I’d always thought I’d be brave when faced with danger. I’d never shied away from risk and received praise from my self-defense teacher. I even remembered bragging to my good friend Katie, from my local bouldering gym, that I would beat up any man before he could touch me. If I could master stone, I could master men.
How wrong I’d been.
How stupidly, awfully wrong.
This wasn’t just a man. He wasn’t some overweight jerk on the street. He wasn’t some nerd from an online dating site. He was...feral.
Don’t be weak, Gem.
Get ready to fight.
I held my breath as he stalked into the small cell, his bare feet whispering over dank concrete. Unlike when I’d first seen him, he wasn’t naked. The shirt he wore looked as if he’d crawled through caves and gotten into a fight with thorns, and his slacks weren’t much better. The cuffs were torn around his ankles, ragged and discolored with dirt. His long hair had been scraped back to his nape, and his skin once again glittered with scars.
Thick ones, fine ones, crisscross ones, and ones that looked like round pennies along his jaw. Each wound had lost the redness of healing and turned silvery with age. His pain wasn’t recent. Whatever he’d lived through was in the past, but it’d scarred his soul as well as his body.
Needing oxygen, I sucked in a shaky breath as he closed the door behind him. He didn’t have a common scent. Once again, a faint whisper of rivers and woods entered my nose. He seemed to have adopted the earthiness, the ivy sharpness, and the fragrant subtleness of the valley’s neglected wildflowers.
He made a show of inserting a key into his pocket before crossing the small space and stopping a few feet from me.
He didn’t speak.
I didn’t speak.
I hated that my fight had fled before I’d even tried. That curse words and shouted slurs for my freedom remained stubbornly out of reach. If he hadn’t talked to me when he’d strangled me, I would’ve been adamant he wouldn’t understand me.
It wasn’t that he looked uneducated or not smart enough to converse, more like he was above such practices. The way he watched me spoke of an undomesticated creature who didn’t use words often. His wildness and aura of viciousness hinted that he hadn’t been around another human in a very, very long time. Perhaps so long, he’d forgotten he was human himself.
It’s just shock, Gem.
Stop making him scarier than he is.
He’s just a man.
He’s a hermit with bad clothes and overgrown hair.
A nudist most likely who lives in a cult.
Oh, God.
That thought brought a trailer load of other worries. Maybe I had it all wrong, and this place wasn’t just his, after all. Maybe it was some secret coven that was hidden for a reason. What if I’d stumbled onto something I was never meant to see?
My chest rose and fell as my breathing accelerated.
Even if I do fight and get free, who else is out there?
He noticed.
His dark eyes fell to my chest, narrowing as my breasts moved beneath my windbreaker. A scalding intensity drenched his stare, making my body flinch to get away.
I pressed harder against the wall, wishing I could dissolve right through it.
Licking his bottom lip, he dropped his stare, scanning me from head to toe. Slowly, carefully, so thoroughly it felt like a violation and seduction all at once, he drank me in.
The front of his slacks tightened as he hardened. He made no move to hide his reaction. Nor did he move to unbutton and use me.
He merely kept staring, his eyes scratching over my skin.
I kept my head up and lips pressed together. I didn’t let him see that his stare affected me. That the sheer potency of being alone in a tiny cell with him made me sick to my stomach.
I didn’t know him. What I did know of him was violent and cruel. He’d told me to die. He’d wrapped his awful fingers around my throat and squeezed the very life out of my lungs.
I hated him.
So why did my stomach clench on its own accord? Why did the air shimmer with heat the longer he studied me? Why, why, did I feel hot and cold and itchy and confused the longer we stood in silence?
He had a power.
An awful talent at making my heart rabbit and wordlessly putting me in my place. Our power dynamics were obvious. Hunter versus hunted.
His gaze crept back up my body to linger on my bruised neck. His eyebrows drew together, and his jaw clenched as the ripple of anger flowed from his face down to his hands as they curled into fists by his sides.
He looked utterly untamed and unpredictable.
He made dread seep into my veins. How was I supposed to survive this? How could I get a rational response when he wasn’t a rational human being?
Running a hand over his tied-up hair, he sniffed as if debating his own runaway thoughts. At least, with his hair back, he didn’t look so completely savage, not that it softened any of his harsh edges.
His cheekbones were sharp. His nose severe. His eyes demonic. The scruff around his jaw hinted he didn’t believe in shaving, leaving personal grooming to a more tameless style.
The silence between us continued to thicken until the entire cell throbbed with awareness.
I’d never been so on edge, so poised for pain or pleading.
I wanted to go home.
To run.
That overwhelming need to get away from him ensured a levelheaded coldness settled inside me.
The way he watched me.
The way his tongue moved over his bottom lip and his gaze lingered on my feminine attributes.
I might not have been blessed in romance, but I knew what that look meant.
He wanted me.
He didn’t want to want me, but he did. And it compounded his temper. It tightened his fists. It doused fuel on his rage.
I wasn’t above using any trick I had to get free, and that included letting him believe I was open to the black desire glowing in his gaze...however, it will cost me everything. It went against everything I was as an independent, successful woman.
You’re successful because you don’t shy away from difficulty.
Fine.
Bracing my shoulders, I shoved away my weakness and prepared to fight.
“What do...you want?” I winced and swallowed past the swelling in my throat. His fingers had been ruthless. He could’ve killed me in that bedroom, yet he’d stopped and shoved me in here instead.
Why?
His eyebrows rose, flinching at my voice. The fine lines around his eyes deepened, the harsh brackets around his mouth looked like they’d draw blood from his cheeks, even through his scruff. With such naked hate on his face, it revealed he was younger than I first thought. The weathering of his skin hinted at someone in their late thirties, but the stark distress in his eyes made me guess he was more like late twenties.
A very sheltered late twenties.
Someone who’d never learned how to hide his true feelings and wore naked emotion with no knowledge that it could be used against him.
I cocked my head, studying him in a different light. That was what made him different from other men. He hadn’t mastered the art of deception. He didn’t try to mask the obvious lust in his stare. He didn’t cough away the sudden growl of disgust in his chest.
He was readable.
And in that, I had a weapon.
“You want me.”
He stumbled backward, his eyes narrowing to slits. “Shut up.”
I bowed my head, not out of respect but because with knowledge came a plan and that plan meant I had to get him to see me as a person. Not a prisoner. Not someone to use as he saw fit. I was like him. And maybe, if I made him see that, he’d let me go.
“I’m sorry I trespassed.” I looked up between my eyelashes. “I never intended to go where I didn’t belong—”
“Quiet.” His hand slashed through the air. Another dose of scorching fire set his dark eyes flashing, a
nd the air of the cell turned positively thick with need. I couldn’t breathe without tasting it.
Heat rolled off him, kindling little flames over my skin. It wasn’t my body reacting to his; it was the intensity of his own making everything so much more. More intense, more desperate, more strange than I’d ever experienced.
Who is this man?
Breathing hard, he crossed his arms, making the seams of his shirt strain. He didn’t cross his arms like a CEO would, using the stance as dominance. He didn’t use it as aggression or as a cage to contain the obvious rage inside him. Instead, he used it as protection, almost as if he hugged himself—as if clinging to the shreds of his self-control, searching for answers, same as me, trying to figure this out, same as me.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
“Stop,” he growled. His nostrils flared as he inhaled, the last remaining buttons down his shirt threatening to pop. The silky material splayed over his chest, giving glimpses of a muscular body with a dark snail trail leading into his trousers and a splattering of hair over his pecs. Apart from those areas, he was smooth—unless I counted the scars.
Then, he wasn’t smooth at all. He was damaged.
“I—”
“Don’t say another fucking word,” he hissed.
I nodded and fell silent. For all my scheming and willingness to fight, I would pick my battles wisely.
The cell throbbed with energy. My nipples tingled as he paced in front of me, his erection stabbing upward in his slacks. He paced through puddles and over cold concrete with bare feet.
More time stretched as he threw me dirty looks, and an animalistic grumble echoed in his chest.
His footfalls thudded in time with my heartbeat, counting down to my end.
Tearing his gaze from me, he shook his head as if fighting every dark instinct inside him. His back braced. His thighs bunched. He walked faster with fury.
Every time his eyes landed on my body, it seared. Every time, he sniffed or bared his teeth, my body stiffened with a primal reaction.
He was a trapped beast, and I didn’t like the sensation of being trapped in here with him. I didn’t like the unpredictability. The real fear that he might snap, and I’d either die or wished I had.
Was he contemplating whether to finish the job?
Did he hate that I hadn’t died in that bedroom?
The way he watched me...it made me think he’d been denied company for decades. He looked woefully unprepared to deal with me, violently reckless to get rid of me, and the undeniable confusion of what he truly wanted.
His dark eyes bounced between palpable lust, explicit hate, downright disgust, and absolute turmoil.
When I couldn’t stand the silence or his pacing anymore, I swallowed and flinched past the hurt. “Who...are you?”
Massaging my throat, I watched him carefully. I expected him to order me to be quiet again. Instead, he stopped. He locked his knees and turned to face me like a soldier conscripted to battle.
Wiping a hand over his scruffy jaw, he once again crossed his arms. With impatient anger, he chewed on words before snapping, “I ask the questions.”
His accent was strange. Almost rusty, it slipped over vowels and lingered on consonants in an unusual manner. He sounded American, but with an edge of gentile sophistication. A level of education that didn’t mesh with the current location of his home or the state of his dishevelment.
We continued to stare, neither of us embarrassed to be so blatantly watching. When our eyes weren’t locked in a battle, they were roaming, imprinting.
He was tall but not too tall. His arms once again causing stress to the seams of his taupe shirt while his thighs bulged in the soft material of his slacks. The clothes didn’t fit him or suit him, almost as if they were never his to begin with.
His erection hadn’t faded, and his hips moved just a little, the faintest physical hint of what his eyes were screaming.
Lust.
Squeezing his eyes shut for a second, he reopened them with black determination. The hunger was still there, but this time, it was desire for answers rather than sex. Whatever existed between us was no longer a debate on whether or not he’d pounce on me, but how bad the interrogation would become.
“Where did you come from?” he snapped.
I linked my fingers together, glancing at the PLB by my feet.
Come on, find me. Hurry.
I swallowed. “Michigan.”
“No.” His forehead furrowed into thick annoyance. “I mean how did you come here? How the fuck did you find me?”
“I climbed.”
He scowled again, harsh and spiteful. “Climbed? What the hell does that mean?”
Swallowing again, I wished I had water for my throat. “It means I was searching for a boulder someone claimed was nearby. I got lost. I saw your house from the cliff. And I...” I swallowed again and again, pushing through the bruising. “I climbed down to investigate.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
I shrugged. “It’s the truth.”
“So you’re not here to take me back? You didn’t come in via the cave?”
I shook my head. “Take you where? What cave? Oh, you mean the one at the end of the valley? No, I didn’t come—”
“Who else is out there?”
“I—” I closed my mouth. This was the part where I could lie and say I had a group of friends all desperately searching for me. I could convince him that if he didn’t let me go, then others would come looking. Police would come. The army would come. He’d be shot if he put one more bruise on me.
And all of that might be true...if my PLB worked.
Even now, my faint little signal could be on some helicopter dashboard, flashing brightly as they flew to find me.
But...if rescue took a few days. If I had to survive here, on my own, totally at his mercy, the threat that we’d have company might make him lose his temper. He might call my bluff and—
“Well?” He bit the word in two. “Who else knows you’re here?”
I couldn’t stop my gaze latching once again onto my PLB. To the outstretched antenna. To the very clear evidence that other people would know and soon.
His eyes tracked mine, landing on the device.
I winced, waiting for him to smash it and then smash me. However, he just cocked his head and nudged it with a toe. “What’s that?”
He...he doesn’t know?
How sheltered was he?
What sort of world had I stumbled into?
I bit my tongue. I didn’t want to tell him. Why would I give up my only hope? But could I lie? Would he believe me?
“It’s a useless cell phone.” I held my breath. “The battery is dead.”
His eyes narrowed, and for a second, I thought for sure he was playing with me. Pretending not to know but knowing full well that I’d activated a locator beacon. But he nodded and scoffed under his breath. “I remember those.” Kicking it across the floor, he added, “Even if it had a charge, it wouldn’t do you any good out here. There’s never been phone reception. Not even in the beginning.”
My mind exploded with questions. What beginning? How long ago was the beginning? If he’d seen a cell phone, that meant he’d had access to technology at some point, even if he lived an almost archaic existence now. And if he had seen things like phones, then why was he living mostly naked in a house consumed by ivy?
Exhaustion suddenly crushed my shoulders.
I was hungry and cold and I wanted to go home. Who cared who this guy was? He was keeping me prisoner, and I was done.
Drawing myself up, I let ice slip into my voice. “Let me go. I want to leave.”
With speed that seemed otherworldly, he grabbed my chin and pressed my head against the stone wall behind me. My bruised neck cried in agony as his fingers dug into my cheeks, locking me in place. His nose almost kissed mine. The tension between us returned a thousandfold as his anger consumed me.
“You’re not allowed to l
eave.” He kept squeezing me, his eyes almost feverish. “Ever. Do you hear me?”
I’d felt panic before. I’d fallen and broken bones. I’d scaled mountaintops and stood on the edge of the world. I’d suffered grief when my dad died. I’d endured hardships as well as successes. Yet nothing, nothing had prepared me for the undiluted wave of foreboding.
“I can’t stay here.” I grabbed at his wrist, doing my best to get free. “I won’t.”
“You don’t have a choice.” His stare dropped to my mouth. His other hand came up, running his forefinger over my bottom lip. It didn’t matter to him that I struggled. He didn’t notice or care. He inserted the tip of his finger into my mouth.
He groaned.
I bit him.
Hard.
“Fuck.” Ripping his hand back, he snarled, “Are you trying to die?”
“I’m trying to live!” I bared my teeth and rubbed the indents he’d left behind on my cheeks. “Don’t touch me.”
“I can do more than touch you.” He sucked on the finger that I’d bitten, a trace of blood staining his teeth as he hissed, “You walked into my home uninvited. I didn’t seek you out. I didn’t bring you here against your will. This is your fault. Not mine. Your fault that you’ll die in this valley, same as me.” Planting both hands on the stone behind my head, he crushed his body over mine.
His hips collided into me, wedging his erection against my lower belly. He ground against me, ensuring I felt every thick inch. “That is all your fault. I’m trying really fucking hard not to hurt you. I’m doing everything I can to ignore the fact that I have full right to make you do anything I want.”
“You don’t have that right. No one has that right—”
“You gave me that right the moment you stepped into my home.” His voice dropped to a lashing whisper. “I keep reliving the moment I saw your tracks over my threshold. The disbelief that someone had dared to enter without permission. How you were there, bold as fucking be, standing on my stairs, entering my rooms, touching my things.”
His cock throbbed against my stomach. His entire body shuddered as his forehead lodged on mine, keeping my head locked against the wall. “I didn’t summon you. I didn’t want you. But now that you’re here, Christ, it’s hard not to take what you’ve so stupidly given.”
Fable of Happiness Book One Page 7