by Lizzie Shane
Irritation made her voice sharper than she’d intended. “It’s probably not as bad as you’re imagining. I was drugged the whole time. I don’t really remember it.”
He looked at her like he could tell she was lying. Like he could hear the whispers she sometimes heard in her nightmares.
She had been drugged for most of it. Just not all. And the parts she’d been awake for… it was hard to forget the fear.
“How old were you?”
“Twelve. It was my birthday. And all I was thinking about was how badly I wanted to get my ears pierced. Zero situational awareness.”
“You were a kid. You shouldn’t have had to have situational awareness.”
She shrugged. “I guess not. We knew it could happen. Kidnapping was practically a cottage industry in Venezuela at the time. That’s why we had Kidnapping and Ransom insurance and bodyguards—though that doesn’t do much good when one of your bodyguards is in on it. He vanished after that, but I remember seeing him in the driver’s seat of the car right before they drugged me.”
Candy had been on her way home from ballet class, smug in the certainty that she was going to get her ears pierced because Charlotte had been allowed to get her ears pierced on her twelfth birthday. She hopped into her guard’s SUV like she always did, oblivious to even the possibility of danger, only to find a sticky sweet rag pressed over her mouth and a dark hood dropping over her eyes before the world went black.
“How long did it take them to get you back?”
“Four days. But I was drugged pretty much whenever they weren’t feeding me.”
*
The words were a blow, but Ren had been taught how to take a hit and he breathed through it. No wonder she didn’t trust people. The person hired to protect her had betrayed her. His chest felt tight. He knew she’d lied about not remembering and he hated thinking of that younger version of Candy, scared and alone, but he needed to know whatever she was ready to tell him.
“Did you have much contact with them?”
“They never touched me, if that’s what you mean. Have to keep the merchandise in prime shape. They were pros. Kept me blindfolded, their faces hidden, only spoke in Spanish, which I didn’t understand then.” She smiled without humor, her eyes blank. “My mother thought French was a more elegant language. We all went to the American School, surrounded by children of diplomats and international businessmen, so I rarely even heard Spanish and the closest we ever got to local culture were the maids who cleaned up after us.”
“You must have been so scared.”
She seemed startled by the comment. “Kidnapping is a business in many parts of South America. You’d be surprised how common it is.” As if the commonplace couldn’t be frightening. “I was lucky. There was another girl taken with me. Her family didn’t have as much pull. It took them weeks to get her back, though I didn’t know it at the time.”
Ren wanted to cross the room, to pull her into his arms and tell her how grateful he was that she’d been one of the lucky ones, but throughout the conversation she’d been putting more and more distance between them and he didn’t want to make her feel crowded by closing it now.
“I got better security after that,” she commented, her tone dispassionate, as if they were talking about the weather. “A former Secret Service agent who ended up being my first mentor. She taught me about martial arts and guns and disguises and situational awareness. Everything a rebellious thirteen-year-old is desperate to learn. She’s the one who introduced me to Max.”
“Where is she now?” The affection in Candy’s voice when she mentioned her mentor spoke volumes about their relationship.
“Lung cancer,” she said, blunt and unflinching. “Smoked like a chimney, but she was a tough lady. One of the first female agents in protection. She taught me that you have to be tougher than all the guys. Never let them see you flinch.” Candy eyed him. “And never sleep with them because they lose all respect for you the second you do.”
“I didn’t.”
She looked at him for a long moment, as if evaluating the truth in his words before shrugging. “You’re the exception.”
He wanted to be. He wanted to be her exception. “You don’t have to always be tough, Candy. Not with me.” The pieces she’d added filled in more of the gaps in the puzzle that was Candy Raines, but there were still so many pieces missing. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She looked out the window, but it was dark beyond the glass and all she could be looking at was blackness. Or her own face reflected back at her. “It’s not the kind of thing that comes up in everyday conversation. And I didn’t want you to know.”
She turned back to him and something of his disappointment must have shown on his face because she rolled her eyes. “It isn’t about you, Pretty Boy. People look at me differently when they know and I didn’t want you to look at me like that. Like you’re looking at me now.”
“How am I looking at you?”
“Like this defines me. It doesn’t, you know.”
“Are you sure about that? It seems like you’ve been putting up walls to protect yourself ever since. Did you ever talk to anyone about this?”
“We don’t talk about our feelings in this family.”
“What about a therapist?”
“I’m fine.”
On any other day he might have let it go, but he was so frustrated with her, so frustrated with being locked out of her life that he couldn’t keep his mouth shut this time. “You have nightmares every other night. You spend most of your life hiding behind one disguise or another and push away anyone who might want to care about you. You refuse to ask for help, let alone trust anyone. Is that your definition of fine?”
Her expression locked down tight, eyes blank. “It’s nobody’s business but mine if it is.”
“What if I want it to be my business? What if I’ve been trying to make it my business for years? Trying to be worthy of your trust. Does that matter at all? Do I matter at all?”
She pursed her lips, tight and angry. “I like you, Pretty Boy. But you aren’t my husband. You might want to try to remember that.”
She turned and walked into the bathroom, leaving him alone in their luxurious suite.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Four years and two months ago…
“We—can’t—keep—doing this.”
The words were punctuated by breathless gasps as Ren drove into her from behind. She braced her hands on the countertop she was bent over, reveling in the feel of his long fingers digging into her hips, holding her steady for his thrusts. “Fuck, Ren, that feels good,” she groaned, her previous statement wiped from her mind.
They were in the bathroom at Elite Protection—which was at least clean and private. More than she could say for some of the places she’d jumped him in the last three months. Her promise to herself that she wouldn’t have sex with him at work had lasted about as long as her vow to stay away from him entirely. Where Ren Xiao was concerned, she had no self-control.
She watched his face in the mirror, caught up in the way his eyes blazed as he looked down at where they were joined, his to-die-for cheekbones seeming to stand out in even sharper relief. Dear God, he was a gorgeous man. And he was all hers.
No.
No, that wasn’t right. She wasn’t possessive. This wasn’t a relationship. This was need. This was—
He reached in front of her to circle a finger over her clit and Candy came with a jerk, biting down hard on her lip to smother the sounds she wanted to make as he pressed his face against her neck to stifle the audible evidence of his own release, coming hard against her.
They’d gotten good at sex in public places. The man was nothing if not creative with unconventional venues and positions, but as Candy came down from her high she realized she’d started fantasizing about a nice soft bed and the missionary position.
But that meant taking him home. Or going to his place. And that was too real. Too intimate. Too scary.
&
nbsp; Lust in the bathroom was one thing. Her body needed the release and he was excellent at providing it. That was all this was. It wasn’t him. It was this.
Ren disengaged, taking care of the condom and tucking himself away. They were perfect. He was exactly what she needed.
Then he said the one thing designed to ruin it all.
“I think you should let me take you to dinner.”
*
Present day…
Candy couldn’t sleep.
She’d hidden in the bathroom, removing her make-up with deliberate precision and taking a long shower until the heat seeped into her knotted muscles and she began to feel almost human again. Like she could face another day of this fiasco.
Like she could face Pretty Boy.
She’d wrapped herself in a robe and stepped into the bedroom, braced for whatever he would say to her, but he hadn’t rekindled the argument. He’d just handed her a cup of tea and slipped into the bathroom to take his own shower.
Tea. Because she didn’t drink coffee at night. Because she sometimes made herself a cup when she was upset after one of her stupid nightmares. Because Pretty Boy paid attention to the details. To her details.
He was a goddamn prince among men and she could almost hate him for being so damn considerate, because it made her feel like even more of an ungrateful wretch because she couldn’t give him what he wanted. She couldn’t just magically be the person he wanted her to be.
She perched on the edge of the bed, drinking her tea, and finally curled up beneath the covers. She’d run through a dozen different things to tell him in the time between hearing the shower shut off and when the bathroom door opened, but in the end she closed her eyes and pretended to be sleeping.
She’d always been a coward where he was concerned—so damn scared of saying the wrong thing and finally driving him away for good.
So she pretended to be asleep.
He shut off the light and climbed into the opposite side of the bed—not touching her, not even encroaching on her side of the bed like he sometimes would back home, when he would tug her against him and cuddle her close. Tonight, he lay all the way on his side of the bed and before long his breathing became deep and even.
And Candy still couldn’t sleep.
Thoughts chased one another through her head on a dizzy loop, too fast for her to even catch one and pin it down. Her higher brain functions had shut off and she felt like she was reacting on instinct—and every instinct told her to flee. Ren had been her safe place for so long—but part of the reason he’d felt so safe was because he didn’t know her secrets. He didn’t know about the kidnapping or everything that had happened since. How that one day had shifted everything.
But he was starting to.
It sounded so melodramatic, thinking of it that way—the day that changed everything—but her twelfth birthday had cleanly divided her life into before and after. It was hard for something so pivotal not to take on mammoth significance in her memories.
August fourteenth. The day she’d been kidnapped.
She’d woken up, blindfolded, to the sound of water slowly dripping down the walls of a room that smelled of mildew and sweat. A coarse, braided cord wrapped around her wrists and ankles and she’d shivered in the hot, humid room, scared senseless—her only comfort the blind certainty that her father would save her. He was the ambassador, a Powerful Man, and practically a deity in her world. He would come.
But he hadn’t come. Instead, her kidnappers had come. Men with deep voices who seemed larger than life and a thousand times more terrifying because they only spoke to one another in Spanish—phrases she didn’t quite understand.
She’d heard about men like them—had heard the maids whispering about the horrible things that could happen to young girls, statements that always seemed that much more terrifying for their vagueness, and she was certain that a fate worse than death awaited her, but they never touched her.
They shoved sandwiches into her hands—the same kind she ate at the fancy American School, the familiarity disturbing and comforting at the same time. And when they wanted to knock her out again they pressed another sickly sweet cloth over her nose and mouth.
The blindfold never came off. She had no sense of time—hours? Days? Her waking moments were punctuated by fear, sandwiches and rags that made the world spin away. Then, after what felt like a lifetime, when she would wake up already crying, her subconscious mind as scared as her conscious one, one of those deep voices began to speak in English, saying words she could understand, but couldn’t believe.
“Your parents don’t pay,” that voice whispered. “They try to get down the price. Not their favorite child maybe? Maybe they don’t love you so much. Maybe it’s all for show, eh?”
She’d pinned her mouth shut, rolling her lips between her teeth. He was lying. Trying to scare her. She chanted the word inside her head—Liar. Liar. Liar. Liar.—until he finally gave up taunting her and went away.
But some things you couldn’t unhear and those insidious words stayed behind.
Maybe her father wasn’t coming for her. Maybe he didn’t love her. She’d always had her doubts about her mother, but she’d known her father would never let anything happen to her. He was searching for her right this very second, fighting for her, slaying dragons.
Wasn’t he?
There were more sandwiches, but fewer rags—as if they couldn’t be bothered to knock her out now that they’d discovered she didn’t scream and carry on when she was awake.
Her parents did pay. The kidnappers did give her back. One day they knocked her out and she simply woke up in a hospital with her mother’s voice ringing in her ears as she browbeat the doctors.
Not a scratch, everyone said, so relieved. Thank God she was okay. Thank God no one had touched her. Thank God nothing had happened to her.
Nothing.
Four days, she learned after they got her home from the hospital—after their initial refusal to tell her anything about her own kidnapping had resulted in screaming tantrums the likes of which they’d never seen from perfect little Candice.
Four days, they’d had her. Four days, it had taken her parents to pay. When the average ransom kidnapping lasted less than twenty-four hours in a city that made a business out of it.
And then there was Laura. The nanny’s daughter who’d been taken with her. The one who had screamed every time she woke up in the dark, the sound punching through the thin walls where they’d been held. The one Candy wasn’t allowed to ask about.
Her mother told her Laura’s mother would take care of her release, as if that was the whole story. No more discussion of Laura was allowed.
It was over. Period. Candy was home. Safe and sound. End of story.
For a while it was ice cream for dinner and everyone fussing over her, but the spoiling didn’t last and before long it was time to get back to normal. New bodyguards—retired Special Service, the best patriots money could buy. New security measures—and Candy was supposed to feel safe, supposed to forget.
But she couldn’t seem to understand how they could think everything would be the same as it had been before.
Her life was split into before and after—a division marked not just by fear, but by faith. She’d believed in her father with the faith of a true believer before, but after she was a lapsed devotee, going through the motions of a faith she no longer held.
They pretended they were one big happy family, but for four days she’d been alone in the dark with those words whispering over and over in her mind. Maybe it’s all for show, eh?
And now Ren knew about it. The before-and-after.
There was still so much he didn’t know, but Pandora’s box had been opened and it was only a matter of time before everything came out. All the pieces of herself she’d kept hidden for so long.
She looked over at him to be certain he was asleep and then crept out of bed, slipping her arms into her robe and toeing on her sandals. She tiptoed across the ro
om and ducked out into the hallway, careful to keep her steps silent as she moved past Scott’s suite and down the stairs.
The night was perfect—warm without being oppressively humid, with a light breeze rustling her shower-damp hair. They were a few days away from a full moon, but it hung high in the sky, already bright enough to outline the back garden in moonlight.
Candy made her way to her grandfather’s award-winning rose garden. She’d always been fond of the prickly blooms and the way they would bleed you if you got too close, but her favorites were the thornless varietals. The ones which had been engineered to be perfect, beautiful, and harmless. She’d always felt a certain affinity for them when she was younger. The over-cultivated hot house flower that could no longer defend itself.
She wove through the plants in the dark, her sandals crunching on the gravel path until she came to the center of the garden where a small stone fountain awaited.
And beside it, the large, dark silhouette of a man.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Four years and two months ago…
Her hair was red today.
He’d gotten so used to seeing her in all her different disguises that sometimes he didn’t even notice them anymore. He only noticed the red curls now because he’d had them wrapped around his fist a minute ago. And because they so perfectly complemented the flash of temper in her eyes when he dared to do the unthinkable and ask her for a date.
“I don’t do relationships, Pretty Boy. You know that.”
Pretty Boy again. Of course. “What exactly do you call what we’ve been doing?”
“Screwing?
“Maybe I don’t want to just be used for sex.” If his teenage self could hear the words coming out of his mouth… “It would be one thing if this were friends-with-benefits, but you’re trying to pretend it isn’t even that. That we’re just two strangers scratching an itch when we both know it’s more than that.”