by Dara England
Time to practice the speech she’d been working on all day. Teagan licked her lips and grasped after the planned speech as it scattered in bits from her memory. She was unused to such positions as the one she now found herself in. She had never considered herself stupid or socially awkward, but somehow he had the power to freeze her body and mind simply by looking at her. She stood floundering, trying to remember exactly what it was that had brought her here.
Taking an unexpected pity on her, he said, “If sitting down would help to loosen your tongue, you can pull up a seat.” He indicated a leather armchair opposite him.
Teagan sensed he removed his eyes from her as a sort of concession, to give her a moment to compose herself again. Maybe he wasn’t accustomed to women who flustered so easily. Perhaps it wasn’t intentional; his brazen air of assurance, his mocking eyes, and the way his well-fitted shirt strained around his impressively muscled shoulders as he moved…
Where had that thought come from?
Teagan shook her head and fixed her concentration on something safe and ordinary: the fat, white chair settled opposite Sir. She walked to the seat with casual ease and displayed an unprecedented level of courage as she sank into it. So far so good, she reassured herself, as the thick leather upholstered cushions rose up to meet her. Still avoiding the eyes of her companion, she leaned back and crossed her legs. That immediately felt stupid. She wasn’t putting a pair of long, elegant legs on display, after all. She was outfitted in torn, stained jeans, along with the several-sizes-too-large pair of men’s tennis shoes she’d recently dug from a trash can.
Sir made a light throat clearing noise, reminding her he sat waiting. His attention was already half turned to the stack of papers he had set aside on her entrance. Clearly, he had other things to be doing.
“I’m, uh, sorry I caught you while you were busy,” Teagan managed to say and then instantly gave herself a mental kick for departing from her planned script. This wasn’t going well.
“It’s nothing,” he said dismissively. “Some business accounts. They’ll wait.”
Teagan nodded awkwardly. She hadn’t intended to say anything at that moment, but suddenly, of its own accord, her mouth opened and the nervous statement spilled forth. “Sir, I’m here to blackmail you.”
Chapter 7
Teagan actually heard the click of her teeth as she clamped her mouth shut. She didn’t know where the abrupt declaration had come from. Certainly in none of her mental rehearsals for this moment had she used the word blackmail. And yet now that she had committed herself to the statement, she had to admit it described adequately what she had in mind. She nodded and decided to stick with it.
Clinging to a strangely cool tone that sounded nothing like her usual voice she plowed onward, sealing whatever fate waited ahead. “That’s right. You heard me,” she said evenly into the stunned silence. It was the first time she’d ever had the pleasure of seeing Sir at a loss and suspecting it might be the last, she meant to take all the enjoyment from it she could.
She continued. “Those five hundred dollars you passed over to me last month were just pennies to you. Don’t think I’m so stupid I didn’t see that. From the moment I saw where and how you lived I knew you were worth much, much more. And yet because you viewed me as ignorant trash off the street you saw no reason to offer me fair pay.” She didn’t know where she was getting the courage to voice such thoughts. But these feelings of injustice had been growing in her since she had set foot into this place.
Sir didn’t take long to recover from what must have been a surprising onslaught. “Fair pay?” he repeated her words softly as if weighing them. “You feel you were granted inadequate compensation for the tasks you carried out?”
“If ‘inadequate compensation’ is Latin for ‘not enough money’, that’s right,” Teagan said, her hopes rising. At least he seemed to be giving the matter thought.
Her optimism, as it turned out, was premature. Not until he spoke again did she recognize the telltale flash deep within his brown eyes. “So you feel you might have earned better money elsewhere that night,” he said.
“Well, I—”
But he didn’t let her finish. “Or maybe it’s just that the duties you carried out were so difficult or required such a level of skill no one but you could have met them?”
He was turning her argument on its head. Teagan decided it was time she wrested back control of the conversation. “I’m not saying I was the only person for the job,” she put in defensively. “Only that you could afford to give more, and that I…” She stumbled a little under his gaze. “I…deserve more,” she finished lamely, her voice dropping to a mumble.
He surprised her by seemingly shifting the topic. “Do you know why I picked you for the job that night?” he asked. He answered his own question. “Evidently not. I was walking down the street, on my way home from the office, enjoying the evening air on my lonely stroll. And then I passed by a darkened alleyway, where I discovered a miserable specimen of humanity huddled on the filthy ground, beneath a pile of rags. Moved by the horrible conditions I saw this sad creature suffering under, I made up my mind on a whim to offer her first chance at a task I needed fulfilled.” He spoke the explanation with no hint of sentiment so that his implied sympathy was hard to swallow.
Teagan bristled at the implication he had approached her out of pity. She countered with, “You know, most people who want to help just throw me a ten dollar bill.”
“Did you want a ten dollar bill?” he shot back easily. “Because I thought your argument was that I didn’t pay enough.”
He had trapped Teagan neatly with his logic, and although she knew there had to be a way around his twisting of the argument, she wasn’t quick-witted enough to work it out.
He appeared to take satisfaction in her confusion. “And now,” he continued, “after already receiving more than your due, you have the unmitigated nerve to come prowling around here again, begging for another handout.”
“I wasn’t begging.” Teagan’s head snapped up. For an instant she felt too insulted to care about the plan or anything else. “I have never begged for anything in my life,” she said hotly. “And I hope I’d die before I asked any favors of you. After that night—” She broke off abruptly. This was the first time either of them had made open reference to what had passed between them before.
“Ah, so now we get to the real root of your visit.” He said it coolly, but his eyes sparked with some unreadable emotion. “Is this a question of revenge then? Have you stormed back in self-righteous indignation to make the coldhearted villain pay?”
There was such sarcasm to his tone that if Teagan had harbored any doubts about how he really saw her, they were dispelled. She was right when she’d accused him of thinking of her as street trash. The offense she felt made it easy to form her next reply. “This isn’t a matter of revenge, Sir. Just a question of whether or not I’ve received the payment due me.”
But he wasn’t to be silenced so easily. She thought he was beginning to enjoy decimating her arguments. He leaned back in his seat, elbows resting on the armrests of his chair and fingers templed in a thoughtful gesture. “So you still think you want to discuss payment, do you? I thought we’d already exhausted the topic and moved on. However, if I’ve left any doubts in your mind, let me close the subject more fully.” His expression became direct. “You won’t be seeing another penny.”
“But—”
He forestalled her protests. “We agreed on a sum. I paid you the amount, despite the fact you rightfully forfeited it when you broke my rules by opening the silver box.”
“But the box was empty,” Teagan finally had a chance to put in.
He regarded her shrewdly. “And was the refrigerator also empty when you helped yourself to its contents?”
Teagan was left speechless. How could he know of that?
He dismissed the explanation he apparently expected with a wave of one hand. It was just as well. Teagan had no excuses
prepared. “Never mind that,” he said. “I can afford to lose a few pieces of fruit. I even gave you your precious money, despite your light fingers. I think you must admit that was more than generous on my part. You can count it as reparation for any unnerving behavior I may have indulged in that night. I was not myself.”
May have indulged in? There was no question his behavior had been more than unnerving, Teagan fumed. Surely he saw as much, whether he was willing to admit it or not. Anger granted her greater courage. “Reparation?” she demanded, rising from her chair. “Do you think I would take money as some sort of payoff for a thing like that?”
“And yet,” he said coolly from his seat, “that was exactly what you had in mind when you came here, wasn’t it? As if I could have been harmed by your blabbing nonsense about some ridiculous little incident all over town.” Again he cut off the protest she was about to offer. “Let’s look at the facts as anyone else would, shall we?”
He held up a large hand that Teagan couldn’t help noticing flashed a ring on nearly every finger. It was yet another reminder of his careless wealth. Either unaware or uninterested in her private thoughts, he began ticking off the facts on his fingers.
“To begin with, what evidence do you have of any wrongdoing on my part? None but the words of your own mouth. Not a very trustworthy source in most eyes.”
Teagan’s cheeks grew warm in the way they did when she was truly angry. “That’s not—”
“Not fair, I agree,” he admitted. “But it remains a fact.” He ticked off his first finger and moved on to a second. “Next, what can you honestly say happened? A stranger threatened you. Is that all you’ve got? Worse crimes are committed every night on the streets of this city. What are they going to do—throw me in jail?”
This time Teagan couldn’t keep silent. “A threat?” she asked incredulously. “Is that what you call it? You terrified me. You hurt me. I had bruises that took days to heal.” She was startled to find her voice shaking, but she couldn’t seem to gain control of it. “I was afraid out of my mind. I thought you were going to murder me and stuff my body into some dumpster…”
Her voice broke off, which was probably just as well. Her words had dropped to a whisper, and she found herself trembling as the frightening scene replayed in her head. She had never before felt so close to death as she had that night. The strange fierceness that had possessed him… She became abruptly aware of the silence around her—of the emptiness of this room that held only two lonely inhabitants. As fear began to tickle against the back of her mind, she asked herself what she had been thinking to return here.
Sir appeared unaware of the new turn of her thoughts. He held his silence so long Teagan almost dared to imagine her words might have stirred some pangs of remorse in him.
“I…didn’t realize the incident had affected you so deeply,” he said. There was no apology in his words—no sympathy. He merely eyed her as if trying to work out some sort of foreign puzzle.
“Is that all you have to say?” she whispered disbelievingly. “No apology—no explanation?”
He shrugged. “Why should I beg forgiveness for your overactive imagination? I didn’t do what you feared. I probably wouldn’t have even—”
“Probably?” Teagan had heard enough. “That does it. I’ve been reasonable. I’ve given you every chance to make up for…everything. Well, forget it. I don’t want your money anymore. All I want now is to spread this story to every ear within hearing distance. We’ll see how well your respectability and your reputation can stand up to the light of day. I’ll tell how you handled me—I’ll tell about your weird rituals with the music and the locked room and the place settings for secret guests who never arrive—”
Seeing the shadow pass over his face, she broke off quickly. It wasn’t the charge of his rough treatment that had brought about the change in him. It was as she spoke of the secret rituals that the look of mild annoyance he’d been wearing swiftly faded from his features to be replaced by another, sharper look. Teagan knew that expression. It held something of the fierce attitude that had overtaken him the other night. But there was also a colder, more controlled façade stretched tightly over his fury that somehow made him seem all the more dangerous.
“Is that the real threat then?” he asked, his voice tense, his eyes boring twin holes into her. “You expected me to pay to keep you quiet about my rituals?”
As he spoke, he rose and took a step toward her. Teagan found herself retreating an equal distance. The barely restrained anger in his tone brought back an unpleasant taste of the panic she had known once before in his presence. Teagan opened her mouth to take back her threat—to promise to keep his secrets—but no sound escaped her dry throat.
He continued to advance on her until Teagan found herself backing into a solid wall in her efforts to keep out of his reach.
“You enjoy examining things—prying into areas that are none of your business,” he continued, crowding her against the wall. “Take a look around you now,” he invited. “What do you see?”
Teagan was already casting wild glances around her, looking for some avenue of escape. All that met her search was an empty apartment with just one way in and one way out.
“That’s right,” he said, seemingly reading her thoughts. “It’s just you and me. If I am the evil, loathsome excuse for a human being you imagined me that night, what’s to prevent me from permanently silencing a foolish little street girl who threatens to shoot her mouth off about secrets I don’t care to have divulged to the public?”
Teagan swallowed, unsure what answer she should give even if she were in a mental condition to form a rational response. Right now, she would have said about anything he wanted to hear just to get out of this place alive. Her heartbeat was thundering so loudly in her ears his voice seemed to filter in from a distance.
His face was now so near that the words he whispered were a breath against her skin. “What,” he asked slowly, deliberately, “is to prevent your fears from becoming reality?” His fathomless dark eyes were intense, taunting, angry… How could they be so many things at once? She flinched as he abruptly raised one hand to touch the hollow of her throat. His hand was warm—gentle—as he stroked a careful finger across her skin. But the dangerous glint in his eyes and the hint of underlying anger in his tone didn’t match the lightness of his touch.
Teagan had the horrible sense that at any moment his mockingly gentle touch was going to grow firmer. How easy would it be for her fears to come true—for him to tighten his hands around her throat, squeeze the life out of her, and then discard her lifeless body in the shadows of some back alley? Surely such an act would be easy for a man like him. He had his wealth and reputation to protect him. Besides that, he had already demonstrated he was powerful enough to carry out the deed. The gleam of sadistic pleasure in his eyes as he contemplated her fearful state made it obvious he possessed the cruelty for such an act.
Teagan became aware of an odd, surging motion in the floor beneath her feet. Was it the floor moving or her shaky limbs that made it suddenly difficult for her to maintain her stance? Her lungs ached and she realized abruptly it was because she was holding her breath. The room behind Sir grew hazy. Even Sir’s face was now difficult to focus on and she gave up the effort, closing her eyes. She felt his strong hands wrapping around her waist but whether he put them there to hold her in place or to prevent her collapsing, it was impossible to know. The last thing she consciously thought of before falling into oblivion was how desperately she regretted returning to this place and this man.
Chapter 8
When Teagan awoke she had no idea where she was. She was lying prone on her back and her head felt light, as if she were coming out of a long sleep. Opening her eyes, she expected to see the bright blue of a winter sky overhead with the towering shadows of city skyscrapers etched across its face. Instead, dim indoor lighting revealed unfamiliar surroundings. The walls above her were red brick and the ceiling high. A black wrought
iron candelabra hung suspended over her head.
Slowly, cautiously, Teagan lifted herself enough to look around. The careful movement sent the world spinning dizzyingly before her eyes for a moment, and she had to concentrate on a single spot on the opposite side of the room until the feeling subsided. Her visual point was a square, black frame fixed onto the far wall. The frame held a large picture that looked something like a newspaper clipping, featuring two men in suits sharing a handshake. Even at this distance Teagan recognized the face of one of them. Sir…
That recognition sent her spiraling into a descent of panic as events came crashing back to mind. Her return to Sir’s apartment, the tense confrontation, his threats… She shot bolt upright, scanning the room for another presence. To her vast relief, she seemed to be alone. She had feared to find him hovering nearby, watching. The brief rush of relief she felt was short lived. Whether Sir was presently here or not, there seemed no question he must be somewhere close by. The luxuriousness of her surroundings told her she was still in the apartment.
She supposed that was something to be grateful for—that she had not as yet been deposited into the much feared dumpster or even dropped into the river. And yet there was nothing to say she was beyond the danger line. In fact, the position she now found herself in was almost as alarming as her last memories of Sir looming over her. She was sitting in a red-blanketed bed with a massive headboard and footboard towering at either end, its thick posts stretching almost to the ceiling. At one end of the large room stood an upright chest of drawers, and beside it, a tall armoire. There were heavy matching nightstands on both sides of the bed, and an oak bookshelf with glass panes lining an entire wall.
