I stop typing on those last words.
His seed.
“That will never fly in a Moonlight Sonata book,” I whisper. “They won’t allow it. It’s too crude. Too sexual. We don’t—”
He smacks me on the butt again.
Harder.
“I told you to write it,” Erik said.
I dig my fingernails into the surface of the desk. “There’s no point. They won’t take the book like that.”
Another slap.
Oh, it stings. He isn’t going lightly on me at all. I can feel the raw strength in him. Every kayak he’s ever carried down to Lake Symphony, every stroke of the paddle that propels him through the water, every tree he’s sawed down without the help of power tools…
Every literary agent he’s ever strangled and left to drown?
“Type,” Erik says.
But I can’t. Not now that I’ve had that thought.
His strength is functional in more ways than one. He is dangerous. And yet here he is behind me, holding me down, slapping my ass with his massive hand. He could easily hurt me with such strength. But he promised that he wouldn’t, and I believe him. I really do.
My body knows he could hurt me, though. There is no rationalizing with the panicked prey instincts that make me want to run.
I am the caged bird.
Fighting to stand against Erik Duke’s strength is useless. He’s too powerful for me. It only makes him tighten his grip on my hair, to the point where it feels like he might pull it out from the roots, and he strikes me harder.
His hand comes down on my backside again, and again.
Each strike lances through my entire body.
I feel it in my nipples rubbing lightly against the desk, tender skin against rough antique wood.
I feel it in the catch of my breath in my throat.
I feel it in the burn of my blood, the weight between my thighs, the growth of the need unfolding deep in my belly.
When he spanks me again, harder than before, my nipples graze against the paper of the manuscript. The slightest scrape, but I can feel it acutely through my shirt. It’s impossible to swallow down my groan now.
It’s also impossible to keep writing.
At this point, I don’t think Erik cares.
His breathing comes harder as he spanks me again, and again.
My body jerks against the desk.
Knees shaking, sweat beading my forehead, I clutch at the sides of the laptop as though it is my only remaining lifeline. The glowing screen is all I see. The words that Erik and I have written together are huge in my vision.
What we are making together is obscene—on the page, and between our bodies.
It is foul.
It is so very, very good.
His hand shifts just an inch to the right when he slaps me again, and this time, it lands solidly between my legs. I am wearing jeans, and the denim is tight against me in this position. The seam squeezes against my nether lips. A strike there radiates all the way up and down my cleft.
“Oh God,” I whisper breathlessly.
Erik bows over me, the weight of his body pressing against my shoulders. “I told you to write,” he says, his lips against the side of my neck.
Another spank.
It’s in the same spot as the last one. It jolts through the rosebud at the core of my pleasure.
My nipples scrape.
I cry out.
Twisting to try to escape him only brings my lips close to his. He is there, Erik Duke—no longer a specter in the corner of my vision, but a grizzled, dangerous man looming over me, consuming me with the enormity of his presence.
He’s not the one who initiates the kiss.
My lips press against his, and I am desperate in the thrust of my tongue, as if pleading with him for help. It is like a deer asking the wolf for mercy as he sinks his teeth into her jugular.
Erik kisses back just as hard.
His palm smacks between my legs.
It is lightning, this heat. It consumes me. I rip away from him only to cry out as the orgasm takes me—a powerful but reluctant release. My shout is halfway to sobbing.
All the tension that has been coiled within me these recent weeks comes out in that cry.
The fear, the nightmares, the need.
God, but I’ve missed Erik since leaving his basement.
My arms can no longer support me. I collapse to the desk as my muscles spasm with orgasm, relieved and sated.
In my thrashing, my hand has pressed against the keyboard, leaving a line of the letter “G” across the end of the paragraph with the line that I refused to write. I will have to turn this manuscript into Moonlight Sonata once we finish it. Raoul will read the book that my passion for Erik wrought.
Orgiastic bliss is brief.
Erik stands suddenly, leaving me cold.
He doesn’t give me any new words. He doesn’t touch me again.
Silent, Erik Duke turns and walks from the room.
4
I don’t follow Erik when he leaves.
Alone, I am left staring at the blinking cursor on my word processor, gazing at the words that we have created together.
And I am numb.
My mind has detached from my body, which still trembles with Erik’s touch. The wingback chair in which I sit smells of him. It doesn’t smell like Fletcher Durand and his old cigars anymore. My father’s space has become Erik’s space.
Our space.
Our book is waiting on the laptop.
It’s unquestionable that Erik Duke is a literary genius. He is brilliant, and what we have written together is brilliant. But it is dark. Clearly the work of a horror author, and unappealing to the kind of people who will surely buy books from a Moonlight Sonata release.
They won’t admire the psychological elements, the powerful themes, the window into the darkest parts of our heart.
This puts my reputation at risk.
As an artist, I don’t know what to think.
But as a woman, I am a little proud, a little frightened, and more than a little ashamed.
I work on our book as the sun continues to creep across the sky. I work for hours, rewriting what we have rewritten, making subtle changes to tone. It is my fingerprint on Erik’s work. I make it a little more appealing, a little less frightening.
When I catch up to the pages that we wrote together—which are surprisingly many—I continue for a few more chapters, weaving Erik’s notes into my draft.
He has inspired me. The work flows easily.
Insane as it might be, he has really brought something special out of me.
Only when the room is so dark that I can no longer see the bookshelves and my hands are cramping do I stop.
I stand, pressing my hands into the small of my back to pop my spine. I shouldn’t have been sitting for so long, but I was lost in the work. My first book—at least, the first book that will have my name on the cover. It’s a strange feeling. Stranger still because even though my name will be on the cover, in many ways, it will be Erik’s words on the inside.
He is the one who has been pushing me through this.
Scrolling through the many pages, I am stunned to realize I’m already halfway through rewriting the entire book to suit Erik’s notes. Even so, it is a collaboration. Not a work from my heart.
I don’t know how to feel.
But I do find myself wondering what has become of Erik.
I am sleepwalking through my father’s summer home, searching for Erik. I almost expect to find him hanging from one of the rafters in the attic upside down, like a bat. Nothing would surprise me from him at this point.
Instead, I discover him on the balcony, looking over the steely ocean. His shirt is unbuttoned and hangs open to expose his chest. He is scarred underneath the hair that mats his muscles. I have never seen him in such a way before. It makes him look vulnerable—a silly thought, since “vulnerability” and “Erik Duke” are not concepts that combine
well. They are oil and water slicking the surface of my mind.
The look he gives me when I step through the doors is chilling.
Not because he’s angry, or violent, but because he looks so…desolate.
There is pain within this man, so obvious and raw in the glass shards of his eyes that I want to forgive him for every sin he might have ever committed.
It is a warm night. Too warm for the beach. The warmth caressing against my flesh is dreamlike in its surreal comfort, like silk brushing over my body. Disconnected from my feelings, confused by the strange setting from my childhood, for all I know this could be a dream.
Perhaps Erik knocked me unconscious when we struggled in my bedroom earlier. None of this is real. It is fantasy.
I stand beside him.
“I’m halfway through the manuscript,” I tell him, because I don’t know what to say about everything else that’s happened.
“Good,” he says.
“I wasn’t going to break my contract.”
His jaw tightens. “You ran away.”
“And you followed me,” I say. “Do you blame me?”
“Yes.” He faces me. Even on the balcony, with the ocean wind blowing past us, he sucks all the oxygen from my lungs. “You’re mine, Christine. No matter how many ways you try to run. No matter how many contracts you try to escape. No matter how many editors try to steal you away. You are mine.” He glares at the ocean. “That man thinks he owns you.”
Only then do I realize Erik isn’t actually glaring at the ocean. He’s looking too far to the left.
He’s looking at the gates that bar entrance to the property. The road leading from town. The private path to my father’s summer home.
Is he thinking about leaving?
It hasn’t even occurred to me until this moment that either of us could leave the house. I haven’t given even a moment’s consideration to escape since he trapped me in my bedroom.
If I hadn’t sought out Erik, I could have run.
I should have run.
“Raoul isn’t the only one who thinks he owns me,” I say. “You do, too.”
“There’s a difference,” Erik says.
I know what he considers that difference to be.
He believes Raoul to be delusional. But he, Erik Duke, bestselling author, the eye at a hurricane of mysteries, truly does own me in his mind.
To be honest, I’m not sure I don’t agree.
There is something different between Erik and me. I’m not sure if it’s better or more important or…I don’t know, but it’s something.
And it’s that something that makes me pliant in his arms, allowing Erik to push me against the balcony, hitching my weight up so that my backside rests on the railing.
An endless ocean waits hundreds of feet below. The cliff is steep enough that I would hit nothing on the way down if I were to fall—not until I crashed upon the rocks at the bottom, forever shattered.
Erik hold my waist so that I can’t fall. But despite his promises that he will never hurt me, I still have to link my legs reflexively around his waist to give myself that little extra security.
If I fall, he does too.
We fall together.
We are already fallen, in some ways.
He drags my hips forward a fraction of an inch, pressing me flush against him. My eyes widen. I feel that he is already aroused, his turgid member painfully engorged, driving against my cleft between the layers of our clothes like an iron bar.
Erik doesn’t ask permission before kissing me. At this point, I would be more surprised if he waited for consent.
His mouth slants against mine, deepening the angle, giving his tongue full access to the crevices of my mouth. His free hand tangles in my hair. It seems that he likes to pull on my hair, because the tiny sound of pain I make only forces his breath to quicken.
Could this truly be reality? Is it possible that I’m awake?
No, this is certainly a dream.
I am not really leaning into Erik’s touch, arching my back to press myself to him, belly to belly, squeezing my thighs on his hips.
He is not really undulating against me in motions that are now familiar. The fourth time that we have had an interlude, surreal subplot developing in the thriller that our lives have become. It is not a romance; it is suspense, with a deadly climax that approaches even as the ocean thunders behind me and the wind presses against the tiniest cracks between our bodies.
Reality is the warm place in Raoul’s condominium. I only left that morning, but it feels so much longer than that.
I am in my childhood.
I am with the angel.
I am…asleep.
Erik breaks the kiss first, clutching me to my chest.
“There are things you need to know, Christine,” he says. “And once you do, you’re going to have to make a choice.”
Is he talking about his wife? The newspaper article that I found about his dead bride? The one that accused him of murder?
I taste my tears, and I shake my head. “Don’t tell me.” I don’t want to have to make that choice and face the decisions that will follow afterward.
“It’s about your father,” Erik says.
That’s not what I expected him to say at all.
I draw back. “What?”
Pulling away, even an inch, ruins my center of balance. I tip back over the cliff.
He yanks me back before my heart even has a chance to skip a beat.
That motion—dragging me against him—it makes me keenly aware of the place that our bodies are connected again. It is so hard trying to think rationally when all I want is for Erik to finally follow through on the promise that our bodies have been making to each other for weeks.
It’s about your father.
The man who died and left me nothing but an empty bank account and a shattered mother.
To be honest, I’m not sure I want to know anything about that. The idea is almost worse than learning whether or not Erik is a murderer.
It would be easier if I could allow myself to fall into the frightening precipice that threatens to consume me. Not the one with the jagged rocks, but the one pressing his erection against the inside of my thigh. I know that he could consume me if I allowed it.
But I can’t resist. I have to know.
“What about my father?” I ask.
He hooks his fingers in the waistband of my jeans and draws them down my hips. I am wearing underwear that isn’t very flattering; they are peach in color, trimmed with white lace. I hadn’t intended on anyone seeing me like this.
Luckily, Erik doesn’t see me in them. He pulls them down with my jeans.
“Wait,” I say, grabbing his wrists.
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Erik says.
The jeans are around my knees. The railing is cold on my backside. The ocean churns below.
“You can’t start this conversation and then stop again. You have to tell me. What about my father?”
He kneels as he yanks the jeans over my feet, removing my shoes along with them.
I am bare from the waist down.
But it’s far more than my body that’s naked.
As he’s stripped the clothing from me, it feels like he’s stripped all the defenses from my soul, too, exposing me to far worse than the elements.
Erik pushes my knees apart.
“Did you know him?” I ask.
Even as I speak the words, I remember what he had said at the launch party—how he had been involved with the publishing company for so long.
He must have known my father.
“Did you have something to do with the formation of Durand-Price?”
His hands slither up the insides of my thighs.
“Don’t talk, Christine,” he says.
At any other time, the command would silence me. He’s so very convincing.
All the more convincing when he presses a hot kiss against the tender skin inside of my knee.
“Erik, please,” I say.
I’m not sure what I’m asking him to do.
His tongue darts out.
Erik licks a long line up the most private part of my body, and any thoughts of Durand-Price fly from my head. My head tips back. The clouds above are heavy in the night, threatening rain. My curls sway over the cliff far below.
“Don’t,” I tell him, and I think I must mean don’t stop because I put my hand on his head, not to push him away, but to draw him closer.
He licks again, with more confidence, fingers digging into my thighs as he begins to explore my cleft.
Erik’s lips work over my hot core of need.
Who knew that a horror author, whose mind dwells in such dark places, could be so skilled in something so intimate?
My hands clutch at the railing.
“Erik,” I breathe, and “Don’t,” and then again, “Please.” A few more times, that same word. Please, please, please…
His tongue slips inside of me.
It seems that he is capable of reaching parts of me that I never dreamed would be accessible. I can feel him moving within my body. I am feverish in the cool ocean wind, breathing hard, gripping his hair to pull him tight against my hips.
Instinct makes me want to thrust against him, inviting him to take me, but Erik holds me tight.
His eyes flash up to meet mine.
“Careful,” he says without moving back.
It might be the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen: Erik Duke between my thighs, nose buried in the soft golden curls, my juices glistening on his face in the moonlight.
This must be a dream.
I would be a fool to allow him to do this otherwise.
He has such immense power over my body and soul. Erik is hypnotizing, possessive, consuming me. I should be running from him. I should be shouting for help. But as his hands carve lines into the meat of my thighs, mounding my curves, worshipping them as he worships my female core, I can’t do anything but moan again.
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