Behind the Facade

by Rebecca Heap

  They both turned their heads in unison as Angela entered the room. Sean noticed Kate’s pupils dilate as she took in Angela’s striking appearance. Angela, in her turn, blanched on catching sight of Kate manacled to the bed.

  She turned to Sean, “Is this strictly necessary?” she asked in a stage whisper.

  “As I explained, Angela, I had no choice but to restrain her,” he said a forlorn tone to his voice.

  Angela presented him with a plate of sandwiches. “I thought you’d both be hungry.” She had obviously made the food to use as an excuse for coming in.

  Her gaze returned to Kate, a slight frown on her face. Kate stared back at her, not daring to speak but pleading with her eyes, hoping this woman would realise that there was something more to the situation.

  “Is that my t-shirt she’s wearing?” Angela asked, noticing this fact before anything else.

  “Yes,” answered Sean. “Sorry Angela. I didn’t think you’d mind. We didn’t exactly have time to pack.”

  Sean was acutely aware of how subdued Katie looked and he quickly made a show of unlocking the handcuffs, saying “I am going to release you now, a mhuirnín, but please understand that I cannot let you leave until I know you are not going to endanger yourself or anyone else.”

  He stroked her face lovingly for Angela’s benefit. Katie visibly flinched at his touch but her hate-filled eyes were blocked from view. He grasped her elbow and helped her to sit up. He then gave her the cup of tea, saying, “Please drink this, ghrá.” His voice was soft and beseeching but his fierce eyes defied her to do otherwise.

  Katie took the cup from him, tempted to fling the tea in his conniving face, sickened by the foreign sounding endearments and false words he had used to add credence to his charade. She knew that any rebuttal from her would just incur his wrath and serve to further corroborate his story.

  She glanced across at Angela but her hope of playing on this woman’s sympathy faded, as she read only impatience in her gaze. She first sipped at the warm beverage but then gulped it down, her body desperate for fluid once the liquid hit her parched throat. He quickly took the cup from her once she had drained it.

  “I’m going to go and change into something more relaxing, Seanie,” Angela declared, running a manicured hand down her body in an alluring way. “I’m just off a long flight and I need to wind down. Please feel very free to come and find me when you’ve finished here.”

  Despite her kidnapper’s threats and the apparent indifference of Angela, Katie’s last remaining will screamed at her to do something to try and alert the woman to her plight before the opportunity was lost. In fact, her instincts told her, surely he would not have warned her against it so strongly if nothing could possibly be gained from speaking out?

  “I am not this man’s sister!” she cried out hoarsely to Angela’s retreating back. Angela turned round, aghast at this outburst and looked at Sean her eyebrows raised in query, “What is she saying..?” she started.

  Sean simply smiled and held his hand up to block her questioning. “She is just trying shock tactics. I told you she’s not herself. She’d deny her own mother if it meant she could get away.”

  He then turned to Kate and said, “Please come to your senses, sis. I know you’ve been hurt and you just want to hurt back... but I’m your brother and I love you.” Kate’s eyes pricked with outraged tears at the mockery of this phony declaration. “I just want to keep you safe,” he said.

  Angela watched them for another moment but then shrugged and left the room. Once Angela had gone, the smile he had planted on his face quickly disappeared, replaced by a cold, determined scowl. He reached for her but she somehow managed to escape his grasp and scramble off the bed.

  She shrank back as he came around the bed, dreading some retaliation from him as a result of her outburst. In a belated attempt to avoid him she urgently scanned the room but there was nowhere to go. However, her eye did catch sight of a pair of small metal nail scissors resting on the dressing table. As he advanced, she deliberately backed away towards the table and, reaching out frantically behind her, managed to grab them.

  Raising them in front of her, she cried out, “Get away from me! Get away from me!”

  He did stop advancing but just laughed at her. “And what do you think you are going to do to me with those?”

  She brandished the tiny pair of scissors in front of him, her face distorted in a grimace of desperate intent. He moved towards her again, still laughing. He made to grab her arm but she took him by surprise, ducking unexpectedly and then lunging at him with the scissors. She managed to slash his arm, deeply enough to draw blood, and he was no longer amused. He caught her then, whipping her body in towards his and exerting vicious pressure on her wrist until she dropped the implement.

  He held on to her and snarled, “You just don’t know when to give up, do you? Well, carry on provoking me and it won’t be long before I lose what little patience I have left. Do you really want to piss me off? Is that it?” He received no response to this.

  The sudden exertion, together with the lack of food and the pressure of his grip on her wrist, had an inevitable effect. He felt her body suddenly crumple against him and, before he could do anything to counter this, he found her collapsed in a faint at his feet.

  Sean stared at her insentient form, shaking his head. She just kept surprising him. One minute she seemed completely defeated and the next she was fighting like a tiger. He bent down and slowly lifted her from the floor into his arms. He looked down at her soft, pale face. Christ, he thought to himself, she was really just a baby and weighed little more than one.

  The action of lifting her caused his injured arm to complain, which caught him by surprise. He had not thought the injury was that noteworthy. He glanced at the wound and noticed it was bleeding quite profusely and had probably run deeper than he had realised. He kept underestimating her to his cost.

  Lifting her back on to the bed he then grabbed a towel from the bathroom. He sat on the bed next to her while he tied the towel around his bleeding arm. Katie coughed and suddenly started to come round. Feeling woozy and light headed she leaned into him, grabbing at him as though he was a life raft. When she finally focused on his face she couldn’t quite remember who he was and looked at him as if for the first time.

  She frowned, wondering why this striking stranger with his luminous grey eyes was holding her so firmly and staring at her so intently. His scrutiny inspired a strange feeling she found it difficult to identify and she felt conversely hot and cold at the same time. When she recognised him as her tormentor she took a sharp intake of breath and recoiled violently.

  She was severely disturbed that, before she knew him for who he was, she had felt a stirring of what she could only describe as attraction towards him. At the same time as admitting this she dismissed it as being a temporary aberration, brought on by the illusion that he was being kind to her.

  Sean accepted the inevitable change in her when she recollected who he was but was unsettled by how incredible it had felt when she had looked at him differently. A wry grimace briefly touched his face.

  He passed the plate of sandwiches emphatically to her. “You need to eat. Unless you want me to force feed you, which will be an unpleasant experience for both of us, I suggest you get these down you.”

  Kate meekly took the plate from him and began to eat listlessly. The food tasted as edible as cotton wool but she somehow managed to force it down her dry throat.

  He watched her, his eyes unreadable.

  Once she’d finished he moved away from her, retrieving the handcuffs. “Give me your hand,” he instructed gruffly.

  She shied away. “Please don’t use those on me again….please,” she begged plaintively. He didn’t answer but just grabbed her hand.

  “You were going to let me go, weren’t you? Before your girlfriend arrived?” she continued to plead, hoping he would reconsider, desperately hoping he had doubts about detaining her.

&nbs
p; “But what if I do let you go? You’ve shown me you can’t be trusted. You’ll lead the authorities straight to me.”

  “I won’t,” Kate answered, gazing directly into his feral eyes. “I won’t breathe a word about this, I swear. Please believe me. Please just let me go.”

  Sean pondered on this. Could he trust her? And could he let her go now that Angela had seen her? Angela seemed to have swallowed his story and Katherine Pearson was hardly well-known. Her father protected her from any publicity as he’d found very little reference to her when he’d been doing his research. The irony was that this was probably Harry’s attempt to keep her safe, especially from those who would exploit her or use her to extort money from him.

  “I don’t know why I took you,” he admitted suddenly. “I had this crazy idea you could help me.” Kate frowned at him. “I want to let you go. But you need to prove I can trust you.” He roughly manacled her to the bed again. “Now keep quiet and try and get some more sleep. I need to go and smooth things over with Angela.”

  He found Angela in her room checking messages on her phone. She put it down as he entered and stood up to greet him. She had showered and wore a silky jade robe that brought out the emerald colour of her cat-like eyes. It was loosely tied, revealing seductive underwear.

  She frowned when she saw the bloody towel he had wrapped around his injured arm. “What the hell happened?” she asked.

  “It’s nothin’. Really,” he said, clumsily motioning her away, when she seemed intent on examining it.

  Angela was undeterred and started fidgeting with the improvised bandage. “Let me have a look at this,” she said. He submitted to her attention, letting her unwind the towel.

  She tutted when she saw the deep gash and looked at him with concern. “Did your sister do this?”

  “Aye,” he said, sitting down wearily on the bed. “I think she may be even more mentally unbalanced than I originally thought.” He closed his eyes and rubbed a despairing hand over his face. “I just don’t know what to do with her,” he admitted.

  Angela sat down next to him, after fetching a swab and a dressing from her ensuite bathroom. She gently cleaned the wound and bandaged it up saying, “Look why don’t you take it easy and let me look after you? When you’ve calmed down you’ll be able to think more clearly.”

  She then moved round to face his back and started kneading his shoulders. He stiffened at first. “Angela..,” he started but she shushed him, telling him to just relax. He leaned back, letting her rub the tension out of his neck and shoulders. He’d forgotten just how good she was at this. “That’s great, angel,” he murmured. He closed his eyes and gradually allowed himself to relax.

  He felt a shift in pressure and his eyes shot open to find that she had manoeuvred herself on to his lap. Her robe was unfastened to reveal her generous breasts, straining at the lace of her lingerie. Unabashedly lowering the straps of her bra, she fully exposed them and bent her mouth to his, kissing him urgently, her hands continuing to massage his shoulders. She wriggled against him and he felt himself responding, unable to quell the lust she was awakening in him.

  She pushed him back onto the bed, slid sensuously down his body and began to unfasten his trousers. She pulled his pants down past his hips and her hands deftly stroked his burgeoning erection. However, as Angela bent her head towards him, an image of Katherine’s haunted face flashed into his mind and his desire inexplicably started to dwindle. He silently swore to himself; even when she wasn’t here she was managing to unbalance him.

  Angela attacked his manhood with her lips and tongue but though his body reacted predictably, his mind was now irretrievably disconnected. She sensed something was wrong when she was unable to bring him to climax and she lifted her head, asking, “Have you been drinking baby? Your snaky doesn’t seem to want to play.”

  He sat up and placed his hands on her shoulders. “I’m sorry Angela. It’s been a rough night. I appreciate it, I really do. You’ve been great, but I just can’t switch off.”

  He stood and pulled his trousers up, saying “I need to check on Katie. I can’t risk leaving her alone.”

  Angela had folded her arms over her chest and was now looking rather like a sulky child. “Well,” she said, her lips set in a full blown pout, “no man has ever walked out of my bed before. I hope she’s really worth it Seanie. From what I can see, you’re better off without her. You need to stop feeling responsible for her. She’s a full grown woman, for God’s sake. If she wants to mess up her life then that’s down to her!”

  He walked over to her and dropped a kiss on her now unresponsive lips. “I know, Angela. And you know how much I’m grateful to you for putting up with our uninvited presence.”

  Angela still looked very put out. She flicked her hair over her shoulder petulantly and walked back towards her bed, replacing her shoulder straps. “I suppose I’ll just have to play with my toys by myself,” she said.

  She lay down on the bed, resting her chin on her hand. “If you come to your senses and dump that crazy bitch in a ditch where she belongs, you know where I am. Otherwise, if she’s still here when I wake up, I’ll be doing what I should have done in the first place and ringing the cops.”

  Sean returned to the guest bedroom. The girl was still curled up miserably against the headboard. Her hair had fallen over her face and she peered out from between the smooth strands, her eyes like those of a small animal caught in a trap. For a moment he couldn’t help wanting to take that awful hunted look off her face. He felt a wild urge to reach out and comfort her. What kind of an eejit was he? He scolded himself. She’d reject any such advance with extreme hostility. He was the root of her terror. He had never had a problem attracting the opposite sex so it must be that his male ego simply couldn’t cope with her being so repulsed by him.

  Raking a hand through his hair he sighed. What a mess he was in. He was as captive as she. Two beautiful women, one after the other, had put him in an impossible situation. And was he any nearer to finding out the truth about his sister? No. Damn the sex. They were nothing but trouble. Hadn’t he learnt that a long time ago?

  Breaking into his frustrated musings, he heard her ask, “Why did you think I could help you? What is it that you want?”

  It was only then that he realised he’d unconsciously moved to sit on the bed next to her. He lifted his head to look at her. “I just want answers,” he stated.

  “What about?”

  He didn’t immediately respond, unsure how much to reveal.

  “You asked about my father,” she prompted. “Is this about him?”

  He narrowed his eyes and asked, “Do you really know your father? He’s a powerful man, but is he a good man?”

  “Yes, of course he is,” she said.

  He stared hard at her. This wasn’t exactly a glowing endorsement. “Is he capable of killing and abducting someone?”

  “What, like you?”

  This both shamed and infuriated him; his pupils dilated violently, eclipsing the colour of his irises. He suddenly reached over and pushed her on to her back. She yelped in surprise and stared up at him with wide, shocked eyes. He raised his hand and she closed her eyes in anticipation of the blow.

  The blow never came. Before he even realised what he was doing he gripped her shoulder instead and planted his mouth on hers, kissing her fiercely. When he felt her struggling, he released her, breathing hard, his face almost as stunned as hers. What the hell was wrong with him? He’d rejected a woman who wanted him and was now forcing himself on his unwilling captive. He stood up quickly, backing away and dragging a hand over his face as if to wipe away the devil that had suddenly possessed him.

  Kate felt numb with shock and disbelief. She pressed a hand to her burning lips, tears welling in her eyes. Hadn’t she known something like this would happen? Hadn’t her desperate attempts to escape really been rooted in this knowledge? He must have had sex with that other woman. She had clearly been giving him the come on earlier. So why wa
s he so obviously unable to control his urges towards her? What if next time he hadn’t already been satiated and he gave them full rein? She trembled.

  Sean sat on the adjacent bed and listened to her weeping. Shit, he couldn’t stand it! Every part of him yearned to console her. But his consolation would be her torment. He was fooling himself where she was concerned; he knew that now, now after just one taste of her. He wanted her. It wasn’t that her looks were particularly astonishing, he’d had his fair share of beautiful women, it was her nature and spirit that seemed to have cut through his defences. He couldn’t cope with having her around any longer. The time to part ways was very definitely upon them.

  He almost didn’t trust himself to go near her again but they had to get moving. He quickly approached her. Without fuss and in one motion he released the handcuff from the bed and locked it firmly around his own wrist, pulling her brusquely to her feet as he did.

  As she came off the bed she staggered. He pulled her unsympathetically upright again, ordering her to be quiet, and half walked, half hauled her to the bedroom door and down the stairs.

  Outside it was freezing cold but clear. It was past dawn and the winter sun glinted between the trees, pale and bright but offering little warmth.

  Kate had nothing on her feet and so her progress was slow. She walked awkwardly but bit down on the automatic urge to voice a complaint, not wanting to antagonise him. Sean pulled at the handcuff, glancing at her in irritation. Noticing her feet were bare without warning he lifted her into his arms. He tried not to notice how satisfying it felt to have her up next to him again.

  Kate hated being so close to this monster but he gripped her so firmly she could do nothing to resist and she was now more afraid of him than ever. Fear of death had been superseded by a personal fear, much greater in magnitude. She thought she understood now why he’d taken her: he wanted to rape her. It was nothing more complicated, nor more horrifying, than that.

  They arrived at the car and Sean bundled Kate inside, quickly and expertly unfastening the cuff that linked her to him, only to secure it to the inner door handle. Once in the driver’s seat he didn’t start the engine but chose instead to release the handbrake, letting the car slowly glide backwards down the driveway to ensure their departure was as silent as possible. Once they reached the entryway he turned to Kate and passed her the sunglasses, demanding that she put them on. He then turned the ignition, flipped the car around and accelerated away.