He put his hand over his face. Was it the thought of immediate sex that scrambled his brain? Or her sad eyes? Better yet, her do-me lips?
He jammed his fingertips against his temples. This was the perfect opportunity to investigate and get closer to her. Remember? That was why he’d invited her here. Not for sex.
He shifted uncomfortably and wished…what? That he was screwing her? Screwing his career?
One of the things he’d always prided himself on was his self-control. He was a loner. He didn’t need sex. He’d didn’t need relationships. He sure as hell didn’t need this complicated attraction to a woman who might have caused a bloodbath that killed his best friend and marred a perfect law-enforcement career.
He closed his eyes. There was a thump in the shower followed by a curse. Why the hell had she been the one to rescue him? And who’d pushed him in the harbor in the first place?
Did they know he was DEA?
And how had anyone in Scotland or Santayana’s compound known Jacob was DEA? That was one question that jabbed at Ben’s conscience. Had he inadvertently given Jacob away? Was it his fault that Jacob, surveillance geek—who’d never even entered Santayana’s mansion before that fateful day—had ended up riddled with hot lead?
Ben didn’t know.
Questions bombarded his brain until he wanted to hit something in frustration. Desperate for a distraction, he looked around the small living room. Spotted the bag of clothes he’d propped beside the front door. Sorcha’s gear.
Crouching besides the bag, he pulled out her long black cardigan and delved into the pockets. Found a small red wallet.
Rifling quickly through her bank cards, he noted there were no foreign cards. A British driving license, an Australian driving license. But no car.
Nuts.
Delving into the back pockets of the wallet he pulled out a couple of passport-sized photos. Sorcha with sun-bleached hair and some guy with a big stupid grin on his face. Probably the Australian loser.
Okay. Nothing.
He fingered the photographs for another second. Put the wallet back, searched deeper through the bag and came up with a Filofax. A small blue leather one. He flipped the diary to this week and went through the entries. Nothing except school schedules. He froze, the sinking of his stomach colliding with the sound of the shower turning off.
Damn. Tomorrow she was going out to the Isle of May to check up on her research project.
Double damn. He stuffed the diary into her bag and moved back to his chair beside the window. Sat staring at the moonlight bleeding across the ocean as sweat glued the clothes to his back. Tomorrow, he was going to have to do a little phobia desensitization work. ’Cos it looked like he was going on a boat ride.
***
The bastard hadn’t drowned.
Unadulterated fear had been the only emotion to slip past the American’s impenetrable guard as he’d stared at the water. But he hadn’t drowned.
Sorcha had gone and saved the guy.
Shadows flared in his vision as he tried to contain his agitation. He was being forced to take risks he never usually took, and he still hadn’t found those journals.
Thrusting open the door of the squalid little building, he stormed through, slamming it behind him. He thundered up the first flight of stairs, immediately regretted warning the girl in the flat above.
The musty smell of damp and decay seeped into his senses, as much a part of the people who lived here as the crumbling walls and rotten carpet.
Cautiously, he pushed open the door to the apartment, listened to make sure they were alone, then closed it and slid the bolt home. He didn’t sense anybody else here, but not everybody was as transparent as little Evie.
Reining in his fury, he took another deep breath before getting his temper under control. Control was the key to his life.
“Honey, I’m home.” He nearly cooed with pleasure as inside his mind he saw her whole body tense up with agitation.
His baby. Picky little bitch.
He moved silently through the living room, then walked down a small unlit corridor to the bedroom. A low-wattage bulb illuminated the room with a cold white light.
A mattress sat on the floor in the corner and Evie lay shivering on top of a single sheet, a thin blanket drawn up around her scrawny shoulders. Black hair. White skin. Wide eyes surrounded by thick smudged eyeliner that hid the lost innocence of childhood.
“I wasn’t expecting you.” Her voice was reed thin, as though it might snap under his will alone.
He liked that idea. “Busy?” Prostitution wasn’t big in a fishing village like this, but she had her regulars.
“N-no.” Her body shook forcefully under his gaze. “Not tonight, I didn’t feel like it.”
Good. He wasn’t big on sloppy seconds. He shed his coat, unbuttoned his shirt, and her eyes skipped across his scars.
“I said I didn’t feel like it!”
He stilled his fingers as his mood sharpened. She was so dumb she didn’t know he controlled every decision she’d ever made, from spreading her legs for her first customer to smoking a joint to numb the experience.
Hard to stop being a whore when there was nothing else you were good at. He smiled as she started to tremble. That’s what he’d made her believe. Since she’d been a timid twelve-year-old servicing him with blowjobs every time she was too scared to go home.
Well, he’d protected her, hadn’t he? He’d got her brother to walk under a bus just by planting the thought inside his thick skull.
Ungrateful little hussy.
Narrowing his gaze on her emaciated frame, he realized it wasn’t cold that made her shake. She had the DTs. Weak. So friggin’ weak. She needed control.
He owned it.
Picking up his jacket, he retrieved a small baggy from his pocket, rubbing the silky package between thumb and forefinger.
“Trying to kick your nasty habit?” He gave her his angelic smile and her eyes lit up with a mixture of despair and longing.
“N-no.” She licked her lips and her eyes followed the white powder the way iron filings tracked a magnet.
Power made him hard and he laughed louder.
“Do you feel like it now?” Not that he cared. He tilted his head as if her answer mattered.
Hysterical laughter rose within him as her head bobbed eagerly, even though her thoughts told him a different story.
She dropped the blanket from her shoulders. Two small white inoculation scars stood out against pale skin. Uglier scars lined her forearms, but something about those innocent childhood marks of protection made him want to close his eyes and pretend the world wasn’t a dirty, dangerous place where only the pitiless survived.
She held out a shaky hand, almost begging for the oblivion a little bit of blow would provide.
He palmed the bag. Almost wasn’t good enough.
“Take off your clothes.” He catalogued her thoughts with ease, anger burning along his veins because she wasn’t as meek and obedient as she pretended to be.
I’m cold! I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to touch anybody ever again. Ugh, that dirty old man this morning. God! I can’t get the taste out of my mouth. But coke…Aw, I don’t want it, but it’ll warm me faster than any blanket. And it won’t take long.
“Not long, darlin’, not long at all.”
She raised a pair of thinly plucked brows at him. She’d never figured out he could read every thought in her little head.
Eyes locked on the drugs, she slowly pulled her vest over her head. Turned away to unbutton her jeans and dropped them and her panties to the floor. He moved behind her. Put his hand across the base of her spine and forced her to bend further. Unsteady, she grabbed the bedside table while he unbuttoned his jeans and pulled out his cock. He probed the head of his penis into her dry folds and pushed.
“Aow!” she cried out as he thrust forward. Grabbing her shoulder and hip to stop her getting away from him, he dragged her back and ignored her shriek
s.
“Get off me!” she screamed.
Slick sensations of pure need swamped him. He squeezed her breast and pumped away from behind.
Jerking free, she fell to the floor and turned toward him on her knees. Her arms covered her small white breasts. Rage made him want to lash out, smack her on the side of the head, but he held it all inside.
“I don’t like it from behind.” Her voice was threadbare. She paled visibly when he shrugged and started pulling his trousers back up.
“Where are you going?” she asked, as if she had a right to question him.
Stupid slut.
Darting back and forth, she searched for the coke. Panic stretched the skin around her eyes wide, her eyeballs bulging in frantic desperation.
He reached for his shirt. She lunged for him, her small fingers clutching his wrist.
“Don’t go.” Her eyes were frenzied now. “I can do something else.”
His hands stilled as if he was listening to her words rather than the thoughts that scattered inside her dimwitted skull. She licked her lips, distaste barely hidden in her eyes.
He let her unbutton his fly and slip her hand around the length of him.
Give me that coke! I need it. I want it. Nothing else helps…Oh God, Oh God. I hate it. I hate men. I hate—
Blanking his thoughts, he smiled into her eyes. She hesitated, her lips an inch from his cock, and he twitched at the image.
Christ! For once in his life he wanted somebody to actually want him. To really want him. What was wrong with women? If they knew how rich he was, they’d be all over him. Women were lying whores, and if they weren’t lying whores they were vicious hags.
Finally her lips opened and she took him inside her moist little mouth. But he could feel her reluctance in every professional sweep of her tongue. Every hard suck.
Why couldn’t somebody love him the way they were supposed to?
With a growl, he thrust Evie away and she sprawled onto the mattress. He shucked his jeans, pulled the baggy of coke from his pocket and watched her makeup-blackened eyes follow it to the bedside table.
She was too stupid to know real fear. Needed a fix more than she needed her soul.
“Get on all fours,” he commanded.
“I told you, I don’t like it from—” Furtively she glanced at the baggy, sweat gleaming on her temples despite the temperature of the room. Without finishing her sentence, she turned on her front and crouched on her knees like a dog.
Maybe he could get her to bark.
He came up behind her, wrapped his fingers in her greasy hair and tipped her head back to look at him.
“If you say one word, one single word, you don’t get anything, understand?”
She nodded, dislike overwhelmed by desperation. He nudged her knees wider apart and pretended she was somebody else. He rammed into her and took her hard, nearly shoving her head into the wall. His hand tightened on her hair. She tensed and panted, but didn’t say a word.
Despite her silence all he could hear were her internal shrieks and moans. Complaints. Christ almighty. Pumping viciously, he tried to ignore the noise.
Aow! Bastard! Get it over. Please. I’m cold. I need a fix. I’m going to be sick. I can’t stand this. I’ve earned it, you tosser.
“Shut. Up.” He pushed her face into the pillow, tried to drown out the noise, the screams, the ridicule. Her hands started to flail, one fingernail scoring a line across his knee.
I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.
Finally, finally, his lust drowned out the tirade of criticism and noise. Excitement took over. Breathtaking tension spread from his tight balls to his clenched teeth.
The sweet, sweet, promise of release filled him, pounded into him, a blast of white-hot energy that purged his mind of every other thing. And finally he was alone, finally it was just him and pleasure and the single-minded fervor of sex. It rocketed through his dick, spread out until sensation filled his whole body and he came in a glorious scream that echoed throughout the quiet room.
Slowly, after a few seconds of enjoying the moment, enjoying the peace, he realized the silence was total.
He looked down.
“Shit.” The stupid bitch was dead.
***
Sorcha’s eyes opened instantly.
Where am I?
The drumbeat of her heart was so loud it bounced off the walls. Damp fear coated her skin in the chill morning air. Her mouth was dry, her breathing jerky and shallow.
Then she remembered. Ben Foley. The cottage.
Slowly her fingers relaxed.
She’d been having the same dream for months now, of burning in a sea of flames, but somehow the threat seemed more real this morning. She’d felt her skin melt, her flesh char, the delicate tissue of her lungs sear. And no matter how hard she fought, she couldn’t escape.
Cold now, she shook the sensation off. It was only a dream. She wouldn’t let it scare her.
The dreams, combined with her father’s ghost, made her feel as though she was losing her grip on reality. Being accepted into the graduate program at St. Andrew’s University had seemed like fate. She’d thought maybe her father wanted her to come back to her childhood home, to learn about her roots. So she’d come home. But his ghost hadn’t disappeared and she didn’t know what to do. Being haunted had her strung tighter than a gallows’ rope.
A doctor would have her committed before she could blink, and an exorcism wouldn’t look good on her résumé. Therapy? Revealing her innermost secrets to a total stranger? Telling a psychiatrist she saw ghosts and heard voices, only to become his personal case-study on paranoid schizophrenia?
No thanks.
Flower-sprigged wallpaper covered the wall. The bed had a heavy teak headboard and baseboard, and an old-fashioned wardrobe sat against one wall. The smell of the sea pervaded the air, and the windowpanes shook as a car rattled by.
Glancing at her watch, she saw it was already six. She rolled over, got up and dressed in yesterday’s clothes. She needed to get moving.
Her hair hung like rats’ tails down her back. She tied it up with a band and groaned, her stiff muscles and dull brain begging for another hour in bed. Since the dreams started, she’d been lucky to get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep a night. She’d tried pills, but they made her too groggy for her brain to function.
Carefully she straightened the bed, folded the clothes Ben had lent her and crept out of the room. He hadn’t closed the curtains, and the first rays of dawn haloed the May Isle in a blaze of gold through the picture window, capturing her attention.
The sea lay as flat as a sheet of glass.
Perfect. She’d check the Marine Weather Forecast but, with luck, she should get out to the island today.
A tiny sound made her jump. Ben was asleep in the chair beside the window, as if he’d spent the night staring out to sea.
It could do that to a person. Hypnotize you with beauty.
His face was raised to the ceiling. The back of his head rested against the top of the chair, and she didn’t envy him the crick in his neck he’d have when he woke. She resisted the urge to skim a finger over the bronzed skin of his cheekbone.
The lines of his face were cut less harshly in sleep and he looked younger. Maybe thirty? Maybe a little older? Old enough not to make stupid mistakes such as sleeping with strangers.
Inexplicably drawn, she crept closer, placing her feet softly on the floorboards so as not to make a sound.
His hair was one shade off black. Cut short, with a telltale kink that probably drove him nuts when it got longer. His lips looked warm and inviting, extremely kissable, even this morning, after a few hours’ sleep and some serious self-castigation. The attraction she felt for him made her doubly glad she hadn’t made a fool of herself last night.
Relationships made you vulnerable. Sex wasn’t something to undertake lightly. She knew that, but sometimes loneliness reached out and swallowed her whole.
Looking away f
rom him, she scanned the beach, watched breakers tumble over each other at the edge of the sea. The water was such a dazzling blue, reflecting the dawn so brightly, it hurt to look. This was her hometown. Where she’d been born and raised until she was ten years old. Nostalgia hovered somewhere between happiness and heartbreak, but still the memories wouldn’t come. How could she stop being haunted by ghosts and nightmares, if she couldn’t unlock the secrets of her childhood and unravel the mystery of night her father died?
Her gaze drifted to the rock pool where she’d found his body.
And suddenly she remembered her father waving to her from the deck of his fishing boat. The two of them sipping hot chocolate together as they watched waves crash over the pier. Practicing her letters as her father wrote in his journal.
“Do you miss him?”
She jumped. Ben captured her wrist as if to stop her running away. His question curled around her like a cold flame. It felt as though the temperature had plummeted twenty degrees.
“Who?” Stalling, she pulled back. She knew who he meant, but the brief flashes of memory left her unsettled.
“Your uncle said your father died out there.”
“Yes.” She didn’t know what Ben wanted from her. Not sex, she’d discovered that last night. Instead he probed secrets she kept locked away. “I miss him.” But no matter how much she’d loved her father, there were days when she hated him. For leaving her. For haunting her now. “But I don’t remember him very well.”
She could have shaken off Ben’s hand, yet she didn’t. He was the only warmth in the room.
“How did he die?” Interest stirred in his eyes.
As a child she’d learned to tell the story without feeling the words, but it felt different now. Too close, too overwhelming.
“He was on a rescue with the lifeboats.” Memories tripped through her mind once more. She’d loved the lifeboat, spent many training sessions playing on the gleaming deck among thick coils of rope under Sheila Morgan’s watchful eye. How could she have forgotten that?
The pulse from Ben’s thumb thrummed lightly against her wrist where her own pulse beat.
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