Skylar never moved to help me, she acted as though nothing out of the ordinary happened and disappeared into the darkness with the three gentlemen.
After waiting three hours for Skylar—it was a quarter to four in the morning—I decided it was time to get home.
Outside, while walking down the broken path toward my car, I texted Skylar to tell her that I was leaving and she had five minutes to come with me.
I received a response right away containing a picture of her holding a cock in her mouth. Disgusted, I turned off my phone and shoved it into my handbag. With my hand still searching around inside my bag, I remembered Skylar had my car keys.
I looked up and startled at the sight. Jerking upright, I clutched my racing heart. Elias was leaning up against the passenger side of my car. His arms hung tensely at his sides. He broadened his shoulders as tension took a hold of his facial muscles.
Jaco was with him, pacing the sidewalk a few feet away. He walked around, searching the area speculatively as though he was Elias’s personal bodyguard.
Elias's car was parked dead in front my Camaro, while another car had pulled up behind it, leaving only a few centimeters of space between the bumpers.
I scanned his appearance: his well-rested eyes, smoothly shaven skin, his pressed black shirt, open at the collar, and creaseless slacks. I began to wonder where he came from, how he knew I was here, and why he looked so refreshed at an ungodly hour.
“Hanley,” Elias began, his tone cold and low, “is there a very good reason as to why you’re in this type of neighborhood at almost four o’clock in the morning?”
Thinking I should’ve been the one asking the questions, I shot a suspicious look at Jaco and then to Elias. “How did you find me?"
He arched a brow. "You're very unbiddable, but not imperceptive. Take a wild guess.”
I studied the Camaro for answers, happening upon one that stunned me—the car was equipped with a GPS tracker. “Why are you tracking me?"
He pushed off of the car, walking toward me with so much purpose my nerves became more frazzled. His heat and scent pressed at me as he looked down at me. Not a hint of geniality was in his face. “Who were you with?"
"Skylar,” I offered up the answer a little too easily.
Exhaling slowly, he sank his teeth into his bottom lip while shaking his head at me. “Listen to me very carefully; Skylar is a work associate that you will not associate with outside of work. She will not be your friend or a woman you hang out with outside of work. In case you need clarification, that wasn’t a question or a suggestion, it was a demand.” Both hands grabbed either side of my face, forcing my head into a position that made looking away from him impossible.
“You don’t have the goddamn right to tell me who I can and cannot see,” I growled back, trying to push him away.
He grabbed my flailing arms, yanking them down to my sides with such a brutal force, my shoulders protested in pain. He pushed me toward the street and latched his hand on the back of my head, ensuring I faced the Camaro. “Jaco, it seems clear to me that I need to send a message to my very rebellious girlfriend.” His eyes narrowed as he began to smile in a smug manner. “Do you catch my meaning?”
“Understood.” Jaco sneered in kind and nodded. He rounded his car, parked behind mine, and reached into the retracted window on the passenger side to retrieve a metal bat. He walked up to us and tossed it to Elias who caught it in one hand.
With a terrifying look in his squinting eyes, Elias pinched my chin and hissed, “Watch.” He stalked over to my car with his grip strong and swung—brutally, swiftly, and strongly—shattering the window of the Camaro with one hit. The security alarm immediately enacted its loud defense, but was rendered as background noise to the crash and crunching sound of the windows being shattered. Never slowing down, he proceeded to walk around the car, shattering the other three side windows. Each hit and impact made me jolt as though I was the one being hit. When he was done, he handed off the bat to Jaco, and ambled up the walk to face me. A proud smile brightened up his face, making the moment hit me a little harder.
The resounding alarm was so deafening, I couldn't enact a defense when Elias pulled me down the path and ushered me to the passenger side of his car and made sure I stepped inside. The moment he settled into the driver’s seat, he promptly locked the doors. Thanks to his modernization of the interior of the car, the safety locks worked to make sure I couldn’t get out.
He glimpsed at the rearview with a humorless skewed grin. “It looks as though your car will be in the shop for a few days. Maybe more. I'm going to take you to and from work. When I'm not able, Jaco will. You have two destinations to visit after you're done with work. My place, or your home. Nowhere else, Hanley. I'm going to ask you to repeat what I asked you to do, or I'll have Jaco add a few weeks to the repair time."
“Are you crazy? Asked me? You didn’t ask me. You demanded after you wrecked my car.” I looked over my shoulder at Jaco, tossing the baseball bat from hand to hand while waiting for Elias’s instructions.
Elias cupped my chin, ensuring I met his darkly-shielded eyes. “That would be because I find it completely unnecessary to ask you to do something you should be willing to do on your own. Do I need to remind you how serious I am?”
“I won't hang out with Skylar outside of work,” I said begrudgingly. It was an empty promise. I had no intention of giving into what he wanted because the method he used to convince me was severe.
He leaned forward, allowing his lips to touch mine. “You were putting your safety at risk. A beautiful woman like you, driving a seventy-five thousand dollar car, in a neighborhood like this, is a crime waiting to happen." He gently kissed my lips. "I missed you. Don't give me a reason to miss you more." He started up the car and began to drive off.
I snapped my neck to regard my battered Camaro. “What about the car?"
"Jaco has an extra set of keys and will have it towed to a repair shop. You don’t have to worry about anything, Hanley. That’s my job. Put your seatbelt on.”
In a huff, I pulled the belt around my body and fastened it. Boiling mad, I kept my gaze out of the window instead of on the face of a man who showed me pieces of the fatal flaws hidden beneath his beautiful exterior.
ELIAS PULLED INTO the driveway to my father’s home after hours of silence in his car. He removed the key from the ignition and walked me to the door. My pace made sure he had to walk swiftly to catch up to me. Thankful that I kept the house and car keys on separate key rings, I fully intended to go inside the house without having to say goodbye.
My hips were grabbed the instant I laid my hand on the door knob. He twirled me and gently pushed me against the door. The shield of madness was released for desire. In response, my anger began to dissipate and made way for the sensation he coerced out of my body. His eyes, his lips, the crooked grin all served one purpose—to make me feel stupefied.
I hated the way he could command me away from certain moods with just a look or a simple gesture. It was too easy for him to take control of me with very little effort at times.
When he was near to kissing me, his cool stream of breath tickling my lips, I thrust myself out of a near successful seduction. “That was not okay,” I stated quieter than I meant it to come across.
He searched my eyes in silence, the austerity taking over again. “I’m fully aware of my actions and whether they are right or wrong. I act against morals and socially accepted norms when it’s needed.
“If you think there is a fault inside my brain that makes determining right from wrong troubling for me, you’re wrong. I purposely ignore the line because I can. Nothing I do is okay, Hanley. Increasingly when it comes to you, it will be inexplicable. Don't make decisions which force me to react this way. Your safety is tantamount to my well-being.”
He shook me. Severely. There was no way I could’ve worked around someone who knew their psychotic actions were wrong but cared little for the consequences. It was as though he�
�d told me he was insane because he chose to be, not because he lacked the ability to be sane. A man like him was a dangerous creature. He dismantled all of my preconceived notions. My father was right to advise me to back down. There was a larger problem: I’d become hooked on what Elias drew out of me. I was enraptured with him and had no desire to feel anything less.
“Coming from the man who almost ran me over when we met, it's kind of laughable."
His iron façade cracked, bringing a dimpled smile to his face that made my heart ignite. He linked his hands into mine, pulling me forward. "I'm a very intense guy, Ley. It's just who I am. I'll go to the extremes to protect what I have. That includes you. I'm very familiar with Skylar, while you’ve barely scratched the surface of the kind of person she is. If I'm telling you not to be around her, it's because I know things you clearly don't, not because I'm trying to isolate you."
“Why do you two hate each other so much?” I questioned.
“If she was a factor for you to be concerned about when it comes to me,” he replied casually, “I would tell you the reasons. She’s not; therefore, there really is no need for me to explain. The past is the past.”
“Were you two…together?”
He laughed as though the idea was preposterous. “I know you heard what I said. Pestering me about it isn’t going to get you the answers you want.”
“Fine,” I conceded. “I understand you don’t want me around her because you think she’s bad for me, but can I judge her for myself? I’m not some impressionable, fragile woman.”
"Hanley," he warned darkly, “if you thought tonight was severe, don’t push me to show you just how bad I can be.”
I sighed, wanting to move forward instead of fighting a battle neither of us would really win. “I’ll stay away from her,” I lied.
A smirk of satisfaction pressed against his lips, telling me that he believed me. “It's becoming harder and harder to say goodbye to you."
"Then…make it quick.”
"I don't do quick, minha amada." With me firmly in his arms, he dipped me and kissed me softly, slowly, exploring my mouth with his lips and his tongue and making me ache for more. The second I was ready to ask him to meet me in the back of the house, he released me and wished me a good night.
My father sat on the patio just outside the back door when I returned home. He was smoking one of the exotic cigars he usually saved for special occasions, or rough times. The dawning sun served as a backlight. He’d obviously felt my presence, but didn’t feel compelled to regard me when I stepped out on the patio. He clutched his cell phone in his lap, touching the screen to illuminate the surface and show the time. “Why didn’t you check in?” he asked, his voice tired and hoarse.
I exhaled sharply and sat in the adjacent lawn chair. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Is it that Skylar woman you’ve been hanging around?” He slanted his head up to look at the sky with a scowl. “I don’t care for her. I haven’t met her, but I don’t care for her.”
“You're not the only one,” I groaned. “I'm trying to appear normal, Dad. Seems you, nor Mr. Control Freak, want that.”
He rubbed his forehead with the fat cigar laced between his fingers. “Are we doing what we planned or not? I wanted you out of this, but you fought to continue. I don’t understand. If we’re still on the plan, why are you disobeying him? If that's what he wants of you, listen to him. Don't let some strange girl ruin this for you. For all of us."
“Having her as a friend might help me.”
He finally gave me eye contact. “Is that what it really is?”
My comfort was snatched from me with the way he stared at me. I submitted again for the night to avoid an argument or rehashing of things we’d gone over far too many times.
“Fine,” he said, startling me with his increased volume. “You know what you’re doing and obviously don’t want my say in any of it.”
I shook my head. “I’ve done it before.”
“It was a failure, remember? You said this one is different. I can’t help but think he’s different because you feel for him. It’s odd, the first man you fall for, and it’s him? If there was a man you should’ve felt anything for it’s the man who—”
"Elias has his sweet moments. Roth was verbally abusive.” He was just as adamant about me remaining detached with Roth as he was with Elias. His ire was obviously rooted in a different cause. “Isn’t this what you wanted? For me to be what you think is normal?”
“Hanley,” he gasped, “this is different. Any other man and I might be fine with it. Elias isn’t the one. Everything has to slide into perfect working order.”
“No one said the plan can’t be adjusted. Maybe I can do what we said and…” I knew I wasn’t ready to initiate that part of the plan yet, much less change the way it should proceed. To save face, I told him, “Give me a little more time.”
He glared at me, his eyes shimmering against the heightening sun. “The drugstore called, by the way. Your prescription is ready.” He brushed past me, giving me a look that disclosed he knew the prescription was for birth control pills, and headed upstairs. It served as proof of things I wanted to deny, and now he knew the truth: I was diverting from our original plan.
With my phone in my hand, I walked inside my bedroom and closed the door. I set my phone down on the desk right beside the door. On my way to the bathroom en suite, I began to remove my shirt until I saw Elias in my bedroom leaned up against the frame of the French doors.
“You can’t be here like this.” I marched forward with my hands on my hips, speaking to him in a hushed tone. “You should at least call first, or I don’t know, knock on the door like a normal person.”
Slanting down, he kissed my forehead as he reached behind him and locked the French doors. “Why would I have to call unless you had company? Myself excluded, you shouldn’t have any company at this time of the morning—or at all.” His lips moved down to my nose, making his offensive statement hit a little less harder than it would have had he not been touching me. "I feel like I fucked with you a little too much today. I want to make it up to you."
Freeing myself from his grasp, I flopped down on my bed, exhaling a long stream of air.
"You make me feel crazed." Brooding, he sat on the edge of my bed alongside me.
I smiled softly at him using the term “crazed.” I turned my smile down, when I realized he followed me with his goon and wrecked my car like he was some kind of thug leader. Not to mention, he showed up in my room unannounced and uninvited. “You don't act like an architect.”
The charming smile made a return. "What does an architect behave like?"
"Keep in mind, I've worked with a lot of them."
He stood and strolled around my room to inspect my furniture. "I own the firm, I never said I was an actual architect there."
"I could've sworn you did."
"Then, you heard wrong." He sauntered toward me and bent over. I tilted my head up to meet his face. My lips parted, ready to receive his kiss.
“I didn’t come here to fight with you.” He thumbed my chin, pushing it down until my mouth opened. Teasing me, he licked the dip in my lips. His body moved forward, forcing me to crawl backward and sink deeper into the bed. He knelt between my legs and whipped off his shirt.
Elias had to be the closest to perfection I’d ever seen. Before me was the model for—well, an underwear model.
When he unbuttoned his pants, the opening came completely apart and slipped down his hips, showing his thick and long erection pressed down the leg of his snug boxer briefs. He slid his pants off his legs, allowing them to pool onto the floor.
“I see the wide-eyed look.” He traced my bottom lip with his thumb. “I haven’t decided what I’m going to do to you, but don’t worry, I’m not planning on fucking you tonight." He sucked in a breath and allowed it to slowly release around my neck, drawing out a shocking, chilling sensation on my skin. "You make me so tense,” he said, his words
breathy and low. “I'm trying to figure out if it's because you don't listen or because you persistently make very bad decisions.” His lips made a trail down my neck, burning me to an uncomfortable and sweltering temperature level. “Either way,” he whispered against my skin, “you're putting me through changes I don't like.”
Pulling me out of my ascension, he took my hand and moved it down the ridges and peaks of his body until it slid underneath his boxer briefs. As my hand surrounded the shaft, it hardened and thickened against my palm. “And then…you do this to me every single time I see you.” He began to gyrate against my hand, making his cock slide in and out of my grip. “You’re torturing me, do you know that?”
I blinked rapidly, fighting hard to remove myself from the way he swayed me. Finding my clarity, I figured out exactly what he wanted. He was in the wrong, yet wanted me to make him feel better? In any other scenario, I would’ve slapped him for it and made him be the one to make it up to me. Right now, he was where I wanted him to be. Because of that, I swallowed my pride and played along.
Needing to act quickly, and only knowing one way to do it, I put on the act I was sure would’ve worked.
“I’ll…make it up to you,” I whispered. Removing my hand from his cock, I glided both hands up to settle on his shoulders. I pushed until he lifted off the bed and stood. Sliding off the bed, I pressed myself against him and gently kissed his chest, between his perfectly formed chest muscles. He shuddered under my lips and slipped his hand up to the back of my head, tangling it in my hair and angled my head upward. Leaning down, he kissed me, sucking and biting my lips.
I slipped my hands down and curled them underneath the waistband of his boxer-briefs.
He released me, and I knelt down, scraping my lips against the dips and ridges of his body. I slipped my hands around and up to cup his firm ass. My mouth brushed against the small trail of hair that led to a neatly trimmed patch of pubic hair. Using my tongue, I explored the head of his erection straining against the cotton material.
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