by Hannah Ford
He held me tight, kissing the back of my neck and snuggling me close. “Are you hungry?” he asked. The backs of his fingers brushed my forearm absentmindedly, and I shivered and pushed closer to him, warming myself with his body heat.
I shook my head. “No. I’m not hungry.”
“You’re sleepy?”
“No.”
“Liar.” He was playing with my hair now. “You can sleep if you want.”
“What will you do?”
“Hold you.”
I smiled. “Hold me while I sleep?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because now that I have you, I’m never letting you go.”
* * *
When I woke the next morning, Callum was wrapped around me, seemingly in the same position that we’d been in last night, his strong arms holding me tight, our legs tangled together under the sheets.
“’Morning, sleepy,” he said, and stretched.
I turned over to get a better look, admiring the lines of his body, the smooth planes of his chest, his narrow hips and chiseled abs.
He reached for me again, pulling me to him, and I could feel him harden against me as he began to kiss my neck.
I closed my eyes and sighed contentedly. I tilted my head back, enjoying the feel of his body against mine and the brush of his lips on my skin.
A second later, the alarm on my cell phone echoed through the room, breaking the moment – I’d set it for six-thirty yesterday while I was still at work, so I could make sure I wasn’t late again.
“Sorry,” I said sheepishly. I reached for my phone and suddenly I was shy, gathering the sheets around my body as they slipped down around me. I knew Callum seen every part of me (he’d had me on a freakin’ spreader bar for God’s sake!), but something about being exposed to him now, in the light of day, made me self-conscious.
“No phones.” Callum took my cell from my hand and tossed it onto the bed just out of my reach. He rolled on top of me, his muscular thighs pinning my hips, his hands grabbing at my wrists, forcing them over my head and holding me down.
“I have to go to work,” I said, giggling and squirming underneath him.
“Why?”
“Um, because I have a job?”
“You don’t need a job.” He lowered his mouth to my neck and kissed me there again, his tongue flicking against my skin. My body responded instantly, my nerve endings igniting, my core aching.
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
“Because people need to work.”
“I have plenty of money for both of us.” He skated his lips down over my collarbone.
“I have to work,” I said, giggling, and squirmed out from under him. Callum reached for me, but before he could pull me back into bed my eyes fell on something that was laid out on the bench.
It looked like an outfit -- a long black pencil skirt and a button-up white blouse with a black cardigan.
“What is that?” I asked, standing there with the sheets clutched around my body.
Callum followed my gaze. “Your clothes.”
I walked over and ran my hand over the soft material of the skirt. “Where did you get them? These aren’t mine.”
“They belong to you.”
“No, I mean…they’re not from my apartment.”
“I had them sent over.”
“So I wouldn’t have to go home and change?”
“No. Because I’ll be in charge of what you wear from now on.”
“Oh.” I swallowed around the lump in my throat, suddenly unsettled, although I didn’t know why. Callum had told me he was going to take control of every aspect of my life. I’d read the freakin’ contract for God’s sake, I’d understood all the things he expected of me. And yet, now that I was faced with it, it was different. Giving myself over to him sexually was one thing – that was easy. My natural inclination was to do that, to let him play my body and use it in whatever way he desired. But him telling me what to wear? My instincts on that told me it was messed up and wrong.
“Adriana?” Callum stood and crossed the room to me. “What is it?”
“It’s just… I mean, it’s kind of weird, you picking my outfit.”
“You don’t like the outfit?”
“No, the outfit is beautiful.” I glanced back down at it. It was gorgeous, the fabrics obviously expensive, everything beautifully cut and chic. “It’s just strange that you chose it.”
He tugged at the sheet around me, sliding it down my shoulders. Jealousy blazed in his eyes. “I don’t want anyone looking at you.”
“Who would look at me?”
“Other men.”
“So you have to choose what I wear?”
“I own your body. And I don’t want anyone else seeing any part of it.”
I bit my lip. This was so messed up! I mean, talk about red flags. But you knew this was how it would be. You knew when you signed that contract last night what you were agreeing to.
“Do not make me punish you,” Callum growled, and his hands tightened on my bare shoulders.
I opened my mouth to speak, to tell him I didn’t need to be punished, that I would do what he said, that I would play by his rules. But before I could, there was a horrible crashing sound, followed immediately by the sound of breaking glass.
Callum was on top of me in an instant, pushing me down to the floor and covering me with his body as a shower of shattered glass rained down over us. Something hit the floor next to me, hard and heavy, the thudding sound it generated so loud I could feel it reverberating through my body.
It seemed like forever, but it was probably only a few seconds before it was all over.
I opened my eyes, blinking them until the room came into focus.
A brick.
There was a freakin’ brick a foot from my face. Someone had thrown it through the window.
“Don’t move,” Callum commanded. “There’s glass all over.”
He removed his body from mine and and stood up. I stayed still, like he’d told me to.
He surveyed the scene, then reached down, slid his hands underneath my knees and scooped me up, carrying me out of the broken glass and to the bed, where he sat me down gently on the edge of the mattress.
“What the hell?” The adrenaline coursed through my veins as I took in the carnage. The window was completely gone. Not just shattered, but gone, the entire pane of glass in shards on the floor.
“Are you okay?” Callum was kneeling in front of me, running his hands over my body, inspecting me for wounds or cuts, turning my hands over in his.
“Yes. I’m okay. That was just… holy crap, that was scary. Who would do something like that, throw a brick through your window?”
Jason. Of course! It had to have been him. Had he been following me last night after all? Had I led him right to Callum’s apartment? Before I could voice my fear, my gaze fell on Callum’s bare back. It was covered in shards of glass. “Oh my God, Callum, you’re bleeding.”
He glanced over his shoulder absentmindedly. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.” I leaned down to take a closer look. His back was covered in pieces of glass, some of which were embedded in his skin. Blood oozed from the wounds, one of them so hard and deep it formed a crevice, blood flowing in a rivulet down his spine. I sucked in a breath. “You’re hurt.”
He stood up and walked to the bathroom. I grabbed the shirt he’d been wearing last night and tossed it over myself, then followed him to the bathroom, and stood in the doorway, watching him.
Callum turned and glanced at his back in the mirror. “Shit,” he swore. He opened the cabinet under the sink and pulled out a first aid kit, then went to work on the glass with a pair of tweezers.
“You need to see a doctor.” There was no way he was going to be able to take care of that himself, not with some crappy first aid kit.
“No.”
“You’re never going to be able to get all the glass out.” I cringed as I
watched him pulling the shards out with the tweezers. It looked extremely painful. And yet he never winced, never flinched, never showed the slightest sign that he was hurting. He did that for me, I thought. He’d protected me. If he really wanted to hurt me, if he was really bad for me, would he have done something like that?
“I’ll get it out.”
“Let me do it,” I said, walking into the bathroom and reaching for the tweezers.
“No.”
“Callum. You’re acting crazy. If you’re not going to go to the doctor, then at least let me help you.”
He sighed and held the tweezers out to me grudgingly, then turned around.
“Oh, Callum,” I breathed. He’d actually done a good job of getting the glass out, but his back was still a mess. I grabbed a bunch of antiseptic wipes from the first aid kit and wiped away the blood. “We need to call the police.”
“No.” He shook his head again. “No police.”
“What do you mean, no police? Of course we have to call the police! If this guy is going to start taking things to the next level, if he’s going to throw a freakin’ brick through your window, then we have to make sure the police know about him.”
“What guy?”
“Jason!” The antiseptic wipes had cleared most of the blood from Callum’s back, and had also helped to get rid of some of the smaller shards of glass, the tiny particles that would have been impossible to find with the tweezers. But he needed to go to the hospital. I wasn’t a doctor, and I couldn’t be sure I was getting every last piece of glass out.
Callum glanced over his shoulder, inspecting the work I was doing. “It wasn’t Jason who did that, Lemon.”
“Of course it was!” I bit my lip as I looked at the biggest shard of glass that had fallen on him. It was embedded deep in his flesh, right between his shoulder blades. “Hold still,” I said. “This is going to hurt.” I sucked in a breath and steeled myself, then pulled it out. But again, Callum didn’t flinch or show any sign of discomfort.
“That’s enough,” he declared as I began to open another antiseptic wipe. He picked up a gauze pad, one of those big ones that was designed to cover a large area. He ripped a piece of gauze tape off the roll with his teeth. “Put the gauze on me now.”
“But it’s not all the way cl –”
“I don’t care.”
I sighed and did as he said, pressing the gauze against his skin and fastening it with the tape, hoping that I’d at least done enough to keep his wounds from getting infected.
He leaned back against the counter, holding onto it with his hands, his brow furrowed in concentration.
“We should call the police,” I said again.
“That’s not how I do things.”
“Not how you do things?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “That’s insane talk, you realize that, right?”
“The police aren’t going to do anything, Adriana. They’ll come take a statement and that’s it.”
“But if we tell them about Jason, if we –”
“I told you, it wasn’t Jason who did that.”
“It had to be Jason. I mean, come on, Callum, he was following me last night, and now a brick gets thrown through your window? That doesn’t sound like a coincidence.”
“I know guys like Jason, Adriana. They’re all talk.” He was so sure of himself, so assertive, and I marveled again at how calm he was. He was pensive, yes, but he wasn’t rattled in the slightest. People only achieved that level of calmness after a crisis from two things – from being so cut off from their emotions that they didn’t access them, or from seeing and experiencing such horrible things that nothing shook them anymore. I was almost sure that in Callum’s case, it was a combination of the two.
“So then who was it?” I pressed.
He shrugged. “I have lots of enemies.” He pushed past me and out of the bathroom, leaving me staring after him incredulously.
“You have lots of enemies?” I repeated. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means that when you’re successful, a lot of people want to hurt you.”
He was in the kitchen now, assembling things for breakfast. “Get ready for work,” he commanded. “I’m making you blueberry pancakes.”
“What if I don’t like blueberry pancakes?” It was a test and a lie. Everybody loved blueberry pancakes, especially me.
“You like what I say you like.”
His back was to me as he continued pulling things from the refrigerator – milk, eggs, blueberries. I wondered where the food had come from, imagined faceless workers showing up and stocking his refrigerator with food.
I sighed, knowing the conversation was over, and began heading for the bathroom.
“Adriana,” Callum called after me.
“Yeah?” I turned around.
“I’ll take care of it.”
“You’ll take care of what?”
“Jason.” His eyes darkened as he said the man’s name, letting me know that even though Callum might not have thought Jason was the one who’d thrown the brick, he was still furious with Jason for scaring me. “He won’t bother you again.”
My stomach turned in on itself. “You mean like kill him?” I whispered.
Callum grinned, that sexy cocky little grin of his that made me melt. “Jesus, Lemon, what the hell must you think of me? No, not kill him. Just make him go away.”
My mouth dropped. “So kill him!”
“Adriana!” he said again, grinning and shaking his head as he began making up the pancake better. “I’m not going to kill him, Jesus. But there are ways of dealing with these things.”
“He won’t be hurt?”
“Just his pride.”
“Okay.” I bit my lip. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” he said, he looked up at me, his eyes locked on mine. “I will do whatever it takes to protect you.”
* * *
I showered again, even though I’d just showered last night, because I wanted to make sure my hair was perfect for work. After the disheveled state I’d shown up in yesterday, I needed to make sure it didn’t happen again. I brushed my teeth and did my makeup with the makeup I had in my purse.
Then I dressed carefully in the outfit Callum had provided for me, surveying myself in the mirror when I was done.
I looked very much put together, a professional woman on her way to work. The blouse was gorgeous and silky, the lines of the pencil skirt hitting perfectly just below my knees. The cardigan was pure cashmere.
The underwear Callum had chosen was sexy and felt delicious against my skin. A black lace push up bra and a matching thong. He must have liked knowing that I was wearing sexy things under my conservative outfit.
When I got back to the kitchen, Callum was sitting at the table, clad in nothing but pajama pants, his naked, toned torso on full display. There was a plate of pancakes in front of him, and he was looking at something on his IPad.
“Don’t tell me you’re actually reading something on your iPad,” I said, sinking into the seat next to him. “What about your paper Wall Street Journal?”
“The Wall Street Journal doesn’t have the latest real estate listings.”
“Are you looking to buy real estate?”
He stood up, ignoring the question, and slid the plate of pancakes over to me. “Eat your breakfast.”
“What about your breakfast?”
“I already ate.”
“Oh.” My hands twisted together in my lap. “I thought… I mean, I thought we would eat together.”
He shook his head. “I have to get ready for work.”
“Okay.” I tried to hide my disappointment. I wondered how much of him not eating with me had to do with him actually needing to get ready for work, and how much of it was that he didn’t want to give me unrealistic expectations about what was going on between us. Sitting here eating breakfast together before work was something a couple did, the kind of thing that could give me the wrong idea about how our
relationship really worked. But I did my best to push these thoughts out of my mind while I ate the pancakes he’d made me.
When I was finished, I brought my plate to the sink and rinsed it off, then placed it in the dishwasher.
“You don’t have to do that,” Callum said, appearing in the doorway of the bedroom. He was freshly showered, his hair damp, his strong jawline smooth, the dusting of stubble that had been there earlier now completely gone. “The housekeeper will take care of it.”
“I don’t mind.”
He shrugged as he fixed the cufflinks of his shirt, the gesture so strong, so masculine that it made me shiver. Then he put his suit coat on, and I marveled at how quickly he could transform, like a chameleon, from a badass hero falling onto me and protecting me from falling glass, into a businessman who was going to spend all day behind a desk, yelling orders at people.
He was so freakin’ sexy.
“I’ll take you to work.”
“You’ll drive me?”
“My car will drop you off.”
“Oh. But you’ll come too?”
“Yes.”
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling. More time with Callum! He was bringing me to work!
“The windows are tinted,” he said. “I will let you off around the corner so we can make sure to stay discreet.”
“Thank you.”
He picked up the leather briefcase that was sitting on the floor and set it on the counter, then turned the lock to the right combination and opened the case with a click.
He took something out of the briefcase, curving his fist around the object so that I couldn’t see what it was. He crossed the kitchen to me, then reached down and took the sides of my cardigan and pulled them tighter around my body. I’d left the top four buttons undone, and he began to button them.
“Callum,” I said, reaching for his hand. “What are you – ”
“Your body is mine.”
“Callum, I’ll look like –”
“You will look like a woman who has a man who doesn’t want anyone looking at her but him.”
He finished buttoning me up and then kissed me softly on the lips, his hand pressed against the small of my back as the kiss deepened. When he pulled back, he kept his hand against my back, holding me close to him, making it impossible for me to move.
