by Linda Barlow
It's not about you anymore was right. Hadley had made that clear.
“Hadley’s dad has the money and the influence,” Finlay continued. “He’s been using it all year, searching for her, chasing down every dark alley. But he never got far. At least her family will know now that she’s not dead. The investigation has you and your hacker chick to thank for that.”
Yeah. Even if Hadley never came home, the airport pictures would clear me with the authorities. The cops and the feds would leave me alone.
“So where do you suppose she went?”
It took me a moment to realize he was talking about Rory. My head cleared as if I were coming out of a trance. Where the hell was Rory? Given how eager she had been to find out what had happened to Hadley, why had she ducked out? Had she really gotten upset when I’d talked about finding Hadley and bringing her home?
“I guess she went for a walk.”
“You'll have to silence her, dude. She can’t blab about this.”
“Okay. She’s smart. She’ll understand.”
“I don't know. Girl like her, she’d probably love the publicity.”
What the fuck? I thought about hitting him. I wanted to knock that sneer off his face. I had to remind myself that this wasn't about him. My emotions were roiling for other reasons altogether.
He didn't let up, though. “I'm amazed she's still here when she could have jetted off to Hollywood for some serious partying. You must be showing her a real good time in there.” He nodded toward the bedroom.
“Right,” I snorted. “I can just see Rory in Hollywood.”
He gave me an odd look. “You do know who she is? I mean the two of you sure seem cozy. And she knows jack-all about you.”
I was beginning to feel queasy. “She's a student at MIT.”
He laughed. A hard, unpleasant laugh. “Yeah, amazingly enough, she is. At least, when she’s not flitting around the country on a private jet.”
“Sure, Finlay.” I couldn’t imagine Rory on a private jet.
“She's a damn fine hacker, I'll give her that. Who knew? She must have stood out like the freak she is at Beverly Hills High.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Sorry, man.” He gave me a faintly superior look. “I thought you knew. She's searched out stuff about you in every public database on the planet, and God only knows how many private ones. You telling me you haven't even Googled her?”
“She kinda took over my computer,” I said, knowing how lame the answer was. Why hadn't I looked her up anywhere? I'd meant to. “What's this crap about a private jet? She comes from a disadvantaged background.”
It was his turn to snort. “Disadvantaged my ass. You remember that picture I took of her with my phone? The one I said I’d run facial recognition on?”
I remembered Rory’s panic when he’d taken the shot. Her belated attempt to cover her face.
“So I ran it, and fuck me bloody if her mother didn’t turn out to be Nina McKenna. You've heard of her—famous movie star? Do-gooder humanitarian? She even won an Academy Award. The mom's getting a bit old for the good roles now, though. That's why she wants to turn our Lorelei into the next major ingénue.”
I was gaping at him. “Lorelei?”
“That's her real name. Lorelei McKenna. She calls herself Rory, and the McKay's obviously just a variation of McKenna, probably to give her a little distance from her mom.”
“You are fucking kidding me.” But I knew from the look in his eyes—there was amusement there, and maybe a flash of pity—that he was being straight with me.
Unlike Rory.
I knew who Nina McKenna was. Everybody did. She was famous for her violet eyes and her incredibly wide and fetching smile. Hadn't she started her career back in the 80s playing the proverbial prostitute with the heart of gold? In addition to being an actress, she was into various causes, like poverty and save the whales and global warming and shit. She wasn't exactly a genius, though. No way Rory had gotten her super smarts from Nina McKenna. “Who's her father?” I could barely hear my own voice asking.
“Don't know. Her mother's been married a couple times, but not when she was pregnant with Lorelei. But her brother Jesse is a rock star and her sister Lily is a supermodel.”
Her brother Jesse? Her big bro, the drug addict musician, was a fucking rock star? My brain was exploding.
“What is it about you, dude, that you attract all these rich chicks? Do they go for the bad boy type? That must be it.”
“I found her on the outskirts of Boston, running from some guy with a shotgun.” There was a sister, too? Rory hadn’t mentioned her. A supermodel? Holy shit. “Are you telling me that was all an act?”
“I guess you don't read Variety.”
I glared at him.
“Well, it's true that she's bright and that she goes to Geek-I-T. But she's also an actress, which is probably how she fooled you so completely. Last summer she made a small indie movie about a sex worker's kids who use their brains to learn math, get out of the life and go to college. Sort of a feminist Good Will Hunting. She wrote and directed the thing, using mommy's money. I think she sees herself as the next Lena Dunham.”
I was too dumbfounded to say a word.
“I don't think the film did very well, but she got good reviews. Supposedly your honey spent several weeks living on the mean streets of Roxbury, MA. That's where they shot the film. She made some friends there. Sounds like she may have gone back to visit some of those folks. But she got herself into trouble, and voila, you came along.”
Un-fucking-believable. I was getting a headache, which only happened when I was sick. I was remembering several things she'd told me that had struck me as off at the time. The expensive cell phone she'd disabled when she'd jumped into my car. LaVerle, the prostitute who was supposedly her mom, then not really her mom, then someone she'd met during a “project.”
The smooth, confident way she’d addressed and then lied to a billionaire. Her musician brother who was always on the road. Miguel the Mexican pool guy. The dead girl who had been found on the side of the freeway. We don't even call them freeways in Massachusetts. The girl's parents had been out at a big Oscar party…meaning, holy shit, the Academy Awards.
Big Oscar was not some dude in the ‘hood.
Fuck me backwards. I'd sensed that Rory had been evasive about some stuff, but I hadn't put the pieces together.
I could feel my stomach churning, my fingers clenching. I wasn't sure who I hated more—Finlay for telling me this, or Rory for lying to me. Hadley’s situation had gone clean out of my mind. All I could think of was Rory and how many lies she’d told me.
“So it was all a game? Right from the start, it was all just acting for her?”
“Probably. Except the hacking. That was real. And the info she fed me did lead to those pictures of your ex. She's wasted as an actress, if you ask me. She's nowhere near as gorgeous as her mother, anyhow. She needs to quit this film shit and do what she was born for. Hell, I might even offer her a job, if I thought I could tear her out of the arms of Hollywood.”
Finlay gave me a nasty grin. He was enjoying this. Bastard.
“You'll dump the girl if you have any sense. You don’t need the publicity. Just imagine if the tabloids got hold of the story: Nina's Daughter Dating Suspected Killer. They'll never leave you alone.”
With that parting shot, he left.
Chapter 33
Griff
My head was a complete mess. Hadley was alive. She was probably in some kind of danger, even though she denied it.
Rory was a fucking liar.
These two big, unexpected ideas were smashing into each other in my brain, each trying to get the upper hand. As for my emotions, they were all over the place. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling, except that I wanted to smash something.
What the hell was I supposed to do now? I still didn’t know where Hadley was. Did I still care? She’d made it clear that she didn’t give a
shit about me. She probably never had.
What did I owe her? Last time someone in my family attempted to rescue someone, he'd ended up underground. I wasn't afraid of that. Down into the depths was where I'd been headed for quite a while. I'd thought once I could escape that fate. Work myself up and out of it, but that hadn't turned out so well, had it?
Hadley had tried pulling me into her dangerous, edgy world before, and I'd resisted. But I got it now. I got how seductive the darkness could be.
Screw Hadley.
What about Rory? She had lied to me. All along, she had pretended to be someone she wasn't. Part of me fucking hated her for that.
The front door slammed. She was back.
I was waiting for her in my bedroom.
“Rory? Come in here.”
She did her thing of hesitating on the threshold. I knew what she was thinking. She was wary about how I had received the news that Hadley was alive. She hadn't expected that. When she'd gone scouring the internet for what had happened to my old girlfriend, she hadn't fully thought it through.
Not quite as smart as you thought you were, huh, Rory? She hadn't believed she would actually find Hadley.
“Are you OK?” she asked. “That must have been some shock, talking to Hadley.”
I gave her no answer. I had pulled a certain bag out of my closet and set it on the edge of the bed. I was rifling through it. Rory hadn’t seen most of the stuff I had in that bag.
“I talked to Silas Marks. He was outside in his big fancy car. He and I made a deal.”
I stiffened. The thought of her talking to Marks, who had touched her…hurt her just stoked my fury hotter.
“What kind of deal?” I snarled.
“He’s gonna send me some stupid puzzles to solve and in return he’s going to use his influence to make sure you’re fully exonerated. In the press, I mean. So everybody knows you didn’t kill Hadley. Who is not, in fact, dead.”
“Puzzles? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I don’t know exactly. Probably like that thing Microsoft supposedly used to do when you applied for a job in the nineties—calculate how many tennis balls could fit inside a Boeing-747. Come up with a mathematically accurate but creative solution. These geeky guys love that shit.”
I didn't get why Marks wanted to give her puzzles, but I didn't care, either. Fuck him. Fuck everybody.
I didn’t say anything, and for a couple of moments we just stared at each other. Then Rory bit her lip and said, “So I guess you want me to leave, right? Well, spring break’s just about over anyway. I can probably get back into my dorm.”
“You're leaving?”
She smiled at me, but her bottom lip trembled and it looked as if the rims of her eyes were a bit red. “I guess. My work here is done.”
She couldn't just leave. I'd gotten used to having her around. But at the same time I wanted to shove her into my car and toss her in a ditch on the side of the fucking freeway. Lying bitch.
“I’m gonna take the train back to Boston.” She paused, blinking at me. “I'm sure you're anxious to get rid of me. I mean...now that Hadley's alive, and all.”
I said nothing. I was staring at her through eyes that saw everything differently. I could see the resemblance now. Finlay was right—Rory didn't have her mother's extraordinary beauty. Her features weren't quite as perfect or symmetrical. But she had Nina's smile. Was that why it had seemed familiar to me?
I think she was crushed that I didn't deny wanting to get rid of her, because she sagged a little in the doorway. Then she squared her shoulders and did her usual thing when she was nervous—she kept right on talking:
“Anyway. I've got to start thinking about my classes. Spring break's almost over, and I haven't done shit. I've got books to read, papers to write, exams to prepare for. I was planning on getting a lot of this semester's crap finished this week, but I didn't, so now I'm behind. I hate that. I need to keep on schedule if I expect to keep my 4.0 average.”
“Come here.”
She did. I think she was relieved by the order. She wouldn't be relieved for long.
“What's in the bag?”
“Strip,” I said.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“But, Griff—”
“Now,” I barked at her.
Slowly, looking uncertain, she pulled her top over her head. Seeing her obey me gave me that same powerful thrill I always felt with her, and my dick turned rock hard.
She wasn't wearing a bra. As I gazed at her breasts, she slid down her pants, getting jaunty about it as her confidence rose. When she got down to her panties, she was almost smiling. They were the plain cotton briefs I'd seen in her backpack on the first night, but she shimmied and twirled for me as she removed them.
My eyes must have been devouring her sweet body, because she began to blush in that adorable way she had.
I blew out a tight breath. “Good girl.” I removed a couple pairs of leather cuffs from my bag. “Now put these on.”
She swayed, staring as I laid out some of my toys. “I'm not sure this is the moment for—”
“Do it.”
She bowed her head. I'd seen hints of it before with her—if aroused, she would submit. Clumsily, she slid her wrist into one of the cuffs. It fastened with Velcro, as she figured out quickly enough. 204 IQ. I put the other one on her other wrist and tightened them both.
As always, touching her, smelling her, feeling her close to me made me ache with lust. I wanted to piston-fuck her until we both collapsed with exhaustion.
I locked cuffs on her ankles too, and got out my already-cut lengths of bondage rope.
“Now lie down in the middle of the bed.”
She did it. She was blushing all over now, a faint pinkish glow of combined embarrassment and sexual excitement. I bound her arms and legs to the four bedposts. I probably seemed calmer and more controlled than I was. Being with her, seeing her lovely body, touching her, even hearing her voice excited me past the point of reason. I wanted to ram the daylights out of her.
“This feels amazing.” She favored me with her smile—the seductive one. But I could tell she wasn't exactly sure about this. She pretended to be, though. “Why are you still wearing clothes?”
I stripped off the T-shirt, but the jeans were staying on for a while. If I took them off, forget it, this thing would be over in about ten seconds.
“Should I writhe around or something?”
“You'll writhe around soon enough.” Reaching over her body, I pulled open the top drawer in the bedside table and removed the blindfold that I sometimes wear to help me sleep. It was a good one, soft and thick and impossible to see through no matter which way you angled your eyes. I slid it over her head, covered her eyes, and tightened the Velcro binding. A few strands of her luxurious brown hair clung to my fingers as I worked.
“Whoa. Not sure I like that.”
“Tough. My game, my rules.”
“It’s just that I prefer to see you.” She pulled a bit at her wrist restraints. The rope stretched to its limits and she stopped. “I like to watch you watching me.”
“Too bad.” I slowly stroked my hand up one of her legs, from her ankle to her thigh. I stopped before reaching her sex and stroked down the other leg to the ankle cuff. I loved touching her, but I was damned if I was going to admit it. I caressed her ankle and then her foot. I slid my index finger along the sole of her foot until she shivered and gave a breathless laugh.
I thought about snapping a rattan cane against the tender flesh of her foot. She wouldn't be laughing then.
“Griff, why are you doing this? I’d like to talk to you first. I’ve got stuff to tell you.”
“Say anything more and I’ll stuff a gag down your throat.”
She swallowed, looking uncertain. But she didn’t speak. I wasn't sure if she was obeying orders or evaluating my sanity.
“I like that you can't see what I'm doing.” I moved my hand up until it
was hovering over her breast. “You won't know where I'm going to strike next.”
I let my hand fall onto her flesh and caressed her. Just as I felt her starting to relax into the caress, I pinched her nipple between my thumb and index finger. Hard enough to surprise her. She let out a sexy little moan. I had nipple clamps in the bag, but I wouldn't use them yet. Not while she was wearing the blindfold. I wanted her to watch when I applied those.
From my bag I took a long, pointed feather. It was wrapped in cellophane, which I stripped off. Brand new. Leaning over her, I touched the feather to the tip of her earlobe, pushing her hair out of the way first. Then I glided it along the side of her throat, turning it slightly back and forth so the feather could brush her different ways, producing different sensations.
She shifted in her bondage. “What's that?”
I slid it down to her collarbone and traced its ridge. “You tell me.” I drew slow concentric circles with the tip of the feather around one of her breasts. Switching to the other, I grazed the nipple delicately.
“A feather?” She was breathing hard—her chest was rising and falling rapidly. Both her nipples had stiffened into pointy nubs, suitable for teasing. I leaned over and kissed her breasts, enjoying her sweet-salty taste.
“That MIT brain is good for something, after all.” I moved the feather down over her belly, brushing, caressing, poking gently with the tip. I kept guiding it lower, inch by inch. “You know where it's going, don't you?”
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
By the time I reached the mound of her sex, her body was well into the writhing I'd predicted. The feather skipped over and moved to the inside of her thighs. She moaned, and I knew she was torn between relief and disappointment. The feather was much more effective at arousing than at giving pleasure. It could be quite maddening, in fact, as I proceeded to demonstrate.
I only allowed the lightest stimulation of her labia. When I touched it to her clit, her body arched and she strained to break free. I soothed her with my other hand, stroking her pussy in a pleasanter way until she relaxed a little.
