by Anne Malcom
Because he was Jacob, he sensed the way the air changed with the moment, he didn’t say a word, he continued to eat the food he’d made at a table that I’d never sat at, while I lived a version of my life I never could have imagined.
A life I never wanted.
I wasn’t even sure if I still wanted it now.
But it wasn’t about want with Jacob.
Or need.
It was just Jacob.
I continued to eat the food he made, while my soul digested the truth, his permanence. Molly was right. A man like this was never going to be temporary. I’d feel him here, at this cold table, in my cold apartment, inside my frigid heart, long after he was gone.
And he’d go.
Because I was getting close to finding a way to take Kershaw’s company out from under him. And once I did that, I’d take his power. He’d no longer be a threat.
He might try and kill me again, but I doubted it.
So Jacob would leave.
And I’d have the cold table, colder heart and agonizing memories.
My plate was swiped from under me, I hadn’t even realized I’d finished.
Jacob’s fingers snatched my chin, forcing my gaze out of my own mind and into the present. Into his present.
“I can think of some other things we can do to get your money’s worth of this table,” he growled.
I was wet instantly.
He didn’t waste time in lifting me up, splitting my legs, ripping yet another skirt and pair of panties and having an entirely different kind of meal at the table.
One that was worth quite a lot more than twenty-five thousand dollars.
I hadn’t forgotten about the painting.
I could never.
But I also never let myself entertain the idea that Jacob would have a reason to be inside my bedroom and therefore have a reason to see it.
And when he walked into the bedroom for the first time, after he’d given me two orgasms at twelve thousand dollars each, my legs were wrapped around his hips and he was inside me, so I didn’t expect him to be focusing on the décor.
But this was Jacob.
He was not a man to be distracted, even by the best sex of my life. I knew the second his eyes met the gaze of the wolf on my wall. Because he froze, his already painful grip intensified.
My head turned with his. “Molly painted it,” I breathed, my voice fractured. “She made me hang it here.” I paused. “But I would’ve put it here anyway. It’s where you belong. Watching me.”
He jerked. Then his eyes, the ones that had watched over my nightmares focused on me. He didn’t say anything. He kissed me. And then he fucked me brutally, without holding back, without anything but the wolf inside him.
And that was saying it all.
14
My thoughts were soft around the edges, fuzzy. Like I’d drunk two bottles of pink wine. Fermented grapes or strong liquor was the only thing that could affect me like this. Even those didn’t have me feeling so...content. My thoughts were usually hard, angular and ordered. Not subject to emotions. And certainly not subject to a man.
Until now.
Though nothing was fixed. Or sorted. He was still an enigma, still holding me at arm’s length with words left unsaid that nearly burst the room apart, but it didn’t matter.
Not in this moment.
It didn’t even matter that Kershaw may or may not still be plotting to kill me. That my uncle might have a hand in it. That my company’s stocks were suffering while I publicly seemed to be doing nothing since the pull out of the merger.
That was out there. Floors below. In the real world. The place I always lived.
I hadn’t taken a vacation in six years. I was enjoying one now. Not an island, because Vaughn was right, no woman was an island, even if I lived on one. Jacob was an island, with rugged, dangerous cliffs, like the backdrop of Cathy and Heathcliff’s story. I always knew I’d find a vacation in darkness and pain. In Jacob’s darkness and pain.
I ached to know more about his captivity. How he got out. I wanted to claw at his demons, make my mark on them. But there was nothing more said. And I had yet to expose some of the ugliest parts of me.
The harsh ringing of a phone interrupted me, cutting through my mind. I frowned, it wasn’t my phone, but out of instinct I hopped up and padded across my bedroom to Jacob’s jacket.
My hand outstretched, I paused.
Jacob was private. He barely spoke to me. And while we spent all of our time together, he’d just done the most intimate things anyone had ever done to me and killed for me twice, answering his phone seemed like a personal gesture. One for boyfriends and girlfriends who enjoyed simplicity.
Simple would never be a word to describe Jacob. Or me. Or us.
Despite that, the logic of it all, my hand had a mind of its own and snaked into the jacket and had the cool metal at my ear before I could fully understand what was going on.
“Hello, Jacob’s phone,” I answered, putting on the professional voice I’d distanced myself from as late. Well, distanced myself from insofar as I didn’t adopt it with Jacob.
I was met with a small intake of breath, then silence.
I waited a beat.
“Hello?” I repeated, my eyes on the door to my bathroom, were the sounds of a shower still pattered lightly in the background.
“Um, hi,” a small female voice greeted, sounding uncertain. “This is Jacob’s phone?” she clarified.
“Yes, it is,” I replied.
I knew I shouldn’t have done this. The way she said his name, the emotion drenched in that one word told me something.
Had I just addressed a woman he was sleeping with? An ex-girlfriend? His secret wife that lived on Long Island with two kids and a dog?
Inner me shook her head. No. Jacob didn’t even wear suits because they caged him. A wedding ring? A promise of forever? No. He would never.
“I-is Jacob there?” she asked in a small voice.
I glanced at the door where the shower was still running, gritting my teeth. “Yeah, he’s just in the shower for a moment, would you like me to take a message?” I asked politely.
It wasn’t this soft-spoken woman’s fault that Jacob had more than one woman on the go and I didn’t want to be rude. Though my insinuation from the shower wasn’t exactly kind if she was his estranged wife.
She sucked in a breath. “He’s in the shower?” she asked, and instead of anger or jealous, she sounded strangely exuberant. “And you’re...” She trailed off.
“Charlotte,” I replied with hesitation. Was she waiting for my name and then going to try and stalk me and kill me? Because I already had one person trying to do that and it would be awkward for her to meet Jacob as my bodyguard when she came in to go all Single White Female on me.
“Charlotte,” she breathed. “You’re Charlotte and he’s in the shower,” she almost sang the words.
My eyes never moved from the door. “And he is taking an extremely long shower, too,” I muttered. “He better not be using the last of my Jo Malone body wash.”
She immediately burst out laughing and the sound was like bells. Literally feminine and light and nothing I could ever reproduce. It reminded me of Molly. It caught me off guard, mostly because I wasn’t used to making anyone laugh, nor was I used to uttering thoughts out loud like I just had.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” I said when she finished laughing. “But who are you?”
She paused. “I’m Tina,” she replied, waiting a beat, for me to say something. When I didn’t, she continued. “Jacob’s sister.”
I pursed my lips. “Oh right, Jacob’s sister,” I said, trying not to betray my surprise.
I had assumed he was some kind of rogue orphan who was raised in the woods. He certainly didn’t seem like he had a sister whose laugh sounded like bells.
“He usually doesn’t answer my calls,” she said, her voice not as cheerful as before. “I’m a little surprised to get one, and with a woman
on the other end,” she explained.
“Yes, well, I’m surprised to answer it. My hand had a mind of its own,” I replied honestly. “Curiosity killed the cat, but I’m totally hoping it won’t do the same to the Charlotte.”
Another laugh. “Well, I’m glad you did. Answer that is.” There was a pause. A loaded one. One that seemed to travel sadness even across the phone line. “He’s...okay then?” she asked in a small voice.
I paused. Could anyone ever describe Jacob as okay? Unhinged? Yes. Homicidal? Definitely. Addictive and dangerous? Double yes.
But okay? Never.
“Yeah. He is,” I replied simply. This woman was obviously concerned, yet she still laughed easily, and despite Jacob not returning her calls, she still called him. The shower turned off. “I can get him for you, if you want?” I offered, not liking the wrath I would get from Jacob.
But his sister sounded, concerned. Nice. And overall, haunted by whatever lurked behind his eyes.
The fact that he hadn’t answered her calls in what I guessed was a long while had me willing to risk the wrath. I couldn’t imagine not going a week without talking to Molly. Even if I was lying to her. Though I guessed I could rule out one lie, Jacob and I were dating. In the sense that he followed me around and tried to stop someone from killing me and fucked me within an inch of my life.
“No,” she shot quickly. “No, no. He’ll answer, when he’s ready. It’s just...” She paused. “I’m happy that you did. Answer. And I really hope I meet you one day.” Her voice was small.
“I do too,” I told her back, just as honestly even though I knew that was never going to happen.
Jacob was never going to be in the space to be okay enough to be around a sister who still laughed, whose voice was still light and whose heart was obviously still hopeful.
He’d told me that who he was before was dead. I believed him. He wouldn’t show this woman the ghost of himself. Or the monster he’d turned into. I wondered if she knew that, deep down.
Probably not.
People that laughed with strangers normally hadn’t abandoned hope.
“Bye, Charlotte,” she said, more than a whisper. “And thank you.”
Then she was gone.
Then the door opened, and I was presented with the male goodness of Jacob, dripping wet with droplets of water trailing down the ridges of his abs. He took me in too. Not hungrily. No, he focused on the phone at my ear.
Yeah, here came the wrath.
I waited. Held my breath in fear and anticipation.
But his face stayed empty, eyes flaring slightly over my naked body, covered in bruises from his beautiful assault.
“Your sister called,” I said after a long silence.
His jaw twitched. The movement was tiny.
But it was movement.
It was reaction.
Maybe there was hope yet.
“And you answered,” he replied.
I nodded. “Are you mad?”
He moved across the room instead of answering. He came to stand in front of me. His towel was slung low on his waist, revealing the scars that proved why Tina was calling her brother’s ghost.
Well, it explained some of it.
The deadness in his eyes explained the rest.
“I thought I might be,” he said by reply.
“But you’re not?”
He shook his head once. “Not mad. But I think I might punish you anyway.”
And I let him.
“Will you tell me about your sister?”
My words broke the long and easy silence that had followed the long, not at all easy and definitely not silent sex.
He tensed underneath me, his arms tightening.
I didn’t think he was going to answer. Even now, with the entire dynamic between us in tatters, with us being more intimate than I guessed he had been with anyone, he still picked and chose which of my questions he answered. Especially the personal ones. I didn’t press him, demand answers, demand respect like I would’ve with anyone else. Because he gave me his respect without having to demand it, and the answers were when he chose to do so. I got all the answers I really needed in a meaningful glance.
“She’s younger than me,” he said finally. “Three years. Looked up to me since she could hold her own head up. Don’t know why, even before, I wasn’t exactly the person anyone should be lookin’ up to, but that was a responsibility I took on, like I did looking out for her. Tried to make myself into someone worth looking up to.”
He paused. And I heard a lot in that pause. Felt a lot in that pause. A whole lifetime that might’ve been, had reality not been so cruel.
“I did a good enough job,” he continued. “For a while. Then I took a road so well paved with good intentions. But I’m not makin’ excuses, placing blame. Every choice I made was my own. Every life I ended, every trigger I pulled, that was done with purpose, for a start, then with a kind of sick satisfaction as I fed some kind of hunger that I’d created.” His arms tightened around me, finger pads pressing into my hips creating fresh bruises to accompany the fading ones he’d already put there.
“Hunger turned into something altogether different being locked in that box, unable to feed it. So I started gnawing on my insides, killing parts of myself if only to feed the wolf. I wasn’t human when I got out. What I did to the fuckers who put me in that box...”
He trailed off.
I waited.
“When I came home, I knew I wasn’t gonna fit there,” he continued. “Knew that I had buried whatever part of me that belonged there in that hole I’d been kept in. In the holes I’d put others in.”
He gritted his teeth. “But I also knew that my sister would hurt if I didn’t. My whole family went through hell thinkin’ I was dead. So I tried to come back from hell and pretend it hadn’t turned me into a demon. Didn’t work.”
I felt his words deep down, in the part of me I’d covered with ice in order to come back from my own hell.
“That was apparent the second they tried to hug me, touch me, fuckin’ look at me,” Jacob said. “They were scared of me. Knew that. They tried to hide it, of course, ‘cause I come from a good family. Solid people. But people who hadn’t seen shit that I had, hadn’t seen monsters like I’d turned into. But they tried. I tried. Worked on the farm with my brother in law. He was mindful. Good man. So he kept his distance. Made sure I was never alone with his wife, kids. Though I’d never hurt them. Consciously.”
He pressed harder into my skin.
I bit my lip, drawing blood so I didn’t cry out. I knew what pain he was going through to answer my question, so I wasn’t going to complain about a shadow of it being projected onto me. I wanted it all projected onto me. I would cut my skin open just so I could have scars like his.
“Didn’t sleep well. Nightmares,” he continued, voice cold, detached. Clinical.
But it chilled me, because of what a nightmare must’ve been to a man like Jacob. He’d gone through most of what other people couldn’t even comprehend, but the human mind could always conjure up a worse nightmare, depending on how hellish reality got.
“Lack of sleep got the best of me, rested my eyes for a few seconds while my sister’s husband was out,” Jacob said, his brow twitched slightly, as if he were trying to call up a memory, an answer. “Must’ve done somethin’ to bring Tina into the room. She was worried. Kind, she is. And fearless in her own way. She tried to wake me up. I did wake up. In that hole in the ground thousands of miles away. Woke up as the man I was over there, and the man I was deep inside back home. Broke her arm before I could find my way back.”
I was expecting something of the sort. It wasn’t like I knew Jacob’s story had a happy ending, considering his ending had him living in an abandoned warehouse, stalking the streets of New York finding someone to kill.
“Didn’t blame me, not outwardly, of course,” he said. “They were scared. Saw it. Plain as day. So I left. Did the thing I should’ve done in the first pla
ce, let them think I was dead. Since it’s the closest version of the truth there is.”
I waited. Because there was more. I was ravenous for it like Jacob was for killing. It was pain that fed me, his pain. And he was a feast.
“The dead can still be haunted by the things they’ve done to the living,” he said, eyes clear and cold on me. My breathing shallowed at the monster within them. “The day everything I’ve done stops haunting me, is the day there’s nothing left of me but the monster I wore to do those things. That’s the day you kill me. Or you run.”
I didn’t need to ask if he was serious. I knew it, some part of me knew from the beginning. He was there in the alley, not to save me from monsters, but to keep me for himself. There was a possibility one day, Jacob would stop being human. He was capable of hurting me. Killing me.
“I don’t run,” I said as response.
Something moved beyond his eyes. “Then you better prepare yourself for death.”
I swallowed roughly at his words and let silence take us both captive.
“I don’t like the thought of you there, in the middle of all that ruin, living in that,” I admitted after the words left unsaid needed to be drowned out with yet another admission.
Why? Does bein’ surrounded by something pretty somehow dress up ugly thoughts?” He glanced around the bedroom pointedly.
“No,” I said, shocked at how close his words were to my witching hour thoughts. “But it’s not worthy of you.”
My admission wasn’t planned. It betrayed more of my feelings toward him.
Jacob’s eyes darkened the same time his hands tightened around me. “You don’t know what’s worthy of me,” he growled.
“Or maybe you don’t,” I replied, not shying away from his brutal gaze.
“It’s your tell,” he said instead of responding.
I straightened my spine. “What is?”
“You blink,” he said, fingers trailing my eyes. “When you’re scared, hesitant or unsure, you blink. Rapidly. Outwardly every decision you make is made with confidence and surety a reigning monarch doesn’t likely have.” His hand ghosted the sides of my face. “Except for this. The blink. It shows you’re scared.”