by Gabi Moore
“Nora, shh, it’s OK. It was just a picture. He’s just trying to scare you, that’s all.”
“I am scared!” she cried.
“I know. But I’m here, OK?” I said and stroked down her hair. She leapt over, slammed the laptop closed and gave me an imploring look. I knew what she was asking. But I didn’t have answers for her. I knew my father had an edge to him. I knew he wasn’t above pushing over people who got in his way, and that his moral fiber was probably a lot flimsier than most. But I was beginning to get the impression that Nora had tapped into a dark streak of his that even I hadn’t known about.
I guided her to the bed and sat her down, then kissed her fingertips idly while her sobs died down. Once she realized what I was doing, she went completely silent and looked at me. The teardrops clung to her lashes and sparkled; her face seemed naked and raw.
I’ve had many girlfriends in my time. Many admirers, many flings, many friends that turned into something more, many short-term things, many long-term things. I’ve met all kinds of women, and had all kinds of relationships with them. But I never before felt how I did when I looked into Nora’s eyes.
And it scared the fuck out of me.
“My father is a bully. You have to understand, he just wants to push you around, to frighten you.”
“But the picture… the picture was just so…”
“Nevermind about that. Forget about that picture, OK?”
She nodded.
I looked over at the yellowish haze starting to press through the dark drapes and then back at her. “It’s probably time we headed out, since neither of us can sleep anyway.”
She sniffed hard and gave a strange little smile.
“You know, Dean, when I met you, I had a little secret wish that maybe, you were the start of something different for me. That maybe I’d stop being Mistress Morgan and, I don’t know, go somewhere else… be somebody else.”
Her hands felt cold in mine.
“I just never knew it would turn out like this, though,” she said and shone her sparkling eyes at me.
I squeezed her hands, lifted her up and we silently got to work packing a small bag. Her face was even paler than usual, and I could tell that whatever little stunt he had pulled, it had really shaken her. But the truth was that she wasn’t the only one that was afraid. If I was really going to go through with this, if I really meant to defy my father and side with a woman I had known for only a few weeks, well, there was a lot to be afraid of. The truth was that my father was intimidating. I could abandon her and let her take the fall and walk away from all of this …or I could run with her now and do my best to protect her. I don’t know who I was without the Cane money and power behind me, but that was seeming less and less important.
With every little item I helped her throw into her overnight bag, the choice became more concrete. Cutting myself off from the Cane empire? Incurring the wrath of one of the most influential men in the country?
I looked down at Nora’s small, folded shirts in the bag, her little toiletries, her comb, and my heart ached. Together our chances might not have been good. But alone, she had no chance at all. Revenge had brought me to Nora, but I wasn’t going to let revenge pull us apart again.
“You ready to go?” I said. I looked at her now in slight awe. In less than ten minutes she had completely transformed herself. Her hair was slick and combed, her face fresh and perfectly made up and she wore a simple pair of pale jeans and a white shirt that hugged each one of her tight little curves to perfection. More than that, she had stopped crying and genuinely looked ready to kick ass.
“Leaving now is going to buy us some time. He doesn’t know I’ve come here and as far as he’s concerned, I’m his alibi. If I know my dad, he’ll try to get the police on us but if we can come up with our own plan before that happens, we might have a chance.”
She gave me a slow, cautious look.
“A chance for …what?”
I gave her a steely gaze.
“So,” she said, raising an eyebrow at me, “we’re about to run off like fugitives into the night, to some place I don’t know, for a reason you won’t reveal to me, to get away from a man who could do anything at this point… have I got that right?”
I couldn’t resist a smile.
“Something like that.”
“And I’m supposed to trust you, and just follow you without question.”
“That was the deal.”
We exchanged a look loaded with suggestion, holding each other’s gaze there as we both tried to come to terms with the craziness of what was happening.
I wanted her so fucking badly. Just one kiss. Just a taste of her lips would have been enough.
“Well, am I at least dressed properly for the occasion?” she said and gestured to her outfit. I felt a pang of pride for her. Even at a time like this, she was still tough as nails, still able to whip out that dark sense of humor. I looked down appreciatively at her toned thighs and the dramatic curve of her waist as it swooped down into her hips.
“As always, you look phenomenal.”
We stole out into the night like ghosts, got into my car and pulled off quietly into the lifting darkness. A faint yellow and pink blush was rising on the horizon behind us as we made our way to the main road and drove on in silence. We pulled up at a gas station and I told her to wait in the car while I drew some money and picked up a few things.
She nodded and I went outside.
I stood huddled over the cash machine in the still morning air, casting backwards glances at her sitting in the car. The screen flashed dull at me: insufficient funds.
What the fuck?
I tried another card, then another. All declined. I couldn’t swallow. I looked back again at her, sitting there, waiting for me. Her little Cleopatra hairstyle and her eyes big as saucers.
Fuck.
I looked into my wallet. I had less than a hundred dollars cash on me. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to think. There was nothing to do but pay for the gas and head back to the car.
“He’s onto us,” I said quietly as I sat down beside her. “None of my bank cards work.”
She stared straight ahead, then nodded her head slowly.
“We have to go to the Police,” she said.
“The Police? Nora, do you have any idea how much money my father pulls into this town? There’s not a policeman in the state who wouldn’t jump if he asked them to. The Police are the last people we can trust.”
“Then we need another plan.”
I sighed loudly as I started the car and pulled off.
“We have a plan.”
“Running away from the law?”
“Look, you were the one who chose to mess with a man who has infinitely more resources than you, you--”
“Excuse me, I did what? Did I ask either of you to be dragged into this?”
The car fell silent.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just …I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation.”
She spun in her seat and turned to glare at me.
“Don’t I? I’ve known your father for years. You don’t have to tell me what he’s capable of.”
I clenched my jaw at the thought of her and my father. I wanted to ask a whole universe of questions that I didn’t want the answers to. Did she ever fuck him? What did they do together? Did he hurt her? I rolled those painful thoughts up tight and pushed them out of my mind. She was staring ahead, and I could make out the row of street lights flashing past on the curves of her eyes.
“He’s intelligent,” she said. “Very intelligent. Low empathy. He probably has antisocial personality disorder but he’s smart enough to know to hide it. He’s a covert narcissist, but with excellent impulse control and the understanding of how to turn his exploitation of others into profit.”
I scoffed.
“You sound like some kind of shrink.”
“I am some kind of shrink,” she snapped back. “I was licensed to pract
ice in this state for four years before Mistress Morgan came along. Trust me, I know more about men and what makes them tick than you can imagine.”
I tried to catch her eye but she just kept staring ahead. I didn’t know what to say. I suppose we all wear many masks in this life.
“Tell me the truth, Nora. Did you leak those photos?” At first I wasn’t sure she had heard me, but then she lowered her head and looked at her hands in her lap.
“No,” she whispered. “But I wanted to. I meant to. Your father did something to me. He …I wanted to hurt him. Wanted to make him pay for thinking that he could do whatever he liked with whoever he liked. I wanted …to teach him a lesson.”
The car sped on along the quiet roads, every mile we did eating away at our only gas, taking us further away from normal life and deeper into some plan I was only half sure could work. She turned to look at me.
“You’re angry?”
“No. I get it.”
“Men like your father… they treat human beings like things, Dean. Like everything in the world can be bought and sold, and because they have money, they think… they think…”
“They think that their money entitles to them to whatever they want,” I said, finishing her sentence for her.
“Yes, exactly. I’m no angel, but… I know it’s hard to understand.”
“No, I understand you perfectly.” And I did. It was precisely the same sentiment that had led me to seek her out in the first place. I knew the feeling of staring at raw, unbridled, arrogant power and knowing that there was nothing you could do about it. Knew that burning feeling of wanting to set things right, to claim your dignity in the face of a person who believed the rules didn’t apply to them. To want revenge.
I looked at my hands curled round the steering wheel of my expensive car. Sometimes, it was difficult to say which things in my life were only there because they were part of that revenge.
“Dean, can you tell me where we’re going?”
Her hand went to my thigh and rested there. To say it drove me wild was an understatement. Every inch of my body tightened at the memories her touch unlocked. Thoughts of her flooded through me. Thoughts of her gorgeous, silky breath sliding in and out of her as she inched closer to losing control, using my body to pleasure herself. Thoughts of her tumbling, melting laugh. Thoughts of the way her eyes went narrow when she liked one of my jokes but wanted to hide it. Thoughts of the way her lower lip trembled whenever she came.
I was the only one that could do that to her. I had made her come for the first time. It was my cock that had her squirming and screaming with pleasure. It’ll sound cheap, but that thought alone was giving me courage. I placed my hand over hers and held it there, and we drove on. Perhaps Nora wouldn’t be the only one to run away from her old life and into a new one. Perhaps I could try on a few new masks of my own.
I squeezed her hand. “We’re going to get help from the only person I believe can bring my father down.”
Chapter 4
Myth: The best things in life are free
Reality: The best things in life are so expensive there is no amount of money that can buy them
I laid everything out on the bed: a fresh pack of black drugstore tights, two pairs of dark sunglasses and a box of L’Oreal platinum blonde hair bleach. It didn’t look like enough to make a new identity out of, but it would have to do. I kept the news on at low volume just in case any more reports popped up. People in diners had already recognized me one time too many, and I wasn’t willing to take any more risks. I had blown the last few dollars we had on these few items and a cheap throwaway, non-Portal phone. Nora had paid for our motel room and now we were both gearing up to spend the night in what felt like a scene from a cheesy 70s cop drama.
It felt dangerous.
It felt fantastic.
“I’ve got exactly four dollars left on me,” I announced, and made a show of pulling my suit pockets inside out. She laughed.
“Ok, so I’m going to try life as a blonde, and you can try life as a person who’s not a billionaire,” she said with a naughty wink.
“Billionaire? Don’t be ridiculous. I’m a multi-millionaire at most,” I said, and tucked my pockets back in. We’d be OK till we made it to where we were going. For now, the most important part was not to be recognized. Nora had what I’d call a …distinctive look. She looked like someone on a movie set, a natural-born starlet. She stood out in any crowd. Something about the severe lines of her black hair and those big black ingénue eyes made her impossible to hide.
But I had to hide her.
I had to protect her.
She peeked out the closed curtains again and paced the room. The TV hummed in the background. The media couldn’t get enough of the story. The man Time magazine had called ‘The Titan of Tech’ had suddenly found himself in the middle of a seedy sex and murder scandal that was just mysterious enough to have the world weighing in with a million theories of what happened that fateful night. No arrests had been made yet. But I knew that this meant nothing – behind the scenes, I knew my father was already working hard at making sure the outcome of this chaos was exactly what he wanted it to be.
She paced over to the bed and looked down at the items, then took the hair dye in her hand and gave me a knowing look.
“I never thought you had a thing for blondes,” she said teasingly.
“I don’t.”
“So, what is my new name going to be, huh?” She flopped down onto the bed like a little kid, kicking her legs like we were playing a simple game of make-believe.
Fuck, she was hot.
“Shall I be, like, a Natasha?” she said in a phony Russian accent. “Or a Brandy?” she said and put her finger in her mouth and did a stripper pose. I laughed. She was just kidding around, but I had a feeling she had no idea how much she was really turning me on.
“How about Kat,” I said, and flopped down on the bed next to her.
“Kat?”
“Yes, Kat.”
“Meow,” she said, and started messing around again. “And who is this beguiling Kat woman?”
It was hard to believe that this was the same woman who had kept me at arms length for so long. I took her hand in mine and stroked it carefully. “Who is she? Kat is… well, she’s a bit of a firecracker, you see. A runaway. She left home at 16 to become an actress in Hollywood. Kat has some very, very naughty habits. And they get her into all sorts of trouble unfortunately.”
Her fingers went limp as she let me play at opening and closing her palm.
“Oh yes? Is she a bit of a femme fatale, this Kat? Does she chew the boys up and spit them out?”
I gave her a serious look.
“Oh no. Kat is a distressed damsel, through and through. She knows she needs to keep away from the big, bad, dangerous men she craves, but she just can’t, you see…”
She raised her eyebrows at me.
“Kat’s bitten off a bit more than she can chew. Now she’s in over her head, on the run with a devastatingly handsome stranger who is gearing up to take advantage of her innocence…”
I had no idea what I was saying. But I liked it. And judging by her smile, she liked it too. I don’t know why we were such freaks together, Nora and I.
“Come on, let’s get this done,” I said, pulled her up and grabbed the box from her.
“But wait! I want to hear what happens to Kat.” She flashed her big dark eyes at me, and just like that, just like magic, a jolt shot through my body and made me ache hard for her.
“Oh, I’ll tell you when the time is right,” I said with a stern look. She squealed with laughter and walked off to the bathroom with the box. I had no idea where that had come from. Nora was the ballsy, dark seductress. But I liked how willing she was to be someone completely different.
When I went into the bathroom, her shirt was off. I froze, but she was acting casual, fussing with the bottles from the package. I hadn’t decided if I was still mad at her, and now there were her ni
pples. She turned to face me, one gloved hand held out in front of her, her other offering me the remaining glove. I knew each of Nora’s breasts personally, like old friends. The left was the fuller, rounder one, but the right was slightly perkier. They were delicious breasts, puffy and soft and the same raw pink of her lips. I tried not to stare as I went over, put on a glove and started to help her smear the purple paste onto her black strands.
We worked together in silence.
She would look gorgeous blonde. Cleopatra, but from the distant future. A photo negative of her ordinary self.
Despite my attempts to focus on the job at hand, it was like our bodies were carrying on a quiet conversation of their own, without our permission. Each time my wrist brushed against her collarbone, or my breath touched her naked shoulder, it was electric. Even more potent and distracting than the hot smell of peroxide filling the tiny bathroom. It was ridiculous, to think of sex at a time like this. I was still mad at her, after all, still nursing a vague sense of betrayal… and yet.
“Kat is a tease,” I said quietly. “She pushes her luck. She goes to a motel with a man she shouldn’t… This man shows her things. He makes her do things she’s never done before.”
“Oh? I think Kat must have been frightened, deep down.”
“Nope. Not at all. Deep down, she loves the things he makes her do. She’s too shy to say them out loud. But he isn’t,” I said, and pressed my body gently against hers, so she could feel exactly what she was doing to me. Her hands paused hovering above her head and she took a deep breath. I had seen what she could do with those lips. I knew the words that had been on those lips, when she was deep and far in the throes of passion and blurting out filthy things.
“Kiss me, Nora.”
She instantly obeyed, pressing her cool, soft lips to mine. I grabbed the back of her neck and took everything from that kiss that I had wanted from the moment I had gone to her house to warn her. Her resistance melted away easily. I wrapped my hands around her warm, naked chest and down her curved back. She kissed me back, hard, with abandon. And then that thought, the thought I had compressed and packed away, came bursting in again.