by Pam Godwin
When he stepped away and handed her the towel, she knotted it around her and stared at his outstretched hand. Don't let your guard down. With a steady breath, she gripped his fingers and followed him out of the bathroom to the kitchen.
The drapes on all the ground-level windows kept her breathing at an even tempo, but the layers of dust on the furniture, the crusty dishes on the counter and in the sink, and black smudges on the tiles ratcheted her pulse to ear-ringing anxiety. She pulled away from his hand and sprinted to the sink, the tremors in her legs numbing her feet.
Where to start? Oh God, she would never get this place clean enough. She ducked her head, searching for the soap, the scrub brushes, the dishwasher... Where were the damned—?
His hand wrapped around her throat and yanked her back. Deep grooves formed in his forehead, his eyes narrowed and steely. “Sit the fuck down.” He shoved her by her neck until her ass hit a chair at the table, seating her.
Utensils and canisters cluttered the counters in no logical order. Streaks of grime coated the cabinet doors. God only knew what she'd find if she opened them. Her lungs tightened, her inhales shallowing, coming faster.
His fingers returned to her throat, forcing her chin up. Frustration hardened his eyes, but it didn't channel to the soft rumble of his voice. “There's no way a room full of shallow fuckwads turned you into this. When did it start?”
Nothing was that simple with her. “I have—” She choked around his grip, and he dropped his hand to her lap, squatting before her. She coughed, glaring at him. “I have a genetic connection to agoraphobia, OCD, and substance abuse.” Don't look at the burnt splashes of food on the stove. Don't look at it. “My mother predisposed me to some nasty traits.” And she was seconds away from having a full-on freak-out amidst his nuclear level of disgusting clutter. She leaned into his face, her chest pumping with heavy breaths. “You should probably return me. I'm no good.”
His jaw set. “If you lose your shit, I'm tossing you on the porch.” He stabbed a finger at the front door.
In that moment, she despised him. Her eyes and chest ached, and she wanted nothing more than to stick it to him by stepping over that porch and running to safety. But there was no safety out there. Her safe place was unreachable, and once the mortgage foreclosed, it would be gone.
He stood. “You're going to sit there and tell me about the anxiety while I fix dinner.”
When his back turned, she closed her eyes, shielding herself from the cluster-fuck-chaos of his kitchen, and drew a ragged breath. “Eighty percent of patients with my conditions have first degree relatives who suffer from panic attacks. My mother is a doozy of mental illnesses and was committed to Austin State Hospital when I was twenty-two. Tawny was twelve when I took her in.”
The glide of his feet over tiles drifted toward the fridge. “Does your sister have these conditions?”
“She has her own obsessions, but nothing like my mom and me.” Strange how she could talk about this with a man who would hit her as readily as kiss her. It took twelve phone calls with Dr. Michaels before she'd opened up. Probably because she wasn't trying to impress Van. He'd brought her crazy into his home, so he could suffer the ugly details or fuck off.
“Where's your dad?” he asked.
“He left when Tawny was a baby. He couldn't handle it.” She didn't blame him for leaving her mother, but leaving her and Tawny? That was unforgivable.
She rested her closed eyes on her hands, elbows propped on the table. “I used to manage the anxiety with medication until I became addicted to the pills. With the help of one of my therapists, I learned how to focus it outward. Pageantry and modeling was a distraction.” Though not a healthy one.
Dishes and silverware clattered behind her. Then the microwave beeped four times, grounding her.
“After the night in the ballroom, I held myself together for three months. Brent and Tawny had been my only potential support network, and when I lost them, I had no one. Still, I bought that house, applied for competitions, and taught myself leather-crafting to keep busy.” To keep herself sane. She crossed and uncrossed her legs beneath the table. “Then the panic attacks started. The first one happened in a clothing boutique where I ran into a group of models who had been there that night. When they saw me, they laughed and whispered. But they made sure I heard what they were saying.”
The panic attack had left her crippled and sobbing on the floor for hours. The manager had to drive her home. “I never returned to that store or any other boutique again. One by one, the attacks surfaced in different places. I'd see someone leer at me at the gym, smell something in a store that reminded me of that night, and an attack would drop me to my knees. I couldn't go back to those places, and my world grew smaller and smaller. Eventually, I stopped going anywhere.”
The chair beside her screeched across the floor, and the scent of chopped onion, peppers, and cilantro tickled her nose. She opened her eyes to find a platter of folded shells resembling enchiladas.
“Enfrijoladas.” He cut into a corner with a fork and held it to her mouth. “Corn tortillas dipped in bean sauce. Open.”
“You just made this?” He could cook?
“Last night. For you.”
A shiver licked down her spine, a reminder that he'd been stalking her, planning her capture. “I'm not hungry.” How many calories were in the shavings of white cheese alone? Two days worth, at least.
“This” —he wiggled the fork— “or the door.”
She slammed her teeth together. She was a captor's dream. No steel bars needed here. Just threaten her with an open door, and she would fall at his feet. Well, she wouldn't make it that easy for him. “Four bites.”
He smirked and pushed a glass of water across the table so she could reach it. “Three.”
Tension vibrated her shoulders. Three was fewer calories, but it wasn't four. His smirk meant he knew how much she depended on that number. So much for being difficult. She opened her mouth, too tired to dwell on numbers or the fact that he was creeping her out by feeding her.
He slid the fork between her lips, and a zest of full-bodied seasonings mingled over her tongue. Spicy but not too hot, the taste of Mexico melted in her mouth. He watched her with an expectant expression as she chewed.
His last name was Quiso. His pale gray eyes looked European, but with his dark hair and tanned skin, he could easily have a little Mexican in his woodpile.
After he fed her two more bites, she asked, “Did your mother teach you how to cook?”
He laughed, but there was no humor in the clipped tumble of huffs. “If Isadora couldn't smoke it or inject it, she didn't bake it.”
Oh. He'd said she was dead. She gripped the towel covering her lap, curiosity scrabbling at her tongue. “Your father—”
The fork clanked against the plate. He stared at the table, eyes shuttering as his silence tightened around her. She tensed for the impact of his fist. But what he hit her with was far more jarring.
“He was a human trafficker like me.” His empty voice coiled the tension in the room. “Brought me into the business when I was twenty-five.” He looked up. “When Austin appointed him Chief of Police.”
She stopped breathing, her head spinning with the biggest news story to come out of Austin. Police Chief linked to the kidnapping and rape of two missing persons.
“Eli Eary,” she whispered.
“Good ol' Dad. Quality role model for Austin's youth.” Disgust and sarcasm layered his tone, but it also held an edge of sadness.
His father trafficked slaves. His mother was a drug addict. She looked at him, really looked into his insidious silver eyes. What must they have seen in his thirty-something years? Had he spent his entire life in a dark light, dragging the sins of his parents behind him? How could he not be anything but fucked up?
Don't make excuses for him, Amber.
He dug into the food and spoke while he chewed. “You followed the news story?”
“Some. He kidnapped
that girl and held her for years. And the football player from Baylor.” Enslaved them in a suburban house doing unimaginable things to them. “They shot him.”
“Yep.” He leaned back in the chair and leveled her with his luminescent gaze. “Don't remember their names, do you?”
She shook her head, dread creeping into her bones.
He chewed, swallowed. “Liv Reed and Joshua Carter.”
Liv and Joshua got away. They all got away.
The trembling started in her chest and rippled to her arms and legs. They lived right next door all this time? The reason he was on her porch?
She could guess why he'd returned for them, and it slammed her heart into a laborious frenzy. Even if she could return home and save her mortgage, would she feel safe living beside Liv and Joshua? Van would come back for them. For her.
“You should really get out more.” He raised a glass of water to his lips, grinning.
She choked, wanting to argue this unbelievable story. “The news reports said he worked alone.” Her voice strangled, rising in pitch. “There wasn't any mention of a son.”
He drained the glass, set it down, and leaned in to stroke her jaw. “Because I don't exist.”
As Amber paled and scooted her ass away inch by inch, Van questioned the brilliance of telling her who he was. He put his elbows on the kitchen table and rubbed his aching head. Despite how familiar he'd become with her strained fearful look, she now stared at him through new eyes. He already told her he'd trafficked slaves. Apparently, connecting him to the infamous Eli Eary had sent her over the edge. Literally.
She'd scooted so far, she fell over the side of the chair and crashed to the floor, giving him a glorious view of all her taut little lines and curves beneath the splayed towel. He bit his lip, halting his grin. Her clumsiness in these frazzled moments was such a contrast to the image of her decorously posed on a stage.
With a huff, she jumped to her feet and retied the knot at her chest. “What do you mean, you don't exist?”
Here we go. He'd opened the door. Might as well give her a tour of the shit hole. He dug a toothpick from his pocket and slid it between his teeth. “Eli Eary—we called him Mr. E—never mentioned me to anyone in his lawful life.”
“Why not? You're his son.”
“The bastard son of his first slave. Not something you brag about over donuts at the police station.” He gnawed on the toothpick. “And in his criminal life, I only existed to the slave buyers—who don't talk because they're dead. And the slaves—who don't talk because they killed the buyers.”
She touched her throat, her voice disbelieving. “That's how the others got away?”
Should he worry about her connecting Liv's escape with hope for her own way out? Nah. She couldn't even look at the windows, let alone step outside. And by the time she overcame the agoraphobia, she would be too attached to him to leave. “Yep.” Liv had been a very naughty girl, but her ability to outsmart him and Mr. E lifted his chest with pride. “I didn't know Liv had freed the others until I started watching her.”
“Stalking her.” She flashed him a reproving glower. For long moments, she didn't move, but she seemed to be calming herself. It was a fascinating thing to watch. The heave of her torso slowed, and her hands loosened around the knot of the towel. She had no idea how strong she was. “You said you were twenty-five when he brought you into the...business. Does that mean you and your mom had escaped before that?”
Not quite. He smiled as his acidic existence burned him from the inside out. “Mr. E took my mother from a US-Mexican border ghetto when she was sixteen. He broke her, impregnated her, and returned her where he'd found her.” She'd been his first, after all. His guinea pig. And a pregnant slave, so far beyond mentally ruined, had no value on the market. So he'd thrown her away like a used condom.
She stepped toward the kitchen table and sat two chairs away. “And you went with her?”
“Yeah.” The unwanted spawn. He rolled the toothpick with his tongue and relaxed against the chair back as every organ inside him twisted and turned. He'd only ever shared this with Liv, and he'd been weak from her bullet when the truth spilled out with his blood.
Her slim eyebrows pulled in, her face pinched in thought. “What did her family do when she returned? Wasn't there retaliation? An investigation?”
He laughed and shook his head. “My mother was a run away, and we lived in a colonia. The dumping grounds for America's uneducated, discarded waste. No drinking water, no working sewers, no law, and certainly no care for someone else's problems.” A wave of bitterness tightened his muscles. It was no wonder he took pleasure in human suffering.
She gripped the knuckles of one hand. He waited for the four cracking pops, a mechanism he'd noticed she turned to when she was upset. But they never came. She flattened her palms over her thighs, staring at them, and spoke quietly. “You were cursed at birth to be fucked-up. Just like me.” A ragged inhale. “Honestly, I'm surprised you're so...” She closed her eyes.
He leaned toward her, his heart knocking at his ribs with anticipation to hear the rest of that thought. “I'm so...what?”
Her eyes cut to his, and she shrugged. “You're smart.”
The compliment curled through him, loosening his shoulders and thickening his tongue. He'd never considered himself smart. He researched anything and everything that interested him, but he certainly wasn't educated in the traditional sense. “Mr. E taught me what I needed to know.” How to read expressions, lure the unsuspecting, calculate human reaction, and how to break the strongest will. “But I couldn't tell you what the square root of sixteen is.”
She moved her mouth as if tasting her precious number. Then her eyes glimmered. “Liar.”
True, but that was the extent of his math skills. Feeling playful, he smirked. “You know what the square root of us is?”
She cocked her head and wrinkled her nose. Then her lips curved, dimpling her cheeks. “Fucked-up.” The strength of her brilliant smile hit him smack in the chest with a shimmering burst of warmth and connection.
He was so fucking tempted to grab his chest and trap the feeling there, that strange exuberant joy. Whatever his expression held made her lips soften. The seam of her mouth slowly separated, the rosy flesh clinging together then letting go. Something was inching its way into the air, energizing the space between them, and she was two chairs too far away.
Carefully, he slid back from the table. Her shoulders tightened, and her chest expanded on an inhale. He stood and covered the distance between them with lazy deliberate steps, marking her subtle breaths. When he reached her, he lowered to his knees.
Her gaze dipped to his mouth, and her tongue darted out to tap her upper lip. “What's with the toothpicks?”
The question stiffened his back. He'd acquired the habit as a means to intimidate. Nothing conveyed scary motherfucker like removing something from his mouth, something he would've appeared to be concentrating on, to focus all of his attention on a frightened little slave.
No way would he remind her what he was and ruin the moment. “It used to be a tree trunk. I'm so badass I chewed it down to a toothpick.”
She shook her head, gifting him with another sweeping smile.
His dick swelled. He flexed his thighs but couldn't shake the grip of his arousal. It surged blood down the length of his cock and lowered his voice to a gruff rumble. “Admit it. Ain't nothing sexier than me on your ass, gnawing a toothpick.”
She reached up and flicked the protruding end, making it quiver like an arrow. Then she exploded with laughter. “Yeah, you're soooo hot when you have wood in your mouth.”
Aw God, the husky rhythm of her laugh could light a fire in a cold dead heart. “I'd rather have you in my mouth. Specifically, your perfect, tight cunt.”
A flush crept across her cheeks, but her touch lingered, brushing against the toothpick and slipping to the corner of his lips. Her fingernails scraped the stubble on his cheek, and her eyes followed the moveme
nt, lashes heavy and dark against her glowing skin.
This tenderness...it was like nothing he'd ever experienced. It made his heart race and his fingers shake. It both alarmed and invigorated him. He didn't want it to end.
He held still, aching for her kiss. Not to take her lips but to give her his, just to experience a moment of surrender, to be at her mercy. Throughout the toxic span of his sexual history, he'd only had one relationship, and Liv had fought him through every damned interaction. He'd never allowed another to initiate a kiss, not even when he was used as a boy or later as a whore. What would it feel like to receive genuine affection?
Her face neared, perhaps an unconscious movement, and her exhales caressed his chin. He knew what this was. Stockholm Syndrome was a foregone conclusion, a symptom of being captured. But that didn't stop him from parting his mouth, hoping for something that couldn't be explained away by a criminal psychologist. The toothpick dangled between his teeth, seconds from falling. She plucked it away and replaced it with her lips.
Every cell in his body zeroed in on the soft glide of her mouth, the gentle suckle of his lower lip, and the taste of spices and honey swirling over his tongue. His entire fucking world flipped inside out, everything he knew about intimacy crumbling away to be replaced by something softer, farther-reaching, and intensely terrifying.
He tried not to fall, told himself it was dangerous, but her kiss grew in confidence, demanding more, stretching so fucking deep she was swallowing him whole. If she reached his soul, he would've given it to her. If the cabin burned down around him, he wouldn't have noticed. He was a goner.
Her jaw stretched wider, and he opened his, letting her explore his mouth with licks and nibbles. Her little bites stroked a feverish heat over his skin, and his brain melted into useless mush. Soon, he couldn't feel his body at all, didn't know where he was, as every sensation concentrated on the warmth of her lips, the dance of her tongue, the beat of her pulse beneath his palm.
