by K. A. Linde
It couldn’t have been a ploy.
Her heart raced.
Her stomach clenched.
Her eyes drooped.
And she was floating away.
Voices broke through to her subconscious. She couldn’t figure out who it was or what was happening. All she did was giggle.
“How is she?”
“How would you be?”
“That bad?”
“Worse. She saw the news.”
“So soon?”
“Unfortunately.”
A hand touched her forehead and brushed her hair off of her face. She didn’t know where the hand had come from or why it was touching her. She didn’t know if she should even care.
“We’ll have to take it easy with her.”
“I don’t think anything we do is going to help.”
A sigh. “I told Beckham to be gentle with her heart.”
“As if he listens to anyone.”
“As if he is gentle.”
No Beckham wasn’t gentle. Definitely not with her heart.
* * *
—
Reyna awoke with a start. Her hand flew to her chest, which was heaving up and down. Her eyes flew around the room, taking in the bed and the closet and the pictures.
Elle.
She was at Elle.
She wasn’t back at Visage. She wasn’t with Harrington. She wasn’t being turned into B.
She’d had a nightmare. That was all. Just a nightmare.
She felt the tension release from her shoulders. A sense of calm came over her. She was fine. She was safe. A headache was blossoming pretty spectacularly in her temples though. The venom. She’d forgotten all about it. Someone must have gotten her back to her rooms after she’d been dosed. It always left her with a headache. She hated that part the most, after the needle.
Her hand moved to the nightstand. She flicked on the lamp, ready to get out of bed and try to find something to curb the pounding in her head. But then she felt it. A prickling at the back of her neck. As if she wasn’t completely alone.
She gasped and pushed herself to the head of the bed as fear crawled through her. A figure sat in a darkened corner. All she could see were long fingers steepled in front of the person’s face and shiny black shoes. Her eyes drifted over the mysterious figure as fear turned to awareness.
“Hello, Little One,” Beckham finally said.
Chapter 12
“Beckham?” Reyna whispered into the stillness.
He stood from the chair he had been sitting in. He dusted off his black suit jacket and buttoned the front button. She swallowed at his immense size. Tall and broad and foreboding. His very presence screamed menacing, ominous, threatening, sinister. Run. Run far away.
His face was a mask carved out of granite. He revealed nothing of his thoughts. Nothing as to why he was here or what he was doing or where he had been. He simply stood there in all of his terrifying beauty and waited. He wasn’t a particularly patient man so his waiting meant something.
“What are you doing here?” Reyna asked. She hastily got out of the bed. She didn’t like being on unequal footing with him. It didn’t help that she was only wearing a T-shirt and one of the lacy undergarments left in her drawers. His eyes dropped to her bare legs and she saw desire dance around his irises. She grabbed sweats off of the floor and tugged them on.
“Would you prefer I hadn’t come?” His tone was dark and laced with aggression.
“I didn’t say that.” She straightened her spine and met his gaze.
A muscle in his jaw twitched as if to say You implied it. He paced away from her to the other side of the room and then back. When he looked at her again, his stare held all the force of a freight train.
“I meant why are you here in my room in the middle of the night?”
“Vampires enjoy the darkness, Reyna. Did you forget?” He smirked at her. His mask firmly in place. This was the man she had first met at Visage, but this was not Beckham. Not the man she had gotten to know.
She swallowed back anger at the bite in his tone. This wasn’t what she had pictured. All those times she had dreamed of their reunion she had envisioned heartfelt words, love and devotion and apologies broken by vigorous sex to make up for all those lost weeks. Not crisp conversation and words that danced around the issue.
“You didn’t answer the question,” she pointed out. She wanted him to be straight with her. She tried to rip the words about Penelope out of her throat and to feed on all the disappointment and anger building inside herself, but instead, she waited for his reply.
“You were sleeping. So, I didn’t wake you,” he said simply.
She suspected it was the only truth he wanted to tell her. Once again, she was left in the dark. She thought they had gotten over that. But what the fuck did she know? She’d been gone from him nine weeks now. Clearly everything had changed.
“I thought you would be here when I was brought back.”
“Did you?”
Was that actual surprise or was he mocking her? His eyes were empty. Just two blank slates on his face that held no expression. He was stoic and reserved and in control. Perfect control. He had mastered it over the years and now he was using it on her. She hated that it was so hard to read him.
“You should have been here,” she told him.
He arched an eyebrow and stood there assessing her. What the hell was he thinking?
“What are you even doing here if you can’t answer a simple question?”
“I am perfectly capable of answering a simple question.”
“Well, where were you?” she ground out.
“Busy.”
An answer. But a vague one. So vague.
Her frustration mounted. Was he going to tell her where he had been? What was happening with Penelope? The engagement? What the hell he’d been doing the last nine weeks?
A chasm opened up between them the longer he stalled. If she walked any closer, she’d fall into that bottomless pit forever.
“Busy doing what?” she spat.
“Working.”
Her anger overloaded and she just went there.
“With Penelope? Are you two back together?”
His nostrils flared and his eyes hardened. “I don’t want to talk about Penelope.”
“Oh, what else is new?” Sarcasm dripped from every word.
“You have been gone for nine weeks,” he pointed out, gesturing to her. Some of his façade slipped away and his own anger was clear. “You cannot expect everything to be the same now that you’ve returned.”
“You make it sound like I chose to leave,” she said, her voice rising. “That I decided to go to Visage and work with Harrington. That this was what I actually wanted.”
“How could I possibly know if that was true or not?”
Reyna gaped at him. “Because I’m not suicidal!”
“He wouldn’t kill you. He needs you.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Her breathing was coming out uneven as she recounted all the things Harrington had said he would do to her if she didn’t comply. How he would torture and ruin her because all he really needed was her blood. B…God, just B. Her constant nightmare. But she didn’t tell him that. She hadn’t told anyone that.
“You left that night,” Beckham said, reminding her all over again of the night he had bit her, when she’d ran, and her life had turned to shit. “What am I supposed to expect when you come back?”
“Something other than this! I didn’t want to leave that night. It was an instinct. And I never would have left permanently.” She shook her head in frustration. “Be honest with me. Tell me what’s going on.”
All she wanted was the truth. Even if it hurt. If he could tell her that he hadn’t been with Penelop
e, explain the engagement, admit that it was all an act, then they could move on. Or at the very least, she needed to know so that she could try to pick up the broken pieces of her heart.
“Are you ready to speak about the last nine weeks?” he asked carefully. He slid his hands in his pocket nonchalantly.
She clammed up. No. No, she definitely wasn’t.
“Are you engaged?” she shot back.
“I said that I didn’t want to talk about Penny.”
“Oh God,” she said, backing slowly away from him. “You are engaged. You actually are.”
“Reyna…”
“Don’t.” She held up her hand.
“Reyna,” he said, his voice harsher, trying to fight for control. She didn’t care that it was slipping away from him. If he was engaged to Penelope, then none of it fucking mattered.
“I don’t want to hear you evading my questions.” Her eyes were wide and fierce. Her head held high as she faced him down. She’d had to be strong with him from the start. It was only fitting that she had to be strong while he was breaking her. “I don’t want to be treated with kid gloves. I want the truth. You said once that you would tell me all of your secrets.”
“That was nine weeks ago.”
She shook her head. “Even Harrington told me the truth. Even the truth I didn’t want to hear.”
Beckham didn’t so much as blink at her slap in the face. But she could see him straighten. See the tension build in his shoulders. She could see the damage it had inflicted. She’d meant the words. Harrington, though a monster, was at least an honest one.
“I have told you before and I will tell you again, Reyna, that I am a ruthless vampire. I am not a man. I have not gotten to the position that I am in without doing things that would make your blood run cold.” He stepped forward, bridging that gap between them. “I hold on to control by a thread. If you continue to test me, I will snap.”
“At least then you’d show some emotion.”
His finger moved to her chin, tilting her head up to look at him. “You called me a monster,” he said, his voice low. “You were not wrong. That is what I am.”
“No,” she breathed. Understanding at last. He thought that those words were her truth. But they had been spoken in fear and the first dizzying side effects of the bite. She’d never meant them. “You’re not.”
“Yes, I am. You were right when you ran. You trusted me to stop and I didn’t. You trusted me and I failed.”
Remorse shone bright in his eyes. Those obsidian orbs shattering to finally reveal the man she had known. Deep self-loathing radiated from him. He felt he was in the wrong. He felt he was nothing more than the beast within. She could see it painted across his face as if it were a canvas.
“I did not deserve your trust,” he said. “I do not deserve it now.”
“Please,” she whispered. She didn’t know if she was begging for him to stop or to continue. For him to slip just a bit closer. For his lips to graze hers. For this distance to shatter into oblivion.
He moved her head to bare her neck to him. Her breathing hitched as memories assaulted her. Beckham buried deep inside of her. His fangs grazing the artery on her inner thigh. The pleasure mingling with the pain as he sank his fangs into her neck. The shudder of adrenaline as she came.
She was so angry with him. So uncertain about their future. And yet…she still wanted this. She wanted all of him if he would open himself up to her.
“There are no bite marks,” he finally said.
“No,” she breathed, swallowing at the inspection.
“No scars.”
“No.”
“All this time…”
Their eyes met. “He never…”
Her body pulsed at his nearness. No matter that they’d been arguing seconds ago. That she was still uncertain about everything. That she had no concrete answers to any of her questions. Having the sole attention of Beckham Anderson was terrifying. Like a mouse caught in a trap. And yet…her core clenched at his nearness. Her mind went blank at his touch. The lacy panties stood no chance.
“Your smell.” His voice was indulgent.
Her body only ached more, bowing toward him. Her insides taut like a strung arrow.
“Becks,” she breathed.
“…is different,” he finished.
Her eyes locked on his in confusion. “Different?”
“If there was no bite, then he’s been giving you an injection?”
She nodded mutely.
Beckham growled low. “Then he has owned you.”
“No one owns me,” she said defiantly.
“The bite is possession,” he told her. “The saliva in the injection says as much that you are his. That you belong to him.”
Reyna shook her head. “I belong to no one. Least of all William Harrington.”
His eyes probed her, searching out the meaning in her words. She wanted to tell him everything that had happened. Lay her soul bare. But it was so fresh and there was this gap between them that she thought they had finally torn down. But the wall was back. Bigger and taller than ever. She had broken it down once, but it seemed impossible now.
Whatever he saw in her gaze made him shift forward. His lips landed on her forehead and she shivered from head to toe. This was what she wanted. This man. Though he didn’t consider himself one. She’d ached for him for weeks. Now he was here, he was touching her, and she was unable to move.
This wasn’t the reunion she had wanted. He wasn’t honest with her. He wouldn’t answer her questions. She understood his remorse for the bite and the uncertainty in seeing her again after she had run out. But it wasn’t enough. Not when he was so secretive. Not when they had moved backward instead of forward. Not when Penelope was still between them.
Her hands came out and instead of twining in his suit coat, she pushed him backward. It didn’t budge him more than an inch, but she took a step back.
“Stop,” she gasped.
Any warmth in his eyes shuttered and dissipated.
“I can’t do this again. I spent eight weeks wondering when you were going to save me. When you would storm into the room and carry me out of my hell. I dreamed of our reunion, Beckham, and it wasn’t this,” she said, her voice hollow. “But I won’t…no, I can’t live in a world where Penelope stands between us again.”
Beckham took a step backward. “She’s…it’s complicated.”
“Then you should go.”
“Go,” he growled at the dismissal.
“Come back when you can talk to me like you once did. When we don’t have to play games. Because I’m through with the games.”
She watched as he moved away from her and toward her closet. She followed him, wondering what he was doing. Then she saw it. A door handle. He had come in through a secret doorway in her closet. Of course. Because he wouldn’t want anyone to see him.
“Becks,” she whispered as he stood there, frozen.
His hand rested on the doorknob. “Sydney will want to see you. You’re…important to the organization. This was where you should have been all along. Not with me.”
Then he strode out of the bedroom and became a shadow, disappearing into the darkness of the corridor.
She couldn’t believe that after all this time and everything she had dreamed about this day, he was going to walk out…walk away from her. No. She couldn’t have that. She didn’t want him to walk away. She wanted them to talk. To actually talk. She wanted to make things right.
Her heart thudded as she rushed toward the door. Rushed back toward Beckham. She could right these wrongs. They could make this work. Talk it out.
Her hand closed over the doorknob, ready to rush after him. But as she twisted it, there was no give. It was locked…from the outside. A way for Beckham to get in, but not for her to get out.
>
Reyna’s knees hit the carpeted floor as her heart cracked open wide. What had they done? This wasn’t how any of it was supposed to happen. She wanted a do-over. For him to come back and for them to actually figure all of this out. Instead of the nightmare that they had just walked through.
She’d stood her ground and refused to give in to him when he’d evaded all of her questions. She’d made him go even though she’d wanted nothing more than for him to stay.
And now he was gone…maybe forever.
Chapter 13
“Let me get this straight,” Jodie said, later that day. “Homeboy shows up in your room to see you and you flip?”
“Um, sort of,” Reyna admitted.
“You’ve been mooning over him for however long you were in that hellhole. You get out of said hellhole. Then your dream man shows up for you. And what do you do? Turn him away?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Seems that simple to me,” she said, lounging back on Meghan’s bed. They’d dragged a cot in for Jodie to sleep on until they got her a place to stay more permanently. “You know what you should have done?”
“What?”
“Fucked him.”
Reyna choked on her laughter. It felt nice. Waking up in the middle of the night from a nightmare and confronting Beckham about Penelope hadn’t been her best move. But him completely avoiding the question and acting like a total stranger hadn’t been that great either.
“I’m for real!” Jodie said when Reyna didn’t respond.
“I know you are, but…I don’t know. It wouldn’t fix everything.”
“It would sure as hell fix the lack of orgasms.”
“I can’t even argue with that.”
“ ’Course you can’t.”
“But come on, wouldn’t you argue with a guy who was possibly engaged to someone else before sleeping with them again?” Reyna asked.
Jodie tapped her finger on her lips. “If I’d just gotten out of prison and been on a dry spell, I’d probably have to think about it for a second beforehand.”