by Amber Bardan
“What’s wrong with me?” Bitterness burned the back of my throat, and my tongue felt twice its normal size. “Did you drug me?”
Haithem tugged the arm off my face. “You were ill. I took care of you.” The way he’d said that. Slowly. Purposefully. My temperature leaped back up a few notches. I stared at him. The way he looked at me when he’d said that. Intimate—possessive. He took care of me. As though I was his to take care of.
I went hotter still—hot yet shivery.
An image struck me of being his. Being his pet. Taken care of. More shivers swept me.
He released my arm and leaned back. Bristles coated the wide angles of his jaw. Somehow making him hotter. Somehow making him more rugged, a little dirty, yet more touchable. His eyes glowed black in the dim cabin.
The sheets clung to me—his sheets, the sheets on his giant sex bed.
“You made yourself sick from hiding in the lifeboat overnight.”
My mouth opened. “From falling into the lifeboat, you mean.”
He didn’t blink, just watched me—read me, I’m sure. If he could really read me, then he should’ve known the truth.
“I need to go home now.”
His jaw pulsed. A rap sounded on the door, then Karim burst in. My little black bag swung from his hand, and the last dying note of my cell phone ringtone trickled from inside it. He rushed to Haithem and held out the bag.
“We found this in the lifeboat.”
Haithem took my bag and yanked out my phone. His finger swiped across the screen, and I sat up, seeing the flashing missed calls notification before the screen faded. He drew back, eyes trained on the screen, fingers tapping. His expression hardened, turned cold and empty.
He turned to Karim. “How long have we been in range?”
“About half an hour.”
Haithem flashed a look at me then handed the cell to Karim. “We’ll detour. Dispose of this immediately.”
“No, it’s mine.” I lunged for the phone, and my head spun.
Haithem grabbed my wrist and urged me back against the mountain of pillows. “You need to rest.”
“I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m no spy—give me my fucking phone.” I shoved his hand away, panic spurting through me with enough force to subdue the hot, sick feeling clinging to me. “I need to go home.”
Haithem switched languages, speaking softly to the man behind him without taking his gaze off me. Karim nodded and left the room. I pushed off the blankets, scrambling after him. Haithem dropped my bag and seized my arms.
“Calm down. Everything will be fine.” He spoke in soothing tones, and despite myself, it calmed me. “You’ll be home before you know it.”
His touch gentled. His fingers on my skin were light, his hold on me ludicrously comforting.
I relaxed against the pillows and smoothed a hand over the dirty dress that somehow had magically materialized back over my body while I was passed out. “So you believe me?”
He said nothing but reached down for the handbag on the floor. The mattress rose and fell under his weight. I held out my hand for my bag, but he flipped open the top and rummaged inside. He placed my lip gloss and compact on the side table, then fished inside and pulled out my emergency tampons.
My cheeks burned. “May I have my bag, please?”
“Soon,” he said, and drew out my wallet.
“There is absolutely nothing in there that could possibly interest you.”
He flicked through the pockets of my wallet, pulling out old receipts and movie ticket stubs and placing them beside the other items. He moved to the inside pocket, and I sat up quickly. He tugged out a worn photograph.
“Don’t touch that.” I reached for it.
He held the photo higher, rising off the bed and examining it. His lips thinned, and he looked at me. “What’s this?”
I knew what he saw, and my heart rushed, my chest squeezed and pain echoed through my limbs. Me and a boy. Me and a boy, embracing inside a blue Mustang. My hair wild from a ride with the top down. Joy in my eyes and in my heart.
“None of your fucking business.”
He sank to his knee beside me. “You have a boyfriend, Angel?” Under other circumstances, the nickname might have been an endearment, but he spoke it now as though it were a curse. “You have a boyfriend yet kiss men in elevators, meet them on yachts?” He leaned down. “Is this the responsibility you were talking about?”
My pain exploded into rage, and I snatched the photo from his hand. He let me take it.
“Shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” My eyes burned, my lungs burned, my skin burned. I could have caught fire, but the scariest part was the sobs building behind my ribs. Sobs I could never let out. Sobs I’d held back a year. I pressed the photo against my collarbone and rolled away from him. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”
I felt him watching me. Felt him staring, judging, weighing my truthfulness. He moved, and the slap of cards against wood sounded next to my head. Bank card, library card... I listed them in my head.
The sounds stopped. His movements stopped. He muttered something foreign.
I rolled onto my back. He held my driver’s license in his hand, staring at it as though it had singed his fingers. He glanced from it to me. His expression flattened. “You’re only twenty?”
I frowned and nodded. “Yes.”
He stood, dropping the card, and stared at me so long I became painfully aware of my entire external self. Aware of every hair on my head, of my eyelashes, of the split that had developed in the middle of my bottom lip.
I ran my tongue along the crack. “May I call my parents, please?”
He continued looking at me, staring. “No.”
No?
The skip, skip, skip of my heart became a bang, bang, bang.
“I need to let them know I’m okay. They’ll be freaking out.” I sat, leaning up on one hand. I needed to get home. Needed to get as far away from him as possible. “I won’t mention you...if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“You’re learning,” he said, and sat next to me. “I’m glad you understand you can never, ever speak about me.” He placed a hand on my arm, his grip firm and inescapable. “Tell me you understand, Angelina?” He tugged me closer and looked into my face. “For your own good, agree that I don’t exist.”
I didn’t try to pull away from him. Not that he’d have let me. There was zero give in his grip. I panted. It was almost as if the lining on my lungs had thickened. Thank fuck he didn’t know the other reason I’d come here. I wiped words like article and magazine from my mind. No matter what happened, I could never tell him now. I’d say whatever I needed to say, whatever he wanted me to say to get him to let me go. “You. Don’t. Exist.”
He smiled, but it was cold and jagged. Then he reached out and smudged the sweat above my mouth with his thumb.
My lips parted.
He watched my lips too long. “Good girl.” His hand stayed on me, moving to my cheek. “Where are you then, Angel? If I don’t exist?”
I blinked. What was he doing? Goose bumps managed to spring along my arms despite my internal furnace. This was a game. A game with rules I had to learn or I’d lose before it even started. I couldn’t lose this game.
“I ran off with a boy from the party.”
He traced the outside of my jaw, but his fingertips curled, and his knuckles bumped my chin.
“We’re staying in a caravan park,” I whispered. My gaze traveled to his mouth. He had such a compelling mouth. Pink smooth lips, but the stubble around them was hard and sharp. His teeth were large and white and straight. He tapped my chin with his thumb, bringing my focus to his eyes.
“Why would you run off with a boy from a party without telling anyone?” he said, studyin
g every flick of my eyes. “That’s not very nice.”
The heat in my cheeks cooled. His words were a kick to my chest. He was toying with me. Showing me a way home but making me pay for it. My teeth clamped together.
The muscles around my nose scrunched, then I let the truth bleed into our contest of lies. “I’m tired of being nice. I’m tired of doing the right thing. I wanted to get away.”
“You wanted to get away?” he asked. “That’s a good enough reason to hurt the people you care about? That’s enough reason to make your mother cry, your father sick?”
My gaze snapped up, and my lips shook. “It’s not like that. I’m smothered. I can’t breathe. I can’t move.” My lungs burned like I’d inhaled smoke. “But nobody even sees me. No one hears me at all.”
My shoulders twitched. I clamped my arms around myself. Somehow everything I’d been tying down came springing free.
He gripped the back of my neck and pulled me close, planting his lips on my forehead. “Good girl.”
His kiss was electric cool.
I grabbed his shirt and tipped my head back to see him. “Let me speak to them now, please.”
He pried my hands from his shirt and leaned forward, opening the drawer in the side table, and pulled out a notepad and pen.
“I assume your family members have email addresses?”
He held out the pen. I took it. He opened the notepad. I scribbled Dad’s email.
“I’ll make sure they know you’re okay, and that you’ll be home safe with them in three weeks.”
The pen slipped from my fingers. “Three weeks? You said two.”
My heart ping-ponged from hope to horror. An email might keep my parents under control for a weekend—but not for weeks.
I couldn’t be stuck with him for weeks. A day couldn’t end soon enough.
He scooped up the pen and handed it back, not looking me in the face.
“That was before. Things have changed.” He held the notepad out again and seized my gaze. “Before, with your agreement, I could’ve trusted you. Now I need to be sure when you leave, I’ll be a ghost...”
NINE
I SHUDDERED WITH a ripple of fear and dread. Fear over what staying here one more moment would cost me, and dread over the idea that one day soon, I’d wake up and Haithem would indeed be a ghost—yet another one to haunt me.
“You can trust me,” I whispered. “You want me to sign something? I’ll sign it.”
He looked just as hard and unreasonable as before. I reached out and placed my fingertips on his hand.
“I swear—you never existed. I never met you at all.”
His gaze flicked to my touch, and stuck there as though the touching of him was not something that was usually done. His expression shivered and whatever I thought I saw vanished. He rose to his feet. “I’m afraid a promise made under duress is no promise at all.”
“What do you mean, duress?” I leaped off the bed.
He strode for the door. Apparently, he thought our conversation was over. Pity—I wasn’t done. I followed him onto the deck.
Salty air swept hair across my face.
“It’s not as if you’ve threatened me, so I’m not under duress.”
He paused, pushed the notepad into his pocket and turned. “You think someone has to hold a gun to your head for you to be helpless?” His movements changed, went sharp yet somehow also slinky. He walked—not to me but around me. “I have all the power, all the say. And you—” he pointed his finger directly at me “—you, Angel, are a scared girl who wants to go home.”
His words whipped me like lashings from the wind. Painful, cutting lashes that made me want to cry. He stalked me, closing his circle just as surely as a shark. My veins spurted adrenaline, instinct compelling me to run.
But I didn’t run. That would break the dubious politeness he’d affected, and this small glimpse at what lay underneath was enough to shake the skin around me.
There was nowhere to run. He’d catch me, and—god help me—I might even enjoy it.
I might enjoy something so real and so raw as being caught, even if it hurt. No polite control. Nothing proper or respectable. Just real.
He walked and walked, round and around. My neck strained to keep up with him. I couldn’t drop my gaze, couldn’t let him out of my peripheral vision.
“You owe me nothing. I expect nothing from you. I trust no promises from you.” His voice softened, whispered around me from what felt like all directions. He stopped directly behind me, his hands coming down on my shoulders so I couldn’t turn. “But this doesn’t have to be a nightmare. It doesn’t have to be a trap or a prison.” He pulled me back against him, and suddenly his arms were around me and the beast was gone, replaced instead by a comforting protector.
My pulse jumped. How quickly he could change.
“This isn’t fair. For that, I owe you, and I always honor my debts.”
I’d slipped into hyperawareness—of the arm around my waist, the body at my back, the voice in my ear. I could almost see myself in his arms, standing like a waxwork, so still and glassy-eyed. Mesmerized.
“I saw your face when you told me you’re smothered so tightly you can’t breathe,” he whispered. “You could be free...” He brushed his cheek against my temple. “No one around. You could be yourself.”
He rocked me, so softly I almost missed the shift of my weight from one side to the other. I no longer knew if I was holding myself up.
“I can give you sunsets on the ocean. I can show you space so endless you’ll lose yourself.”
My hair caught on his bristles.
“Have you ever run down a deserted beach, Angel?” His hand moved on my belly. “Have you ever swum naked in salt water?” His voice penetrated my head, my blood, sinking down somewhere even deeper.
“Imagine three weeks where anything you ask will be indulged. All your demands met. Ask me for something—ask me for anything.”
My eyes closed.
“Do you need someone to hear you?” His word curled into my ear so gently, I felt the heat of his body in his breath. “I’ll listen to you talk for days.”
He touched my chest, pressed his palm flat against me.
I twitched.
“You can tell me what it is you keep buried in here. What you’re holding on to so tightly that you can’t let go. You can give it all to me, Angel. Just hand it all over to me...”
Air flooded my lungs, and I lunged out of his grasp. My heart beat so fast, I could imagine coronary damage taking place. I turned and faced him, backing out of reach.
Had I let him read me so thoroughly? Had I laid out my weakness so well that he could drive himself into my head and fuck me there?
Because that’s what he was doing—he was fucking my mind. I knew it. He knew it.
It was working.
But he didn’t know me yet—not really. No one did. Not even Emma. My heart squeezed just thinking about her, about my parents, too. How things must be while I stood here and let him toy with me.
“Ask you for anything?” I said. “I want to go home right now.”
He lowered his chin. “You know that’s not possible, and that’s not what I meant. Ask me for something else—something just for you.”
I swallowed. Of course, he wouldn’t give in. “All right, I want to be draped in diamonds.” I pulled back my shoulders and watched him.
Go find that in the middle of the ocean, asshole.
He just smiled. “I’m disappointed in you.”
“Too much to ask?”
“Not hardly,” he said. He nodded then walked toward the stairs, toward the lower deck. The lower deck where there were men with guns.
“Wait, where are you going?” I called. “What am I supposed to
do up here?”
He didn’t look back. “Just stay put.”
As if there was another option.
TEN
I DID WHAT any reasonable prisoner would do—I tore apart the cabin. Not in the way a toddler would, not dumping clothes onto the floor, although the thought appealed—but sneakily. I rummaged through every drawer, searching for some clue I could use. Some scrap of something that could give me leverage...that could give me an advantage.
All I found were socks, handkerchiefs and a wardrobe full of clothes that only made me picture the man who owned them. My hands stilled on a leather jacket. I pulled it closer and ran my fingers over the collar. I hadn’t seen him in anything like this.
Casual.
Relaxed.
The thought of Haithem’s big shoulders filling black leather—oh god.
I let the jacket drop and shut the wardrobe. I needed to get off this yacht before I started rolling around on the enemy’s sheets just to catch a whiff of his scent. Already, the walls seemed to be closing. Small spaces didn’t suit me. Free time suited me even less.
There’d be nothing but time here. Nothing but hours and hours on the damn boat.
Wondering, thinking, remembering.
My shoulders tensed up. Some girls dreamed of days spent lying in the sun. But not me. The mere thought of being still for so long made me twitchy.
I walked to one of the two doors on either side of bed. The handle stuck at half a turn.
Locked.
I stared at the doorknob, my thoughts slowing. The other side of this door would be where I’d find what I wanted. Locks are for secrets. And I’d discover every secret I could. I went around the bed and tried the other side. It opened into a cavernous bathroom. White marble, a deep tub, shower, toilet, a double vanity. I raided the vanity cupboards, coming up with nothing more exciting than toothpaste, razors and aftershave. I tugged the lid off a bottle and sniffed. The smooth, musky scent went straight through my nose and into my blood.