by Zoey Parker
Not in danger.
She shook the feeling away. She would just lock the door and forget about this feeling. It took her a minute. The lock blended in with the color of the doorknob, and there was something off about the latch. It didn’t look new. The way she had to hold onto the knob and press it closer to the doorframe as she locked the door told her this entire thing was old. The cabin looked newer than the door did; maybe whoever put these here had a thing for antique doorknobs. Maybe this place wasn’t as secure as Darren would have her believe.
Where the hell was Darren? She’d intended on finding him and getting him to take her to the store, where she may or may not have ditched him. Now she was mildly worried. She’d already combed through the house and she hadn’t found him.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a trail of steam leading from farther down the hallway to the bathroom. She blinked. The shower. Of course. She took a second to listen, recognizing the sounds she heard coming from that direction as the sound of running water.
The door to the bathroom was open. Maybe Darren had walked from there to the bedroom while she’d been out back. The idiot had forgotten to turn the water off. She should really fix that. And the steam looked so warm. There was no harm in going in it. The closer she got to the bathroom door, the more steam there seemed to be; the door wasn’t just cracked open, it was swung wide so she could see the entirety of the bathroom.
Like she’d have been able to see anything.
The room was full of so much steam she couldn’t see her fingers in front of her. She made her way farther into the bathroom, even though she couldn’t see shit. This was probably a bad idea. There was no way anyone was in here, though; why would Darren just leave the bathroom door open if he was showering, when he clearly knew she was there? Well, he might. It's not like he was the type to care if someone saw him naked. So maybe he was in here. And maybe that was the driving force that made her want to keep going further into the bathroom.
She shook her head. Maybe it wasn't. No, she was going into the bathroom for her own safety. She’d had a weird feeling earlier, when she was out in the yard, and the door leading outside had been left slightly open. Now the bathroom door was also open and steam was pouring out of it; something had to be amiss, and she was just investigating it. That was all that was happening.
Yeah. Exactly. She didn’t even stop to question the fact that her excuse had changed from turning off the water Darren had accidentally left running to checking for potential killers hiding in the bathroom.
The farther she got in the bathroom, the easier it was to see. The storm of steam started to gradually dissipate the farther in she got. The shower was getting closer. She could see the thin outline of the shower curtain from her position, but that was about it. The toilet and the sink had to be somewhere right?
What was she thinking? Why had she gone in here in the first place? She wasn't really scared. Of Darren, of anything, of being murdered. So far there wasn't even really proof that someone wanted her dead specifically. That drive-by could have been an accident. She doubted that she was the only person in the city with her type of car. Maybe she hadn’t even been the intended target.
And yet, even though she didn’t want it to be true, everything in her believed Darren when he said that someone wanted her dead. So if that same everything inside of her wanted something more with him, she might as well go for it. It seemed like the entire time she'd been at this safe house, she'd spent it trying to convince herself that it was okay for her to want him.
And she still didn’t even fully believe it.
God damn it.
By the time she'd come back down from that now-familiar line of thought, she'd noticed that the steam was gone. The air around her was cooler, in that muggy way that the air can only be after the thick heat of too-warm water.
She could see more than just the thin line of the shower curtain now, and she hadn’t even advanced farther into the bathroom. If she turned around now, she could still go back. Whoever was in the shower wouldn’thave to know that she was ever there, and she could believe that it was someone else in the shower, and that she wasn't just trying to creep on–
Darren.
The familiar, hard lines of his body came into view. He was still hidden from behind the shower curtain, which was regrettably dark enough that she couldn’t see his skin. It was easy enough to guess who was in there, though. Meaning, not only were they the only two people in the house, and presumably the only two people who currently knew about its existence, but also that Darren was the only one with that rugged physique. It was unique to him in the way that –
Oh, shit. A quake. And then another quake, and then, the shower curtain started to move. It felt like forever watching it, even though it was just the slightest motion as his hand first started to grab and then pull at the material. It was probably just a few seconds, actually, but it felt like forever. She had nowhere to go but back from where she’d come, and she didn’t have enough time to cross back and exit the bathroom from where she was now. She’d gone too far.
Nope. There was no way of leaving. She turned her head to look behind her for just a second, but she didn’t even have time to do that before he was in front of her.
Should she look? Should she not? Her eyes were on the floor, but from the corner of her view she saw Darren emerge from the shower.
She was turning into a blabbering idiot inside her own head. Maybe he wouldn’t see her. Maybe he’d look to the left, or to the opposite of where she was. And maybe he’d just ignore his street smarts and the feeling of another person being in the room with him. Yeah. Yeah, right. Like that would happen.
He lifted his head to her before he even made as if he was going to grab a towel.
She didn’t know how, but she could just tell that he was looking at her, even though her eye were still on the floor. It sent a flush of heat to her cheeks, and down to her neck. Her ears must've been red, too, but that might have all been from the steam instead of from something else.
No. He was the reason. The only reason. Of course. Maybe he wouldn’t notice.
“Looking for something.”
She lifted her eyes hesitantly, not wanting to make eye contact. She’d just been caught trying to peep on him! And she knew immediately that there was no way she could use the excuse of being afraid of something. He might go check – that was his thing; he seemed to have a thing for generic masculinity and all those other male standards that Victoria hated, but that made her weak in the knees. But he’d find nothing, and then the jig would be up.
She could probably make up for it if she said something clever right away.
“Hey.”
Yeah. Nailed it, Victoria. That was the best she had.
She was used to being in control of herself, but it looked like a couple days of being locked up in a house with this asshole was making her lose touch with everything about herself. She hated it, but, at the same time, she loved it. What did that even say about her?
Whatever. Now that he knew she was completely creeping on him, she might as well take the chance to admire him. There was no reason to just be embarrassed and do nothing with it. She lifted her eyes from the floor slowly, dragging them across the lines of the tile – trying to be slow about this was the most aggravating part – before resting them at his feet.
Her eyes went from his feet up to his legs. There was no sense in dragging it out any more than she had. She closed her eyes again for a brief moment, and then looked all the way up. She tried to skim over the area between his legs – his cock; why was she being so shy about it all of a sudden? That wasn't like her. But her gaze was drawn there immediately. She saw the head of it first, big and thick, and...
Her eyes moved away from it, but in trying to avoid gazing at the tip her view dragged up his shaft. He was long, and white, and, and...
Most definitely getting hard.
Splotches of red danced up to her cheeks at the same time as she
drew in a hissing breath. How could he be hard? Maybe he wasn't even turned on. He probably wasn't. She went to look at him again, but she couldn’t bring herself to openly gawk, and her gaze slid back up to his eyes.
Well, his face, and then his eyes.
He was smirking: a huge grin that started on either side of his face and stretched wide, holding itself up so neatly at the corners as it folded open. He raised an eyebrow at her as she looked, and that just made her blush some more.
She was resolved not to let him get the best of her, though. There was only so much she could do here, and falling around at his feet wasn't going to do her any favors. Lord knows the man probably already had some kind of ego complex, especially over his well-sized manhood.
She shook her head. The steam in the room was completely gone now, the only evidence of it ever having been there the hot mist on the mirror above the sink. She looked to it, trying to look at herself, to see how bad her blush was. Anything to avoid looking at him.
“Like what you see?”
She turned her head as he spoke, knowing that he’d say something but not knowing where this was going. His tone was light, playful; if she didn’t know any better, she'd say that he liked just about everything that was going on here.
What could she say, though? They hadn’t even had to deal with each other that long, and she was already starting to give into the idea of sleeping with him. There was no way she was going to do that, in any situation. But the idea was still somewhat tempting.
She made eye contact. This blushing bride crap wasn't like her at all, and she wasn't going to let some lust change that about her.
“You should put a towel on,” she suggested.
He raised his eyebrow at her again.
“And why exactly should I do that?” He grabbed a towel off of the rack beside him.
She didn’t say anything for a moment. There was only so much sass you could throw at one man. But if she stayed silent, he might think that she was dumbfounded, shell-shocked, or something like that, and that wasn't the impression she wanted to leave on a man like Darren Saylor. She was able to handle him, and he had to know it. If he didn’t already, that is.
“To dry yourself off.” She rolled her eyes. She knew it was a weak retort.
But it was hard to even get that much out. Her eyes roamed over his body again. How hadn’t she noticed this physique when he’d first touched her? Brought her to this house? They hadn’t had that much physical contact, unfortunately, but they had kissed. She should've been able to feel the hard lines of his body before then and make guesses about what he’d look like without his shirt. Not that she hadn’t seen him shirtless before; she had. That did nothing to prepare her for the hard line of his cock, though, the firm shape of his thighs, and the deep V that was made by the outline of his hips.
“Is that what you really want me to do?”
She had to get out of there.
This was going in exactly the direction she didn’t want it to. She was standing there gawking like a schoolgirl and that wasn't going to get him to view her as anything more than some slutty bartender. She was so much more than that, even though she hadn’t put much effort into finding something better in life.
“I think,” she finally said, trying to make it seem like she hadn’t just put a few moments of agonizing thought into these few short sentences, “that you should put some clothes on, and then we'll do something.”
And then she left.
Chapter Eleven
Victoria
The walk back to the living room was more difficult than it should have been. Victoria’s mind was full of visuals of Darren naked. She hadn’t looked at him all that long, but the thought of his body was still burned into her mind. And he’d caught her looking. Great. He was going to tease her for this, in all the ways he possibly could.
That didn’t mean she couldn’t keep him from doing anything about it, though. Sure, he could say things, but it was how she chose to respond that would determine the outcome of this situation. And if she filled her time with other things, there probably wasn't that much of a big deal to be made out of it, right?
The only problem was that there was still nothing to do here. There hadn’t been before she'd seen him naked, and there still wasn't now. Her mind whispered dirty things to her that she couldn’t consider. He was absolutely not an option. But he was so damned attractive.
It was awful.
It was really, truly awful.
She bit her lip, trying to think of anything at all aside from him. There were books here. She could think about books. She could try to cook something, except there was barely any food here. She still hadn’t gotten him to go to the store for her. But maybe they could play a game. There were plenty of games they could play that didn’t rely solely on a board or something like that, and it didn’t even have to involve their bodies.
Why did her mind just go there?
Maybe there were cards. Yeah.
She finally made her way out of the hallway and back towards those treacherous shelves of books she'd seen earlier. She didn’t even pretend that she was going to flip through the books this time, though. Earlier, when she was making her way through the books, she'd seen a small tin box. It looked more like a lunchbox than anything else, really, but that it could have something interesting in it, right?
Unless there was nothing in it at all. But after just a few minutes of searching the bookshelves, she found that there was not one but a couple of lunchboxes tucked neatly in beside the bunch of novels.
She gathered the boxes under her arm and moved to the couch. She could probably put the boxes on the table in front of the couch to make things easier for her when as she scoured through them, but then Darren might sit next to her and ask her what she was doing.
There were five boxes in all. She scooted a little further to the right, and put two boxes on the couch next to her, so he couldn’t sit there. Then she spread out the other three to the left of her, making sure there was well and truly no room for Darren to plop down if he decided to come out immediately.
Not that he would. She didn’t know how Darren operated, but she was under the impression that he didn’t often get the chance to dawdle in the shower. She didn’t even know how long he’d taken this time around. It took her a while to go looking for him. But he probably wanted to be in there for a while. Maybe he was even touching himself.
She shook her head. As bad as her past relationships had been – she'd been burned by a guy more than once or twice in her life so far – she'd never been with a guy like Darren. She hadn’t even tried to flirt with one, actually. That was why she wasn't so happy about working at that shitty bar. She could do so much better, and she hadn’t.
She couldn’t flirt with him. She hadn’t been flirting with anybody. She hadn’t been with anyone in a long time. What would it mean if she broke that streak by trying to get with Darren? It probably wouldn’t mean anything good for her. Yeah, she needed to keep doing what she was doing, minus the whole bathroom fiasco.
She opened each box. She didn’t really look in them, she just undid the metal latches that kept the secrets of the tins guarded. She didn’t know what she was looking for, and she didn’t know what she was expecting, or what she was supposed to be expecting, but she didn’t really care.
It was weird to her that these boxes were here in the first place. Why hadn’t she bothered opening them earlier? Maybe she’d been nervous about what she’d find inside. She was at a club safe house, after all. Could it be drugs? Hit lists? Severed fingers? She rolled her eyes at herself. There weren’t going to be severed fingers in these boxes. Why had she even thought that? Probably stress.
Once all the boxes were unlatched, she threw the lids open as fast as she could, half excited, half dreading what she’d find inside.
A bunch of paper.
A dull pencil. She tried scratching it across a piece of paper to see if she could use it to write anything, but it didn’t
work. The word came out dull and faded, and she could barely see it even when she moved the thin scrap of paper so it fell further into the light. So that wasn't going to be good for anything, it seemed. She didn’t see a sharpener. She put the pencil down and went back through the next box.
More paper. There was a post-it note in there, too. A whole thing of them. She brought them out and tried to read the imprint of whatever the last note there had been, but she couldn’t see any indents. Even if she had a pencil that was in working order, she wasn't exactly going to be getting any secrets out of that thing soon.
She sighed.
That box was no good. She made her way to the next one, and its contents were just as disappointing: some rubber bands that looked to be in such poor shape that she almost mistook them for twine; a pen, but it didn’t have its cap and the ink had long since dried out; another mass of paper; and some coins.
