Eliza scrunched her nose in disapproval, and took a swig of the cold coffee that had helped her get through her late night study session at the library. She changed the radio to an easy listening jazz station Rachelle hated, and then replied with one simple phrase, emoticon-free. It’s Wednesday.
On weekends, Eliza sometimes humored her sister by joining her at a bar or two. Despite Rachelle’s claims that they would stay up and watch the sunrise together, she inevitably became engrossed in a conversation-slash-make out session with whichever hot guy she had just fallen deeply in love with. She would then forget that Eliza existed, and Eliza could make her exit, straight home to a warm shower and a good book.
So? Rachelle texted back. You’re such an old biddy.
Rachelle and Eliza weren’t identical, but they looked a lot alike. Their parents were of different ethnic backgrounds, their mother black and father white, so they both had creamy dark skin and big green eyes. They shared the same full lips and long lashes, but Rachelle used hers much more frequently—batting those lashes and constantly smiling or giggling. Since they looked so similar, Eliza didn’t have the luxury of blaming Rachelle’s greater popularity on something superficial like looks. It had to be personality. Rachelle was simply more likable. Although Eliza preferred a quiet life, she had to admit that stung.
Rachelle then texted a photo of a beautiful dark skinned man who winked at the camera, presumably beckoning Eliza to join them. Eliza threw her phone in the back seat, tired of being distracted by the insane chirping of the text message alert. The guy in the photo looked like one of Rachelle’s disposable boy toys. Eliza didn’t understand why Rachelle would waste energy on a man she planned on just throwing away right away.
Eliza only cared about the real deal. If she was going to be married within a year of graduating law school as planned, she needed to find a serious boyfriend soon. After all, they needed to date for two years before he proposed. Then she needed a year to plan the wedding. Rachelle acted like she had all the time in the world to settle down, but she wasn’t doing the math. They were young now, but if Eliza wanted to marry and give birth to two children before thirty—preferably two daughters named Josie and Faith—she couldn’t mess around.
Lost in images of lacy white dresses and tiny pink socks and the gentle rhythms of Miles Davis, she didn’t see it coming. As Eliza passed through an intersection under a green light, another car barreled toward her through the red light on the cross street, probably headed back from the Northgate bars. Eliza had the feeling of being suspended in time. It had to have been less than a second before the hit, but it felt longer. Her body froze in terror and she felt disconnected from her body, watching the scene as if watching a movie. If only that had been true…if only she could have floated above the car, safe from the blow.
However, there was nothing for her to do. The car careened into the passenger side of Eliza’s Jetta at high speed. She felt a painful jolt in her spine and heard a metallic crunch over the sound of Blue in Green, and then everything went black.
When Eliza woke, it took her a while to figure out where she was. She heard a familiar beeping sound and couldn’t place it at first. She smelled an also familiar, but sickening medicinal smell, and another smell that didn’t match—the smoky smell of a bar. She heard her father’s deep, gentle voice calling her name. The sound of his voice helped her place the beeping. It was the same beeping she had heard after her father’s emergency gall bladder surgery. She remembered watching him sleep, looking far too grayish yellow in the harsh light of the recovery room.
Eliza opened her eyes carefully. She had in fact determined her location from smell and sound alone. This had to be the exact same recovery room where she had prayed for her father’s survival--the place where she had felt more terrified than she ever had in her life. After all, her father was the only parent she had left. Was this a bad dream?
“Eliza,” her father said again. “Are you awake?”
His green eyes looked watery, but his voice sounded calm. That was what made him such a great father. No matter how bad things were, he could say that everything would be okay in his comforting low rumble of a voice, and she would always believe him.
“Lizzie,” said her sister, who Eliza realized was grasping one of her hands, some of her cheap bauble rings cutting into her already sore flesh. Rachelle seemed far less calm, with black lines of make-up running down her cheeks. Her usually supernaturally smooth hair now frizzed like Eliza’s usually did. Eliza realized the bar smell had been coming from Rachelle, a slightly sickening blend of cheap beer and cigarettes. No, not beer. Whiskey. A whiskey sour. How in the hell could she guess her sister’s latest drink from smell alone?
“Do you hear me, baby?” her father asked.
“Yes,” Eliza said. As a matter of fact, she heard him surprisingly well. His voice was so clear that it might have been coming from inside her head. She thought she could feel her eardrums vibrating. And she could hear more than just his voice. She could hear the air pushing in and out of his lungs. She could hear his heart pumping…more quickly than usual. It had to be the drugs. She didn’t know what they had given her for pain, but it was trippy.
“You’re going to be okay,” Rachelle said, although her tear soaked words contradicted the statement. Rachelle kissed the back of Eliza’s hand and then held it against her cheek. Since Rachelle couldn’t give her sister a full-on hug, she seemed to settle for just the hand. Eliza had the strangest sensation of feeling like she could count the skin cells on Rachelle’s cheek. She could feel the tiny blood vessels under her smooth skin, each one pumping away gently in elegant rhythm like her body played its own kind of gentle jazz.
Yeah, she’d never been a fan of getting high, and she didn’t like this either. Once they released her, she was going back to nothing stronger than Advil.
Chapter Two
Eliza stayed in the hospital for a week, which felt like an eternity. The nurses and doctors kept marveling at how fast she healed. In the car accident, she suffered a concussion, four broken ribs, and internal bleeding. And after only a week in the hospital, the doctor said her rib fractures had healed. As this wasn’t possible, the doctor suggested that perhaps they’d made a mistake with their original diagnosis. But Eliza didn’t care why, she just wanted out.
Rachelle had flatly refused to bring Eliza her laptop. She had said, “I know you’re just going to use it for schoolwork.” Well…yeah, what else would I use it for? They were in the middle of fall semester and she couldn’t just disappear for a week. Her life schedule didn’t allow for a skipped semester. Spending the week doing nothing was torture. She hated watching daytime television and the nurses constantly telling her to get her butt back in bed.
She didn’t feel like she needed rest, and that wasn’t just the bull-headedness that she had inherited from her mother. She felt great. She thought she could jump out of bed and run a 5K, no problem. And the world seemed even more worth jumping in to than it had before. She noticed everything. She knew they were cooking meat loaf in the kitchen before they sent her a menu—because she could smell it wafting up from the first floor.
And when the man two rooms over died, Eliza knew even before she heard the alarms. One of the heartbeats around her had silenced, leaving only a cold absence in its wake. She had no idea how she could hear a heartbeat from two rooms away, and assumed she must be imagining it, or maybe there was more than saline in her IV.
When they finally gave her the release papers, Eliza took a moment to look in the mirror closely for the first time since she’d been admitted. She still had mild bruising on the side of her face, but that wasn’t what made her look twice. She looked…different.
She didn’t like much about her frizzy, high-maintenance hair, but she did like the color. A touch of red from the Irish on her father’s side had mixed with the black, making her hair a unique reddish brown. If she looked at one single hair, it looked red, but as a group, her hair looked dark brown. And
when her hair got frizzy, the tiny strands formed what her father called her little halo. He said it always looked like the sun shone behind her.
No drop of dye had ever touched her hair. She didn’t want to mess with her halo. But it looked like someone had given her highlights while she was asleep. She certainly couldn’t blame the change on sun bleaching, as she’d been stuck inside for a week. Her sister was strange enough that giving her highlights against her will was within the realm of possibility, but it still seemed like a really weird thing to do. And was her skin lighter? That couldn’t be possible, right? Eliza decided that it must be a trick of the lights. Or maybe the florescent lights above her bed had permanently damaged her eyeballs.
Eliza gathered her things and headed out of the hospital confidently. She technically wasn’t supposed to drive herself home and if they caught her running out, they might stop her. But she felt great, and she needed a moment of freedom—away from the hospital and away from her doting sister and father. She knew that as soon as she got home, they would stick her right back in bed, and she couldn’t stand one more minute of it.
When Eliza turned the ignition in the rental car, she couldn’t help but smile to herself. The car smelled like dust and cigarettes, but she was free. In her drug-addled state she had moments where she truly believed that she would never get out of the hospital. Just the idea of going to class, drinking coffee, and listening to jazz on the radio seemed too wonderful to be true. However, now that she was outside, going back to her old life didn’t feel as tempting.
Eliza blinked in the harsh sunlight, wishing she had her sunglasses. Of course, they had been in her Jetta and were probably smashed beyond recognition just like the rest of her poor little car. She found a radio station she liked—going for Blues this time, and turned it up loud. Thank Me Someday by Buddy Guy, just what she was in the mood for. She cracked open the window so she could smell the fresh, non-hospital air. Of course, she lived in Baton Rouge, so the air smelled like refineries and sulfur, but that was the smell of home. And she could smell more than the sulfur--she could smell the fryer from the hole-in-the-wall restaurant she loved. She also thought she could smell a blooming butterfly ginger flower and some Mexican bush sage. How had she never noticed all of these amazing fragrances?
She pulled onto the highway on her familiar route back to her apartment and noticed that some new buildings had cropped up while she was in the hospital. But that didn’t make sense…she had only been there for a week. Besides, these buildings didn’t look like new developments. She passed by a massive plantation style home that she would have sworn wasn’t there before, even though it looked like it had stood since the 1800s. The way home was full of undeveloped land and empty fields. Had she taken a wrong turn?
Just to be sure, she checked the exit signs. Nope, she was on I-10, just passing exit 151 toward Lobdell Highway. That was right. But the next exit sign confused her. There shouldn’t be an exit 152—at least she could have sworn it wasn’t there before. Curious, Eliza took the exit.
She quickly found herself in an unfamiliar neighborhood without any clue how to get back on the highway. Eliza cursed herself. She couldn’t wait to hear the lecture she would get from her father when he found out that she tried to drive home from the hospital by herself, when she was clearly still whacked out on drugs. That had to be the only explanation. Sober, sane people didn’t get lost in imaginary neighborhoods in the town they’ve lived in all their life.
Eventually, she’d probably have to call her father or—cringe—her sister and tell them that she needed rescuing, but she wasn’t ready to admit defeat. Besides, her curiosity pushed her forward. This neighborhood was breathtaking. How could she have never noticed it before? The residents appeared wealthy, in fact, a little too wealthy for Baton Rogue. They drove luxury cars—nothing less fashionable than a Mercedes--and had them sitting boldly in their driveways with no concern for crime. She even saw some breathtaking classic cars, an old Rolls Royce and 1950s Bentley. She almost wanted to call her dad now, he would absolutely freak at seeing that 1950s Bentley.
Chapter Three
Eliza slowed the car and pulled up to the curb in front of an eclectic, Gothic style home that could have been a movie set. She felt a little dizzy and thought she might be sick. Yep. She should not have driven home from the hospital alone. Something was definitely wrong with her. She should have guessed as much when she started hallucinating the sound of a heart beat two rooms over and believed that her skin had magically gotten lighter. How had a smart person missed something so obvious? She was not okay.
She opened her car door and stepped out, feeling like she needed some fresh air. Once again, she was accosted by thousands of different smells, each more pungent than the last. As fascinating as it had been earlier, now it was overwhelming. She just needed some oxygen. She didn’t need to smell the chili cooking down the street or the leaves decomposing in the gutters.
Something grabbed her arm and she gasped. She thought “something” not someone because his hand felt more like metal prong than human flesh. He was just far too cold and hard for a normal human. Probably just more hallucinations.
“Let go of me,” she said weakly.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said back in a voice as cold and hard as his hand.
“I know…I took a wrong turn.”
“Get back on the highway. Now.”
Even in her confused state, Eliza didn’t appreciate being bossed around. Okay, so she didn’t belong here, but since when was it acceptable to demand that people leave a neighborhood? There wasn’t even a security gate. Was this some kind of secret remaining whites-only neighborhood? Or maybe she actually had wandered into 1950s Baton Rouge. That didn’t seem that much stranger than a phantom neighborhood appearing out of nowhere.
The rude man certainly was white…really white. She might have even guessed he was albino except for his thick, dark lashes and his warm hazel eyes. And his hair was such a light color blond, it almost looked silver. He was far too young to have gray hair, as he couldn’t be any older than thirty. He looked strange, but the effect was hypnotic. She didn’t want to look away. Despite his rudeness, he also looked at her in a surprisingly attentive way, as if he found her fascinating. He took a deep breath and almost seemed to be breathing her in.
Eliza reached into her purse and fumbled for her keys. How did she manage to lose her keys in the thirty seconds since she got out of the car?
“It’s too late,” the man said, and a chill went up Eliza’s spine. Too late for what?
Eliza felt something hit her from behind, something hard and solid like a metal beam. She fell to the ground, scraping her palms and her knees. Her previously miraculously healed ribs seemed to crack again, sending splitting pains through her body. She looked up to see that it wasn’t a metal beam, but a human who had knocked her down. A woman at that. She was as pale as the man and could have been his sister. Eliza guessed that she had at least twenty pounds on the pale woman. How had she knocked her over like a Saints lineman?
Eliza tried to prepare herself to fight back, but the man was faster. He grabbed her under her arms and pulled her to her feet. He seemed to hiss at the woman…yeah, she had to be hallucinating…and he dragged Eliza across his lawn at unusual speed. She lost a flip-flop, but he didn’t stop. Before she could even react, she was inside his house and he had bolted the door behind him. Her heart rate spiked to what was probably a dangerous level for someone recovering from serious injuries. How did she let his happen? Eliza had always been the cautious one, never getting in cars with men she didn’t know well and guarding her drink like it was Fort Knox. All of that, and now a strange man had pulled her into his house and she hadn’t even fought back. She hadn’t even had the chance.
He stood at his door, so Eliza scanned the room for other escape routes. She found herself briefly distracted by the odd décor. This wasn’t the home of a young man. Maybe he lived with his grandfather? The home wasn’t stuc
k in one time period--it was stuck in several. He had a mustard yellow couch from the 1970s, a record player and a phonograph machine, a 1980s Nintendo, and a brand new plasma television set. There was no consistency with the time period and it might make an interior designer’s head explode. However, she liked it. The home was unusual but authentic. He wasn’t trying to be strange for the effect like a New Orleans hipster.
She darted toward the kitchen, assuming she’d find a backdoor, but he blocked her path with surprising speed. She thought she should scream but she couldn’t quite find her voice.
“Don’t panic,” he said. He held his hand out to her like he was trying to feed a frightened squirrel. “But you can’t go outside.”
“Why not? What are you going to do to me?”
“I’m old enough to resist temptation. You’re safe with me. But you’re not safe out on those streets.”
What the hell was he talking about?
“My father is a policeman,” she lied. “You’re making a big mistake.”
She had to admit, it did seem like the woman was attacking her, not the man. But she didn’t trust any man who dragged her into his home and locked the door.
“They can smell you,” he said. “More will come.”
Okay. That’s just creepy.
“They respect territory,” he continued. “They won’t come inside my home. But out on the street, you’re fair game.”
“You’re really freaking me out, you know.”
“Just look.” He pointed his long, pale finger toward the window.
Eliza went to window to look as instructed. Sure enough, a crowd had begun to form outside the house. It was the strangest group of people she’d ever seen. They were all pale, but it varied. Some of them looked like darker skinned people who had been bleached slightly…kind of like she had. And even stranger, they were as oddly dressed as this man’s home was decorated. One woman wore a long dress that looked like it belonged in Downton Abbey…but with a baseball cap. Another man wore jeans and looked normal from the waist down, but looked more like a pirate from the waist up with a ruffled shirt and long, unruly hair.
BILLIONAIRE ROMANCE: The Unforgettable Billionaires: The Complete Collection Boxed Set 1-12 (Young Adult Rich Alpha Male Billionaire Romance) (Alpha Bad Boy Billionaire Romance) Page 75