That simple connection, there in the dark, did more to steady me than I would’ve thought possible. Her voice had connected me back to the present and her touch reminded me I wasn’t in hell anymore.
“One of the servers heard me singing and asked if I’d like to sing for the people. I had no idea he was serious. But I said yes and he took me up there. The woman singing went over the song with me and we sang it together…” She laughed a little and I looked back at her, seeking her face in the darkness. “Then I sang ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’ It was August. But it was the only song I could think of off the top of my head. She started to sing another one. I didn’t know it, but it was a silly little kids’ ballad they sing there and after a verse or two, I had it. The people listening clapped and hooted and hollered. It was the first time I ever sang in front of people and I was hooked.”
“It’s a buzz, performing.”
She scooted closer, curling up around me, a warm curve against the small of my back, along my hips. She slid her arm around my waist. “I’ve been told I’m a good listener, Sly.”
I opened my mouth to brush the comment away.
What came out was a secret I’d kept hidden so long, it felt like it had grown inside me, become a very part of my flesh. “I let my little sister die.”
She had been stroking my back as she talked.
Now, her hand paused, but only for a fraction. “How old were you?”
“What the fuck does that matter?”
“I’d say it matters a lot,” she replied, still stroking.
I focused on the feel of her hand, kept my mind locked on it. “I don’t know how old I was. Shit, I didn’t even know when my real birthday is—I ended up in foster care at some point after a cop found me living on the streets. After nobody ever stepped forward to claim me, the only place for me was foster care. O’Malley isn’t even my real name. They gave me the last name of Smith. I changed it at eighteen.” I stared at her, watching as all the emotions, everything from shock to pity to dismay played across her features. “I don’t know how old I was—I didn’t even know my own fucking birthday until I did some digging a few years back,” I said, all but challenging her now. “I’ve never had a fancy party, never even had a cake until Mac and LeVan got one for me a few years back.” It had been one of the few things that had stunned me into silence. Shit, I’d almost started crying and wouldn’t that have been a laugh.
“You were young. Weren’t you?”
She’d wiggled around until she could look up at me. I met her gaze and nodded reluctantly. “I didn’t know anything about babies. My mom…the old bastard said someone hit her car. I found out the information about her later on. It was a drunk driver. She died instantly. Found out her name, my real last name…. I would’ve been four. The baby was still little. I don’t even know how old.” Unable to look at her, I got up from the bed and started to pace. “My step-father was there… miserable, lazy slob of a bastard didn’t work. I know one day my mother was there, and then she wasn’t and he’d yell at me and the baby like it was our fault. He’d put the little girl in my arms, arms that could hardly hold her, and tell me to take care of her. But I didn’t know how to take care of a baby. I was barely out of toddler stage. Still, I figured out how to change her diaper…” Shame scalded my cheeks and I looked back at her. “I dropped her once. She was so heavy.”
“You were a little boy, Sly.”
Swallowing the bile that threatened to choke me, I shook my head. “She was just a baby. She wouldn’t eat. I didn’t know how to make her eat, didn’t understand she couldn’t eat food like we did, but I remembered seeing her take bottles. I gave her milk in a bottle. She didn’t like it, but she drank it eventually. For a few days, it seemed like maybe I’d be okay with her. Then one day I came back and Rick…” Even saying his name left a bad taste in my mouth, but I forced it out. “That was my stepfather. He was sitting in front of the TV and Addy wasn’t in her crib. She wasn’t big enough to climb out or anything. She was so skinny…”
She’d been starving. I knew that now, but then, all I’d known was she was little.
“He looked at me and said, ‘Little brat’s gone. You weren’t taking good care of her.’”
Gone.
“I didn’t understand and started to cry. He did what he always did…” I grimaced, not wanting to tell her about that.
“He beat you.” The words were delivered in a stark, ugly tone that made me flinch.
I didn’t want her knowing that.
But… “Yeah. At least I was old enough to survive it.” Hitching a shoulder up in a shrug, I shook my head. “Addy was too little to survive neglect. He told me she died and it was all my fault.” Bitter bile tried to choke me. “And it was. I could’ve told one of the people that lived around us that I didn’t know how to take care of a baby, that I needed help. They didn’t like my stepdad, but I don’t think they were bad people. I didn’t know anything about CPS, but someone could’ve called the cops…actually someone did.” Looking away, I blew out a breath. “It was probably only a day later. Maybe someone found out what happened to Addy, or they overhead him telling me. I have no idea. But cops showed up one morning when I was trying to make breakfast. Two cops and this lady in a suit. They took me away. I didn’t ever see Rick again.”
Slim arms came around me.
I covered Emmy’s hands with mine.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said, passion pulsing in her voice. “You were just a baby yourself, Sly. You can’t blame that little boy for the fact that your stepdad was a neglectful asshole.”
When I didn’t answer, she circled around me and reached up, cupping my face in her hands. “If a small child saw something bad happening, but didn’t know what to do about it, is it their fault that something bad did happen?”
“Don’t try to make this into something it’s not,” I said, forcing the words out.
“I’m not. You are,” she whispered, tugging my head down to meet hers. “If the situations were reversed, would you want your sister blaming herself?”
“No!” The answer flew out of me before I could stop it.
Emmy gave me a gentle smile. “Then why should you bear the brunt of this?”
Her words didn’t penetrate the layer of ice that had gripped me for so long. Not that night.
But I did hear them.
14
Emmy
One week slid into two.
Sly and I would go out for pizza one night, and then he’d surprise me with a candlelit dinner the next.
I wouldn’t dare let myself think that he was trying to woo me, or that we were dating per se, although apparently, half of Vegas did. Tonight, we were out for a walk, and a photographer snapped a picture of us together. Sly flipped him off in the next shot.
“Aren’t you worried those fans of yours will see that?” I asked him, and felt a brief wave of anxiety that tensed up my spine and spread through me. I didn’t want to be seen either. Not that publicly. Not if that photo could end up being seen by the one man I wanted to stay the hell away from.
“Nope. Yet another benefit of being known as a surly bastard. They don’t just accept my bad behavior, they expect it.” He tightened his hold around my waist and pulled me in for a kiss, slamming his mouth down on mine as he ran one hand down my back, eliminating even the hint of air between our bodies. When he finished kissing me breathless, he murmured against my lips, “They might as well see that, too.”
Later that day in his suite, I found myself opening up to him about some of the things that made me so uptight. It all started when I went down on him and when it ended, as I sat with my head on his thigh and he combing his fingers through my hair, Sly said, “I just don’t get it. Two weeks ago, you were a virgin and now you’ve got me wondering how I could’ve turning you into such a sex-hungry seductress. I didn’t just ruin you, I corrupted you. But I fucking love it.”
It had made me laugh self-consciously, but it had led to
a talk about…me.
After everything he’d revealed to me, how could I hold back on him?
How could I not tell him about the time when I’d been twelve years old and walked in on my mother getting it on with the guy who did the maintenance on the pool, or how she’d had given me a vibrator for my not so sweet sixteenth birthday? Or her gift of condoms the first time I had a date to a dance. The woman was a hippie swinger to the power of crazy, thinking back on that now. Thank heavens I didn’t turn out to have three baby daddies and an STD before I hit my twenties. Maybe seeing her at such an extreme end of the sexual spectrum shot me to the complete other end of the scale.
“Sounds like your mom has her own special way of doing fucked up shit,” Sly told me.
“She does.” I felt guilty confessing that. “Mom was the baby of the family…a late-life surprise and from what I can tell, she ran pretty wild. Didn’t have much in the way of discipline or anything.” Rolling my eyes, I glanced at him. “She and Angel’s mom are sisters. The two of them are like…they’re night and day, seriously. Angel would end up grounded for bringing home a rare C on her report card, but me? I could skip school two or three days a week and Mom wouldn’t even care. I’d get a pat on the head and she’d say something like, Well, kids do need the occasional mental health day…try to go tomorrow, love.” I squashed the lingering frustration and shrugged. “She loves me, I know she does. But she’s so free-spirited, and wrapped up in her own weird life, I’m sometimes an afterthought.”
“At least they got the brains to love you.”
A few days later, he asked me to join him at a club.
When I asked what kind of club, his answer had made my eyes bug out.
“A BDSM club.”
Wow, did he have to do some talking to convince me to go, but he took my face in his hands and whispered, “As fucking sexy as you are, you should be able to do anything you want and not feel self-conscious. Now if you’re not curious…tell me, and I’ll let it go. But if you are…”
So we went.
I left there so aroused, we didn’t even make it back to the hotel before I looked over at him.
That was when I found out that Sly didn’t have so much as a bit of modesty in him. In the parking garage, after his clever fingers unlocked a door marked Employees Only, I found myself face first against the door, my skirt pushed to my waist, and then I was stuffed full of cock as he thrust up into me.
“You spent the entire time walking around looking like a kid in a candy store…look but don’t touch…and you wanted to touch, didn’t you?” Sly muttered in my ear, that raw, low voice of his like another caress on my senses.
“Yes.”
“Other men there wanted you. Could you tell?” He slid a hand around and thrust his fingers through my curls, seeking out my clit. “They looked at you and they wanted…a few women, too. Could you tell?”
“Yes.”
“And you liked it, didn’t you, baby?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” I admitted. Then I turned my head around, craning it until I could brush my lips against his cheek. “But I only wanted you.”
He swelled inside me, so thick and heavy, it almost hurt.
“Good girl.”
He drove into me harder and harder until I went screaming over the edge, then he followed.
Not even a minute later, he was tugging me out of the dark room. I had no idea what was inside there, nor did I care.
On the way to his car, he tossed something in the trash. The condom, probably. And maybe even my panties.
I had been wearing a pair, but they were gone now.
I didn’t even care.
“It’s just a walk.”
The morning after I’d gone to the BDSM club with Sly, I stood at the main entrance of Casino Torrid, staring out at the strip and trying to convince myself I could go outside and take a walk.
I’d been taking short walks with the baby that just involved strolling back and forth in front of the hotel, maybe going up the escalator and circling back down, but I always stayed close.
I was beginning to feel like a prisoner and I was the one who’d crafted the walls.
I needed to stop letting fear rule me.
I’d do that when I stepped outside the perimeter I’d made for myself.
Sometimes, Topher still called.
I told myself I should just get rid of the phone, and change my number. But a part of me had some morbid idea that if he was calling me, it was because he was still looking for me, which meant…he hadn’t found me. I was safe.
He hadn’t been seen here.
It had been a couple of months. Surely, if he was going to find me…
“Stop torturing yourself and just go outside,” I muttered.
Sly was right.
He’d told me I should be able to do anything I wanted and not feel self-conscious and this wasn’t a matter of self-consciousness but fear. Still, the same principle mattered. Topher hadn’t been able to stop me before. I hadn’t let him. I wasn’t going to let the memory of the fear he’d inspired in me stop me now.
Emboldened, I stepped outside.
Sucking in a breath of air, I looked up, then down the strip, trying to decide what to do next. I had absolutely no idea what action I wanted to take or how to go about it, but I knew where I needed to start. With a broad smile, I headed toward the replica of the Eiffel Tower I’d seen so many times.
Three hours later, five hundred dollars richer—it would’ve been a thousand, but I spent five hundred on a new purse—I started to make my way back to Casino Torrid. Home, I realized. Crazy, but I was starting to equate a hotel with the word home.
And Sly, I realized abruptly.
I was falling for him in the worst possible way and it was something I had to keep to myself.
As good as we were together—at least I thought we were good—we weren’t getting involved in anything other than a physical relationship. He’d made it clear he didn’t want anything more.
I wasn’t going to burden him with the fact that I was falling for him.
I swung around the bottom of the escalator, ready to take the next flight down, smiling a little despite the maudlin turn my thoughts had taken. I glanced up when a group of young women—girls, really, broke out into shrieks of laughter.
That was when I saw him.
That familiar, despised face.
Wavy golden brown hair framed a face that might’ve been pleasant, but the intensity in his otherwise mild blue eyes turned his everyday Joe appearance into one that made others shy away. It was obvious, even as he stood there. A mom with her two kids guided them to the stairs rather than get closer and the giggling girls abruptly went silent when they saw him.
Topher didn’t seem to even notice.
He was staring at me, that strange smile of his appearing on his lips.
He took one step.
I all but flew down the last escalator that would put me on street level. I took off running, then, glad I hadn’t stopped to do anymore shopping. The new purse I had banged against my leg in its sack and if it had gotten in my way, I would’ve dropped it without batting an eye.
At the very last moment, I kept myself from crossing into Casino Torrid. The strip was huge. There were thousands of hotel rooms, hundreds of hotels in Las Vegas. He couldn’t know where I was staying, could he?
But I wasn’t risking anything. I ducked into the hotel across the street. I didn’t dare look behind me, not yet. I walked straight to the security guards—I’d learned to identify them by hanging out so much at Casino Torrid. Security guards all had a type.
The one who noticed me first gave me a nod then. “Ma’am?”
Pulling Topher’s image to mind, I said, “There’s a man back there who’s been following me. He has wavy, brown hair and blue eyes. He was wearing a blue polo shirt and jeans.”
His eyes didn’t leave my face. “Nobody fitting that description came in after you.”
I almost sagged
in relief. Nodding my thanks at him, I smiled, feeling more than a little shaky. “Is there any way you can point me to the taxi area? I’m staying at the Torrid across the street but I don’t want to risk him seeing me come out of here.”
“Good call.” He called for someone to come take his position. “I’ll walk you down and find you a car. Will an Uber work? Most of them have tinted windows so even if he’s watching that will make it more difficult.”
A walk that would’ve taken me five minutes was a twenty-minute Uber ride.
But I knew every second was worth it. The security guard had gotten my name, then exchanged a few words with the Uber driver, and once I got into the car, he pulled his phone from his pocket.
I didn’t think much of it until I got to Casino Torrid twenty minutes later and found a small army of security guards waiting for me.
They surrounded me and hustled me inside. I was so thoroughly surrounded, I couldn’t see beyond their bodies. No way was anyone seeing me inside their living, breathing wall.
Once inside, the security wall fell away, all save for two, and the shorter one turned to me. What he lacked in height, he made up for in presence and sheer…bulk. He looked to be half as wide as I was tall and I’d bet my eyeteeth he was pure muscle.
“Ms. Montrose, I’m Stefan, one of the heads of security. Mac briefed me on the situation some time ago.” He hesitated, looking me over. “I’d ask if you were sure, but you look rather shaken.”
I nodded.
“Security across the street notified us.” He offered a card. “Put that number in your phone. It’s my direct line. If you ever see him again while you’re out on the strip, call me. But do it only after you do exactly what you did—get inside one of the casinos and find security. The hotels here take the safety of their guests very seriously.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed.” I offered a weak smile and brushed my hair back from my face.
“Can I ask a couple of questions?” He offered a conciliatory look. “I know you’re bound to be upset, but it will help me prepare my team in case there is any trouble.”
Rule You (Vegas Knights Book 3) Page 10
