by Rachel Woods
contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Have you read?
About the Author
Dedication Page
Copyright Page
About the Publisher
chapter 1
The Woodlands, Texas
Players’ Woods Community
Thin ice skimmed along the surface of her skin.
Lids fluttering, Spencer Edwards opened her eyes and then immediately closed them, regretting her decision to escape the unrestrained darkness of unconsciousness.
She preferred the black void of dreams she would never remember.
But the cold line trailing across her cheek was too confusing to ignore.
She opened her eyes again. Sun streamed into the room from three large rectangular ceiling-to-floor windows across from the king-sized bed.
Annoyed by the harsh morning rays, she turned her head from the windows. Spencer frowned, her heart kicking as she stared at the sun reflected on the gleaming blade of the knife hovering inches from her face.
“Good morning, sweet girl,” Ben Chang said. Lying next to her, propped up on his left elbow, he held the knife with his right hand. “How did you sleep?”
Spencer couldn’t answer him, couldn’t take her eyes off the razor-sharp blade. He held the knife casually, almost carelessly, as though it was some benign trinket, as though he couldn’t use it to slice her throat open, or slash her face to ribbons.
“Do you recognize this knife, sweet girl?” Ben asked.
Hardly able to breathe, Spencer followed the blade as it inched closer to her face and then descended beyond her line of sight.
Her heart slammed.
Cold steel skimmed the curve of her jaw.
Panic, terror, and confusion converged upon her, leaving her unable to speak or move, incapable of any coherent, logical thought.
Trailing the flat part of the blade across her cheek, Ben said, “You should remember this knife very well.” The thin spine of the knife glided over her neck and down over her collarbone.
Trembling, she stared at Ben, her blood colder than the knife trailing along her shoulder.
Was he going to kill her? Would she die a horrific, bloody death? Would he stab her over and over until the sheets were soaked with her blood?
“This is the knife you stabbed me with, sweet girl.”
A moment later, Spencer felt cold steel against her breasts. The scream she should have put into the atmosphere was strangled, silenced by terror and lust. Ben lifted the blade from her skin. Swinging his arm overhead in a swift arc, he stabbed the knife into the tufted leather headboard and moved on top of her.
Knowing what he wanted, Spencer didn’t deny him. She wanted the same thing, even though she knew, when it was over, she would hate herself for giving into him, for being so desperate and shameless.
She stared at the mural on the tray ceiling. It was different from the one on the ceiling in the townhouse bedroom, but still just as violent and bloody.
A dragon and a tiger fighting to the death.
Unlike the mural in the townhouse, this painting had words on the first panel.
The tiger will strike with claws.
The dragon will consume with fire.
In one section of the vivid, lurid drawing, the dragon used his tail as a weapon, thrusting the razor-sharp spines into the tiger’s powerful flank.
Gazing at another section of the mural, she gasped and clutched his shoulders as the sensations began to overwhelm her. Though wounded, the tiger sank a claw into the dragon’s back, between the scales, piercing the delicate flesh beneath the armor.
The sensations began to rocket through her, becoming almost overpowering as something violent and primitive took hold of her. Wrapping her arms around Ben’s neck, Spencer struggled to catch her breath as the feelings became overbearing.
Ben was rough with her, but she didn’t want tender caresses. She didn’t want gentle lovemaking to fool her or trick her into thinking he gave a damn about her.
Her eyes roamed across the mural to a section where the dragon swung his tail and penetrated the tiger’s side with the tip, pushing his tail deep into the tiger until the tiger was impaled upon him.
Something barbaric broke within her, and Spencer succumbed to an explosion of desperate thrashing. As the tumult subsided and her heart began to slow, she went limp.
Tracing his fingers along her cheek, Ben kissed her and lifted his head, smiling at her.
“Sonofabitch!” Spencer screamed and slapped him.
He cursed, shock in his dark gaze.
Flipping on her stomach, Spencer belly-crawled across the damp, crumpled sheets and flopped over the side of the bed to the floor.
No sooner had she hit the stamped carpet than she was on
her feet, sprinting across the room to the chair were she’d flung her clothes after hastily discarding them last night. Stumbling, she grabbed her shirt, pulled it over her head, then slipped into her jeans, and ran to the bedroom door.
Grabbing the knob, she opened it and—
A whispery swish, near her ear, too close, and then a thud against the doorframe.
Spencer turned her head to the left.
Her heart jumped and then dropped, as she saw the reflection of her own wild, wide-eyed stare in the blade jutting from the wood where the tip of the knife had penetrated the frame. Her fear exploding into rage, Spencer grabbed the hilt of the knife and yanked. The tip of the blade remained in the doorframe. Screaming, she struggled to pull it free, determined to pull the knife out.
Determined to kill Ben before he could kill her.
Spurred by visions of sinking the blade into him again, Spencer gritted her teeth, clutched the hilt with both hands, and yanked. The knife dislodged. Stumbling back, Spencer turned. Ben was almost right on her, moments away.
Undaunted, Spencer raised the knife, but he overshadowed her, smothering her with a powerful arm that snaked around her and dragged her toward him. Trapped in his hostile embrace, she wrestled against him, desperate and disoriented, not sure where she began and he ended or where she ended and he began.
She wasn’t even sure where the knife was until he grabbed her wrist, tightening his fingers like a vise.
“Not again, sweet girl,” Ben said, glaring down at her. “You will never get another chance to put this knife in my gut again. You will never get another chance to leave me bleeding on the floor, begging for your help, watching as you turn and walk away from me, leaving me to die.” He jerked her toward him, twisting her wrist.
Crying out, Spencer’s death grip on the hilt slipped, and the knife fell from her hand as Ben held her closer, tighter, crushing her against him.
chapter 2
The Woodlands, Texas
Players’ Woods Community
“You know, sweet girl, there is something I have been wondering,” Ben said.
Arms crossed, disgruntled and hostile, Spencer sat on a wicker stool at the island in Ben’s bright, yellow and French country blue kitchen. As the sun streamed in, warm and ethereal, she struggled to reconcile the feelings of domesticity with the rage racing through her blood. The cozy surroundings were disconcerting, and she fought to remember who Ben Chang really was—a devious asshole and not the kind, caring man he’d tricked her into thinking he was, the man she wanted him to be.
Standing at the gas range, Ben was making her an omelet. As she stared at the muscles beneath his smooth, deep chocolate skin, she felt her body responding. He didn’t have a shirt on, and the boxer briefs he wore left little to the imagination, reminding her of their tumultuous lovemaking. Spencer looked away, disgusted with herself, wishing she’d never me him on that beautiful afternoon.
Sitting on a park bench in front of the Houston City Hall reflecting pool, Spencer couldn’t help but think that the weather was too lovely for her to be so depressed. But how could she not be desolate after the disastrous interview she’d suffered through earlier that morning? She’d missed her chance for honest, gainful employment. So unless she wanted to starve, have her car repossessed, and get evicted from her apartment, she’d have to continue “dating” old men—drugging them and stealing from them.
Spencer had been close to tears when, peripherally, she became aware of someone sitting next to her. Annoyed, she’d rolled her eyes. Why the hell had someone decided to sit next to her? Most of the benches lined around the perimeter of the park were empty. Why couldn’t she be left alone to enjoy the grand, lavish pity party she’d thrown for herself? Wasn’t it a party she deserved, having just blown her interview at a leading oil and gas conglomerate?
Irritated by the interruption of her lamentations, Spencer was about to move to another bench when a deep, enchanting, lyrical baritone said, “You okay?”
The stranger’s concern seemed genuine, and as their conversation continued, she found herself intrigued by his island accent. Her interest increased as his compassion intensified, and when he asked her out to dinner, she didn’t turn him down.
She should have told him to go to hell. Instead, she’d spent two months getting to know Benjamin Chang.
But the tilt-a-whirl romance started to scare Spencer. She worried she might be falling in love, something she’d promised herself she would never do. Allowing carefree romance to turn into love wasn’t going to happen, not ever, not for her. But her aversion to love wasn’t the result of some tortuous heartbreak, or any rampant issues of low self-worth.
Spencer had her mother to blame. She supposed her mother could be blamed for most of the problems she’d suffered throughout her life. And most of those problems had started the day her mother had walked out of their small, hot apartment, leaving Spencer to fend for herself.
Child abandonment. Spencer hated the word abandonment and what it had meant in her life. Abandonment was frightening and embarrassing, but it had happened to her. She’d been abandoned—a neglected, discarded seven-year-old with purple bruises covering her arms and legs like tattoos. If not for the love and support of her grandmother, she would have ended up in foster care, a potentially worse predicament. But, the abandonment hadn’t been forever.
The prodigal mother came back five years later, when Spencer was twelve. Claiming to be a changed woman, the former absentee mother promised that she was different and wanted the chance to be the mother Spencer deserved. She’d found God and herself her mother had told the judge, and he’d been convinced. Though, it was more likely her mother’s beauty, and not her convictions, that had swayed him.
And her mother had been different. Gone was the woman who could be hyper and obsessive one moment and then violent and enraged the next. There was no more screaming and cursing. Her mother no longer threw things and broke dishes as she ranted and raged.
And the physical abuse was nonexistent.
No more slaps and kicks.
No having a pillow pressed against her face as she struggled desperately to breathe.
The violent mother was gone, but in her place was someone even worse. A needy, pathetic woman who had been more than willing to degrade herself in order to keep her husband, the first of three, it would turn out to be. Mommy dearest’s three doomed marriages had terrorized Spencer, leaving her with a palpable disdain and distrust of holy matrimony.
Love sent a woman to the depths of despair. Marriage was even worse, as it turned a woman into what Spencer thought of as “that wife”—a clinging woman who would humiliate and demean herself to please her man.
Sighing, Spencer stared at the glass of grapefruit juice Ben had poured her, fortified with a healthy dose of vodka. To calm her nerves, he’d claimed. As if liquor could erase the terror and trauma of waking up to a knife in her face that could have ended up in her back instead of the doorframe.
“How did you get into this business of drugging men and stealing from them?” Ben asked.
Spencer said nothing.
“You’re a beautiful woman,” Ben said. “Why would you risk stealing expensive things from men who would probably fall all over themselves to give them to you if you just asked?”
“I would have to do more than ask.” She stared at the vodka-laden grapefruit juice, tempted to grab it.
“That’s true,” he said and then poured a bit too much vodka into his own glass of grapefruit juice. “You’d probably also have to smile.”
Again, Spencer stayed quiet.
“Are you one of those women who gets turned on by the idea of getting caught taking something that doesn’t belong to her?”
“I’m one of those women who has bills to pay,” she said. “I’m one of those women who lost her job and then couldn’t find another one, and then …”
“And then what?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You wouldn’t unde
rstand and neither would you care.”
“I care more than you think, sweet girl,” he said. “Maybe more than I should.”
Rolling her eyes, Spencer glanced out the window over the sink, refusing to believe he’d ever cared about her, or even had the ability to give a damn. “Why don’t you tell me something,” she said. “How did you find out about me? Who told you that I—”
“That you drug old men and rob them blind?”
Deaf, dumb, and blind, she thought, remembering what Rae always said.
“Well, it is a sad, but interesting, tale of betrayal and heartbreak.” Ben slid the omelet from the skillet onto a plate, then turned, and reached across the island to sit the plate in front of her. “It’s the story of a young handsome industrious and enterprising entrepreneur who made the mistake of extending his compassion, concern, and caring to a beautiful woman who he thought was sweet and kind, but who turned out to be devious and treacherous.”
“Are you going to answer me anytime soon?” she asked, not in the mood to be shamed by his ridiculous theatrics.
“The devious woman stabbed the compassionate entrepreneur, in an act of cold-blooded mercilessness, and left him to die, even though he begged and pleaded with her for help,” Ben said. “Somehow, he was able to crawl to a phone and call nine-one-one. A few weeks later, the man went away to recuperate.”
Spencer rolled her eyes.
“During his sabbatical, the man was visited by a very good friend, whom he confided in about his disappointment. The man’s friend was livid at the woman’s callous treatment of the man, and he set out to find out why the woman had done the man wrong. The friend decided to look into the woman’s background—”
“Look into my background?” She stared at him, her heart racing. “You had somebody investigate me?”
“The friend learned several interesting things about the woman,” Ben said, disregarding her questions. “And he shared his findings with the man. It turned out that the woman had a treacherous half-sister, a woman named Desarae Bedard.”
Spencer looked away, her heart racing with fear now, the rage eclipsed by panic and confusion.
“Desarae Bedard, the man’s friend learned, was the star of her own sick, twisted plot,” Ben said and then smiled. “Two years ago, Desarae Bedard had been accused of murdering a wealthy investment banker and his wife. She was cleared, but the subsequent criminal investigation revealed that she had been the investment banker’s secret mistress.”
