by Gemma James
My denial hadn’t placated him, and his parting words blared through my head, more forceful than my shame. “If you go anywhere near him, I’ll fuck him up for life. He’s a lot easier to get to now, isn’t he?”
The thought of my brother hurting Rafe terrified me, so I’d told Zach I hadn’t heard from him. A lie, because I was pretty sure the note came from Rafe.
Was this always going to be my life? Lies upon lies, sprinkled with the occasional half-truth?
I could leave. I’d considered it before, had even tried once, though I only made it halfway to the California border before chickening out. Too many people close to me had suffered, like the guy I’d teamed up with my Junior year for a science project. He made the mistake of hitting on me, and Zach had given him the nastiest beat down of his life, leaving broken bones and bloody flesh in his wake. Dad’s money swept that one under the rug.
There had been others, some no one knew about because Zach was intimidating enough without his reputation as a fighter to keep most quiet. They suffered his rage in silence. Fear of retaliation wasn’t the only thing keeping me from fleeing though. I’d hung on to the stupid, absurd, fanciful hope that Rafe would someday forgive me.
Impossible. What I’d done was unforgivable.
Standing at a crossroads of sorts, I needed to find the strength to move on with my life. I glanced at the enormous engagement ring Lucas had pushed onto my finger earlier that night. No matter what Dad believed, tying myself to a man I didn’t love wouldn’t fix anything. Neither would continuing to allow Zach free rein of my puppet strings.
For the first time in your life, Alexandra, do the right thing.
The voice sounded like my father’s. Certainly, the words were something he’d say, something he’d said again and again every time I fucked up. And I fucked up a lot. My whole life was one big fuck up.
I shut off the water, wrapped a towel around my body, and entered the bedroom, then changed into jeans and a sweatshirt before pulling a duffle from the closet. I blindly flung clothes onto the bed and stuffed some into the bag. The stash of cash I’d saved, tucked underneath the mattress, also went inside. Lastly, I tossed in my wallet. I didn’t need anything else. Just myself and the courage to leave.
That was the hard part.
I took off the ring and let it drop onto the nightstand, then I closed my eyes and envisioned my escape. I’d walk down the hall, feet sinking into the plush runner one last time. I saw myself crack the door open and peek outside, saw myself hop down the stairs of the porch, my paranoid gaze buzzing around as I approached the Volvo Dad had given me for graduation.
The alluring taste of freedom, only a few feet away, tempted with promise. I just had to close the distance and take the first step. I left the bedroom and moved toward the foyer, like a teenager sneaking out past curfew. I felt like a child, excitement fluttering in my belly as my hand neared the doorknob.
Trepidation also stirred in my gut. If I disappeared, would Zach really hurt Rafe, a man he’d once called his best friend?
A knock sounded, and I jerked my fingers back. A few tense seconds passed before the knock repeated. For someone terrified of escaping the shackles of a life unwanted, I should have given more thought to the possibilities on the other side of that door. Swinging the duffle to my back, I pulled it open, and my breath whooshed from me as I uttered his name.
“Rafe.”
He was here, standing in front of me, and my knees almost buckled, weaker now than when I’d first spied his note upon returning home. A violent blast of air and rain blew in with his presence, carrying a hint of roses from the bushes off the porch. The aroma infused me with a sense of serenity despite the darkness shadowing my street.
I was the perfect prey in that moment, too stunned to keep my head. I stumbled back, a mistake on my part because he was the second man that night to shove his way into my house.
I’d always fantasized about taking a woman, really taking a woman, and until Alex had destroyed me with a single lie, the fantasy had only been the depraved thoughts of a man who still had his moral compass intact. A lot could change in eight years. Fuck, I remembered her as the 15-year-old girl she’d been, so I had trouble thinking of Alex as a woman. My dick didn’t have the same problem; it couldn’t wait to get her alone on Mason Island.
Engaging the deadbolt, I leaned against the door and stared at her with a nonchalance I didn’t feel. God help me, but I couldn’t take my eyes off all those dark curls cascading over her tiny shoulders. The slender slope of her neck drew my attention, and I imagined closing my hands around her throat and squeezing the essence from her, imagined the panic in her eyes as she neared loss of consciousness.
“Miss me?” I asked.
Her eyes, already wide at the sight of me, grew even rounder. “What?”
I crossed my arms, aware of how my biceps bulged. “I didn’t stutter, sweetheart. It’s been a long time. Did you miss me?”
“Did I…?” She shook her head, as if I’d uttered the most ridiculous question she’d ever heard. “What do you want, Rafe?” Her words fell from her lips in a nervous whisper.
“I think you already know.” You couldn’t send an innocent man to prison without expecting some sort of consequences. Except Alex didn’t know two fucks about me. The real Rafe Mason was about to do reprehensible things to her, like toss her deceitful naked ass into a cage.
Her gaze veered to the floor, and I barked at her to look at me.
“If I could change things, I would,” she said, inching back, a fist rising to her mouth to hide her trembling lips.
“Would you now?” I tilted my head. “What would you do differently? Would you take it back, what, a week later? A month? Maybe after I’d been in there a couple of years? Eight fucking years, Alex. That’s what you took from me.”
“I don’t know what you want from me.” Two more steps back.
I pushed away from the door and followed, hand sliding into my coat pocket to finger the syringe. “I want to know why you lied.” I’d waited so long to ask that question, and the set of her jaw told me she wasn’t going to answer. “You didn’t even have the guts to face me at the trial.” She’d refused to make eye contact, even once. That hadn’t surprised me nearly as much as Zach’s cold shoulder treatment. How he believed I’d do something so vile, to Alex of all people, was beyond comprehension. She must have put on quite the performance for her family, because her testimony in court had been mechanical, as if she’d read from a script.
She’d stripped everything from me in that courtroom. My career, friends, freedom, and she’d displayed no emotion while doing it.
“I-I can’t do this now,” she said, a tremor stringing her words together. “I have to go.” Darting past me, she made a run for the door and managed to fling it open by the time I whirled around. That’s when the duffle swinging on her shoulder caught my attention, and it dawned on me she was running.
Because of the note I’d left on her door? Guess my mind-fuckery had done the trick, only I never expected her to take off. There was no way she could know what I had planned for her. Before she escaped the house, I shot an arm out and slammed the door shut, then pressed into her soft curves that fit perfectly against me.
“You’re not going anywhere.” Even in that heady moment, as adrenaline pumped through my veins, I hesitated. What I was about to do changed everything. I was about to become the criminal they’d accused me of being.
But no one deserved comeuppance more than Alex.
The duffle slid from her shoulder, landing with a thump on the mud mat. She flattened both palms against the door, and I covered her hands with mine, sliding cool leather over warm skin. I wondered if the gloves worried her, if she sense the danger I posed. I wedged a leg between hers, thigh nudging her ass, and electricity spiked, a current so hot my whole body sizzled. Was she aware of it too? Did she feel my cock prodding her backside?
“You need to leave,” she ground out, but even as the wor
ds left her mouth, she relaxed in submission. She turned her head and peered at me through lashes slightly lowered, disguising what I might find in her jade depths. “Please, you’ve gotta go.”
I wanted to take her then, fuck her right against the door. “Not a chance. I’ve waited too long for this.” I latched the deadbolt again, satisfied with the decisive click that echoed off the walls, and pulled her further into the house.
“What are you doing?” she cried, tugging against the fingers I’d clamped around her arm.
I stopped once we reached the hall. “Where’s the note I left?” I couldn’t leave behind any evidence. “Did you show it to Zach?”
She yanked her arm from my grasp. “No, why?”
“Doesn’t matter. I want it back.”
“It’s in my bedroom.” She opened the first door on the right. Going by the clothing piled in haphazard fashion on the bed and the floor, she’d packed in a hurry. She crossed to her nightstand and withdrew the note from the drawer.
I snatched it from her fingers, making her flinch, and pocketed the last piece of evidence. “C’mon.” I dragged her into the kitchen, my pulse rocketing, and my jeans grew uncomfortably tight as I shoved her into a chair. She gazed up at me, mouth open, messy curls partially obscuring her eyes, and I was so close to bending her over the table.
Patience.
I couldn’t rush this, no matter how much I wanted to. “Don’t move,” I warned, pressing on her shoulders to make my point. I rummaged through the room, found a pen and paper, and slammed them on the table in front of her. “Write down what I say, word for word.”
“Why?”
“Quit asking so many fucking questions.” I forced the pen into her fingers, and she clutched it tight, hand hovering above the paper. The fury in her eyes wavered, replaced by confusion. She wasn’t scared of me yet, and I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.
“Rafe, what are you do—”
“Write ‘I need some time. Don’t worry or try to find me.’”
Short and to the point. The less written, the less the authorities could dissect. I expected them to look at me as a person of interest in her disappearance, but I was prepared for that inevitability. Besides, they’d need probable cause and a warrant to search the island, and they wouldn’t have either.
Lower lip tucked between her teeth, she wrote out the words and paid careful attention to each letter, her hand trembling every so often. Once finished, she set the pen down, angled her head, and met my eyes. She didn’t have to voice her alarm. Her expression was unmasked. Naively, she let me see everything.
“What happened to you?” she whispered.
She must have sensed the darkness in me, but what she failed to understand was how it had always lurked, entrapped by a code I no longer lived by. She’d blown the padlock on that cage when she’d uttered three little words that ruined me.
He raped me.
The accusation rang through my mind, as loud as the clank of the prison cell doors when they slammed shut. I grabbed the syringe from my pocket.
“What are you doing?” she cried, wide eyes locking onto the syringe. She jumped into motion and reached the foyer before I caught up to her. I wound an arm around her shoulders and pinned her against me. She bucked, kicked, and clawed, all the while letting loose a scream that made me so fucking hard I almost lost it. I uncapped the needle with my teeth and stabbed it into the side of her neck. An instant later, she went limp in my arms.
Consciousness washed over me in dream-like phases, the first a stifling darkness that pressed from every direction. I trembled as an inescapable chill crawled over my skin like icy tendrils, licking with relish. Hard, rough concrete chafed my body. My naked body. Acid rose in my throat, and I thought I was about to lose my last meal, but the observation only caused more panic to set in. I couldn’t recall what I’d eaten.
For a few horror-stricken moments, I couldn’t recall anything at all. Then I remembered.
Rafe’s face burned in my head, his older, scruffier face. His unforgiving face. The rest of my memories flooded back, and I jerked to total awareness. He’d jabbed a needle into my neck.
Now, I felt it, his presence casting over me like a shadow waiting to swallow me whole. I tried to throw my hands up, my first instinct one of protection, but something heavy and cold and menacing kept my wrists locked together, stretched behind my head and chained to…something. I whimpered as my brain tried to pound out through my eyeballs.
“Good, you’re awake.”
His voice shouldn’t sound so sexy under the circumstances, but that gravelly timbre, barely above a whisper, registered low in my belly.
“Rafe?” I had to be hallucinating or dead. This couldn’t be real.
I sensed movement, a drift of air and swoosh of clothing, and a dim light switched on. Several seconds passed as I blinked my surroundings into focus. I was sprawled on the ground of some sort of cage, my hands secured to the bars. I yanked on my bindings, and the bite of chains to metal made me shudder. My gaze shifted, taking in the space beyond my prison, which was cloaked in shadow, and I thought I spied rows of wine bottles. I returned my attention to him, mouth hanging open as I tried to comprehend that he had me bound and naked.
Rafe stood on the other side and circled the bars with white-knuckled fingers as he glared down at me. “You can try to escape if you want, but I think you’re smart enough to know when you’re fucked.”
On some level, I’d known this day would come. The day I’d have to face him. The day he’d demand an explanation for what I’d done. I’d imagined screaming and yelling on his part. Furious righteousness. Never this. As he withdrew a set of keys and moved to the door of the cage, any hope of forgiveness I’d clung to vanished. I couldn’t stop shaking as he stormed inside.
“What do you want from me?” I asked, nervous about the answer, especially when I thought of how my nudity was on display.
“Do you really want to know what I want?” The corner of his mouth turned up in the legendary Rafe Mason smirk I remembered.
“Yes.”
He bent and crawled over me, his knees settling at the apex of my thighs, and palmed the concrete on either side of my head. I licked my dry lips, acutely aware of how his clothing tickled my skin. That mere contact, the brush of denim on inner thigh, chased some of the chill away.
“I want to fuck you,” he said, and the way those words played off his tongue, with a riff of sinister intent, made my heart jackhammer. His biceps flexed under the strain of supporting his weight, and my attention closed in on the tribal lines streaking out from underneath his sleeves. Breathtaking ink on hard man, winding down strong forearms to the back of his hands. He lowered his face, a tilt to his head, and commanded my gaze. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
I wasn’t sure what I expected him to say or do, and I couldn’t begin to measure how angry he was. “I don’t know what to say, Rafe.”
“You don’t have to say anything. I want what’s mine, what I served time for.”
I gulped. “You didn’t have to kidnap me.”
“You’re right,” he said, his lips hovering, almost touching mine. “I didn’t have to kidnap you, but I wanted to, and I always get what I want. The last eight fucking years notwithstanding, of course. You made sure of that.”
He shifted his weight to the side and brought a key to my wrists. The lock released, and I pulled free of the bars.
“Get up,” he said, rising to his feet.
The floor tilted in a dizzying whirl, but once I regained my bearings, I stood before him, face-to-face with the man I’d wronged. He was just as gorgeous as ever, though his green eyes told me things he didn’t voice. They hinted at how my actions had ruined a good person, because the one before me was anything but.
My heart ached for the guy I remembered, with his deep laugh and teasing grin. The same mouth that sneered at me now used to curve into the sexiest smile when he caught me staring. I’d fallen hard, enticed by
the irresistible contradiction that was Rafe Mason, a guy who displayed a quiet, gentle aura, yet used brute force on his opponents inside the cage. His only crime had been catching the eye of damaged goods.
“Why’d you do it, Alex?” He moved, blocking the opening of the prison and hindering any chance I had to escape.
I wrapped my arms around myself, feeling sick as I recalled the day they arrested him. The media had splashed footage all over the news, and I’d never forget the way his head hung in shame as they hauled him outside my father’s gym where he trained, hands cuffed at his back as if he were really guilty. Sometimes, merely being accused of something, even when innocent, could psyche a person into experiencing false guilt. Zach was an expert at that particular mental warfare.
“I asked you a question,” he snapped.
The moment had arrived, the one I’d dreaded for years, but my mind drew a blank. What could I tell him? There was no excuse or explanation that would make this right. Even the truth didn’t excuse sending an innocent man to prison. “I’m sorry,” I said, fighting tears. “You have every right to be angry.”
“Are you refusing to give me an explanation? Don’t you think I deserve that much?”
I dipped my head, thick hair falling forward and shadowing the shame warming my cheeks. What he deserved was nothing less than the truth, but it caught in my throat, perpetually trapped by my need for him to never find out about Zach and me. “I can’t give you one. It won’t change anything.”
“I see.” He came closer, hands bunching at his sides, and ordered me to lower my arms.
I backed up, hating how my body throbbed with indecent anticipation. My eyes burned, but I hadn’t cried in a long time, not since my mother died and Rafe had embraced me while I lost it. That seemed like a lifetime ago. I blinked several times, willing the tears to dry up, but the sight of him lowered the gates. Something fundamental in him had changed.
My fault.
My doing.
A tear slipped free. With casual ease, he scooped it up and sucked the moisture off his finger. “Hands at your sides, now.”