by Dara England
Never mind, she told herself. There could be no harm in her having gotten an early start. She removed the key from its hiding place under the silver box and retraced her steps to unlock the red door to the study. She didn’t hesitate this time to put her ear against the door. After last night’s weird scenario with the table setting and the untouched wine, locking a simple room now seemed the most unremarkable part of her routine.
Returning to the den, she slipped the brass key back into its hiding place. Her task was complete. Now she was left with the question of what to do with herself until Sir returned. She had no intention of leaving without those five hundred dollars firmly in hand. Briefly, she contemplated stocking her pockets again from the refrigerator.
But what if he should somehow find out? Would the fact she had been stealing from him somehow preclude their arrangement? He had said she would receive no payment unless she followed his instructions to the very letter, and swiping food from his kitchen had certainly not been a part of his instructions. Besides, she reminded herself as her stomach grumbled in rebellion, a short while longer and she would have enough cash in her pockets to walk into any restaurant in town and fill her face with all she could eat.
No, more stealing was definitely out. To kill the time, she found herself pacing before the fireplace, listening to the tick-tock of the pendulum clock. She remembered how disturbed Sir had been by that clock last night. The memory of his dark expression unnerved her so much she sought distraction. Her gaze fell on the little silver box.
Almost furtively, she crossed the room until she stood before the desk. Even though she knew there was no one home, she nevertheless found herself casting a wary glance over her shoulder as she reached a curious hand to hover over the lid.
I will know.
She shook her head. He was bluffing. How could he possibly know?
Quickly, before she could lose her nerve, she threw open the lid. It was a musical box. A cheery tune began to play the moment the top was opened. Teagan leaned forward to peer inside. The inside of the box was red-lined…and empty. Teagan frowned. She didn’t know what she had expected—jewelry maybe, or a secret stash of cash. But why on earth would he have made such a fuss over the opening of a box, if it stood empty? Unless…
Unless it had been some kind of test to see how well she followed orders. I will know. No. He couldn’t know. And yet Teagan found herself stepping back nervously, retreating from the little silver box as its tune wound to an end. In the ensuing silence, it struck her. He would know because he had wound the box. He knew in what place the tune should begin again the next time he opened the lid. It was rather a genius test actually, she admitted to herself. Too bad it wasn’t genius enough. She too had an ear for music, and she remembered where the tune had begun. All she had to do was rewind the box until the song started in the exact same place.
Reaching for the box, she heard a soft footfall behind her.
Chapter 5
Who was it, come to catch her red-handed? Sir? Or his mystery guest of last night? Whirling, Teagan slammed into a solid chest. A pair of strong hands gripped her roughly by the forearms, their hold painfully tight. Teagan couldn’t have stifled a muffled squeal even if she’d thought to try. Steely dark eyes gazed down on her from a face contorted by rage.
Teagan almost didn’t recognize Sir from last night, so changed was his appearance. His hair was wildly mussed and hung down in black strands before his face. His clothing was ripped and blood smeared. There was no knowing whether the crimson stains came from his own flesh or someone else’s.
“What are you doing?” he growled, reddened face twisted in anger. An evil, unreasonable fury drove him, Teagan thought frantically. She trembled to find it directed at her. Looking down she saw the large hands clamped around her arms were smudged with blood still oozing from his torn fingertips. The source of his bloodied shirt?
The pulse pounded in her forehead so she thought she might faint. “I—I just wanted to open—I was going to put it back like it was,” she stumbled over herself, trying to explain. His blazing eyes registered no understanding of the words.
“It’s not dawn!” he shouted in her face. “I told you not until six o’clock!”
Teagan was having difficulty standing, so weak had her legs suddenly became beneath her. “I—I’m sorry,” she gasped out, fear paralyzing her mind too fully to let her think of anything else to say. Whoever or whatever had suffered his wrath before, drawing the streaks of blood smearing his clothes and hands, she didn’t want to share their fate.
“Sorry?” he grated, his voice sounding for a moment more animal than human. Something bestial flashed within the depths of his black eyes and Teagan had the wild, terrifying notion there was no longer a man lurking behind those eyes, but a rabid animal. Something indefinable in him had changed. Sir was no longer in control of this body.
And in the same instant that realization struck, she had the sudden terrifying notion her life depended on her ability to bring him back to himself at once. In this enraged state, he was not above killing her.
She forced a steadiness into her words that belied the horrified sensations rushing through her body. “Sir, I don’t think you know what you’re doing right now. Calm down please. It’s only a little box, and I didn’t mean any harm by opening it. No damage has been done, has it? No one has been hurt.”
That last remark may have been a little premature but already she felt her soothing words had penetrated some barrier, for something in the man opposite her altered abruptly. She felt it the moment his grip loosened so his fingers no longer dug like claws into the skin of her upper arms. Slowly, carefully, he removed his hands from her. Suddenly, there was space between them.
His voice was low and thick when he spoke. “You…you should’ve waited. Until after dawn.” Even as he spoke the accusing words, the first orangey glow of morning’s light slanting through the living room’s long window lit up the doorway behind him.
As if his simple words had been all the explanation required, he stepped away from her. Not until then did Teagan’s shaky knees buckle so that she collapsed to the floor. The Sir of last night would probably have helped her up. The Sir of a few moments ago—the beastly personality that wasn’t really Sir—she didn’t know what he would have done. But the Sir of this morning simply turned his back and walked away.
The set of his shoulders as he disappeared through the doorway was now a posture of exhaustion. Whatever he’d been up to all night, combined with their brief encounter just now, seemed to have sapped the strength from him. Cautiously, Teagan kept an eye on his retreating form as she attempted to pull her shaky legs back beneath her. Her hands were trembling, she noticed. Her whole body was experiencing such a rush of weakness as her adrenaline slowed that she’d be lucky to crawl to the door, let alone walk there.
Although it defied every demand of her shaken mind, she forced herself to stay where she was, drawing slow, deliberate breaths until her trembling lessened. There was no telling what would happen to her if she passed out now on this man’s floor. She had an idea she would never be heard from again.
Slowly, as the initial rush of panic wore away, she became aware of the pain of bruises in her arms. he could almost still feel his fingers sinking into her flesh like talons. She suspected the next time she looked in a mirror she would find deep purpling marks there.
She peered through the doorway to see Sir, illuminated by the light of early morning, collapsed in an armchair with his back toward her. He was sitting upright, but his attitude was so quiet she almost thought him asleep. Her mind letting go the last vestiges of her previous frightened state, she began forcing her thoughts and her body under control again.
This could all be explained away in some rational manner, she told herself, even as her heartbeat slowed to a normal rate and the weakness leaked out of her body, to be replaced by a healthier strength. He was drunk, she decided. That was what had happened. A long night of partying had dri
ven away the intelligent, controlled man of last night, replacing him with this wild creature. It was pathetic, really, how a few drinks brought a dignified man down to this level.
Carefully, she rose to her feet, finding her legs much stronger this time, and crept to the doorway. Spying on him now, he seemed harmless enough. His skin was pale in the morning light; the side of his face visible to her from this angle looked strained and weary. Teagan felt not an ounce of sympathy for him. After his wild behavior, he deserved to suffer the effects of a good hangover. She did, however, find some comfort in his weakened appearance. The Sir she looked on now was not in any condition to give chase should she make a sudden dash to the elevator.
Which was exactly what she did. He made no move to stop her as she skirted quickly around the spot where he sat slumped in his chair. He spoke not a word as she scuttled to the elevator and slammed one nervous hand over the down button. Ordinary drunkenness or not, there was something about this man’s presence that would never cease to unnerve her.
The elevator took its time in arriving, and she found herself pounding again at the little glowing button even as she cast anxious glances over her shoulder. If she expected Sir to suddenly lift his head and show an interest in stopping her, she needn’t have worried. He seemed neither to know nor to care about her presence. After what seemed an eternity, the elevator doors slid open with a ding.
Just as Teagan set her first foot inside the doors, she was startled by a sudden masculine voice. “It’s in my coat pocket,” Sir unexpectedly stirred himself enough to say. “The money’s in my coat pocket.” His words didn’t sound slurred, just heavy with exhaustion.
Teagan hesitated, half on the elevator and half off. Torn between fear and greed, the two emotions that had been her tormentors since she first laid eyes on this man, she cast a fleeting glance from Sir, reclining in his chair, to the coatrack only a few feet away.
Tossing caution to the wind, she made a break for the coatrack. How could she not, with five hundred dollars at stake? She kept an eye on Sir, who never moved from his spot, all the while she dug through the pockets of the single coat hanging on the rack. It was a shorter gray jacket, not the full-length black one he had left in last night. That coat was nowhere in sight.
A hasty exploration of the outside pockets turned up a thick wad of loose bills. Briefly shocked to find him as good as his word, Teagan quickly pocketed the cash, uncounted. Time enough for that later once she’d put this strange man and his creepy apartment behind her. Stepping onto the elevator, she breathed a sigh of relief when its doors closed and she felt herself being carried downward. She couldn’t forget this night fast enough.
Chapter 6
And forgetting was exactly what Teagan did over the following weeks. With the money she had earned in that one night, she put herself up in a cheap motel with enough groceries to last a week. In the beginning she meant to be frugal, to live carefully in order to stretch the money out as long as possible. But somehow those five hundred dollars began dwindling away pretty quickly.
She soon found herself back on the streets with only a few dollars left in her pockets. There were more important necessities than shelter, she decided, and invested what money was left in warm winter clothing and a thick wool coat to keep off some of the chill during those long nights spent sleeping under park benches or in abandoned alleyways. Even the food money she had set aside eventually evaporated until, one night, she found herself once again huddled with an empty belly, trying to keep warm under a blanket of newspapers in an alley not far from the one where she had first encountered Sir.
The difference this time was that above all those newspapers and her new thick coat was a fresh sheet of snow sparkling under the moonlight. It might have been pretty to look at, this new, hushed world of freshly fallen snow, but it certainly wasn’t pleasant to sleep under. As she lay there shuddering at the biting gusts of wind, Teagan’s mind went to the money she had spent and worked over plans for how she could get more of it.
A dark, insistent corner of her mind pointed out that she knew one limitless source of cash. Pushing the thought aside, she burrowed deeper under the snow and tried not to think of it. After the last time, she thought, nothing in the world—not even the possibility of food and shelter—could tempt her to return to that awful place. After her experience in Sir’s apartment, she would rather have turned just about anywhere else for help. But her options were few and the longer she contemplated her memories of that night, the less unpleasant they began to seem when compared to the very real possibility of freezing to death in a lonely alley.
* * * *
It wasn’t that night but the next evening Teagan found herself finally standing before the doorman of Sir’s fancy apartment, trying to finagle her way in. She’d had enough. Her limbs were in a constant state of stiffness from the unceasing cold and it seemed ages since she had felt her benumbed fingers and toes. Even her face felt frozen. Her nose had developed a constant drip. If she didn’t do something soon, she was going to find herself with pneumonia.
Unfortunately, her bedraggled state didn’t exactly lend her the appearance of someone who had any business walking in the door of this particular apartment house. Eventually Teagan persuaded the doorman, not the one from the other night, to at least buzz the gentleman in the penthouse and ask him if he remembered a Teagan. And then, remembering she had never given him her name, she added that she was the street girl who had done him a favor several weeks back. The doorman could make of that message whatever he would.
It was clear by his disapproving expression he did. Even more obvious was his bafflement on returning a few seconds later to admit her. She found her way to the glass elevator with no difficulty. It was one of the details from that weird night that was indelibly etched in her memory. She would need to get some of those memories out of her head if she was going to go through with her plan. She gave her reflection in the elevator doors a quick examination. Normally the roughness of her life left her little opportunity for feminine vanity. She was too busy focusing on keeping alive to spare any concern for what she looked like. Remembering the elegance of the penthouse, however, she did regret the mess confronting her gaze.
Her hair was worse than wind-tossed, having gone unwashed ever since she had run out of hotel money. Her cheeks were pink and roughed by wind and weather; her skin chapped from constant exposure to the elements. The wool coat, which had seemed so warm and practical when she bought it, now looked stained and hideous after the few weeks it had spent out in the wet and mud. She didn’t look like someone a man like Sir would toss a fiver to on the street, let alone allow to set her dirty feet into his penthouse.
It was while she was despairing over her appearance and her chances of carrying out her plan that the elevator came to a sudden stop and the doors opened. It was like that other night all over again. As she stepped slowly off the elevator and let the doors close behind her, she was again hemmed in by elegant finery and richness that took her breath away, even as it stirred a faint twinge of envy that one man should possess so much while people like her lived every day wondering where their next meal was coming from.
“So it is you,” a low masculine voice observed from across the room. Sir was seated on one of the white leather armchairs, looking as dark and formidable as she remembered him, for all his casual tone. He was surrounded by stacks of papers and held a highlighter in one hand. But he set his work aside to regard her with an expression of expectancy. If he was curious as to what motive had brought her to him uninvited, he didn’t show it, maintaining the sense Teagan remembered in him so well—that attitude of already knowing what was to come.
She studied him with a sort of horrified fascination. Dressed in a white button-up shirt and black slacks, as if he had just come from somewhere important, he didn’t look like a man capable of the scene she remembered so vividly from their last meeting. With his expression casual and his hair slicked into place, he looked cool and controlled an
d…yes, extremely attractive, in a vaguely sinister way. Or maybe it was just Teagan’s previous experience evoking that indefinable sense of danger hovering around him. His expression remained bland as he surveyed her standing at the elevator doors, but she thought his calculating eyes were mocking her, even as they summed up her bedraggled condition.
“You can come closer,” he said generously, apparently noting her reluctance to abandon her safe position for flight. “I don’t bite.”
Teagan didn’t wholly believe that. She moved just far enough toward him they wouldn’t have to raise their voices to converse but maintained enough distance to make a hasty retreat if the need arose.
His amused glance told her he noted her response, but he said nothing of it. Teagan read the silent confidence in his eyes that was an echo of her own uneasy thoughts. She looked away from his taunting gaze and concentrated on her purpose. If she let thoughts like these keep intruding on her determination, she may as well cast everything aside and make a hasty break toward safety right now.
Only it wasn’t safety that lay on the other side of those elevator doors. It was another hungry night sleeping in an alley or under a hedgerow in some park. She wasn’t sure she’d survive another night in the cold. This morning she had been alarmed at how difficult it was to get up when crawling from beneath a layer of snow. She’d been forced to keep moving all day, afraid of what would happen if she allowed herself to drop off into the seductive embrace of sleep for even a few minutes.
All these thoughts provided ample reason for her to hold her ground now. Nevertheless, despite her resolve, she leaped like a startled rabbit when he abruptly broke the silence. “Since you don’t seem eager to explain your business, I assume you’re waiting for me to ask. To what do I owe the pleasure of this charming and unexpected visit?”
