ASHFORD (Gray Wolf Security #5)

by Glenna Sinclair

  “Because I’m trying to keep you safe.”

  I pressed my head between my hands as hard as I could. “You can’t keep me safe.”

  “I can do whatever I think I can to keep you safe,” he argued. “Was there a member of my staff who I thought was the source of the threat? Probably not. But maybe they talked to someone outside of this house about your arrival. I have to eliminate every risk, every possibility until we can narrow it down. We can do without the maids and the chef for a while, can’t we? Did you get too used to them?”

  “They’re people, Levi,” I exclaimed. “You can’t just fuck with their lives because of me. I don’t even believe in this threat. Who would threaten me? Who would actually want to do something to you? If it really was my brother who was targeted in the shooting, then whoever it was already got what they wanted. You don’t know. Maybe my brother was talking to someone. Maybe he was the one at fault.”

  The maw was bigger than I was, and it was widening. I didn’t even know what I was saying anymore, didn’t know who or what I was trying to defend. I felt bad that four people had lost their jobs just because I’d started living here. And I felt bad that someone had mentioned me by name in threatening Levi. It just felt like everywhere I went, I spread badness. It was probably something rotten inside of me, vestiges of the poison that had happened to me. I probably secreted it in my bodily fluids, exhaled it, and it infected people.

  I just needed relief from it. Release.

  “Where did you even go?” Levi asked. “You can’t just storm out of here, into the city. New York isn’t like where you came from. It’s a lot bigger. A lot more dangerous.”

  “Everywhere is dangerous,” I said distractedly, slipping out of my panties and my camisole. I was naked in front of him, watching carefully how I affected him. His nostrils flared like he sensed something he liked. He shifted his stance, trying to stem the flow of blood to his crotch, trying to hide his growing bulge.

  “Where did you go, Meagan?” he asked, clearing his throat.

  “I went for a walk.”

  I crossed the foyer until I was standing just a matter of inches away from him. He wanted me, but he didn’t want to be wanting me in this moment. He wanted to talk about serious things, including my whereabouts, the ever-present threat to our safety, the nature of my appetites. It delighted me much more than it should’ve that he was imperfect, just like me.

  Much more perfect than me, of course, but not without his flaws. Levi couldn’t ignore the ripe fruit dangled in front of him. Just like I couldn’t ignore the needs of that fucking maw inside of me. And it needed sex.

  “You were gone all day,” Levi said. “I was worried. I was about to call the police.”

  “You could’ve called my cell phone.”

  “I didn’t think you would’ve answered.”

  “I also went on a bus ride.”

  “Oh?” He was fighting to keep his eyes locked with mine, fighting to keep them from drifting lower, to my still-heaving breasts. I could feel the heat radiating out from my body, and wondered if he could feel it, too.

  “Yes.” I took my hair down from its rubber band and shook it out, feeling it cascade down my sweaty back. “I took it to a meeting.”

  “Is that right?” I instantly regretted revealing that bit. Levi looked to shake himself free from some of the influence my nudity was wielding over him. “How was it? What did you think?”

  “Not for me,” I said, my tone dismissive, lowering my eyes for a moment, biting my lip, flicking my hair, doing every trick I could think of to make him forget his sanctimony, to come back to me, to be normal again.

  I needed my old normal. I had to have it. I was drowning.

  “Well…I’m glad you went,” he tried, but he was losing again. I could feel it, and it made me smile wickedly. “I…would you like to talk about it? What you thought about it?”

  “I’m pretty sick of talking, actually,” I said, using the very tips of my fingers to forge a trail down his chest, appreciating the softness of his shirt. “Been listening to people talking all afternoon. I’m done with it.”

  “I really think we should talk, Meagan.”

  “Later we can talk.” I flicked at one of the pearlized buttons on his shirt before slipping it out of its buttonhole.

  “No, not later. Now.” His tone was strong, but his resolve was weak. I knew this, and I took full advantage of it, flicking open another button, and another until I could run a finger down his bare torso.

  “I have something I want to do right now,” I said, and it was a miracle I could use my words at all. I was so hungry for it that I wondered why I didn’t just push him down and take him against the stairs. It was because the stairs scared me—that was why. I’d done bad things on a set of stairs. So many bad things. Instead, I took him by his hand and more or less yanked him up until we were in the bedroom, the bed beckoning.

  “We have to talk about the meeting,” he said, but he allowed me to lead him still, letting himself sink to the bed, letting me straddle his waist.

  “Later.” I kissed his lips if only to get him to shut up, then finished removing his shirt. He captured my wrists as I moved down to his waistline.

  “Meagan, I don’t think we should have sex until we discuss what happened at the meeting.”

  I was impressed he could string a full sentence together, but I was way too focused to listen to it. I unfastened his pants, drawing his hard cock out of his boxers. See? He wanted me. He wanted this, even if he refused to admit it. He wanted to have sex just as badly as I did right now, and he wanted to help me. Well, this was how he could do it. He could give me whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. Levi would figure it out. He’d get it, eventually. Then, we’d be so happy. We’d be happy all the time, and we wouldn’t doubt each other.

  It would be a pure, perfect love.

  I hissed as I lowered myself onto his cock, wishing I had the self-control to take it slow, but my body would adjust. It always did. I went to my somewhere-else place, watching the maw inside of me stop growing, pause, and start to constrict. Good. It was getting what it needed to put me back in control. I would be myself just as soon as I got there. Just as soon as I came. And Levi never failed to make me come. He was so good for it.

  I kissed his mouth and was a little surprised when he didn’t kiss me back. He didn’t rebuff me, but his lips remained cold, unmoving. I tried again, but it was the same non-reaction. I wondered if he’d fallen asleep by mistake, or perhaps hit his head on something I couldn't see, and was just lying there, unconscious. I looked into his face and was met with a stoic gaze.

  His blue eyes sparked with protest, but his mouth remained in a firm, straight line. He didn’t want to do this, I realized, but his hands were still on my hips, guiding my rocking motions, helping me creep closer and closer to my goal of release, in spite of him not wanting to do this.

  He didn’t want to do this, and I had forced myself upon him.

  I was a terrible human being. That was the identity of that shitty hole inside of me. It took and took and took and it never gave back. Levi had saved me from my hometown, and he was ready to sacrifice himself to try to save me from myself. He was letting me fuck him, and he didn’t want to do it. He had given me a place to live, clothes to wear, food to eat, money to spend, and I’d just decided that I could simply take sex from him, as well.

  I stopped my rocking immediately and began to keen, covering my face with my hands, horrified at myself, horrified that I’d become just as bad as my tragedy, horrified I’d become the very same monster who’d ruined my life. My keen rose to a wail, and Levi was speaking, dragging my hands down from my face, scooting up to a sitting position, but I couldn’t hear anything above my rock bottom.

  Because this was rock bottom. This was me using another human being like he was trash, like he was just something I could use and throw away, just like I’d been used and thrown away.

  I didn’t deserve to be alive.
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br />   I hadn’t realized I’d started screaming until Levi clamped a hand over my mouth tightly, then loosened it. My throat was raw and my cheeks were wet, and I couldn’t stand to be in my own skin. How could Levi touch me? Why was he hugging me to his chest, even now, especially now, after what I’d done?

  “You have to let me in,” Levi said as I wept. “You have to let me help you.”

  “I don’t think anyone can help me,” I sobbed. “I don’t think it’s possible anymore.” My brother had tried to help me and ended up dead. Levi was trying to help me and just look at what I’d done to him. Look what I was doing to his life.

  “I am going to do whatever it takes,” he said, “and I don’t care what it takes. Take whatever you think you need from me. Whatever you need, Meagan. Anything.”

  I shook my head. “No. I can’t take that from you. I can’t take anything from you anymore. You still think you owe my brother. You don’t have to help me anymore. You’ve done enough.”

  “I want to help you. It doesn’t have anything to do with your brother anymore.”

  “Why?” I demanded. “Why would you want to help me? I’m not a good person. You’re not going to like what you see when you peel back the layers. It’s just shards of glass and shit and garbage.”

  “Meagan, I love you. I’ve fallen in love with you.”

  I twisted in his arms to stare at him, dumbfounded. “Why would you do something as stupid as that?”

  He shrugged and actually smiled at me. “I don’t know. I guess you can’t really plan for something like that.”

  Levi was in love with me? It couldn’t be possible. I was the worst possible person in the world for someone to be in love with. It would never work. He would be miserable, and I would be helplessly stupid, hopeless.

  “You have to tell me what’s going on so I can help you,” he said. “Okay?”

  “You can’t help me.” I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Everything that had happened was a tangle of barbed wire inside of me. I stayed away from it because every time I’d tried to unravel it, I’d gotten pricked. It was easier to leave it alone, ignore it, and tiptoe around it. I’d learned to do that, and I liked to think I’d gotten good at it.

  Except, of course, for the small matter of having just forced myself upon Levi, who loved me, like an idiot.

  “I’m messed up inside, Levi. Meetings aren’t going to help that, and I’m afraid what’ll happen to you if you keep trying. I just…I just forced you …”

  “Stop that,” he said, bringing my hands back down from trying to cover my face again. “If I had wanted to stop you, I would’ve.”

  “But you didn’t want to have sex.”

  “Maybe not, but I wanted to help you, and if you needed sex in that moment, then I was going to help you with that.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not fair. That’s not fair to you, and I can’t accept that. I have to go away. I have to get away from everyone. I just consume people. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve had sex with because I honestly don’t know. I’m not proud of it. I don't know that I ever was. It was just something to fill…something I had to do.”

  “Help me understand,” he said, his voice calm even as mine shook and broke. “I want to understand why you think you need to do this. If I can understand that, maybe we can figure out what needs to happen to help you let go. To move forward. To get better.”

  Would it be as easy as that? I wanted to believe Levi, was desperate to believe him, but I just wasn’t sure. I was too tangled up inside, a ball of ugly that refused to be solved. It sounded too good to be true, but I felt like I owed Levi. I owed him for getting me out of his hometown, and for putting up with my bad behavior in his own home.

  Still, it was hard. I’d kept everything inside of me for so long simply because there hadn’t been anyone to tell. I’d been alone. Now that someone was here, ready and willing to listen, I was frightened. What would happen once everything, every awful detail, was out in the air, hanging between us? I wouldn’t be able to shove everything back inside me, hiding it away from his gaze. It would be out there for the rest of my life, and maybe Levi would decide he didn’t want anything to do with a person as messed up as I was.

  I wouldn't blame him. Half the time, I wished I could climb outside of myself and be someone else, just for a little bit.

  “Meagan, just tell me. Nothing can be that bad.”

  He was wrong, of course. He didn’t know what he was asking for. The truth he was asking for wouldn’t be like anything he’d ever heard before, or could’ve imagined in his darkest nightmare. I wouldn’t be able to take it back, and he wouldn’t be able to pretend he didn’t hear it, didn’t understand just how horrific it was. It would color his understanding of me for the rest of our time together, which wouldn't be long. How would it last any longer than it had, once Levi knew what I was?

  “You can’t judge me,” I warned him, my voice sounding weak to my own ears. Weak and ugly. “Whatever I tell you, you can’t think differently of me. Keep loving me. Please.”

  “There’s not a single word you can say that will make me stop loving you,” Levi said, his blue eyes steady.

  I should’ve been reassured by him, comforted by his presence and his promise to listen and support me. But I wasn’t. I was terrified. I believed that once he knew my story, my secrets, he wouldn’t be able to stop judging me.

  No one wanted to love something that was broken. When something was broken, you threw it away. You got something else, something better. Something that was still pretty and new.

  No one should have to try to love something broken. It was just too hard.

  I knew that Levi would stop loving me after he knew the truth. There was no way to get around that. But I also knew that he deserved to know the truth. If he thought he understood me well enough to love me, he just didn’t know me well enough. He didn’t know what he was getting himself into, and he needed to.

  Even if I was about to lose the best thing that had ever happened to me, Levi had to know the truth.

  “Everything starts and ends with my mom remarrying. Her divorce to my real dad happened while she was still pregnant with me, and while Matt was still young. He doesn’t—didn’t have any memories of our father, and I never met him at all.”

  I looked at Levi. There was still time to revise my narrative. I could make something different up. I could omit certain details, lessen the blow of others. He didn’t know my story, so I could tell my story however I liked. I could make myself look better. I could make myself look blameless.

  Instead, I knew that I was going to be as painfully honest as possible. I deserved whatever disgust Levi had for me at the end. He hadn’t known what he was trying to save when he was standing inside of that bar in my hometown. If he’d known, there would’ve been no way he’d use his resources to try to help me. Saving him from myself was the kindest thing I could think of—the best way to repay him for his aid.

  He deserved much better than me. I would inflict so much more pain on him than I already had if this relationship continued.

  So I continued with my truth, the parts where I was a victim, where I was complicit in the horror. I was prepared to tell him everything.

  “The guy my mom married—he seemed normal, at first,” I said, looking into Levi’s blue eyes, trying to get lost in them, to make this easier. “Carl was nice. We’d never really had a father figure in the house. He raised us….”

  Levi jerked, making me trail off.

  “What is it?”

  “What was your stepfather’s name?” he asked, his face and voice urgent.

  “Carl,” I said, confused. I hadn’t even told him what had happened yet. I hadn’t so much as scratched the surface. “Carl Prentice.”

  Levi’s face went ashen. “That’s a name I know.”

  “What? How?”

  He bit off each syllable of the next few words. “Carl Prentice is the man behind the threat against me. Against you.
He knows you’re here.”

  Chapter 12

  Carl had been acting weird lately. He was always kind of off, but in a lovable way, as my mother was so fond of saying. I thought it was just because of how sick she was. Maybe he was upset. The medical bills were mounting, and she wasn’t working, so I knew that had to be stressful. It was why Matt had dropped out of college and started looking for a job in New York City. It was why I was delaying going to college after my upcoming graduation, and instead combing through the limited job options of this backwater town for an 18-year-old.

  I’d begun finding my stepfather lurking outside of the bathroom after I was taking a shower.

  “Did you need something?” I asked him, touching the towel wrapped around my hair. “Is Mom sick in the bathroom downstairs? You could’ve knocked. I would’ve hurried up.”

  He didn’t say anything, just stepped aside far enough for me to have to brush by him as I walked to my room. I chalked it up to stress about my mother. She was getting sicker, the cancer taking a sudden turn for the worse after years of hope for remission.

  I was so distracted by the end of school and my mother’s health that I missed the signs that should’ve helped me understand what kind of person Carl was turning into. I would wake up suddenly in the night to see him leaving my room, the door swinging shut behind him, slicing into the wedge of light from the hallway. He’d been standing over me, watching me sleep, I’d realize later. I convinced myself that he was just checking on me, or trying to decide if it was worth waking me up to tell me that my mother needed to go to the hospital again.

  Maybe, if I’d been more vigilant about things back then, I could’ve stopped what was happening. I could’ve alerted my brother, tried to convince my mother that Carl wasn’t good for us anymore, or gotten myself out of the house. Hell, I could’ve even told the police that my stepfather was gradually shedding his human skin and revealing the monster that lived underneath.

  But things happened so slowly as to be almost imperceptible. I was rushing to finish coursework for my high school degree, preoccupied with my mother’s alarming decline, with no idea of the threat that was growing inside of my own home.