by Lana Grayson
And after?
I pulled from Nicholas’s arms.
I’d learn to survive without them.
“Sarah.” Nicholas frowned as I stepped away. “What happened? Are you okay?”
A tangled chaos of pained words rose from my fluttering chest. Silence comforted me, but it challenged Nicholas—tempted him, angered him, exposed the desperation in his voice only I recognized.
“I told you to wait for me.” Those golden eyes weren’t beautiful now. They hardened in frustration. “Why didn’t you wait?”
I had begged him to stay. Why hadn’t he stayed?
“I didn’t know where you went,” he said. “I thought you were hurt!”
I was.
Max and Reed shared a wordless glance. I preferred their confusion. It was better than their pity. It was better than the helpless rage I suffered each night when the darkness pinned me against the bed without a chance to scratch or punch.
Reed cleared his throat. “Sarah, maybe you should sit down?”
No. Sitting would comfort me, and comfort would only encourage me back to Nicholas’s arms.
Nicholas’s stare tangled me in secrets, lies, and unspoken heartache. He waited, patiently, as though his presence would crack my silence and force me to speak, act, and beg.
Just like Darius.
But I was through submitting to him. To any of them.
My chest tightened.
Why didn’t he stay with me that night?
Nicholas’s voice rumbled in a hard authority. “You left as soon as you inherited the Josmik Trust. I made an agreement with our Board. They let you live if you sold the shares back!”
He thought it was a power play. It wasn’t. For those horrible hours just before dawn, I’d have given the Bennetts every last cent I owned. The farm. The ranches. Everything.
And, in the most shameful moment of my life, I had offered.
Darius declined.
But what was done, was done. I wouldn’t ever beg. I’d never let them see me cry.
And I would never again surrender to anything Darius or the Board willed. I’d have them suffer instead.
“Sarah,” Nicholas said. I flinched as he reached for me. “For Christ’s sake, I had no idea what happened to you.”
Because he didn’t stay with me.
“You didn’t call. You didn’t answer your emails.”
Did he want an apology?
“I thought my father had you killed.”
It wouldn’t have been that simple.
Max exhaled, drawing Nicholas’s attention and breaking the intensity of his demands.
“Baby, you feeling all right?” he eyed Nicholas. “You don’t look so good.”
The understatement of the night. The tightness in my chest hadn’t alleviated, and Nicholas’s crushing interrogation did nothing to ease my queasy stomach.
“Come on.” Reed reached for my hand. I pulled away. “It’s okay. Just sit and rest for a second.”
I didn’t need to rest. The words I longed to say choked over the confession I refused to give. I looked away. Nicholas wasn’t done yet.
“Jesus Christ.” Nicholas’s stillness broke with a frustrated grunt and hand through his hair. His voice turned harsh, the crystalline edge of glass ready to shatter and shred. “I had no fucking idea if you were alive or dead, if you planned to sell the stock and destroy the company, if you left me, if you hated me, if something terrible had happened.”
I said nothing.
“Sarah, I held you in my arms. You said you loved me. I promised I’d be back for you.”
And I asked him not to leave. We both made mistakes. Some hurt more than others.
“Was it a lie?” he didn’t look away. “Don’t pretend you don’t care about me. Don’t act like that night meant nothing to you. I was there. I took you. I felt every goddamned word you said to me, so don’t stand there in goddamned silence like you don’t fucking care—”
“Nick, I’m pregnant.”
Chilled, piercing truth layered me in a quick sweat.
Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.
My step-brothers were threatened with a gun held against my temple. They were forced to hurt me, to kidnap me, to punish me. They suffered through a childhood of abuses at the hands of a monster who raised them to harbor his same cruelties and aggressions.
And yet one word broke them.
One word crippled our fragile alliance.
One single, life-changing word presented Nicholas with everything he once planned to lie, steal, and destroy to acquire for his own.
My life twisted when the test revealed the double lines. I’d have no baby showers and well-wishers, no excited family or darling nurseries.
It wasn’t pregnancy. It was war.
If I wanted to protect myself, my farm, and my child, the truth would follow Darius to his grave. The rape would be forgotten. I carried Nicholas’s son.
And I’d never reveal otherwise.
“You’re…” Nicholas stared. Max hadn’t moved. Reed averted his eyes. “You’re pregnant.”
I nodded.
His breath shuddered. “That night…when you inherited the shares...”
“Yes.”
“That was two months ago. You’re…two months pregnant,” he said.
I nodded. “But the doctors count it like ten weeks because of my cycle.”
Reed counted on his fingers. Max paled. But Nicholas recovered with grace. Then again, he had imagined this moment for so long, months of attempts and plans, fertility drugs and dark hope. Of course he could face it so easily.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
A crack formed in my heart. I felt it, bound it tight, and collected every flaking fragment before I lost what precious devotion it beat for Nicholas.
“Why would I?”
His mocha voice smoothed, too patronizing for little more than a sticky layer of authority over me. He beckoned me forward. Like he wanted me to fall into his embrace, like he’d make everything all right.
I wasn’t that weak.
“You’re scared,” he said. “I understand. I just…we didn’t think it was possible.”
“Bullshit.”
“Sarah—”
“You always planned for this to happen. All of you. Every minute of every day, each of you wanted this to happen.”
The harshness of my tone shocked everyone.
Max folded his arms behind his head, eager to witness how his brother would resolve this. He always treated me like a problem to be handled. Or worse. He used me against Nicholas in a relentless sibling rivalry that sacrificed my body as a battlefield. They thought I never noticed.
Reed extended a hand. I’d break it before I let him touch me.
“Just stay calm,” Reed said.
I was beyond calm.
The nausea, exhaustion, and terror spoke for me. Each word sharper, more frustrated than the last.
“You kidnapped me. Fucked me. Held me down and laughed about rutting me until the seed took. You meant for me to get pregnant. And don’t you deny it, Nicholas Bennett. You told me each and every time you fucked me that you intended for it to happen. This—” I gestured to my tummy, flat with the secret it cradled. “—was always what you wanted.”
Nicholas nodded. “You understood that. You agreed to it.”
“Because it was never supposed to happen!” The words punished me with idiocy. “It was supposed to be impossible. I was infertile!”
Max hid a twisted smile. “Apparently not.”
No, apparently not. Apparently I was just fertile enough to get impregnated by either the man I loved or his demented father. I’d forever be remembered as a whore for my step-brother or a victim of my step-father, and both options suffocated me in panic and rage.
I had an opportunity to end the crisis before it got worse, but I left that information at the clinic.
I was an Atwood. For as much as the Bennetts desired their heir, my family line, my
blood, was too good for that end.
Nicholas silenced his brother with a glance. “You’re upset.”
“Upset?” I laughed. “I’m not upset.”
My step-brothers disagreed but had the sense to stay silent. I stared at each of them, catching Nicholas’s possessive gaze, Max’s challenging smirk, and Reed’s gentle support.
“This was the plan, right? Capture the girl. Imprison her. Rape her if she was unwilling or seduce her so she’d willingly spread her legs.”
They called to me. I didn’t let them speak.
“Each of you planned to impregnate me and steal my farm and fortune. You’d use the child as leverage to eliminate the threat against the Bennett Corporation.” I lowered my voice. “You all wanted this. You all needed this. You did as Daddy ordered and now…?”
I held my arms out. Shrugged. Gritted my teeth.
“You bred me like a fucking animal. Congratulations.”
Nicholas stepped forward. I batted his arm away, but the motion blurred in the haze of blinded vision. I gasped for a breath that never came and damned the constant threat that bound me in more danger than anything Darius planned.
“Sarah, sit,” he said. “Where’s your inhaler?”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“You’re having an asthma attack.”
Of course I was. “That thought never crossed your mind, did it?”
Reed tossed Nicholas my purse. I refused the inhaler.
“You didn’t think about me. Not in any of this.”
“I always thought about you,” Nicholas said. “Every second since you came to the estate.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Sarah, I’m in love with you.”
“If you really loved me,” I spat the word, “you never would have abducted a twenty year old. You wouldn’t have tied me to that bed and stolen my virginity.”
He stiffened, but I didn’t stop. I ripped the inhaler from his hand only to wag it in front of his face.
“You would have considered how dangerous it was to impregnate a woman with this kind of uncontrolled asthma. You would have thought how terrifying it’d be for me to be taken from my home, my school, my life, and forced into a prison where your father—”
The choked cough interrupted me before the memory doused me in weeping fear. I puffed the inhaler. Nicholas stood before me, his eternal, frustrating stillness. I hated it. I envied it. I needed it.
I had to escape from it.
From him.
My words trembled. I met Nicholas’s gaze and adopted his authority as my own.
After all, what did I have to fear?
Darius took what he wanted. My step-brothers fulfilled their obligation to the family name. I was rutted, seeded, and left to suffer the consequences with my life destroyed and another growing in me. Had they considered the baby beyond what rights it would inherit?
Even tiny, hardly a flutter within me, the child was more powerful than any of us—the billions he’d inherit, the names he’d possess. The only thing the Bennetts wanted more than me was their heir.
And while he grew in me, I would own them all. The stock. The child. The future.
It was mine.
“I didn’t come to tell you about the pregnancy.” I held Nicholas’s stare. “I came because I need your help.”
“Sarah—”
I didn’t let him speak. “I’m pregnant, but Darius and the Board don’t know. You will ensure it stays that way.”
Max was always the observant one. “They’ll notice eventually, don’t you think?”
“No.”
Reed tried to be reasonable. “You aren’t running again. You’re pregnant, Sarah. You need to be at home. With doctors and rest and good food and—”
I finished for him. “And a life free of stress and fear and the constant dread that sometime, somewhere Darius will…” The memory sickened me. “Hurt me.”
“He won’t,” Nicholas vowed.
The damned fool. It’d be tragic if his father’s touch didn’t linger like grease over my skin.
“No, he won’t hurt me or this child,” I said. “Because you won’t let him.”
“That is my promise to you.”
Broken without even realizing it.
“I ran because he would have found me. I’m sick. I’m exhausted. I haven’t slept a full night since…” Hell if I knew. Not since before the attack. Not since Nicholas saved me from his father and the board. Not since I stole the trust and tried to protect myself with the money and power Darius coveted. “I need to feel safe.”
“You will be safe with me.” Nicholas stepped too close, promised too much. “You and the baby. Sarah, let me help you. Let me take care of you—”
“There is nothing you can do while Darius is still alive.” I retreated from his arms. “If you really want to protect me, you will kill him. As soon as possible. Before…”
Before he found out about the baby.
Before he reveled in the rape.
Before he ruined everything like he tried to ruin me.
The tears and sickness ripped me apart only to force the raw pieces back together in a broken array, just disjointed enough to render me unrecognizable, pained.
Heartbreak struck me harder than any attack, hurt me more than any assault, and left me mourning a love more wonderful than my lost innocence.
“We are going to kill Darius,” I said. “And then I’m leaving you, Nick. It’s over. The captivity. The false promises. I refuse to put myself or my baby in danger.”
I expected Nicholas’s challenge, but nothing he did would force me to submit to him.
Not ever again.
“My son will never know his father is a Bennett.”
5
Nicholas
It worked.
Sarah Atwood was pregnant with my child.
We left her alone as she requested. The deck jutted into the darkened woods, muffling the words we hadn’t the courage to speak. Max cracked open a beer and pushed it into my hand. Reed leaned against the balcony rail, his perpetual disappointment memorialized in a frown as we, yet again, mistreated the girl.
I hadn’t sipped my beer. I preferred whiskey. We all did. Why hide who we really were? Certainly not now, not when every depraved and monstrous obsession burning in our blood suddenly realized within the tears of the woman we promised to protect.
Reed offered her his bed for the night. Sarah took it without protest, shutting the door behind her.
Then locking it.
Did she honestly believe a wooden door would keep me from her?
Did she think she could hide her pregnancy from me and then cast me from her life?
She threatened to keep me from my son—a word she spoke with such certainty I didn’t know if it was mother’s intuition or her own fear for a male heir that dared us to think otherwise.
I captured her once. I secured a collar around her fragile neck, and I bound her arms above her head while I mounted her morning, afternoon, and night.
Sarah Atwood never had the privilege of escaping from me. Not when we first stole her. Not now that she carried my child.
Not while I suffered in the twisted, agonizing relief that was finally seeing her, touching her, hearing her voice.
Even if she meant to break my heart.
I loved Sarah Atwood. I wanted her more than I ever wanted her heir.
And I had one, but not the other.
This disaster required something stronger than a drink brewed into brown glass.
Then again, we were supposed to smoke imported cigars for this victory. Clink our glasses of vintage brandy and chuckle in satisfaction.
Sarah upped the bet by a thousand dollars. Reed folded. Max swore and chucked his cards over the table.
I matched her bet and called.
“Seriously?” she laughed. “We’re billionaires. This hand getting a little too steep for you, Bennett?”
Tough words for a
girl who was down to her panties from our first few rounds of the game. Of course, we ganged up on her. In more ways than one.
“Thinking of changing the stakes.”
She rolled her eyes. “Clothes, money. I’m your prisoner remember? What can I possibly bet?”
I grinned. “Something very important.”
“Name it.”
“Exactly.”
Sarah adjusted her arm, trying to hide her breasts while holding her cards. “I don’t understand.”
“If you get pregnant this month—”
“If.”
“Winner gets to name the baby.”
“Oh, you’re sick.” She rolled her eyes. “But you’ll never beat my hand.”
I held four of a kind, and her eyebrow twitched when she bluffed.
I hoped she liked the name Adam.
“So.” Max chugged his beer. “Who wants to tell her we were about to kill Dad. You know, before that idiot ruined the plan?”
“Hey.” Reed swore. “She called me and asked for help. What the hell was I supposed to do? Tell her to fuck off because we were busy?”
Max shrugged. “She might have wanted to help.”
“No.” Shock and perverse joy bound my words. “I won’t let her be involved in something like this. She’s pregnant. We’re not endangering her or the…my child.”
“You did it.” Max toasted me with a sarcastic nod of the beer. “How’s it feel, Daddy?”
Like I betrayed an innocent, beautiful woman. Like I fulfilled the promise I made each time I took her to my bed, seized her in my sheets, and violated her while pretending to make love.
And yet…
I succeeded.
I took her. I held her. I bred her.
My primal, savage instincts weren’t quelled with a simple rut and the lure of submission. My urges required a visceral proof of her conquering. This was the result I longed for, the product of complete and utter dominance.
Sarah was right.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
I wasn’t supposed to be this way.
I loved her, but Sarah and I never planned for a future together, only for a funeral which had yet to happen.
Max read my thoughts, but he didn’t have the common sense to leave it unspoken.
“How do we keep this pregnancy from him?” Max asked.