by Emerson Rose
He’s putting on a show of calm control, but I can feel him vibrating against me; he’s still crazy mad. He kisses me on the top of my head and turns back to Mr. Black, who is standing with his mouth hanging open, beads of sweat across his bald head.
“Find. Nick. Put this place on high alert. Nobody comes in, nobody goes out. I want someone walking the perimeter of the property at all times. No, make that two people. Turn on the night vision cameras and lock this place down.” He’s speaking through clenched teeth, trying to hold it together.
“Yes, sir,” he says, and he’s gone.
“I need to watch the video some more. Come with me. I don’t want you out of my sight.”
“Ok.” I agree with not being out of his sight but I don’t want to watch anymore of that video. Back in the secret monitoring room, we painstakingly go through the rest of the video. He follows the dark figure through the house, switching views and angles, but it’s impossible to see exactly where he or she got access.
It’s easy to see that the intruder knows the floor plan of the house, no way could he have eluded the cameras the way he did otherwise.
“Fuck! I can’t see where she came from or where the hell she got out. Who would want to do this, and why did she have that knife if she wasn’t going to use it?”
“She? You think it’s a woman, too?” I had considered that too, when I saw how graceful and petite the intruder was.
“Yes, she can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, and I saw her reflection in the mirror. Her face wasn’t discernable, but there was a little bit of her hair hanging out the front of her hood.”
“Marcus, maybe she didn’t use the knife because it wasn’t intended for me.”
I don’t have any enemies, other than the insane men who tortured me. I’ve never met a person I didn’t instantly get along with. Surely that knife wasn’t meant for me.
Marcus, however, is another story. I haven’t met anybody who likes him yet. I put some space between us again, propping my butt against a small desk next to him.
“You’re right, she could have been searching for me and found you by accident.” His voice is laden with guilt. I feel bad for stating the obvious, but he’s preoccupied with the video.
“It could be a small man, you know, instead of a woman.”
“Mm, no, it’s a woman. See her hands? And the way she moves? I’m sure it’s a woman.” The memory of the woman outside Dominus in the parking lot flashes through my mind.
“Marcus.”
“Yeah,” he says, not looking up at me right away. When he does, he gasps.
“My God, Imani, what is it? You’re white as a ghost.” He starts to get up, but I push off of the desk and go to him first.
“Could it be the woman from the parking lot?” He pulls me into his lap and flips a switch shutting off all of the screens.
“I am sorry, baby. You’re scared, and I’m not helping.” He sets the control pad aside and wraps me in a tight embrace.
I’m trembling, and this is all hitting me at once. The memories of the night I was kidnapped are flooding my mind, being pumped through my bloodstream, terrifying every cell in my body
I feel the hot tears running down my cheeks before it even registers in my mind that I’m crying.
“Shush, honey, I’m right here. I won’t leave your side until we find this person. Never, I promise, not for one single second. I’ll get her, whoever she is. Please, don’t cry.”
His words are meant to comfort me, but there isn’t a person on earth that can help me right now. Shock is taking over, and I’m checking out.
“I want to go home,” I say over and over.
He continues to rub his hand up and down my back shushing me again and again, but it’s no use, I’m gone.
Thirty-Three
I don’t want to wake up. I want to hide here in the dark forever where it’s safe and peaceful, but I can’t. Consciousness creeps through my mind and spreads through my body until I have no choice but to open my eyes.
“There’s my beautiful girl.” I blink and let my eyes adjust to the dim light of Marcus’s room. I’m in his bed, in my nightgown, curled up in our familiar sleeping position.
At first I try to ignore the feeling of doom building just below the surface, but then it comes. I sit up fully awake when I remember what happened this afternoon.
A crazy woman in my room, freaking out, Nick missing, Mr. Black in a panic, and then the overwhelming fear that a stranger came so close to hurting me.
“What happened?”
“You fainted. You’re ok. I called my physician, and he came to the house and checked you over. He said it was related to the stress of the situation. I told him you have a history of trauma in your past. I’ve been waiting for you to come around,” he speaks softly into my hair.
“You told a stranger what happened to me?”
“No, no, just that you had an incident when you were young that might have caused you to react severely to stress. No details, nothing, I promise.”
“Did you find her? Are you sure she’s out of the house? How did she get past security?” I’m asking him the questions as they enter my mind one at a time.
“No. We haven’t found her. The property, main house, pool house, everything has been searched. She’s not here.”
That doesn’t provide me with any comfort at all. She could still be in the house. I have to get out of here. It may be insane, but I want to go home, to my home. I want to be somewhere I have never been afraid. Where no one has touched me while I’m sleeping. Where no one ever broke in with a hunting knife.
Marcus will never let me out of his sight again. Against my better judgment, I start to plan my escape. Maybe I can slip out when he’s asleep? He takes sleeping pills after all. They don’t last long, though. He’s built up immunity to them over the years and that makes my window of opportunity small. And there is the security. I’d have to get past them.
Security. Yeah, right.
Maybe the intruder will come back and show me how she got in and out without security knowing. I wouldn’t even be facing this decision if his security were as great as he thinks it is.
Mr. Black is on hyperalert. It’ll be virtually impossible to lose him.
Maybe after work I’ll go home to my apartment instead of here, if he hasn’t sold it yet. If he even lets me go to work at all. Marcus’s castle feels like a prison instead of fairy-tale.
“Imani, are you ok? How do you feel?”
“Fine. Did you find Nick?”
His warm hand begins traveling down my arm, pulling me into the curve of his body. If I believed in stuff like mind reading, I would think he just read mine. He knows I’m going to run.
“Don’t run, Imani.”
I knew it.
“What?”
“I know you’re scared and worried about the breech in security today, and I have no answers for you right now. It’s logical that you would want to run. But, baby, don’t do it.”
I squirm in his arms, not wanting to hear any of this, but he presses on.
“Believe me, you’re safer here with me than anywhere else. We may have had a glitch tonight, and I know that it is making you fucking crazy, but you have to see that being here with some security is better than your place with none. We need some time to find out what’s going on and what this person’s motive was.”
He is right, but it doesn’t make me want to run any less. I’m getting out of here, and since he seems to have a direct line to my thoughts there’ll be no tricking him.
“I know you’re right. But you can’t babysit me twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. I’m sure your safety is more at risk than mine. She didn’t hurt me. Why do you think that is? Maybe it was a message or a threat. Did you find anything more on the video?”
“As far as I can tell, she came in through an upstairs guest room. The window alarm was turned off, but only that one. She came in on the balcony, and I think Nick was in on it.
There is absolutely no other way she could have gotten in here without being detected.” Well, that’s just great. I liked Nick. I can’t believe he was part of an inside job.
“How long has Nick been with you?”
“A long time, ten years.” His voice is pained, being betrayed by a long-standing employee has to hurt.
“Why do you think he did it?” I ask, propping myself up on my elbow to look into his eyes.
“I have no idea, Imani. I paid him more than he could ever make anywhere else. I don’t think we had any issues; none that I remember anyway.” His body stills, he said something he didn’t mean to…
“What do you mean? Are you having memory problems again?”
“No.” And there it is, proof that he’s lying. His eyes shift ever so slightly to the left and downward. Or he’s hiding something from me. He knows how much I worry about his tumor. How did I not think about that? He would keep any memory problems or pain to himself to prevent me from worrying.
“You are, aren’t you?”
“I am perfectly fine.”
There’s that damn word again -’fine;’ I hate it.
“I know you don’t want me to worry, in fact you insist that I don’t. Why won’t you give me some peace of mind and see the neurologist about that thing growing in your head?” There I said it; we’ve been avoiding the subject for weeks but no more.
“Ok, let’s talk about my tumor, Imani. You love me, yes?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Have you ever noticed that no one else does? No one I know, none of my employees, no relatives can stand to be in the same room as me. They all hate me, and with good reason. While you have been sleeping at night I have been watching old videos from the security’s database here and at Dominus trying to figure out why, trying to fill in the blanks. I do remember things… certain things, some parts of my life are crystal clear but others… it’s as if my brain scrambled the memories and feelings and now I can’t make sense of them. Most of the things I can remember are bad memories, I can tell you that. Interesting, though… I remember everything about my business and Megan’s life, my mother, my parents, growing up. It’s the more recent years I have trouble with.”
He’s been so lost, much more so than I ever imagined. And how would I have known? We only met a month ago.
“Did you learn anything from the videos?”
He sighs heavily and uncharacteristically fiddles with the edge of the blanket. Not the behaviors of the confident cocky man I have come to know.
“I was a motherfucker, Imani. The way I treated my staff. God, I was an incorrigible beast. And from what I can gather, I was involved with some very dangerous people and into some… dark things, to put it mildly. I am sure you’ve felt it: the fear, the hesitancy from people when I am around, and the surprise when they see us together.”
“Yes… I’ve suspected you must have had a serious personality change since the accident, but I didn’t know you had lost so much of your memory.”
“They aren’t all lost, they’re there. They’re just really jumbled up.”
“So why not get help? Maybe it’s operable? You could go back to…”
Oh my God. He doesn’t want to remember. He wants to keep those memories about his dark past buried deep down in his mind. He wants to be the man he is now… for me.
“Ah, beautiful and brilliant. She has unearthed my secret and opened Pandora’s box.”
“You don’t want to change, do you?”
He closes his eyes and rubs the back of his neck.
“No. I don’t want to be that man. I won’t be that man.”
This man is willing to risk his life, leaving a ticking time bomb in his brain, so that he can continue being the man I love.
“No more talking,” I say, trying my hand at taking control, but, as usual, he takes the reins. He pushes me gently onto my back and hovers over me, pressing the scruff of his five o'clock shadow against my cheek. He whispers in my ear, “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” I feel him smile against my face as I melt into the mattress under him letting all of my anxiety evaporate… for now.
“I’m going to kiss you from here,” he says, dropping a kiss on my forehead, “to here…” He moves to place another on my neck, “And… here.” He trails more kisses slowly down to my navel and above the swell of each hip, one and then the other.
A shiver of anticipation travels up my spine, and I wonder where he will explore next. He turns to his side and slides his hand behind my bare knee.
He changed my clothes while I was unconscious. How ironic that he was tending to me like I did for him at the beginning of our journey.
He kisses the inside of my thigh and continues to narrate his actions until he arrives at the top of my foot. He holds my leg in both hands, kissing my foot and the tip of each toe. “And finally here.”
“Wait, is someone watching us from the security room?” I ask when I remember the room full of cameras.
Marcus pauses before answering, “Yes, everything, everywhere, everyone, at all times, especially now.”
Well, I asked for it, now I know.
“Can we turn off the lights? Wait, can they see us in the dark?”
“Yes, we can, and no, they can only use the night vision outside for now. I’m having the system updated to include the inside of the house tomorrow. For now, they can only see outlines, no details, with the lights off.”
“I need the lights off.” I’ll miss seeing him naked. I love to watch him loving me. But right now I need to know that it’s just us, just Marcus and I, no one else.
He moves away from me to switch off the bedside lamp that I’ve never known to be turned off before. I slip the silk and lace nightie over my head and push my panties down my legs, kicking them off of my foot.
His strong hands glide over my body and his mouth covers mine tenderly, but I have no patience for taking things slow right now. I turn to face him on our sides and arch my back, pressing my breasts against the soft hair on his chest. I use my body to beg for more, and he understands. He always knows what I need, what I want, what I’m thinking.
It’s like our souls are connected, and we have been specifically created to be with each other. Beyond body and mind, connected by the universe, two halves of one whole.
I wrap my leg around his waist and grind the wet heat of my core into his fully clothed body. I pull at his skin-tight Henley that shows every muscle on his athletic body.
He obliges, pulling it over his head from behind with one hand, breaking our kiss just long enough to pass the material between us.
I work on his belt and soft jeans until he kicks them off, and we’re pressed against each other, naked, hot, and bare.
“I want you up here,” he says, patting his chest near his shoulders.
I’m glad I had him turn out the lights. He rolls us until he is on his back with me straddling his waist.
“Scoot up.” He grabs my ass with both hands to guide me where he wants me to be, and I realize what we’re doing.
“Hold on to the bed, up here,” he says and points to the wooden slats that make up the headboard. I do as I’m told and move up his body, grabbing the slats, until I’m hovering, trembling over his face, his mouth, looking down at his shadowy figure.
“I wish the lights were on, baby. I want to see you like this, spread open for me, so wet, always so wet for me.” He slips one long finger between my folds, plunging deep and curling it until it hits the spot that makes me writhe against his hand. I gasp and drop my head forward. He slides his finger out and takes my ass in both hands to guide me down onto his face. His tongue blazes my crease, ass to clit in one sudden long hungry sweep.
“Ah, God!” I grip the slats until my fingers ache as Marcus circles his tongue around my clit mercilessly. He rotates between plunging his tongue inside of me, around my bundle of nerves, and back further to my ass, over and over.
“I can’t wait,” I
say, panting as every muscle in my body coils, preparing for release, and I come apart over him, clenching my legs, thrusting into him; spasms rock through me with the longest orgasm I’ve ever experienced.
“You’re gorgeous when you let go, baby.”
It takes some time to recover. I can’t make my hands let go of the bed, but I look down at the outline of his face.
“How can you see me… in the dark?” I ask, trying to catch my breath.
“I don’t have to see you to know the sounds you make, and, my God, Imani, those whimpers and moans paint a lovely picture.”
I smile into the dark, and he moves my legs out from under his shoulders, helping me slide down his body. His rock-hard cock is pressing against me, the tip touching my ass, my palms are flat against his chiseled chest as he slides his hands to cup both of my sensitive breasts. He strokes them with his thumbs, bringing them to hard peaks. A low moan deep in his chest begins, and the need to have him inside me is dizzying.
“Please…,” I beg. He sits up, sliding me back over his length and enters me balls deep. We mold together in a lotus position, wrapped in each other’s arms.
This is what I needed, craved, longed for. I bury my face into his damp neck, savoring the feel of him being so deep and so still. I breathe him in and taste his salty skin on my lips.
True to his word, he has trouble taking it slow with me. He tilts his hips upward, and I start to glide up and down over his silky cock. Marcus guides me where he wants me to go, keeping the tempo by digging his fingers into my hips when he wants more and releasing when he is too close.
I pull away from his neck and thread my fingers through his hair, our lips crash together, his tongue penetrates my mouth at the same pace he fills me with his cock.
He’s frantic under me, and I love making him lose control this way. Grunting with every thrust, his big hands spread over my ass, he lifts me repeatedly and slams into my body, and that familiar electric jolt starts in my chest traveling warp speed to my core.
