by Kitty Thomas
Leo stroked her arm. “I haven’t hurt you, Faith. Trust me. All I want is to protect those I love. I won’t allow Angelo to go to prison. And if you hurt the women—especially my mother—by letting them know the true nature of our arrangement, I will hurt you. That’s the only reason you’d have to fear me. It’s so simple here.”
As she gazed up at him from beneath thick lashes, he knew she wanted to believe that if she played her role right, she’d be safe.
“L-Leo?”
He forced himself to hold onto his temper. She wasn’t trying to annoy him with the stutter. “Yes, Faith?”
“What happens next Christmas? Am I still going to be alive?”
What kind of question was that? “Of course you’ll still be alive. If I wanted you dead, I would have left you with Angelo.”
There was a long pause while she gathered her courage. “What happens then? Or the next year? Will you lock me in the dungeon? We can’t pretend to be engaged forever.”
So that was where it was going. “I know,” he said. “We’ll have to get married. I was thinking next June. Everyone loves June weddings, and my mother will be in wedding-heaven. Shut your mouth when you chew your food, please,” he said in response to her gaping fish impression.
“I can’t do this,” she whispered.
***
Faith raced down the hall to the entryway and flew up the stairs to her room. Once the door was locked, she pressed her back against the wood and slid to the carpet. Her sobs came out among strangled gasps for air.
What he demanded of her was too cruel. Pretend she loved him. Pretend they were a couple. Have a sham marriage. All the while she’d be a princess locked in a tower with no true love or life to call her own. She wanted to survive and stay safe, but what kind of life was this? What kind of safety?
The stupidest part of all of this was that she wouldn’t have told anyone. She would have been too scared. And calling the cops wouldn’t resurrect the guy Angelo had killed. But no matter what she said, there was no way they’d believe her and set her free. Especially now that she’d become their victim. They wouldn’t believe she’d let that go, too.
She’d let anything go if it meant safety.
“Faith, unlock this door, right now!” Leo’s voice boomed from the other side of the door, sending vibrations along her back as if his hands were on her.
She couldn’t breathe. If she opened the door, he might hurt her. If she didn’t open the door, he might break it down and hurt her. Her mind flashed to the night he’d spanked her for such a small infraction. Would he do it again? Or worse? Why did I lock the door? Why did I leave the table?
“A-are you going to h-hurt me?”
“I’ll hurt you if you don’t fucking stop stuttering!” he shouted.
She unlocked the door and rushed to shut herself in the closet, huddling in the corner. All she wanted was to get away from him. God, let her fall through some other magic dimension, away from this place. Why couldn’t he leave her alone?
She hugged herself as his footsteps approached her obvious hiding place.
“Come out. Now.” The anger was still there, but it was muted behind tenuous self-control.
“Please, Leo…”
His breath was harsh outside the closet as he got hold of himself. She prayed he could reign in his temper and that he wouldn’t take it out on her.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She’d gotten caught on a loop and couldn’t stop saying the words, hoping they would calm him.
His breath slowed back to normal, and then he seemed to move away. It was enough to give her the courage to leave the closet.
Leo sat on the edge of the bed, watching her. “Come here.”
“Please…”
“Come. Here.”
She joined him, and he wrapped his arms around her and held her. An attempt at comfort? He had to know, his touch couldn’t comfort her. But somehow, it did. The more he touched her, the more she found herself desensitized to the fear of it.
“I’m sorry,” he said against her hair. “I don’t have any other choices.”
“You could let me go. I swear, I won’t say anything about what I saw, or about being kept here. I’ll go back to my life and be quiet. I’ll never speak of this. Please.” Then she said something she hoped was true but wasn’t sure. “I-I know you don’t want to do this. You can trust me. I promise I won’t talk.”
He stroked her hair. “Family comes first. I won’t take the risk. And you have no idea of the things I want to do where you’re concerned. Pray you never know.”
Despite the irrationality of the act, she found herself clinging to him, because he was the only thing to hold onto. He could protect her from Angelo. She had to get herself together if she wanted to keep his protection.
His voice was quiet when he spoke again. “Next summer you’ll become my wife in name only. I won’t force you. I won’t hurt you. Things will stay as they’ve been the past few days. I know you’re losing so much. I wish things could be different for you. Please believe that.”
He pulled away from her and helped her to stand. “Come finish your dinner. We still need to practice and finish going over our answers on the questionnaire.”
Faith placed a shaky hand in his and allowed him to take her back to the kitchen where their food had been left. He put her plate in the microwave and heated it for about a minute, then did the same with his. While she ate, he stroked her arm and she tried not to jerk away from him.
“Do you have any food allergies?”
The question caught her by surprise. “No, why?”
“It occurred to me that being Irish as well as not having big Christmases, you might not be familiar with our traditions. Our big meal is on Christmas Eve. We have mostly fish, including shellfish, and we tend to have a lot of cookies that have nuts in them on the Venetian table.”
Faith made a face. “Fish for Christmas?”
“It’s an Italian-Catholic thing. We call it The Feast of the Seven Fishes. Not all Italians do it, but it’s been a tradition with my family in Brooklyn since before I was born. We have seven different seafood dishes: calamari, scungilli—which is a conch delicacy—baccala, shrimp, clams with pasta, often lobster with pasta and a red sauce, and then something like salmon or trout. And of course we’ve got other stuff that has no seafood in it like spaghetti without the meat and antipasto.”
“What’s antipasto?”
“Are you kidding? Lettuce, roasted peppers, olives, anchovies, and cheese mainly. Then on the dessert table we have Baci DiDama, which are hazelnut meringue sandwiches filled with chocolate. We have cherry-almond star cookies, and pignoli—those are pine nut cookies. My aunt Lily makes a mean rainbow cookie with an almond filling, even though she’s not Italian. And of course you’ll find some cannoli and various fruits.”
Leo went into a sort of trance. No doubt he was lost inside holiday memories that Faith couldn’t pretend to understand.
After dinner they went through the rest of the questionnaire. She knew all the answers. She’d read them over and over, the threat of the dungeon hanging over her head. The hard part would be pretending she loved him. The easy part was facts and figures. She’d applied herself doggedly to learning everything he’d written down, hoping it would keep him from locking her up during Christmas.
When he was satisfied with her knowledge, he led her to a different room. This one had a large, flat screen against one wall. He put a disc in the player, turned out the lights, and joined her on the couch. It was a mockery of a date: a chick flick and his arm around her.
The movie was a typical romantic comedy with the typical formulaic plot line. If you’d seen one, you’d seen them all. It might be nice to get lost in it, but she couldn’t. She wondered if she might have watched this, or something similar if she’d stayed home with her cat that night instead of going out.
Midway through the film, Leo turned her face to him, and his lips met hers. She still froze
when he did it, unable to bring herself to relax under his touch given the circumstances.
He pulled away. “Give in to me, Faith. All I’ll take from you are chaste kisses. You can give me that. You’ll be doing a lot of this when my family arrives. You’d better get used to it.”
He tried again, and this time she forced herself to relax and pretend it was a date with a guy she’d said yes to.
“Better. We’ll work on it.”
Leo pulled her into his arms to finish the movie. He held her as if he was her boyfriend, but even under cover of darkness, he never tried anything. When the credits rolled, he turned on the light. “We’ll try again tomorrow. Go to bed.”
He didn’t have to ask her twice. She couldn’t get back to her room fast enough, the one place where she was moderately safe.
That night, Leo starred in her dreams. Except instead of being a scary horror-movie monster, he was her boyfriend, and he was kind and funny. When he kissed her in the dream, she melted against him and moaned, opening her mouth to accept his probing tongue. Her arms gripped his shoulders, trying to pull him closer, wanting to be consumed by him. Between her legs, a throbbing ache started until his hand slid underneath her panties to soothe it away.
“See, Faith? This is nothing,” Dream-Leo said. “You can give me this.”
When she woke, her own hand was between her legs, and she was aroused. No! If some part of her actually fell for him, it would be more painful. She didn’t want to be like one of those kidnap victims who started sympathizing with her captor. She didn’t want to start believing his lies. And she definitely didn’t want to want him or like his hands or lips on her. She pressed her face against her pillow in an attempt to muffle her distress—though she knew Leo couldn’t hear her from the other end of the house. Then she pressed her face against the pillow to muffle the sound of her orgasm.
Chapter Seven
Leo paced the entry hall, the usually unobtrusive Christmas music beginning to set his teeth on edge. His family would start arriving in less than an hour. About half of them were coming in from Vegas, and they’d be trickling in until dinnertime. The other half would be equally laissez-faire about their arrival times, though they were all in or around Brooklyn.
He still second-guessed the plan. Faith had improved. When he’d instructed her to do a better acting job, she’d delivered. He couldn’t imagine how afraid she must be of the dungeon to be so compliant. And she’d never even seen the dungeon.
She probably imagined it as a far worse place than it was. In her mind, Leo had no doubt she saw damp stones with water dripping from some unknown source and algae growing through the cracks and crevices. There would be a dripping sound, a dank, putrid smell, a dirt or concrete floor, a chill that wouldn’t leave the air, and heavy chains.
He’d not bothered to disabuse her of that notion. The scarier the dungeon was to her, the easier it would be to get her cooperation. In reality, the dungeon was none of those things. If what he’d been told by the servants who had gone to get her belongings was true, the dungeon was nicer than her apartment in the city had been. It was done in black and a tasteful deep red with occasional splashes of other colors like purples and greens and yellows. It had been an inside joke with his previous submissives that the dungeon was the color of death, blood, and bruises. But it had still turned out beautiful.
There was a comfortable circular sofa in one corner and a bed close to that. There was reading material because a few of his subs had lived down there. There was a small bathroom with a whirlpool tub and a separate standing shower. Nothing large or fancy, but Faith would consider it nice. There was thick carpet in the bedroom area and heat. Max had a habit of curling up on the couch down there for naps when Leo left the door open.
There were chains, of course, and a box full of kinky toys and whipping implements, and the standard and some not-so-standard BDSM furniture. But it looked like a high-end club for kinky people, not a snuff film.
Though maybe it wasn’t the atmosphere that so terrified her. Maybe it was the bondage, the isolation. Maybe it was the fear that she would need something—and no one would hear her to help. Even a luxurious prison could be horrible. She was already living in a prison, confined to the house like an indoor house cat. But chains would be necessary if he kept her underground. Though the dungeon was well-insulated and tucked away from everything else, if she banged on the door, there was always the risk someone might hear.
He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to kill her if she were to alert a sympathetic member of his family to her plight. And even if he could, it wouldn’t stop the cat from being out of the bag.
She’d made such progress. Her lips had become pliant under his. She’d stopped cringing from his touch when he came near her. It had taken working with her every day, but they’d gotten to something resembling a believable relationship forgery. He still worried it wasn’t enough. What if his mother saw through the ruse? What if the men did? They were too shrewd, able to spot a con because they knew how to pull one.
Maybe he should have locked Faith in the dungeon, but locking her up and isolating her for Christmas was too cruel even for his sadistic nature. He had to believe this would work. Then they could go back to the fucked-up dynamic the holidays had been so rude as to interrupt.
Leo smoothed his suit for the fortieth time. He’d dress more casually for most of the family holiday, but he liked to look nice when people first arrived, particularly on Christmas Eve. Jeans and a T-shirt would have made him look less nefarious. If his intent was to come off squeaky clean and sell this engagement story, perhaps greeting his family looking like Michael Corleone wasn’t the best of plans.
He knocked on his captive’s door. “Faith?”
When she opened the door, he was pleased to find her wearing what he’d laid out. He’d raided her closet for something to make a good first impression on his mother, but he’d come up short, so he’d had something brought in. It was a green sweater dress with a scooped neck. The dress came to just past the knees. It accentuated her figure without being too form-fitting. It was sexy, but classy and respectable. He’d given her a pair of brown boots to finish the look. A couple of small, gold chains adorned her otherwise bare neck.
Angelo was the real expert on fashion, but Leo had people, and his people assured him this was understated and stylish, that it would give the impression he wanted his family to have—of a girl who belonged here.
“Do I look all right?” She was so nervous, as if she thought he’d change his mind at the last minute before anybody got there.
“You look beautiful.” And she did. He wished he was more like his brother—more ruthless, less conscience. Seeing her like this, with that gorgeous red hair, made him want to enforce the roles between them. “Come here.” He wanted to devour her, prey upon her, possess her, and in some deep recess of his mind he knew it was only a matter of time before she broke him and he took her like some savage beast.
He frowned when she hesitated. This sign of his displeasure was enough to move her swiftly into his arms. Somewhere in there she had to be a sub. Leo was tempted to test it, to test her. He could have pushed her harder, he could have taken her and dropped her into the darkness with him. Every day that passed, he regretted his decision to be noble and give her space.
“You’ll do fine,” he whispered as he held her close and stroked her hair. “Nervousness is okay. If this was real, you’d be nervous. I have a big family, and they can be intense. It’s a lot to take, even for a real fiancée.”
Faith stiffened further at that, and he rubbed her back. “Shhh. It’s okay. I’ll tell them you’re shy. This will work out. I’ll keep you safe.”
At those words, she relaxed against him. Perhaps some part of her believed in him. Though he was frustrated to have a beautiful captive he couldn’t bring himself to defile, he’d begun to feel oddly protective of her. He might need her to believe he’d kill her if she tried to get help from his family, but holding her i
n his arms, he knew he’d never be able to do it or let anybody else do it, for that matter.
In his mind, he imagined smoothing things over so they would accept him keeping her. Surely they would approve of that outcome more than they would her murder. He could convince them he’d be kind to her. She had no bruises or marks. Such an idea was believable, especially with the way he always took care of everyone and shied from the uglier sides of the family business.
Leo thought back to a couple of nights ago when he’d asked her what she usually did for the holidays. The look she’d given him had been blank. She’d mumbled something about going out for drinks with her friends on Christmas Eve. And then something about an office Christmas party with a store-bought cake and a game that involved gag gifts.
And that was her Christmas experience. When he’d pressed her on her childhood, it hadn’t been much better. She’d said her family hadn’t had very much and she didn’t always get a Christmas present. Some years they didn’t have a tree. Sometimes a local charity would see to it that she got a doll or a game and a decent meal for the holidays, but it wasn’t anything like his own memories of the season. Such sharp contrast between the memories they had made him feel guilt for all he’d enjoyed while she’d suffered or barely scraped by.
From the moment she’d told him all that, he’d become determined to give her a nice holiday. If she must be his prisoner, he would make it easy on her.
The more he’d learned, the more he’d come to admire her, not just for the way she looked and the way she made his dick hard, but the way she’d fought for what she had. As young as she was, if she’d been left to her own devices, she would have made something of herself.
Though her apartment and financial power might be paltry by Leo’s standards, she’d pulled herself up from the gutter to have something resembling a life, with food on her table, clothes in her closet, and her bills all paid.