A smile curved her lips and she fought off a giddy little laugh. She glanced around the empty bedroom, then hastily dropped her towel and donned the conservative black bra and panties she’d retrieved from her suitcase. So he thought to order her around. Well, he had another think coming. She wasn’t going commando under this dress. If he found out and punished her? Well, she did like the spanking and wouldn’t mind at all if they repeated that little activity.
She slipped into the dress and was relieved to find the material stretched a bit, which meant she could reach back and tug up the zipper herself. Once done, she peered at her reflection in the full-length mirror, surprised to find she looked good. Really good. Emery’s gilded cuffs gleamed against her skin. She touched them, admiring the way the light from the window caught the bracelets and they glinted with promise. He’d put a sign of his possession on her. For some insane reason, she was happy. Another unexpected smile snuck up on her.
She wanted to find Emery and thank him for the dress. No one had ever spoiled her before, or treated her like this. It made her feel girlish, hopeful. Like a woman her age should feel. But she hadn’t felt this young and happy…well, ever. Sometimes she worried she’d spent so much of her life trying to fix past mistakes that she’d never given herself a chance to have a life, to just be herself without any baggage weighing her down. Unable to resist giving in to one small temptation, she swirled around in a slow circle, watching her skirt poof out in a blue cloud around her knees.
With a delighted sigh, she left the bedroom and wandered down the hall. Rather than going back down to the kitchen or to Cody’s command center, she took a new route, picking a hallway at random. Some force inside her pulled her in this direction like an invisible string, drawing her closer to something important. The farther she walked the dustier the paintings and side tables were. Tiny cobwebs hung on the high wall sconces lining the hall. Why hadn’t the maids cleaned this part of the house? It looked abandoned.
She paused in front of one door, the only one along the long hallway that wasn’t closed. The force that whispered silkily in her mind entreated her to look within. She set a palm against it and pushed. The door creaked on its hinges as it opened, revealing the sight within.
Her heart shot up into her throat and her blood chilled.
Emery stood only a few feet away, between two twin beds. One lay bare, the other was strewn with toys and knickknacks like small marbles and baseball cards. Sophie held her breath as Emery knelt on one knee and set the single tennis shoe at the foot of the bed that was covered with toys.
It’s a shrine. For the brother who’d died.
Without looking at her, he spoke. “A part of me always expected him to come back. I kept our room the same, but…” He bent his head and rested his forehead in his palms. “He’s never coming back. I’m a damn fool for hoping otherwise. He’s dead.”
Sophie was too upset to breathe or to make a sound. He was hurting, a kind of hurt she was intimately familiar with and it was breaking her heart to see him like this.
Finally he got to his feet and faced her. Dark circles hallowed his eyes, making his features look gaunt and haunted.
“Don’t you want to know how I know he’s dead?” The edge in his voice was razor thin.
“How?” she croaked out on a harsh breath.
“Because I left him to die. Fenn distracted our captors while I escaped. I was outside the house when the shot rang out. I was the coward who ran and left him behind with those monsters.” The raw agony in Emery’s eyes ravaged her soul, but he kept talking, even when she didn’t want to hear anymore. His hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists.
“You know what they say about twins. There’s a connection. When the gun fired, I felt it. Like it exploded out of the back of my own skull. The pain was so bad that I tripped and busted my chin on a rock.” He ran a finger over a small scar on his chin; it matched the placement of a wound she’d seen in a photograph of him when they’d found him.
Sophie started forward but Emery turned away. “It went dark. The little voice in my head, the pulsing light that was my brother. It went dark.”
At his words, her own soul seemed to sink below the surface of a deep, cold sea. It would be so easy to surrender to her own pain, to allow his to join hers and drown them both in a tide of misery.
He raked his hands through his hair before he put his palms on the window sill. He hung his head.
“Sometimes I get these flashes, these instant glimpses of someone else, a life so different from mine. It feels like him, but it can’t be. He’s gone. Otherwise he would have come home. I feel like I’m going insane. The world is pulling me apart from the inside out.”
She knew exactly what he meant. There were moments when she felt like an old tapestry with its edges frayed and torn. All it would take to unravel her was a tug on the right thread.
She inhaled slowly and went toward him. When she touched his shoulder he flinched but didn’t pull away. “Is that why you locked yourself away?”
“It’s a fitting punishment. I ran, left him behind to die. Now I wait for a boy that won’t ever come home, a brother who will never grow up.”
Sophie wrapped her arms around his waist and laid her cheek against the back of his shoulder. He was trembling, but he wasn’t alone anymore and neither was she.
“You asked me what happened, what made me understand you. My best friend Rachel was kidnapped. We were only seven. A man stole her from the playground. I was the only one who saw him. They never caught him. They never found her body. And I couldn’t give them any information—no license plate, no details, to catch him. I failed her, my best friend.”
Emery went utterly still. He turned around in the loose cage of her arms, wrapping his body around hers, crushing her to him as though she were precious.
“What could you have done? You were practically a baby,” he murmured in her ear. His lips teased her sensitive skin and his warm breath was soothing as he nuzzled her hair.
“So were you.” She stroked his chest, feeling the rich fabric of his dress shirt slide beneath her hands. “Even though it’s the truth, it doesn’t ease our guilt.”
He tilted her chin back to peer down at her in all seriousness. “Is that why you came here? You hoped I had some secret answers, some way of coping?” He laughed softly, full of sorrow. “Sophie, I locked myself away in this place. I have no more answers than you.”
He was right. She hadn’t been willing to accept that tragic truth until now. Suddenly an idea struck her.
“Why did you never tell anyone what happened? Why not take the police to the mansion where they held you?”
“The man in charge, Antonio, said he’d kill my mother and father if we ever breathed a word of what happened. Of course, he told us this while still pretending to ransom us. I thought if I just stayed quiet, he’d leave me alone, not harm my parents.”
“Wait. You just said ‘pretending.’ He wasn’t really intending to ransom you?” If that was true, her research on the case had been leading in the right direction. The real intent could have been to murder the boys. A purpose like that often was connected to an inside job.
Emery shook his head. “After the first three weeks, Fenn and I overhead him talking to the other two men. They were making plans for our disposal, but had to wait for the signal from whoever was in charge. Apparently, the ransom was a ruse. Someone must have hired him, otherwise his waiting so long to finish us off doesn’t make sense. Now it’s happening again.”
Sophie narrowed her eyes, peering over Emery’s shoulder out the window as she puzzled over this new development. Just as she suspected. Planned, carefully planned murder of the Lockwood twins.
“Maybe whoever hired him was waiting for something to happen and killing you had to be postponed. He might have gotten scared about being exposed if he had Antonio make another run at you once you were safely home again.” It made sense. A third party could have hired Antonio and the others to tak
e the twins, kill them, and make it all look like a botched ransom. But once Hans had been hired it would have made Antonio’s job harder, and he’d probably been advised to wait until Hans and Emery lowered their guard. Even if it took twenty-five years.
“Antonio never spoke of anyone else. He was a cruel bastard and spent most of the day finding ways to torture Fenn and me.”
“Emery, who could benefit from your death?” It was a risk to ask him something so sensitive, but she could feel the puzzle pieces were so close to coming together. She felt as though she were in a heavy cloud, and although she could feel shapes a dense fog wrapped around them, cloaking them from view, making them appear different from the truth.
“No one. I don’t have any enemies. Not even my business competitors hate me enough to try to kill me. My parents are retired, my uncle dead. Brant has fifty percent ownership of Lockwood Industries.”
At the mention of Brant, Sophie’s hair rose on the back of her neck. Something in her gut warned her he couldn’t be trusted.
“Through his father?”
“No, Uncle Rand didn’t leave anything to him in his will. He sold everything he held back to my father. Brant had to buy his way back into the company. When I took over from my father, I let him in pretty cheap.”
“That was nice of you,” Sophie murmured.
He shrugged. “I offered him the company, full out ownership five years ago. He didn’t take me up on it. Said he liked his position on the board and didn’t want me to leave as the president. Brant’s not perfect, but he’s no murderer.” Emery cupped the back of her neck and held her still as he bent his head to her, stealing a soft little kiss.
She rose up on tiptoes to return his kiss, letting all of her worries go for the moment. Cupping his face, she stroked his cheeks and licked at his lips, begging him to open his mouth to her. Emery curled his fingers around her waist and lifted her up against his body. With a gasp, Sophie clung to his shoulders before smiling at him and claiming his mouth again. Years of inner wounds—lonely aches, pain, and sadness, all of the things that had weighed her down and punctured her soul since she was seven years old—ceased to matter.
The feel of Emery’s mouth on hers, his arms around her body holding her protectively, flooded her with strength and hope. So long as he held her, kissed her, wanted her, she could do anything. She couldn’t think about when this kiss would end. That someday she’d have to go back to her own life. Leaving him would cleave her soul in two, and she’d have to use every bit of her willpower to stay alive. For now…she had this moment.
Beautiful and bittersweet.
* * *
His world was reduced to one single action. A kiss. Who was this woman who plucked his heart from his chest? He was a dominant man and should be in charge. Yet she stripped him of years’ worth of armor. Once more he was naked before her, telling her his every secret, his shames, his failings. And his dear, sweet Sophie had told him her own secret.
Rachel.
Her confession forced him to admit a disheartening truth.
We do blame ourselves for the past. When you loved someone you signed on for the worst moments, the darkest hours. Some battles were obvious. Soldiers went to war on battlefields, giving their lives for their friends. There were other struggles where people were just as brave, though more quiet in their suffering. Mothers who held sick children in cancer wards, parents gazing at the empty bed where their child should be, or a little girl on the playground, watching a gray van drive away, leaving only a black cloud of pollution behind, as her friend was stolen from her.
It was all the same in the end. Some lives were snuffed out too soon, but many of those lives had been filled with love, surrounded with those who stayed and fought to support them till the bitter end. It was those survivors who were faced with the hardest battles. They had to forge ahead without their loved ones and exist with the pain of loss.
Shame burned through him like a roaring fire, searing his insides. He’d hidden from the people who cared about him. His parents hadn’t been able to break through his carefully erected defenses. He’d kept them out. And he might have continued to do so until he died, if it hadn’t been for Sophie. She’d dragged him kicking and screaming out into the light, and he couldn’t go back. He didn’t want to.
She broke free of his mouth and buried her face in his neck. A cold dampness soaked through his shirt where she’d tucked herself against him.
Tears. Sophie was crying for him. Another wall was obliterated inside his heart. His own eyes burned and he blinked rapidly. Her empathy for him, her own suffering, told him she wasn’t anything like the cold-hearted journalist he’d wanted to paint her as. She was so much more. Sophie Ryder was all heart, and right now her heart was bleeding for him. He wasn’t worthy of her tears, yet they filled him with a sense of healing reverence.
“Shush.” He rubbed her back in slow, smoothing strokes. “Don’t cry, please, Sophie.” He tightened his grip on her body as she inhaled a ragged breath.
“I’m okay.” She insisted, sniffling once or twice. She pushed at his chest as if determined to separate herself from him.
With a heavy reluctance he let her go, feeling as though his entire existence was ripped to pieces at the distance she put between them.
She stepped back, dabbing at her eyes with her fingers, rubbing stray tears away. “I’m sorry I lost control.” She looked as though she wished to say more but he fixed her with a stern glare.
“No apologizing for showing me your heart. Never apologize for that.” He cupped her shoulders in his palms and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Come on, I need to fetch something from my room. My parents will be here soon.” He led her from the room and back down the hall.
Her eyes widened. They paused outside his bedroom door and he waved a hand for her to enter.
Understanding flooded his senses. Her faint trembling and shimmering silver eyes spoke of fear. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of them?”
“Well…yeah. They’re your parents. I…What exactly will they think of me?”
“That you’re lovely, intelligent, and entirely mine.” That’s all that matters to me. “Did I tell you how enchanting you look?” He brushed her hair back over her shoulder, reveling in its silkiness.
“No, you didn’t.” She crossed her arms and looked up at him expectantly.
“You are beautiful. I must admit I chose your dress well.”
Sophie’s lips parted on a gasp. “You picked these? How?”
“I had Hans take me into town while you were cleaning up. There’s a little boutique there. The woman who owns it is a close friend. Do you like what I’ve chosen?” Unable to resist he fisted his hands in the dark blue skirts, loving the way he held her captive. Earlier at the store he’d seen many different dresses but this one had seemed so Sophie.
The conservative cut, but the lively flare and bell shape of the skirts gave her comfort and mobility, and for once he found those two qualities appealing. The women he’d been with before had worn tight, restrictive clothes. While outwardly they’d appeared sexier, he’d had a damned hard time getting their clothes off. With Sophie, he could get his hands up her skirts and find her center with ease, and have no trouble taking what he wished, giving her what she needed. As his friend, Madeline, had packaged up the dress, all he could think about was how at dinner he could slide his hand up her inner thigh, stroking her to a slow burning passion, all without any suspicion from the others. And Sophie would have to control herself, or else reveal what his touch was doing to her. It would be a wonderfully wicked game.
“Of course I like it. I guess I expected that if you were picking something you’d make me wear some slinky black dress.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her, surprised she’d assume something so wrong. “I want easy access to you and for you to feel comfortable. A woman has stronger orgasms if she’s comfortable. Slinky dresses hold no interest for me.”
Her blush told him everything and i
t was too much to resist. He caught her wrists by the cuffs and removed a slender chain from his pocket, connecting the cuffs together. With a panicked gasp she struggled to get free but he lifted her arms above her head and hung the tiny chain connecting the cuffs to the small brass hook sticking discretely out of the wood on the left bedpost at the end of his bed.
“Hey! Let me go, Emery. Seriously.” She struggled to stand on tiptoes to pull the chain free. It was no use. Just the way he wanted it to be, Sophie at his mercy.
* * *
Emery stepped back and crossed his arms, studying her with a satisfied expression. “Beautiful and tempting.” He walked a half circle around her, eyes skating over her appreciatively. Her body responded with a flush of heat from her head to her toes. Finally he came back to her and cupped her cheek, his thumb tracing patterns over her lips, while his other hand settled on the back of her lower thigh. He coasted his hand up, and the erotic and playful stroke made her core throb. His hand froze when it met the silk of her panties. Emery’s brows drew together in displeasure.
“I specifically told you to wear the dress and nothing else. Did you misunderstand the instructions or did you rebel on purpose?” The dark carnal gaze he covered her with made her thighs clench tight together.
“Uh…I misunderstood?” she answered in a breathless whisper.
His hand holding her cheek moved around to tangle in her hair and he tugged her head back. “Try again.”
Sophie licked her lips, noting the way his eyes tracked the movement with fascination.
“I rebelled.”
His hold in her hair eased the slightest bit, but his breath quickened. Suddenly he dug the fingers of his other hand into the silk of her panties and ripped the fabric. The small garment dropped to the floor at her ankles. She was bare, completely open now. She felt more vulnerable to him than ever, as though the destroyed undergarment had provided some defense to his wandering hands.
Emery shaped the curve of her bottom, clenching the rounded flesh once before dipping his fingers lower, to the folds of her sex. He brushed them, teased them apart and sank one finger deeply into her. Sophie arched up, pleasure zinging through her limbs like bolts of electricity. He swirled his finger, then thrust it deeper, repeating these two actions as he moved his lips to her neck. Starting with soft kisses, he worked his way down to her collarbone, then back up to her ear, mixing licks and nibbles as he commanded her attention with his mouth and hand.
The Gilded Cuff Page 17