Huh.
I pushed the door open warily.
It was dark inside. Didn’t seem as if anyone had been in there. Everything was where I had left it.
I crept up the hallway quietly, my body thrumming with magic. If anything jumped out at me, I would kill it.
But when I got to the kitchen, I found my key hung on the rack, right where I always kept it.
I found my phone and dialed Lachlan.
It went to voice mail.
God damn him. Probably screening my calls. Well, fine. I waited for the beep. “Hey, Lachlan. It’s Penny. I found something out this evening that you probably want to know. It involves the both of us, and it’s kind of a big deal. You should call me back so that I can fill you in.” I hung up the phone.
Then I flipped on the kitchen light.
Alastair was standing in the middle of the kitchen.
I screamed.
He laughed. “You’re a creature of habit, Penny. You always used to take the key to the house when you went out to shift. Right in your robe pocket.”
“You took my key,” I said quietly.
He nodded. He closed the distance between us.
I tried to back away, but I collided with the wall.
He wrapped an arm around my waist, and pulled me close. “I missed you, babe.”
“Let go of me,” I said. But my body was responding to his nearness. Heat was pooling between my legs. I had a dull aching want for him that was starting to build.
He kissed me.
I let him. Hell, I kissed back. He felt good. His tongue knew the ins and outs of my mouth, claiming me in a way that felt right and familiar.
But then I pushed him back. I balled up magic and flung it into him.
He stumbled, but it hardly fazed him. He stepped closer, and he parted my robe, looking at my bare skin. “You look sexy as hell, Penny.”
I threw more magic at him.
He laughed as it hit him.
“What is it you have?” I said. “Is it a talisman? How could you make something so powerful?”
He snatched my chin and forced me to look at him.
I squeezed my eyes shut. I wasn’t going to let him compel me. I would struggle.
He used his fingers to pry one of my eyes open.
I felt his gaze bore into me.
“You’re coming home with me. And you’re not going to fight.”
I wanted to fight more than anything in the world. But… I couldn’t.
He parted my robe again, running a seeking hand over my skin, squeezing one of my breasts, letting his fingers probe between my thighs. He sighed. “It’s been a long time, Penny. It’s good to know you’re just as turned on as I am.” He took my hand and pressed it against his crotch.
I recoiled. “No,” I whispered. “Please no, Alastair.”
He just laughed. He backhanded me across the face, his knuckles stinging against my cheek. “We’re going home. And then I will have you every way I want you. Because you’re my mate. My wife. My plaything. And you’re never leaving me again.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I stood in the foyer of Alastair’s house and I stared at the surf board, which was propped against the mirror. I was trying to think. He had compelled me to come to his house. He had compelled me not to fight. But he hadn’t compelled me to stay. I could leave. What I needed to do was to play nice, act compliant, and hope that he wouldn’t realize his omission.
Eventually, he would leave me alone, and then I would make my escape.
But being compliant… oh, I didn’t want to do that.
It was confusing, of course. My body wanted to do whatever he told me to do, wanted to work with him, but my truest self—my heart and soul and mind—didn’t want him to touch me. And it was all I could do to give in.
Instead, I ran my hand over the surf board. “When did you get it?”
He was taking off his jacket and hanging it on the rack at the door. “A month ago or so.”
“But you don’t surf.”
“I do now,” he said.
“Why?” I said. “You hate the ocean. You hate the salt water. You hate the waves.” I remembered countless times that he had gone on long tirades about how much he hated the ocean. When Alastair hated something, he thought railing against it was the best pastime on earth. He’d just pound the subject into the ground, going on and on about it.
“I needed something to do to meet women,” he said, giving me a nasty smile. “But now you’re back in my life, and you’ll be tending to my needs.”
I felt sick to my stomach. I turned back to the surf board. There was a scar on the underside, a big long cut into the wood. “You just hang out on the beach with a surf board, waiting for women to come by?”
“No,” he said, coming over. “Sometimes I actually go in the water. It’s amazing what sexual frustration does to help one overcome things he despises.” He touched the scar on the underside of the board. “I got this on a rock. Lucky it didn’t get me.”
“And Fletcher recommended you get this kind of board?”
“I think Fletcher originally tried surfing to get girls as well,” said Alastair. “Of course, by the time I met him, he didn’t much care about that. Hooked on heroin, or didn’t you hear?”
“Did you kill him?” I said.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Alastair reached out and ran his fingers over my jaw, feather soft. “You’d like it if I were guilty of a crime like that. Then they’d lock me up in that prison. The magical one. What’s it called?”
I drew in a shaking breath.
He raised his eyebrows.
“Roxbone,” I muttered.
“You’d throw a party. Fuck your little cop boyfriend and laugh at my misfortune.”
I didn’t say anything.
Alastair laughed. “I didn’t kill him, Penny. As much as you’d like me to be a murderer, I’m not one. I didn’t kill those girls in March, and I didn’t kill Fletcher Remington.”
I swallowed. He did kill Fletcher. It had to be him.
It wasn’t wishful thinking on my part. Of course, he didn’t have a motive.
“Let’s stop talking about this,” said Alastair, his fingers grazing my neck and dipping down onto my chest.
I was still wearing nothing but that stupid robe, and no matter how many times I tried to cinch it closed, Alastair kept opening it back up.
He cupped one of my breasts.
Electric lines of arousal shot through me. And I was also horrified. I wanted to shrink from him. I didn’t. I couldn’t. “Maybe we should wait a bit,” I said in a ragged voice. “Maybe I could get you a drink and give you a massage and help you relax a little.”
“We’ll do that later,” he said, pushing the robe off my shoulders.
“Isn’t this Elizabeth’s place?” I said, feeling desperate. “What if she comes back and walks in on us?” Elizabeth was Alastair’s sister. She didn’t like me. The feeling was mutual. But for once, I thought I’d be really happy if she showed up out of the blue.
“She’s in New York City,” said Alastair. “She won’t be interrupting us.” He pushed the robe completely away from my body, baring everything.
I shivered. I was cold. I was aroused. This could not be happening to me, not again. I had gotten away from this man. He was never supposed to touch me again.
He turned me so that my body was facing away from him. There were a set of four steps in front of me. Then there was a landing and another set of four steps in an adjacent direction. Alastair pushed me down into the first four steps.
I went sprawling. My palms and knees hit the carpet that covered the steps hard.
Alastair was behind me, spreading my legs. He reached one hand around and nudged my clitoris. “Don’t worry, my little slut. I’ll make sure you enjoy yourself.”
My body clenched and twitched in some kind of horrible twisting of pleasure and dread.
I started to crawl up the steps. I needed to g
et away. Now.
He caught me by the back of my hair and yanked me back.
I cried out in pain, in terror. “Don’t, Alastair,” I said. “Please, don’t.”
He only laughed. He held me down, and his fingers worked at me.
It hurt. It felt good. It hurt. I started to cry.
His fingers kept at my clitoris. Circling that bundle of nerves. Stroking it.
I sobbed.
He did a quick little move with his fingers—something he remembered that always drove me crazy.
My traitorous body began to spasm. I was having an orgasm, but it was empty and vaguely painful, something wrenched out of my body because he could mechanically manipulate me to climax.
“There,” he whispered. “You liked that, didn’t you?”
I bit down on my lip.
He clubbed the back of my head.
Pain throbbed through me. “Yes, Alastair,” I gasped.
“Yes, what?”
“I liked that,” I said in a tiny voice.
“Like you mean it, bitch,” he said, clubbing me on the back of the head again.
And—mercifully—I lost consciousness.
* * *
It’s been worse. It’s been worse, I repeated like a litany over and over in my head.
There was the time that Alastair had done something that had dislocated my jaw. The pain had been blinding, impossible to take, whiting out half of my face—just hot, white pain. I remembered that I’d looked in the mirror, and that my face had been lopsided and distorted.
I’d had to stay that way for nearly an hour until I could get away to shift.
This isn’t that bad, I assured myself. I wasn’t even hurt, at least not badly. Whatever he’d done to me, I hadn’t been conscious. And maybe he hadn’t done anything. Maybe he’d stopped when I passed out. Maybe he hadn’t…
Hadn’t…
It was raw between my legs, but it could have been from his fingers, because he’d had them on me. I remembered that, and only that, and maybe nothing else had happened.
My head hurt a little. I had some bruises, some scratches. But I could walk. I could run.
So, it wasn’t that bad.
Right at that moment, I was lying next to Alastair in bed, which was where I had regained consciousness. He was breathing the steady in-and-out breath of a sleeping man, but I didn’t want to chance it.
He might be faking.
So, I was waiting. Watching the clock. After twenty minutes of his breathing like that, he would be asleep for real, I was sure of it. It had been seventeen minutes, but these last three minutes were passing so slowly.
You’re being stupid, Penny, I thought at myself. Three minutes don’t make a difference.
Probably not, but if I got up now and he woke up, I’d regret it.
I waited.
Alastair’s bedroom was decorated in shades of greys and pinks. Well, honestly, this wasn’t his bedroom. It was the master bedroom in Elizabeth’s house. I wasn’t sure how he could stand it. Alastair hated pink.
The walls were painted light, light gray, with a runner going around the center, pink sand dollars. There was a silver chrome lamp on the bedside table. A big mirror over the bureau. The mirror and bureau were both sleek and minimalistic and black.
I peered at Alastair.
I needed to do this. I needed to get out of bed. I needed to get the hell out of here.
He was holding onto me. He lay on his back, but he had an arm under my shoulders, and his fingers brushed my arm.
Slowly, I sat up.
His breathing changed. His brow furrowed a little in his sleep.
I stopped moving. Waited.
He relaxed.
I inched over the bed on my bottom.
Alastair stirred fitfully, his hand reaching out to grasp the sheets.
Oh, God. He was about to wake up. I cringed. Tell him you had to go to the bathroom, I thought frantically. He can’t be mad about that.
But Alastair could be mad about anything. His mercurial moods were the thing that always made him so difficult to live with. If it was predictable what set him off, maybe I could have kept from getting beaten up, but it wasn’t.
I had spent years of my life trying to do exactly that. Trying to be good, so that he wouldn’t punish me.
But I was never good enough for him.
Eventually, I realized that he enjoyed punishing me. He was never going to stop.
Alastair’s eyes fluttered. Then he groaned, rolled onto his side and his breathing returned to the same steady sleeping rhythm as before.
My heart leapt. He was still asleep!
I crawled the rest of the way off the bed. My feet touched down on soft gray carpet. I stood up. My robe was downstairs somewhere, but I didn’t want to put that on again. I could make do with one of Alastair’s shirts and a pair of his sweatpants.
The closet was on the other side of the room.
I debated.
I could run out of the room, beeline for the door, and get outside, but be naked.
Or I could take a couple more minutes and get some damned clothes.
I couldn’t be naked.
I eased my way across the room to the closet. The door was open about a foot. Not wide enough for me to get through. I pulled it open slowly.
Cre-eaaak.
My heart stopped.
I turned to look at Alastair on the bed.
He didn’t move.
I slid sideways into the walk-in closet. It looked just the way Alastair’s closet looked at home. Tidy and organized. All shirts of the same color hanging together, all hangers facing the same way—matching hangers, of course.
His workout clothes were to the left, folded in neat piles. Sweats and t-shirts. I snatched the top one off of each pile and threw them on. I cinched the sweats tight around my hips and tied off the internal drawstring so that they wouldn’t fall down. They were too long, and even with the elastic at the bottom, I was going to trip over them. I bent down and rolled them up.
Then I pushed open the door to the closet.
It creaked again.
Alastair stirred again. He rolled over, making noise in sleep.
I froze, waiting.
What will you say this time? You think he’s going to buy that you needed his clothes to go to the bathroom?
Oh, God, I really hoped he didn’t wake up.
Don’t wake up. Don’t wake up.
I waited.
He was quiet and still.
I tiptoed across the carpet, past the bed, to the door. It stood ajar, open enough that I could walk through it.
I dove out of the door.
I emerged into the hallway. There was a huge watercolor on the wall—the ocean on a sunny day, a family sitting on the beach with a colorful umbrella. It looked like it might be Elizabeth’s original work. She liked to paint. All different mediums. Watercolors. Oils. Acrylics. She was always criticizing me for not having some kind of creative outlet.
Covering up the fact your brother was beating me was the most creative I could be, I thought at the painting as I passed it.
I was getting out of this house now.
The hallway ended at the living room—all peaches and sea foam greens. The top of the stairs was three feet away. I headed there.
A sound.
Behind me, coming from the bedroom.
I turned around, staring back the hall, at the door, still open. I could see the edge of the bed there, the sheets rumpled from where I had lain. But I couldn’t see Alastair. He was blocked by the door.
Go back and check, said a voice in my head. Make sure he’s still there.
What would that accomplish, really? If he was getting out of bed, then I’d be closer to him. I needed to go, get out of here. Now.
I turned to look at the living room, at the pillows on the couch, which were covered in pictures of green seahorses and shells.
I looked back at the open door.
I started dow
n the steps.
I went fast, tripping over my feet, not caring if I made noise. I was running for my life now. If he was behind me…
He couldn’t be. He was asleep, and I was getting the hell out. I was going home.
I alighted at the bottom of the steps, taking one last look at the surf board, and then ran to the door. I threw it open.
Alastair was standing there.
I backed away. “How…?”
“There’s an adjacent door in the bathroom,” he said. “Did you really think I was asleep?”
Oh. Oh, no. I kept backing up.
He came in the door and shut it behind him. “I compelled you not to fight. I compelled you to come with me. But clearly I forgot something very important.” He seized me by the neck, pulling me close, his eyes boring into mine before I had the chance to shut them. “Do not leave this house.”
I felt the magic settle into my bones, capturing me here more surely than a set of shackles. I shook my head. “No,” I murmured.
He let go of me. “And now we’ve got to discuss your punishment for trying to get away, my dear.”
“I wasn’t going anywhere,” I said in a breathless voice. “I was just getting some air. You know I don’t want to leave you. You’re my mate. I love you. And now that we’re together again, I remember that.”
He slapped me. “You’re going to need to do better than that if you want to convince me.”
I licked my lips. “I’m not lying. It’s… it’s your sexy body. I missed it. I missed you. You know I can’t get enough of you.”
He leered at me. “Of course, you missed me. No way that sissy-faced cop was satisfying your greedy little pussy.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
In the morning, I made breakfast for Alastair the way he liked it. Eggs over easy on toast with a side of sausage links.
Alastair wouldn’t let me have as much as him. He liked to control how much I ate, claiming he didn’t want me to get fat. Which was ridiculous, because I’d been on my own for nearly two years now, eating what I wanted, and I hadn’t gained an ounce of weight. Dick. Anyway, he only allowed me one egg—no carbs and no greasy sausage.
It didn’t matter, though. I had sneaked several pieces of sausage while I was cooking for him.
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