe through the layers of linen.
She felt him shift a second before his hand landed sharply on the back of her thigh, his open palm stinging the skin bared by the short skirt.
“Tell me you understand,” he growled.
In the next second Chelsea opened her lips to speak and was blindsided by conflicting thoughts. Make it stop—that was the animal part of her that recoiled at pain, the response to stimulus ingrained in every sentient being. She knew that all she had to do was say the word and it would be over.
But the other part of her—the roiling center where her past and her emotions collided—wondered if, should she stay silent, he might strike her again.
She rubbed ag
ainst the bed and moaned, the sound muffled by the linen and her own tears.
The second blow was harder. Much harder, coming across her buttocks, rocking her sideways. “I understand,” she managed between clenched teeth.
He moved away from her, only to return a moment later and press something silky against the side of her face, caressing her cheek. “Lift your head.”
She did, blinking at the glow of a small lamp on a dresser across the room. The length of silky fabric encircled her head, blindfolding her. She could feel him working at tying it, his hands dexterous and sure.
She couldn’t see a thing. All was black. He put her hand into his and lifted her to her feet, then sat her gently on the side of the bed.
She heard the sound of metal on metal. He had set the tray on the bedside table, but she hadn’t gotten a good look at its contents. A frisson of fear bubbled up as he sat down next to her.
His hand traced lightly along the hem of her skirt, lifting the fabric. Then she felt it tighten and there was the ripping, tearing sound of the fabric being split. She felt the skirt give way from between her knees up to the bodice.
Cold metal pressed against her inner thigh. The blade of a knife. Was it the one he’d used to scrape the wax from her skin the other night? Her body shivered at the memory, but Ricardo didn’t hesitate.
She felt him tug one strap after the next, slicing through them with the knife until the dress fell around her in shredded ribbons. The thought that she now had nothing to wear home flitted through Chelsea’s head and disappeared, as insignificant as a dust mote.
His fingertip traced the outer curve of her hip. “Do you like not wearing underwear, my little putita? Do you like the feel of the breeze against your hot, wet cunt?”
“I…”
He rolled her onto her stomach, ripping the remains of the dress out from under her. She heard the fabric fall to the floor, discarded as he’d discarded the wine-soaked cloth in the living room. Her bare ass was exposed to him, her thighs quivering.
