ASHFORD (Gray Wolf Security #5)

by Glenna Sinclair

  “Beauty?”

  I shook my head violently. No. No, this wasn’t happening. I didn’t want this to be happening. Why had he come here? Why couldn’t he just leave me alone?

  “I don’t want to see you,” I said, having to force the syllables out from between chattering teeth.

  “That’s too bad,” he said. “We have things we need to talk about.”

  “You mean things you have to apologize for,” I shot back, sassy despite my precarious situation. It struck me that maybe I should get my phone in case things went even further south than they already were, but standing up and walking to the bedroom was out of the question. I was rooted to the spot, and my legs had failed me.

  I didn’t understand why my reaction to Dan’s presence had been so visceral, so physical. I was quite literally petrified, as in I was too frightened to move from where I’d fallen to the ground, and it confounded me. I’d never reacted like this to anything in my life. My adrenaline—the fight or flight sensibility that was supposed to keep me safe, or at least alive and kicking in these situations—had failed me. If Dan were a hungry wolf, drooling and growling in my face, I’d basically just offered myself up as supper.

  “These things we have to talk about…they would be better said in person, face to face,” he said.

  I wasn’t fooled—or swayed. “If you have something to say, I can hear you just fine with a door between us.”

  I jumped and scrambled backward as the doorknob rattled and shook. I couldn’t believe that he would try to enter my home after I told him no. It made me extra thankful that I had checked the locks while he was on his way up here.

  “Don’t you think if I wanted to, I could be in there with you?” he asked, his voice silky and threatening at the same time. “If I wanted to, Beauty, I’d kick this door down to say to you what needs to be said. I probably wouldn’t be as polite though.”

  “And I would probably stab you,” I said, craning my neck and wondering if I could muster the strength—at least temporarily—to rise and fish a steak knife out of its drawer.

  “You wouldn’t stab me.”

  “If that’s what you think, you’re more than welcome to try and break down the door.”

  I pulled myself up using the countertop to steady myself. My bravado was helping me pretend to be something I wasn’t, helping me ignore my fear. It was even better when I slid a drawer open to see the metallic gleam of the butcher’s knife I’d purchased with Roland’s credit card.

  “Beauty, you and I need to come to an understanding,” Dan said. “We both have things the other wants.”

  Putting the heavy wooden hilt of the knife in the palm of my hand and gripping it gave me enough courage to laugh haughtily at that statement.

  “I can assure you that you have nothing I want,” I told him. I was still shaking, but at least I was making my stand.

  “I have numerous things that you want,” he said, his words measured. “Numerous things that any woman would want. A prestigious name, for one. A fortune that gives me more disposable income than I know how to spend. Good looks. An incredible car, an incredible house, an incredible future. Any woman would want that. That’s why she would lie to the police when she didn’t get her way, when I rebuffed her affections. That’s why she would lie and say that I attacked her—because she is nothing and she wants a piece of something.”

  “I don’t care about any of that,” I said, scowling. I knew he was threatening me with what he’d do if I tried to go to the police to file any kind of complaint against him. We both knew that Dan’s sparkling reputation would be all the assurances an investigating officer would need to see to dismiss anything I tried to say or show or do.

  “Don’t be naïve,” Dan was saying. “Everyone cares about that. I’ve never met a single person who didn’t want to be comfortable in life, who didn’t desire the finer things.”

  “Then go be with one of those people,” I said. “I don’t want anything you’re offering.”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t want anyone else but you.”

  “Leave me alone!” What was so special about me that Dan had to pursue this? I wasn’t special. He’d said it himself. If I went to the police, he’d tell them I was a nobody who wanted to be with a somebody, who’d escalated a friendly relationship into something it wasn’t. So why did he insist on pushing me? What was it that I had that he wanted? Why was he outside my door? Why did I feel so threatened that I was clutching the biggest knife I owned?

  I had a moment of clarity: Fuck this guy. It didn’t matter to me if he wanted to lie about the cops if I called them. At this point, if calling the cops and telling them I had a stalker would get Dan out of here, I was more than willing to do it.

  “If you don’t leave me alone right now, I will call the cops,” I said, looking over to my bedroom. I could see my cellphone gleaming with promise on my bed from my vantage point in the kitchen. If I had my phone in my hand, I’d already be dialing those three magical numbers to bring the police right to my door.

  “Remember what I told you about the cops, Beauty,” Dan said. “They will never believe you over me. I can promise you that.”

  “They’d have one or two questions for you, if you hung around outside my door long enough,” I told him. “Like why you were here, for instance. Or why you won’t go away when I tell you I don’t want you to be here.”

  “And I’ll tell them it’s because you threatened to kill yourself if I wouldn’t ask you to marry me,” he responded, his voice cool, clinical. “I’ll tell them I came here because I felt like you were going to do something you were going to regret. That maybe you were a threat to yourself and others around you. That you were unstable. And so maybe they’d take you away and lock you up in one of those places…like the one you were in for a while after you caused all those people to die in that car wreck.”

  The world, which had been careening around on its axis ever since Dan showed up at my door, began to slow.

  “You don’t have anything to say to that?” Dan asked, his voice falsely innocent. “No way out of this one, Beauty? No insult?”

  I didn’t have any of those things. I thought that I was the only one who knew the truth about that night, that I’d carry it around on my back for the rest of my life, my cross to bear for what I’d done.

  Then, I’d found out about Roland, about the fact that he was there, receiving help from my parents at the same time that my best friend Caro, drunk behind the wheel with me drunk in the passenger seat, collided with the two stopped cars on the side of the dark road. Caro, my parents, and Roland’s fiancée had all been killed. Roland had been maimed for life, an ugly scar across his face serving as a souvenir of the night his love was taken from him.

  I’d walked away from it all, eventually. I didn’t have any physical scars, but the mental ones were ever present. I had spent quite a bit of time in a facility to deal with my crushing grief and guilt after the wreck. Though it’d been what I’d needed to do at the time, it hadn’t been pleasant nor something I wanted to return to, and it definitely wasn’t something I wanted a person like Dan to know about. I’d been at my most vulnerable back in those days, and eager to leave, hadn’t recovered as well as I should. I lacked the coping skills necessary to get me through this tragedy of my own making, and it had sabotaged my attempt to go to college.

  It had sabotaged my attempt to get on with my life.

  I didn’t need Dan, someone who was quickly emerging as my greatest personal threat, knowing my greatest weakness. It made it way too easy for him.

  “I’d love to know what you’re thinking, Beauty,” he was saying. “I’d love to be swirling around inside that brain of yours right about now.”

  I didn’t even want to be inside my own brain right now.

  “Let’s see, what could you be thinking?” he continued. Would he ever stop talking? “I bet you’re wondering how I could know such a thing, that you caused four people to die on a lonely road in nowher
e, Texas.”

  That was pretty accurate. I was morbidly curious about how Dan happened to know these things. The other things I was thinking, though, included how I could possibly make my escape from this thing. Would I be able to just flee again, like I’d done in so many other places when life started to go wrong? Or would this follow me wherever I tried to go?

  “After my brother’s stint in the hospital—he refused to have his face fixed, by the way, did you know that?” Dan laughed. “The doctors tried to refer him to a plastic surgeon, tried to convince him to do basic reconstruction, but he told them all to go to hell. He wears that scar on his face like a badge of shame—shame at causing the wreck, at killing all those people, killing Mina.”

  “He didn’t cause it,” I protested, forgetting myself in my defense of Roland’s innocence.

  “That’s right,” Dan agreed. “You caused it. But Roland didn’t know that. He’s always been such a martyr, so eager to find something to take a fall for. Maybe he was waiting his entire life for something like that night to happen. As soon as he thought he knew what happened, he stopped asking questions. It didn’t matter to him that some drunken kid—I’m sorry, she was your friend, and I know that. But to Roland, it was just some drunken kid who would’ve spun out into some cornfield or whatever and been fine. It had been his fault for fighting with Mina and distracting her and getting them lost, his fault for her popping the tire, his fault for your parents pulling over to help, and his fault for providing a point of impact for a drunken driver.”

  Roland himself had told me as much. None of this was really fresh news to me—besides the story behind the scar. He wore it to remember what he did, but locked himself away because he couldn’t bear for other people to see it. I realized that only Dan and I—and my predecessor, Roland’s assistant, Myra—ever gazed upon that wretched scar. He could’ve gotten it fixed. He had enough money now, I wagered, that he could hire a surgeon so good it would almost be as if nothing had ever happened to that face. Instead, Roland kept that scar as a punishment for a crime he hadn’t committed, as a memorial for the love of his life. That scar ensured that a talented businessman would only ever conduct his business through email or over a phone.

  I realized that the scar crippled Roland professionally as well as personally. It was a testament to how much potential he had that he could make the kind of deals he made without anyone ever seeing his face. But that would only take him so far. To broker the agreements he was looking to expand the company with, Roland would have to rely on someone else to be the face of the company when he didn’t deem himself worthy enough to do so—not with that scar.

  On a day-to-day basis, just at the office, that was me. Roland relied on me to report back to him what happened in meetings and even just daily observations and progress on projects and initiatives that he couldn’t verify himself via email or a stern phone conversation.

  On a larger scale, however, on the company-growing scale that Roland was beginning to take aim at, I knew that this person would be Dan.

  And Dan wasn’t to be trusted.

  “What do you want?” I asked, dreading the answer, certain that I already knew.

  “I want you to go back to work,” he said. “If you mope for too long, my brother’s going to get suspicious, and I don’t want him to be suspicious. That works against me. He knows we’ve been dating; you’ve seen to that little admission. I was the first person he called when you didn’t show up at the office this morning.”

  I shuddered. I’d been missing at the office and the first person my boss called—even before he called me—was his brother? Was I not the first woman Dan had been problematic around? Was Roland already suspicious?

  “I also want you to keep me informed of just what happens in my brother’s little late night executive sessions,” Dan continued. “I have a feeling they’re going to become more and more frequent. In fact, just keep me apprised of everything my brother’s been asking for. Everything he asks about. Whatever he might be doing.”

  “I can’t spy on Roland for you,” I said. “He’s going to figure it out.”

  “Then you’re going to have to figure out how to be smarter than letting him know you’re spying on him,” Dan said. “What do you think he’d do if he knew that you were the one who was really at fault for the wreck, that you’d convinced your friend to take you on that little joyride? I don’t think it’d break him. Losing Mina already broke him, and he never got around to letting anyone fix him after that. But I do think he’d be pretty eager to jettison you as a dead, traitorous weight from this company and evict you from the apartment he paid a security deposit on. And you might pack it all back up and move on, living in your car like you used to do, but maybe I make that call to the police to tell them to be on the lookout for a suicidal girl who just lost her job and the man she was delusional enough to think she loved. You’ll get a one-way ticket back to the funny farm, Beauty. That’s what it’s going to come down to.”

  Dan seemed to have it all planned out. I wondered how long it had taken him to hone all of his points so they were razor sharp, inescapable. I was backed into a corner—that much was true. Anything I tried to do to wriggle free from Dan’s plans would end in me running for it and hiding for the rest of my life from police who were looking to get a crazy girl off the streets. There was nothing I could do to escape that.

  But Dan had miscalculated in a small but significant way.

  I knew something he didn’t know: Telling Roland that I’d caused the wreck that he had taken the blame for all these years, and letting him realize that I had been lying to him through omission of the truth, allowing our relationship to get closer and closer, would break him.

  It would break Roland to know the truth about me, because Roland had feelings for me.

  I would do anything in my power to keep Dan from figuring this out.

  If I couldn’t protect myself anymore, at least I could try and protect Roland.

  Chapter 15

  There was no amount of showering that would make me feel clean again, no water hot enough, no soap potent enough, nothing to make me feel like I was normal.

  After Dan finally left my building—I’d watched him saunter down the sidewalk until he reached his fancy sports car—I hopped back in the shower, my hair still damp from the one I’d taken the night before to try and wash off the nasty feeling I got from him.

  That one hadn’t worked either. And the pizza that eventually showed up to my door did little in the way of comforting me. I ate a single slice before throwing the entire thing away, my appetite hopelessly shot.

  The truth of the matter was that my job—which I’d only recently started to get the hang of and enjoy—was going to become a lot more difficult. I would still be analyzing everything that went on and reporting to Roland, but I’d be doing double the work in reporting to Dan, as well. It made me realize that, even though they were family, Roland was smart enough to keep Dan at arm’s length where Shepard Shipments was concerned.

  I would be doing all of this, of course, without letting Roland know that there was anything out of the ordinary, or else everything would come crashing down. I couldn’t let him realize the truth about the wreck. Before, when I’d told myself that he’d never know, it had been for purely selfish reasons. I didn’t want to weather his anger or risk the idea that I could lose my job, which had become important to me.

  Now, though, I knew it would wound him deeply, perhaps irreparably, if he knew that I’d kept the truth from him about my own involvement. He wouldn’t be able to handle the idea that he’d lost the woman he loved to the girl he would eventually develop feelings for. It was insane. I had trouble understanding it myself, but there it was.

  The next morning, I woke up early and tried to complete my daily routine without thinking too much about it. Another shower (still felt dirty), doing my hair and makeup, picking out something to wear (would I remember this outfit as the one I started spying on Roland in?), forcing so
me food down my throat and into my stomach, and leaving my home, which no longer felt like my sanctuary away from the world.

  I was now painfully aware that problems could infiltrate those walls, that trouble had come looking for me here and found me. There was no place I could really be safe anymore. “Safe” was just an illusion people let themselves believe. Nobody was safe.

  I bought the paper from the vendor who had grown to trust me once again, walked across that expansive lobby, wondering idly what I might have for lunch when the time came, got into the elevator and thought about visiting a floor of the building I’d never been on…anything to keep me from thinking about what I was about to go in there and do.

  I didn’t want to betray Roland’s trust, but that was what I was going to have to start doing to protect him from Dan—and myself.

  “There you are!” Sam exclaimed, as the elevator door rolled open.

  “Here I am,” I confirmed, plastering a smile on my face before forcing it to relax into something more natural. I had to pull this off. I couldn’t let anyone know there was something wrong. It was the only way this would work, the only way I could protect Roland.

  “I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” Sam said, lowering her voice as she tended to do when she was about to pass along office gossip, “but we were all certain that the beast had finally done something to drive you away for good.”

  My mouth took off running before I could try to stop it. “You know, I wish everyone would just stop calling him that,” I snapped. “Appearances can be deceiving, and he is a deeply misunderstood man. Nobody understands just why he is the way he is except for him.”

  “And you, apparently,” Sam observed, her eyebrows raised almost to her hairline.

  I sighed. “Sorry. I think I’m still a little bit under the weather. My patience is thin with myself; I hate being sick. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”