by Jenna Mills
I didn't plan what happened next. Something came over me, and suddenly the game, the research, took over. I wasn't me anymore. He wasn't Aidan. I had no idea who we were, what was happening—
Only that it had to stop.
His hands found my breasts, and whoever I'd become came to life, jerking back enough to lift my foot and slam it into the front of his knee.
He buckled, went down on a guttural shout.
And I staggered away.
Through the darkness.
I had no idea why—anger maybe. Frustration. Confusion.
But I didn't get far.
I slammed into a wall in the same second his hand closed around my ankle, tugging me down to the floor with him. And then he was on me, and I was under him, and I was trapped, couldn't move—
"Kendall."
My name. His voice.
The combination stopped me. I lay there, beneath him, frozen.
"Breathe," he said quietly, and then the blindfold was gone, ripped from my face, and he was there, hovering over me, not menacing, but his face a collection of hard, concerned lines.
"Just breathe," he said again, this time the words like the stroke of a feather.
"My hands," I managed. "Untie my hands."
Efficiently, he did.
I moved fast, slipping from beneath him to scoot back against the wall, needing to sever—
To sever it all. Everything. The way he touched me, looked at me. The way I felt...burned.
Real. It had all seemed so real.
"I didn't expect that," I said, or tried to say, but once again, the words came out more of a rasp.
"Neither did I."
Real, I thought again. He seemed as shaken as I was.
"Was that what you wanted?" I asked in a hard, hot rush, not sure why I was still unravelling, unravelling when the game was over and pretenses dropped, unravelling when I should have felt safe. "Was that the research you had in mind? To see if I would freak out—"
No. The answer flashed like dark lightning through his eyes. But he didn't give voice to the word. "I can use it."
Use.
It.
The words twisted through me. "I'm not sure whether you're completely twisted, sick, or..." I searched for the right word, the one that described the tangled mess inside me.
"Or what?" he asked.
I tried to read his expression.
I wanted to read his expression.
Couldn't.
"Demented," I said, lifting my chin, but in truth, I had no idea whether I was teasing, or dead serious.
"Isn't that the same as sick?" he asked.
I wanted to look away. I wanted to look away so crazy bad. But even more, even worse, the need to absorb still burned through me. To absorb—
Everything.
"Cruel," I said.
A corner of his mouth lifted. "Same as twisted," he said. "Try again."
I didn't know whether to laugh or shove him as hard as I could. But to shove him, I'd have to touch him—
"Didn't you trust me?" he asked.
All the light, it was across the room now, leaving us in semi-darkness. And I sat there, searching his eyes, and not understanding what I saw.
"I would never have let you blindfold me, if I didn't trust you," I told him, because in that moment, the words, the truth, seemed more important than the game.
"Then why were you coming unglued?"
My breath caught. I was supposed to be the one with the pointed questions—not him.
"Did you start to wonder?" he asked, his voice so painfully hoarse it hurt to hear. "Did you start to wonder if the rumors are true?"
Maybe I shouldn't have moved. Maybe I shouldn't have reached for him. Maybe that was the moment, the touch, that shattered the lines.
But I did. I reached for him. I touched.
"Aidan," I said, and this time it was my hand on his face. My fingers skimming, feathering along the dark shadows of his jaw. "I didn't know what was happening..."
Still didn't.
"And I got scared," I said truthfully.
He pulled back. "And that's when you realized you had to get away."
Stung. I didn't understand it, but I knew. I could tell he was stung.
I could tell he was retreating.
"Yes," I said.
He stood, pulling into himself. Because he was Aidan again, and I was me, and whoever we'd been a few minutes before, whatever had happened, was gone.
"Do I get away?" I asked, watching him. "For whatever it is you're working on, does the girl who gets blindfolded get away?"
The light of the nearly exhausted votives no longer reached him. "I don't know yet," he said, and then he was gone, not just figuratively, but turning to stride from the room, leaving me alone in the shadows, wondering what the hell had just happened.
#
The words came easily. The words flowed. I sat with my back to the wall and my notebook in my lap, the last candle flickering to one side, the silk still strewn along the other, and wrote.
Thirty minutes. Maybe more. I wasn't sure how long he'd been gone, told myself it didn't matter. Because it didn't. But as seconds stretched into minutes, the rhythm of my heart changed, became more erratic. And somewhere in the old house, a door closed.
Looking up, I hung there, waiting.
Waiting to hear his voice.
Footsteps.
Hearing nothing instead.
Except the way the old house whispered around me. I'd had too much to drink. I knew that. I'd let myself get carried away, and now irrational thoughts played through me. What if, I started to think.
No.
No.
I'm not sure what made me grab the candle and stand, leave the room. To prove to myself I was being silly, maybe. To break the moment, the monotony. To break the flow of my imagination.
To my left, the rotting staircase dropped down to the lower level. That's where I wanted to go. But a shift of shadows had me spinning around, not toward the room where I'd been, but toward the end of the hall—
Where a single door hung open.
A door that had not been open before.
A door through which soft light glowed.
I moved without thinking, without considering what I might find. I moved without hesitation. I moved toward the door, the light. I moved to see what Aidan was doing.
But the second I stepped into the room, everything else fell away.
The Room
Behind me, the house lay in its death throes. In front of me, in the room at the end of the hall, the house lived. A massive poster bed dominated the sanctuary of burgundy walls and a hardwood floor, plush white bedding offsetting the dark hue of the walnut furniture. An armoire and a triple dresser, an antique mirror and an antique settee, curtains of a thick grey velvet against the walls, a marble fireplace on the opposite wall.
I stepped forward, onto the plush oriental rug and looked from the ornately-framed art to the top of the dresser, the beautiful gold candlesticks and empty mirrored tray, a single bottle of perfume.
So many questions hit me. Maybe Aidan had staged the room for one of his books. Maybe it was research. Or maybe the opulence had nothing to do with him....
Beyond the dresser, a set of dark wood French doors stood closed. I should have left them that way. I should have turned and gone back to the room where Aidan left me. But I didn't. I didn't walk away. I walked forward, toward the doors, and pulled them open.
The bathroom was large, gorgeous, white marble and black accents, an elegant double vanity. Towels, thick and black and soft. And a tub, curved and freestanding and surrounded by tall taper candles.
I remember the exact second I discovered I wasn't alone. I remember the exact second the silence broke, and reality poured in. I had one of the plush black towels in my hands as I leaned over to touch the porcelain. My back was to the door. I never heard him approach. I never sensed him in anyway.
Until he said my name.
/> I hung there, there in the darkness lit by nothing more than my dying votive, with my hand to the smooth edge of the tub, not sure why my throat suddenly felt tight.
"What are you doing?" And then he was there, in the bathroom with me, turning me, turning me toward him, and exposing me to the most scorched earth eyes I'd ever seen. They were dark and they were violent, driving home the absolute lack of color to his face. Even there in the shadows, I saw the starkly-carved lines, lines that for one of the few times since I walked through his front door five days before, screamed uncertainty. It was only a flash, only a second, like a vicious, momentary streak of lightning across the dead of the night sky, but during it, Aidan looked like he had no idea what to say or do.
"What?" I asked. "Why are you looking at me like that?"
I thought he might ask like how. That's what Aidan Cross did when he didn't want to answer a question. He threw it back.
But I had no idea how to describe the nightmare I saw glittering in his expression, the hell as if he was there but not there, looking at me, but not seeing. Not me anyway. If he hadn't said my name....
But I didn't have to. I didn't have to describe anything.
Because he answered me.
"I couldn't find you," he said quietly, so horribly, awfully quiet, I barely heard him above the thrumming of my own heart.
Or maybe that was his.
"I was looking for you," I whispered. He still held me, but I looked around, through the darkness, to the big empty room. "I was writing and I-I heard a noise—"
His eyes flashed. "What kind of noise?"
"A door. Closing."
Still. He was so crazy still.
"I thought you were checking out the other rooms."
"I was outside." His gaze shifted back toward the bedroom. "Taking nighttime shots."
"The door I heard was inside."
"Only the wind—your imagination. There's no one inside."
I wanted to believe him. "How can you be so sure? There're no locks—"
"Kendall."
This time it was his voice, the strength there, that stopped me.
"Do you really think I'd let you stay here, if I thought it was dangerous?"
That got me. That stripped the breath straight from my lungs, and left me as naked as if he'd stripped the clothes from my body.
"That's a question," I whispered.
A single corner of his mouth curved. "If we're still playing, you owe me a lot more than I owe you."
I watched him, watched him and wondered how he could turn the page so fast. I'd twisted to find him teetering on the brink of some place only he could see, but from one breath to the next, he was back and ready to play again.
And he was right. I'd long since lost track of questions, but knew I owed him far more than he owed me.
"I don't know," I said softly.
"Don't know what?" he asked, still watching me in that never-let-go way of his. "How many you owe me—or if I'd ever put you in danger?"
I swallowed. "I want to say no, that you'd never do anything that you thought could endanger me."
"But you can't."
"I want to. It's what I see in your eyes." It was what I felt every time he touched me. "But that's what you thrive on, misdirection." Telling stories, staging illusions.
His eyes. The blue. It faded, light dimming into absolute darkness.
"You don't like my answer," I said.
"I don't like that you don't see a difference between what I do and who I am."
I wanted to. I was trying.
"Did you know this room was here?" I asked.
Shadows slipped closer, even though the light never changed."There's places like this all over this town. Half alive, half gone." His voice. There was an edge to it, like the words hurt. "Just like people."
That's why we were there, I realized. The dichotomy. The contrast between life and death beneath the very same roof.
"Were you going to tell me about it, or was that part of your research, too? Leave me alone and see if I would find it on my own?"
"I didn't bring you here to leave you alone."
Deep, deep inside, something squeezed.
I had more questions, questions about writing and being an author, but there were others, deeper, more personal, intimate questions that had haunted me since the night before.
"Do you think someone drugged me at the club?" I asked.
There's so much we forget. So much about the minutes that fill our lives. Sometimes it's like we roll along on auto-pilot, not fully dialed into each and every breath. But in that moment I was more than dialed in. I was locked in, and I know for a fact I'll never forget the way he looked there in the shadows of that marble bathroom.
Stricken. It was the only word.
"Yes."
The memory played, and through every second of it I searched for details I might have missed the first time, while living it there with Sloan, under the illusion of his offer to help.
"Why?" I asked. "Why would someone do that?"
Aidan laughed softly, but it wasn't a happy sound. "Come on, Kendie...you weren't born yesterday. You're a very beautiful woman."
"That's not a reason to drug me."
"It is if someone wants something."
"What would someone want?" I asked, still so, so quietly.
His eyes met mine. "Everything," he said. "Everything you have to give."
The Man Inside the Rumors
Darkness. Decay. Danger. That's what the public sees. Broken pieces. Jagged edges. Fading images. That's why passersby stop and stare. Empty. Forsaken. Condemned. That's what the naked eye perceives.
But they are only a veneer.
Look deeper, go inside, and the shadow of what once was remains.
The old house, abandoned for so long, holds its secrets close. But within those walls, memories whisper. They live. They wait.
I always knew that settings play a major role in Aidan Cross stories. But it wasn't until I watched him move from forgotten room to forgotten room that I realized the power of place. That places can live, breathe. That places can create—and destroy.
Aidan Cross knows this. And like every other detail, he explores every crevice of possibility.
We all have fantasies. We all daydream. They're the secret thoughts we never share with anyone else, not even our closest friend. The curiosities. Scenarios we play out in our minds, fueled by lust and longing and recklessness. What if? What if...
What if you open the forbidden door?
What if you step inside?
What if...you never turn back?
These are the places where Aidan Cross dwells. He's not afraid of the forbidden. He doesn't shy away. He steps closer. He steps inside. He faces the unknown. He digs deeper. He explores those dark, disturbing places, unearthing what lies beneath.
And within.
He says he doesn't care. He says what others think and say doesn't matter. But he builds walls to keep that world away. And when those walls start to weaken, he stops at nothing to make them stronger. But he can do nothing about the sorrow that sometimes slips into his eyes, the sadness or the longing that trembles through his touch...
I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. I thought I knew what to expect. But once inside Aidan Cross's world, the rules change. Rules...vanish. It's his world and his rules, and everything you think you understand about yourself slowly and steadily crumbles.
And now I'm left wondering how do you know when you really know someone? How do you know that they are who they say they are? That they want...what they say they want? Mean...what they say they mean?
How do you know when you're right, versus heart-stoppingly wrong?
Aware—
—or dangerously naive?
How do you know?
How do you know when to trust?
To separate fantasy, from reality?
Truth—
—from deception?
I thought I knew
.
I thought I could tell.
I thought it was all so obvious, so easy.
Then I stepped into his world.
And now...
Now nothing is obvious.
Nothing is easy.
Day 6
The Elusive Adelaide
The text came mid-morning.
Two hours later, I stopped writing and closed my laptop, emerging from a French Quarter cafe into the muggy breath of summer, toward the carnival-atmosphere of Jackson Square, and the designated meeting spot.
I recognized her the second I saw her, the striking woman standing by the fountain in a bright pool of sunshine, and realized she had not been so elusive after all. She looked much as she had the first time I'd seen her, my very first night in Aidan's world, when she'd stood at the table where he signed books. Then, I'd assumed the tall woman with the smooth cocoa skin and ornate purple mask was a fan.
The next time I saw her, three nights later, at the club, I hadn't even recognized her. She'd been dressed too differently, her gold sheath dress replaced by a short leather skirt and skimpy black tank, her copper hair wrapped in a braid around her head.
Now I saw remnants of both looks fused into one exquisitely beautiful woman.
Adelaide.
I knew she saw me, too, even though oversized, cat-eye sunglasses concealed her eyes. I could feel her, feel her watching me. Assessing.
Just as she'd done the first night, and the fourth.
It didn't take long for me to reach her. It took even less to realize she wasn't going to try and deny what we both already knew.
"You recognize me," she said, sliding down her sunglasses to reveal the wide, almond eyes I remembered from the book signing. "I wondered if you would."
I couldn't tell if she sounded pleased or dismayed. "You've been watching me," I said. "You're who told Aidan I was at the club." That was one piece I'd never been able to make fit—how he'd known I was there.
"I did."
"Did you tell him I was with Sloan?" He'd given no indication that he knew, but that didn't mean he didn't. Only that he hadn't chosen to let me know yet.
Adelaide smiled, her dark red mouth curving wide. "Do you think you would still be in his home, if I had?"