by Zara Cox
Downstairs in the hallway, the word was filled with icy command. Here, now, it’s no less domineering, but there’s an added inflection to the order, a warning that promises anarchy if unheeded.
I kill the tortured sound that rises in my throat. And take another step back.
His hand whips out, capturing my arm. The restraint isn’t painful or unbreakable, but the fire from his hand brands me, spreads like wildfire until my belly quivers with the shock of it.
“One of the many lessons you’ll need to learn, fast, is this: when I say stay, you stay.”
Panic escalates. “Why would I need to learn anything? Isn’t your business in this house concluded?”
“My business with Finnan is. My business with you is just starting.”
“No. We don’t have anything to—”
“Are you really going to say that, Cleo?” he cuts across me. “Did you really imagine that all you had to do was deliver me to him and you and I would be done?”
My mouth dries at the sight of the unholy blaze in his eyes. “What…why…” I swallow and try again, hating my brain’s inability to form coherent sentences.
“The words you’re looking for are ‘when.’ ‘Where.’ ‘How.’”
I open my mouth but no words emerge. I can only stare as one broad thumb trails over my skin, the lazy caress belying the frenzied look in his eyes.
“The ‘when’ is right fucking now. We’re leaving this shit hole in the next five minutes. The ‘where’ is wherever I damn well decide. The ‘how’ is also my choice, although you should know the first time will probably be with you on your knees. Fucking a woman from behind is the surest and most satisfying way I get off. And I’m not ashamed to say, I need to get off pretty damn soon.”
My heart drops to my stomach, even as my temperature rockets. “Axel—”
He nods approvingly, his head dropping to sniff the curve of my shoulder. “That’s it, baby. Keep saying my name in that terrified little voice. Even if it’s as fake as fuck, I guarantee you it’ll always get me rock hard.” He lingers, the very tip of his nose brushing my earlobe as he inhales me some more.
I stanch the shiver that curls up from toes and summon every ounce of strength into my vocal cords. “I’m not leaving with you. I can’t. I won’t.”
Every cell in his body seems to clench with rigid fury. I can’t succumb to my terror because what Finnan might do to my mother if I leave without his permission is even more terrifying.
“You misunderstand me, sweetheart. This isn’t a negotiation. I’ve already done that. You are my prize. So you see, there’s no fucking way I’m leaving here without you.”
Shock hits rock bottom and bounces hard, birthing pure anger. “Well, that’s too damn bad. I don’t give a flying fuck what you agreed with your father. I’m not leaving this house.” Not when it means leaving the fate of precarious lives in Finnan’s hands.
Axel’s eyes turn into ice chips. “There’s something Finnan wants more than anything else. Even more than you. I have the power to give it to him. In exchange for you.” His gaze drops to my ribs, his chest rising on a furious inhale. “How do you think it’ll play out if I walk out of here, alone?” he rasps with a voice that’s barely human.
My brain scrambles in frenzied alarm. In the end all I can do is appeal to the monster before me. “Please…”
If anything, that drags the beast closer to the edge. My knees sag. His other hand grips my arm, holds me up to the lit fuse flaming in his eyes. “Beg for him one more time,” he dares me.
I shake my head quickly. I can’t leave my mother. I can’t trust that Finnan won’t turn off the machines keeping her alive the moment my back is turned. “I’m not begging for him. I’m pleading with you!”
A muscle jumps in his cheek as he stares at me. “Tell me why you want to stay so badly. Tell me what he has over you.”
So Axel can find my mother and finish what he started? “No.”
His gaze freezes over. “Then stop pleading. There may be other pleas I choose to accommodate. Leaving here without you isn’t one of them.”
His hands move up to my shoulders, the caress imprinting, marking me, attempting to change what can’t be changed.
But despite that knowledge burning in my heart, my body responds to the caress. Already tight nipples strain further, my breasts growing heavy as liquid fire pools between my legs. My body heated the moment I spotted him across the room. Now, with his hands on me, his earth-and-spice scent engulfing me, my pussy swells, its slickness saturating me.
Sharp gray eyes track down my body, absorbing the change. His full lips part, his breath a light pant as his hands drift down my throat. Long fingers trace my collarbone, the hollow where my heart races. The valley between my breasts.
Then, as if he can’t help himself, one hand spears into my hair, holding me still, while the other cups my breast. Kneads. Teases my nipple with a distinct lack of gentleness.
My deep, helpless shudder rips a feral sound from his throat. “Fuck.” His warm breath washes over my upturned face. “You’ve filled out in all the right places. I’m going to enjoy fucking every inch of you. I’m going to relish reclaiming what was once mine. Then I’m going to return you to him, broken beyond repair.”
The clinical outline of what he intends to do to me freezes my heart. Enough to stall the encroaching fear. Enough so I can look him straight in the eye.
“I never belonged to you.” Not this version of Axel anyway. I belong only to the boy I once thought he was. The boy who was only ever real in my imagination.
“Maybe not. But you gave yourself to me first. I was the first man to fill that snug little cunt, to come inside of you, watch you stagger around all day, dreamy-eyed with my cum inside of you. That gives me rights, baby, whether you like it or not.”
“Well, you’re going to be sorely disappointed if you’re counting on me being dreamy eyed again.”
“Dreams are for assholes. I much prefer the reality of hearing you scream my name as you plead for mercy. Mercy you won’t receive. Not until I’ve fucked you till you can’t stand up straight. That is also your new reality. Accept it.”
My mind spins with his words and the situation I can’t immediately figure a way out of. One minute ticks by. Two.
My choices are nonexistent. For now.
He watches the fight go out of me with grim satisfaction. Giving my breast one last squeeze, he releases me. “We’re leaving.”
He casts an eye over the room, and whirls back to me, jaw clenched, his frame brimming with electricity. “And you won’t bring anything he’s given you. Not even a goddamn toothbrush.”
I snort. “You expect me to go out naked?”
He freezes for a moment, eyes narrowed. The next instant, he shrugs off his leather jacket, drops it to the floor, and tugs his T-shirt over his head.
The unexpected display of chiseled, hairless chest, ripped abs, and golden skin fills my vision. My breath shortens, but the sight is nothing compared to what seeing his tattoos does to me. One elaborate design is a mesmerizing blend of words and symbols, some Celtic, others Japanese. They flow from his left ribcage, up and around his back, and over his shoulders. Around his belly button is a perfect symbol of yin and yang surrounded by vicious flames. On his muscled right arm, four letters spell live from top to bottom. On his left, the same letters from bottom to top, evil.
My jaw drops, and my hands fly out to brace myself against the bathroom doorway. Every promise of the physical specimen he would become was there in his late teens. But I’m still nowhere near prepared for the magnificent end product. From the top of his disheveled hair to the killer boots gracing his feet, I’m helpless against the potency of him.
So I stare. Gorge until my lungs scream for me to take a breath.
Self-preservation kicks in, and I know I can’t watch that stunning perfection without spontaneously combusting so I shift my gaze to the T-shirt he’s holding out to me. I must look brainless because he shakes the f
abric at me. “Put this on.”
“You can’t be serious. I can’t go out like this.”
He takes my hand and slaps the material into it. “You can. You will. It’s the choice between my shirt or you being naked.”
“Dear God, you’re insane.”
He doesn’t shrug off the slur. Or laugh it off. He stares at me, a peculiar light in his eyes. “Yes, I am,” he says simply.
I’m not sure what to make of that. Not sure what to make of anything that’s happened here in the last fifteen minutes.
Hands shaking beyond my ability to control them, I pull the T-shirt over my head. Immediately, I’m overwhelmed by his scent. Up close and personal, I drown in the warm spice of him. The cotton slides over my sensitive breasts, eliciting another shudder that shoots straight to my pussy.
Quickly digging my arms through the holes, I tug the shirt down. It falls to my knees, a respectable cover were it not for the fact that everything about this is fucked-up wrong. Especially the light in Axel’s eyes as he drags his gaze over me.
My breath strangles all over again, my senses poised for what he’ll do next.
He bends and scoops up his jacket. I force my gaze from his rippling muscles as he shrugs back into it and zips it halfway up his chest.
Dear heaven, if anything, he looks even more potent.
Desperate to escape the madness rampaging through me, I start walking toward my dressing room.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“I need shoes, Axel.”
“Not. One. Fucking. Thing.”
Striding to the door, he yanks it open and looks pointedly at me.
I can do without shoes. Absurdly enough. But there are vital phone numbers I can’t leave without. “Please. My purse. My phone.”
Tension ripples his jaw. “You can bring your phone, but that’s it. You won’t need your purse.”
He’s a powder keg ready to explode. I rush to my bedside and dig my phone out of my purse while he bristles and catalogues my every move.
Because I can count on the fingers of one hand the things that mean a damn to me in this room, my feet don’t drag as I exit.
He slams the door loud enough to wake the dead. His fingers circle my wrist, and I’m propelled down the hallway to the stairs.
When we’re halfway down, Finnan appears at the bottom of the stairs. Although he doesn’t break his stride, Axel moves in front of me, his bulk almost obscuring my view of Finnan.
“I came to wish you Godspeed. But also to tell you you’re welcome back here anytime you want. Both of you.”
We reach the last step, and Axel places his body directly in front of mine. “You shouldn’t have bothered,” he snaps. “Get out of my way or I’ll be happy to assist you.”
Finnan steps away with a smile. One I haven’t seen in a while. One that says his power has been restored. My heart quakes at what that means for me. When Axel makes tracks for the door, it leaves me free to probe deeper into Finnan’s expression.
What will it cost me to leave here tonight with Axel?
The question burns on my tongue but I dare not ask. Not in front of the man responsible for putting my mother where she is. Finnan stares back at me, offering me nothing while his smile grows.
I open my mouth, prepared to damn myself by asking, no, pleading, for my mother. “Finnan—?”
A hand captures my nape and my personal space is once again filled with Axel. “Do not speak to him. And stop fucking looking at him!” he hisses with fire and ice.
His hand stays on me until we reach the open front door. Then he sweeps me clean off my feet in one smooth move. Powerful arms hold me tight against his body effortlessly, as if I weigh nothing, as he walks swiftly down the steps. As we near his car, the door slides upward. He puts me in the seat, slots in my belt, and slams the door back down. He rounds the hood as if the devil himself is snapping at his heels.
Two seconds later, Axel Rutherford is accelerating down the driveway. Speeding me away from one hellish prison to another.
Chapter Fourteen
LEWD CONDUCT
The time on the dash reads 3:47 a.m.
Forty-two minutes since I was passed from one captor to another. For most of that time, Axel hasn’t spoken. Outside, the landscape whips past in the predawn gloom. He stuck to I-95 when we left Greenwich until five minutes ago when he veered off the highway. Now, with only the occasional property flashing past, I have no idea where we are.
His T-shirt covers my thighs and knees, but my bare legs and feet remind me of my truly vulnerable state. I clutch the phone tighter between my hands. It’s my only connection to my mother’s doctors. My only means of help should I need it.
The idea is laughable. I have the phone only because Axel wishes it but I’m still grateful. Images of my body being found in a forest wearing his T-shirt or heaven forbid, nothing, flash through my mind.
I look around and see nothing but dark trees whizzing past. A shiver courses through me.
“You’re not cold,” he states from beside me, drawing my attention to him.
The hand controlling the wheel is relaxed now, his other arm propped against the door. He’s a lot less tense than he was when we left Greenwich but I don’t fool myself into thinking all is calm.
Instead I concentrate on his statement. “I’m not cold.” The buttery-soft seat is warm, the temperature in the sports car pleasantly ambient.
“You must be shivering for another reason then.”
The statement, softly voiced, nevertheless holds steel and demands an answer.
He’s not getting the contents of my darkest fear. “It’s not every day I’m kidnapped from my home and flung into a car wearing nothing but a borrowed T-shirt. I’m allowed some sort of reaction, aren’t I?”
His mouth twitches for a nanosecond. “The T-shirt is yours to keep.”
“And the kidnapping? Are we going to address that?”
“What’s to address? You’re mine now. End of story.”
“Axel—”
“And if you stare at that phone one more time, it’s going out the fucking window. You even think about calling him, I will crush you so hard you’ll cease to exist. Is that understood?”
The stark words rob me of breath. This time my shudder originates from fear rather than the macabre conjuring of my brain.
“Answer me, Cleo. And for fuck’s sake, stop shivering!”
“Yes. I…I understand.” My voice is little more than a whisper.
I feel his gaze slant to me. Probe me.
“Motherfucker!” He wrenches the car down a dark road and floors the gas for half a mile before he brakes sharply before a semicircle of red maple trees. “What the fuck’s the matter with you?” he demands after he kills the engine.
I glance frantically around me. We’re alone, with no other signs of life. “Why have we stopped? Where are we?”
Narrowed gray eyes shift from my face long enough to stab a finger in the middle of the car’s satellite navigation. The pin on the map zooms in. We’re on the edge of a park near New Rochelle.
“Cleo?”
I shake my head, my hand clenched tight around my phone. “Nothing’s wrong. Can we…can we go please?”
Growling, he pries the phone from my hand and tosses it in the back. “Not until I get some answers.”
“I told you, there’s nothing wrong—”
“What the fuck does he give you that no other man can, Cleo?” The question jerks from him like a missile, straight into my chest. “What’s so damn special about him that he would do this to you,” he grabs the hem of the T-shirt and flings it up to bare my ribs, “and you still stay?”
He doesn’t you know your mother survived. As far as he’s concerned, he finished the job that night. If you have any brains in that head of yours, keep that to yourself.
Finnan’s words tear across my mind.
“Something you can never give me.”
Scalpel-s
harp eyes rip into me, his whole body once again lashed with lethal tension. “And what is that?” he asks. There’s a strange note in his voice that, from any other man, I would attribute to vulnerability.
Axel Rutherford is incapable of that state of being. All the same, I have the upper hand here. For once, I have something he seems to want. Something I don’t intend to give him.
I allow a slow, mysterious smile to curve my lips. “Why should I tell you? You seem to think you have all the power here. This one is my secret to keep. But take my word for it. You can never give me what he can.”
The muted growl of a charging predator fills the dark space a second before he pounces. My seatbelt is whipped from my body and he yanks me from my seat. The moment I’m sprawled across his lap, his fingers grip my hair.
He brings my face up to his. Holds me there, nose to nose, as his harsh breaths wash over my face. As he shows me the rampant madness churning through his eyes. “Maybe not, baby. But I will give you a whole fucking lot more.”
Hot, firm lips slant across mine. Anger. Hunger. Nuclear-grade lust feeds into the kiss long before his tongue demands entry. Once he gets it, he rams deeper, rocketing the volatile dalliance to a whole new level.
It takes a minute to realize the rock I’m clinging to in this insane storm is his shoulders, that my very refuge is also my destruction.
I try to scramble free. His grip tightens until my scalp tingles. “Stay. The fuck. Still.” The words are smashed against our meshed lips, little more than a rumble from his chest.
I should heed the warning. But my mind is in free fall, the darkness both inside and out bloating my fears to uncontainable dimensions. Using his shoulders as leverage, I pull back. Our mouths part with a loud, rude suction that, absurdly, drives carnal need straight between my thighs.
“No,” I manage, even as my body screams yes.
My crazed monster merely grins. “You don’t get to say no to me, sweetheart. Not when I can already smell how badly you want me.”
His mouth recaptures mine, tongue and teeth delivering pleasure so concentrated that my fear begins to melt. Other thoughts encroach.
