TEN DAYS

by Jenna Mills

  "I shouldn't have come here," I realized, turning away, turning and walking, walking fast, toward the door.

  I shouldn't have gone to the penthouse.

  Shouldn't have gone to him.

  To New Orleans.

  His world.

  His story.

  "But you did," he said, and then his hand was on my arm again, stopping me, holding me. There, just inside the sliding glass door. "You did come—why?"

  I refused to let myself shake. I refused to let the salty warmth overflow my lashes. I refused to fall apart, not right there in front of him. "It doesn't matter."

  "Tell me anyway."

  Because I was a fool. I was naive. So lost in fantasy I couldn't see the reality that was right before my eyes.

  But I didn't say any of that.

  "Because I made a mistake," I said, twisting to look at him. "I thought something changed. I thought we—"

  He moved so fast I had no chance to prepare. One second he was standing there, his eyes glittering down on me. The next he had my face in his hands, his mouth on mine, slanting—demanding.

  And everything I thought I knew, thought I wanted, dissolved into absolute nothingness. There was only him, the feel of his mouth taking mine, of his hands, holding me.

  There were a thousand reasons to push him away, to shove him and make for the door. I know that. On some level, I knew that then. But I couldn't come up with one. I couldn't come up with anything. There was no thought, not anymore, only the dark vortex consuming me.

  Reality tumbled. Maybe on some level I was aware, aware of the way I reached for him and pulled him even closer, of the way I opened to him, fought him, fought him for more. For everything. Maybe on some level I was aware when his hands slid down, when his arms crushed me closer, when he walked me backwards, when I felt the wall against my back. But it was all so hazy and far-away, so twisted and jumbled and dreamlike.

  "Not a mistake," he murmured, and then his mouth was sliding, sliding from mine and down along my throat, and I was arching back, arching into him, opening and giving. Wanting.

  Demanding.

  And he was there, at my breasts, and my tank top was gone. My bra. Leaving only my breasts, swollen and aching, and the feel of his mouth opening around me, opening and closing, the possession of his tongue—

  "Aidan," I gasped, fumbling with the buttons of his shirt, the fly of his jeans. "Please."

  I didn't realize my shorts were gone, not until his hand was there, slipping between my legs to ready me.

  But I didn't need readying. I was already there, wet and aching, throbbing.

  Blindly, I reached for him, guiding—

  He didn't need guiding. He found me, and pressed inside as his mouth returned to mine.

  On some level, I was aware of the way I cried out, the way my body sang as I adjusted to the size of him, as I welcomed him and he began to claim.

  "Yes," I whispered as he buried himself, over and over and over. "Yes," as I brought him deeper.

  Yes, as everything inside me fell apart.

  Yes, as he shouted.

  Yes, as we came together, and the rest of the world fell away.

  #

  I stood in the palatial bathroom, with its double shower and jacuzzi tub, its vanity and floor of glistening black marble. I stood with a big white robe wrapped around me, my clothes still strewn across the floor of the main room. My body burned—ached. The gleaming mirror showed red marks on my neck.

  I knew I couldn't stay in there forever, didn't want to, even if I had no idea how to walk out and look at him, not after the way we'd come together.

  I found him in the main room, on the sofa with his legs bent and wide at the knees, his head bowed and his face in his hands. The second I stilled he looked up, and pierced me with his eyes.

  "Hey," he said.

  It seemed so crazy simple. "Hey."

  From somewhere unseen, soft music still played, but the candles no longer burned. The remains stood there, long since dark and cold. "I'm sorry," he said. "That should never have—"

  I didn't let him finish. I couldn't. Because no matter how shell-shocked I was, I didn't want his apology.

  "Don't," I said, crossing to him. "Don't you dare say that shouldn't have happened."

  His eyes darkened.

  "Because it did," I said against the salty sting of my eyes. "And it was more incredible than I ever dreamed."

  The second the words were out, I saw the awareness register in his gaze.

  "Yes," I whispered. "I did. I dreamed of being with you." So many times. "Of what it would be like, what it would feel like to give myself to you, for you to take me—"

  "Kendall, don't."

  Raw. Everything inside me felt so raw and exposed. But I didn't care. "Don't what?" I challenged. "Don't tell you—or don't dream?"

  His eyes flashed. "I come here to get away," he said quietly, his voice as stripped bare as all those naked, hurting places inside me. "I come here to be alone, clear my head. That's why I'm here—because I couldn't be there, anymore, at the house, after you saw everything." Robotically, he turned, and I saw the one candle still burning. "I didn't know how to be there anymore...with you."

  I stood there, stood there wrapped in the big terrycloth robe, naked underneath, naked inside, not trusting myself to move. To say anything. Because I knew. Somehow I knew that at that moment, everything between us hung in the balance.

  "I tried to write," he said, staring at the faltering flame. "I tried to work. But I couldn't. Because you were here, too. You were everywhere. You were in every word—"

  I followed the direction of his gaze, to the laptop on the glass table, next to a bottle of scotch—and roses.

  "I should have left," he said. "I should have gone for a run or a drive."

  But he didn't. He ordered flowers and a candlelit dinner. He put on music.

  "I never should have texted you."

  "But you did," I whispered. He reached out. He gave in. He opened a door, kicked out the wall between us.

  "You didn't come," he said in that same barely there voice, even quieter now. Dead quiet. "You didn't come."

  And I couldn't do it anymore. Couldn't stand there without touching. Couldn't stand there with even a breath between us. I went to him, reaching out, touching. "Aidan—"

  The way he recoiled stopped me cold.

  "I waited," he gritted out. "And I waited. And I told myself no. I told myself you were okay. That I was being paranoid. That nothing bad had happened...."

  I realized it then, what I should have realized all along.

  4 + 1 = 5

  "Aidan," I murmured, and this time the harsh warning lines of his face didn't stop me. He'd been through this before. Four times. "I'm sorry."

  "But I couldn't stop," he said, and I could feel it, the brutal memory playing in the pounding of his pulse beneath my fingertips. "I couldn't stop thinking that it was happening again."

  "No—"

  "That you were hurt—"

  My heart squeezed.

  "Gone."

  "Aidan—"

  "Not coming back. That I failed you—"

  "No," I said more forcefully, easing closer, until our legs brushed, mine bare beneath the robe, his covered by black jeans. "You haven't failed me."

  A hard sound broke from his throat. "Then I saw you'd been with him."

  Him.

  Sloan.

  So much hit me at once, questions and implications that had slipped right by me earlier, when he'd dropped his bomb that he knew where I'd been. But now they twisted through me, leaving a core of cold in their wake.

  "Because you had someone following me," I said flatly.

  He looked at me. His expression was cop-blank. "Your purse. I put a tracker inside."

  The twisting intensified, everything I wanted to believe, that I'd been trying to believe, warring with the ugly reality of what he was telling me.

  He'd been watching my every move.


  I pulled back. I had to. I couldn't touch him. Didn't want to.

  He kept looking straight ahead, while the softest, most erotic music drifted around us. And the cold kept right on seeping. I wanted to tell him that what he'd done was wrong, but there was an inarguable logic to his actions. Despite the past, the familiarity that pulsed between us, I was an unknown. A stranger. And so was he. We each had our own agendas.

  "But not because of you," he shocked me by saying. "Not anymore."

  My heart crashed hard against my ribs.

  "I needed to know...that I could find you," he said hoarsely. "I needed to know that if I needed to find you, I could."

  "And you did." Look for me. Find me. "And I was with Sloan." His enemy.

  The realization made me sick.

  So did the shadows darkening Aidan's eyes. He looked away fast, picking up the bottle of Scotch and pouring a drink.

  His hands shook.

  "And you thought the worst," I realized as he lifted the tumbler to his mouth and drank deeply.

  "What else could I think?"

  Moments, I remembered thinking before. There are moments that define everything. Who we are. What we do. Our relationships. Moments that reveal, moments that reverberate, moments that forever change. Moments that destroy. That you can never get back. Never rescript. Never erase.

  And I knew that was one of those moments.

  I sat there, looking at him, the darkness in his eyes, the pain, and I felt it, felt every broken edge that sliced through him, felt them carve deep, deep inside me, in that place still alive and vibrating from his touch.

  "There's something you need to know," I said, taking a giant leap of faith.

  He glanced from the amber liquid in his glass—to me.

  Not giving myself time to change my mind, I reached for the purse I'd left on the sofa, fished out the matchbooks, and opened them between us.

  "This is why I was with Sloan."

  The blue of Aidan's eyes darkened. He reached out, his hand coming down hard on the neatly printed writing. "Where'd these come from?"

  I told him.

  "Jesus," he muttered. I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't for him to stand and walk away, to the glass door, closed against the night, and stand there with his back to me.

  Maybe I should have stayed where I was. Maybe I should have taken the hint, that he didn't want to be near me. Maybe those would have been the smart, safe things to do.

  But I wasn't very good at hints, and I couldn't just sit there, on the sofa, not with the wall of isolation falling down around Aidan.

  So I stood.

  And I went to him.

  And I lifted my hands to his shoulders, bare still.

  And I felt the hard quiver beneath my fingertips.

  "You went to him," he said, and through the glass, our eyes met. "Someone threatened you, and you went to Sloan."

  The hurt in Aidan's voice stunned me.

  The realization of what he thought stunned me even more. That I trusted Sloan, not him. That I thought Sloan could protect me.

  Not.

  Him.

  "No," I said. "No," I tried to deny. "I thought it was him," I said. "I thought he was trying to warn me."

  Through the glass, Aidan's eyes held mine.

  I wanted him to hold me for real, with his body.

  "Warn you," he said. "About me."

  I swallowed hard. "Yes."

  Aidan looked away, back toward the darkness spilling over the river.

  "He wants me to be careful," I added, for some lame reason thinking that would take away the sting.

  "You mean afraid."

  I wanted to say no, to deny that, too. But doing so would have been a lie, and we both would have known it. "I told him to stop."

  Aidan spun around so fast I had no time to step back. "And what did he say?"

  "That it wasn't him."

  His face twisted into a parody of a smile. "Of course not."

  "But it doesn't matter," I rushed to explain. "Because it was someone—someone put that matchbook in my purse, and someone followed us to the cemetery—"

  The lines of Aidan's face tightened.

  "And I think someone was there the other night, too," I said. "In the house with us. Someone was watching. Sloan or someone else. Someone was there, just like someone was following me today."

  "And you believe Sloan when he says it wasn't him?"

  I let out a slow breath. "I don't know." Truth. It was the truth. I owed him that. "I don't know what to believe anymore."

  Aidan looked at me a long time before moving. A long time before saying anything. "Has it ever occurred to you," he said, his voice still quiet, but not cold anymore, not dead, but gentle, the same gentle as the hands he lifted to my face, and feathered into my hair. "That he's messing with you? Playing a game? Trying to scare you into being scared of me?"

  Everything inside me stilled.

  Playing.

  A.

  Game.

  Sloan had insinuated the same about Aidan.

  "That he wants you away from me, not because he's worried about your safety—but for his own twisted reasons?"

  A vendetta.

  "Because of Laurel," I whispered. Because Sloan loved her first. Because she loved Aidan.

  He turned from me and returned to the sofa, where my phone still lay. "You're not the first," he said, looking at the now blank screen. "You're not the first he's tried to warn."

  "He told me," I admitted. "He told me about the others."

  "Of course he did," Aidan said, twisting back toward me. "Always casting himself the hero. What else did he tell you? Did he tell you that he was with Ashley the night before she vanished?" Ashley. The young woman who came from nowhere. "That he was the last person she was with before—" He broke off, but the memories kept playing in his eyes, the shadows deepening around him.

  "No," I said. "He didn't tell me that."

  Aidan picked up his glass, empty now, and refilled it.

  "He didn't really tell me much," I added. "Only that you were living together."

  Aidan laughed. "Is that what he said?"

  I nodded.

  He ran a hand through his hair, moving from near the sofa to the kitchen table, the sink, back to the balcony.

  "Did he tell you she was a runaway?" he asked. "That I met her doing research? That she was just a kid and she was living on the streets, doing heroin?"

  I stilled.

  He slid open the door, letting the warm breath of evening into the room. "She was alone," he said. "She was scared and the only money she had came from selling her body."

  I cringed.

  "So I brought her to my house—"

  I looked away.

  "—and gave her somewhere to stay."

  The images formed faster, images I didn't want. Of Aidan and Ashley, a runaway who sold her body, of the room upstairs where I now slept.

  "No," he said, and then he was crossing the room and reaching for me, his hands to my shoulders. "Not like that."

  "It's okay—"

  "No," he said again, still looking at me—into me. "Not like that. She was a kid, not even eighteen. And I wanted to help her, not screw her."

  The flash of relief startled me.

  "But that didn't stop Sloan and his poison—"

  "She told you?"

  "I found her packing. She was high, out of her mind, talking crazy about making mistakes."

  I closed my eyes, opened them a long breath later. "I'm so sorry."

  "I thought I talked sense into her, that I got through to her. But the next night she was gone."

  "You think he scared her away." Sloan. And his accusations made her run all over again.

  "I've been looking for her," Aidan said. "That's why I was at the club. She used to go there."

  So many thoughts and possibilities shifted through me. Sloan himself told me he warned them. I didn't know who or what to believe, trust...

  But t
hat wasn't true.

  I did know.

  I was standing there. Aidan was standing there.

  Aidan who'd used his security system to make sure I didn't slip away while he was sleeping...

  "Stay away from him, Kendall."

  I looked up.

  His eyes burned into mine.

  "I need you to come to me. I need you to tell me—trust me. If something else happens...only me."

  I stepped closer. I lifted my hand to his shoulders. But I didn't tell him about what Adelaide said, or about what Dauphine feared. About the darkness, edging closer.

  "You," I whispered. "Only you."

  He looked away fast, pulled away. "You should probably go—"

  And something inside me broke. "Is that what you want?"

  He still didn't look at me. Still looked out at the night.

  "You really want me to go...after what happened before?"

  Now he spun. And now he looked. "I never meant for that to happen," he said, more tortured than I'd ever heard him. "That's not what tonight was about. You deserve better—"

  "Sh-h-h." I stepped toward him. "Not words. That's not what I want from you."

  His look of confusion fired through me.

  "I want you to show me," I said, reaching for the sash of the robe. I pulled and the terry cloth fell open. "Show me what I deserve, Aidan. Show me what tonight was about."

  He stood there, so very, very still. "Jesus, why aren't you afraid?"

  My whole body trembled. My whole body begged. "Because I'm not." At least, not in the way the cryptic warnings wanted me to be. My fears came from a different place.

  And they weren't for my life.

  "But you are," I realized. Because finally, finally the truth was clear. Fear. It glittered there in his eyes.

  "Yes."

  The admission destroyed me. "Because of what's happened before," I realized.

  His shoulders rose, fell, and I was so done with secrets and half-truths, with the unsaid overriding the said.

  "I'm not them," I said, lifting my eyes to his. "And no one is going to scare me away. Not Sloan," I added. "Not you."

  His eyes. They were so incredibly blue, sapphire glowing from the inside out. "You don't back down," he murmured. "You don't run. You just keep coming closer, burning so bright and making me want—"

  My breath caught. "What? What do I make you want?"