by Christa Wick
Riona didn't answer, just worried her plump bottom lip with her teeth. She also failed to meet my gaze, something that was unusual for someone so frank and confident. Other than her behavior after returning from New York, I'd never known her to be evasive or secretive.
"Fine, I'll start," I said. "When I was in Boston, King told me that Dylan killed his daughter."
She snorted and rolled her eyes.
"That, of course, conflicts with the news reports," I prodded.
"Because it conflicts with reality," she snorted again. "First, Dylan never left the party she was at before she died. Even his enemies at the party don't contradict that fact."
I nodded. I had first read through the old clippings about six months after joining the executive support staff. I knew Jake had been driving the car that crashed with Linsey in it. She had died en route to the hospital, never regaining consciousness.
"I hate to say it..." Pausing, Riona traced the grain of the wooden conference table with one long, pink fingernail. "I wish Linsey never existed..."
Her eyes teared up. I stretched my arm across the table to cover her hand and give a little squeeze.
"Why?"
"She was crazy about Dylan, had been since her early teens. He was more charming back then..."
A tear splashed down her cheek. She freed her hand from mine to swipe away the moisture.
"When she moved to Chicago and started fawning over him, he took her out to high end functions, things he couldn't take his call girls to. The party wasn't one of those things."
Leaning back in her seat, her fingers began toying with the edge of the table. Her gaze went blank but she resumed talking. "He had gone there with someone else and disappeared into a playroom."
A dry chuckle crawled its way up her throat. "A former senator's house, everything respectable in the common areas but many of the guests knew there were other diversions to be had behind certain doors. Knowing only that Dylan had disappeared somewhere in the house with a very attractive and overtly sexual woman, Linsey started slamming back drinks -- hard liquor drinks."
"Oh," I interrupted. "That wasn't mentioned in the papers."
I was talking about the alcohol but could have been referring to almost the entire story -- Dylan's presence, his call girl, the playroom, the senator.
"Of course not. There were a lot of powerful people there." She gave up torturing the edge of the table and rolled her head back against the chair to stare up at the ceiling. "Eventually, she was drunk enough to hunt Dylan down and find him balls deep in the woman, who happened to be tied up, gagged, nipple clamped. All voluntarily and well recompensed, naturally."
"Naturally," I agreed wryly. "So Jake offered to take her home?"
She laughed. "If only that were the case. She drove off wild and drunk, Jake managed to jump in the car before she could leave the grounds."
I nodded, remembering that the vehicle was a convertible. "So he talked her into pulling over--"
The angry shake of her head cut my question off.
"Jake wasn't driving when the car flipped."
The new information pushed me back in my seat and held me there like an elephant sitting on my chest. "But...he said--"
Another angry shake. "He lied. He was in and out of consciousness when the ambulance arrived. Linsey was still alive before he passed out completely. He knew his blood was clean and hers wasn't. He didn't have time to learn she was dead before talking to the cops and saying he had been driving at the time of the accident."
"That's stupid!" I burst out.
"That is Jake," Riona answered flatly. "Protector-hero complex if you haven't realized that already."
Slumping in my chair, I nodded. "But once he knew the girl was dead?"
"Then the press would have had to dig for a more interesting angle to the story, such as what possessed him to lie. It would have exposed Dylan's lifestyle, the events at the party and so much more. Can you imagine what that would have done to the business while it was still weak from my father's mishandlings? Jake was under the Kehoe radar, still known publicly under his mother's name, not our father's. There was no visible connection between him and the company."
I sank a little lower in my seat, my eyes misting over the self-sacrificing actions of my pseudo-big brother. "Damn, I love that idiot," I whispered.
Riona nodded vigorously, fat tears streaming down her cheeks. "But Dylan can be every bit as wonderful when he isn't being...well..."
"A dickweed?" I offered.
She burped up a laugh then wiped at her face.
"Seriously, though," she added once all the evidence of her tears were gone.
"I know." I dipped my head as I answered, hoping to hide how well I knew. I hadn't started crushing on Dylan just because of his looks, although they certainly helped. He might presently be rich as any king, but I had access to decades of company ledgers.
Truth was, he should have had more than a third interest in the company, but his siblings were treated as equal owners. Before he had come to them with the proposal to pool their money and resuscitate the company after their father's death, he had injected a huge amount of cash -- equal to the one-third investment he would later make -- all to keep the company's pension and family "welfare" funds running. The welfare fund was extraordinary for a company, covering everything from medical care and family leave for terminal illnesses or life saving operations and treatment to scholarships and low interest first home loans. I had looked hard to find a similar fund at another business and couldn't. And pensions were usually the first obligation shed by the CEO of a troubled enterprise. Even those companies that didn't conveniently break their agreements certainly didn't have the head of the company parting with half his personal fortune to keep them funded.
I slammed down on the brakes in an attempt to stop my internal train of thoughts and memories of Dylan. I couldn't. Keeping the funds running was just the tip of the iceberg for all the selfless and genuine things I had discovered about the man in my two years working in the executive suite. I knew and had witnessed things that I didn't think his own brother and sister were aware of.
When I thought about it too hard, which was more often than I cared to admit, even recently, I felt like the extreme difference between how giving and open he could be with complete strangers versus those closest to him, including me based on our forty plus hours a week around one another, exerted a twisted reverse psychology that had made me love him. Look at Dylan one way and he was a generous, nurturing, loving man -- but most of what I received from him was indifference.
"Hey..." Riona reached across the table and seized both my hands. I didn't realize until she did so that I had fresh tears streaming down my face. She let go of me, circled the long conference table and sat down next to me, her arms draped around my shoulders.
"You can't hide how badly you are still soft on him," she whispered in my ear. "You don't have to be hurting like this. But one of you has to make the next move. I promise, Dylan is crazy about you."
I shook my head. Even if I believed he was crazy about me, why should I think the dynamics of our relationship would ever change. Wasn't the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and hoping for different results?
Releasing me, she slid a folder off from one of the many stacks on the table. "Maybe once this whole King thing is finally resolved, he can put Linsey in the grave once and for all. The whole thing changed him, but he'll never admit that."
"How?" I asked, refusing to meet her gaze while my eyes were still wet with tears.
"It closed him off emotionally and...changed what he wanted from his submissives." She tried to shrug off giving me a more detailed explanation and went silent for a few seconds. She was just opening her mouth to speak again when Dylan's voice cut her off.
"Riona doesn't know even half of the whole story."
********************
"So tell me," I demanded after Dylan had ordered his sister from the room and for
me to stay.
He had another printout in front of him. His gaze lifted slowly, like a lion sizing up its prey. "You're staying because I'm willing to admit you have a good eye for catching anomalous data."
"Really?" I argued. "Are you sure it's not because Riona will be filling my head with inaccurate information once I'm with her again?"
Like, you know, how you supposedly love me...
He jerked to his feet, causing me to tense. I wasn't sure why I responded like that, other than the sudden action might have startled anyone. I wasn't afraid of Dylan being violent with me. I was, perhaps, a little worried that he would walk out once again, putting me -- us -- almost back at square one.
He didn't leave, just walked over to a side table, bent down and scooped up his briefcase. "I came back to grab this so I could work in my room..."
Plopping the soft attache onto the table, he opened it and pulled out his Surface Pro tablet. He powered it up, entered his pin code and tabbed through to a copy of an unsigned, undated report by the Cook County Medical Examiner's office before he handed me the device.
The file was Linsey King's autopsy report -- one that clearly had never been made public or official because the contents would have been all over the internet.
Breakfast tried to jump up my throat and spill out of my mouth. The file was only words, but they made me sicker than I had ever felt.
Vaginal and anal scarring suggestive of long-term abuse.
Multiple healed fractures of varying age on ribs, both clavicles and femurs, left ulna and mandible.
"Some of the areas broken," Dylan said, interrupting my reading, "could have only happened during childhood. Tell me, Marjolein, who has the power to hurt a wealthy man's child with impunity?"
I swallowed down the thick knot that clogged my throat. Dylan suspected Maxwell King had harmed his daughter and I agreed with his logic. I knew abuse existed and could happen at any level in any family, but I had been fortunate enough to have loving parents. My father and, most particularly, my mother had been doting, self-sacrificing, so caring that the concept of child abuse felt alien...
Inhuman
"Everyone knew King could be a bully outside his family -- no one suspected he could be a monster at home." Dylan pulled the tablet from my loose grip and turned it off. "He had a lot more power at the time of Linsey's accident than he does today. He lost half of it trying to ruin me after her death."
I shook my head. It didn't make sense. "Why?"
"He's sick, so depraved he has to project his monstrosity onto others -- or maybe fear of discovery. Fuck if I know. But I think the scene she walked in on..."
Red stained his cheeks while the rest of his tanned face blanched. "Well, it would have seemed abusive to someone with her background and triggered her flight."
Rising from the conference table, I walked over to the small refreshments table set up in one corner of the room. I opened a bottle of water, took a long drink then splashed some of the liquid into my hand so I could rub it on my face.
Just reading the words had made me feel unclean. Trying to associate those words with a change in Dylan's sexual preferences left me barely able to stand. In fact, I couldn't stand. I barely made it back to my seat. I slid into the chair and rested my head against the table.
I needed a hug -- from someone other than Dylan. I truly didn't know the whole man that he was and now I was terrified of what else there was to discover.
"What Riona said about your kink changing..." Unable to form the rest of my question, I fell silent.
"We've already established you have no interest being in my bed," Dylan growled. "It's none of your business what my kink is."
He was wrong on both counts, but I could only argue against half of what he had just said. "It developed after Linsey's death," I argued. "So it's relevant if you want me to figure out Maxwell and how these files might help us bring him down."
Dylan could have countered my specious logic, but a shadow fell across his face. He stood, walked over to the door and stopped. "It didn't develop after Linsey's death, it intensified, but -- whatever. Come with me."
My mind too numb to work on anything other than auto-pilot, I followed after Dylan. He led me deeper through the office area of the hotel to the back of the building where there was a service elevator. The hotel manager had given him a pass card that worked pretty much every electronic lock in the building. He swiped the card then pulled me into the elevator and pressed the button for the sixteenth floor.
"Linsey was beautiful," he started as the elevator began to ascend the building, "but otherwise totally undesirable. Clingy, apprehensive, unpredictable. I didn't recognize it as a possible manifestation of abuse. I wish to hell I had."
I nodded. As his executive assistant for two years, I had fielded a lot of charity requests for the company as well as Dylan and Jake as individual donors. I knew which ones Dylan responded to. He may not have desired Lindsey, but he would have protected her.
At least I wanted to believe he would have.
"Fear is my kink," Dylan continued. "The emotion was looked down on by my father. If he couldn't drill it out of his children, he would at least teach them to hide it from him and the rest of the world. Riona hides hers very well."
I offered another nod. I had very personal glimpses of Jake and Riona. I had thought Jake fearless until Alexa disappeared. Knowing there were some things capable of terrifying the big man had made me treasure him even more. Riona, too, could appear fearless, but I had long known otherwise. She was confident, but not immune to anxiety.
Now, only Dylan seemed immune to so basic a human emotion.
Leaning toward the control panel, he ran his finger up from the sixteenth floor, which he had already pressed, to the last button on the top of the panel.
-R-
I stared at the letter in its circle as he pressed the button, not understanding its meaning.
"You, for example," he said, "are afraid of heights. I've watched it subside over the years. The first time you walked up the ramp to the plane, you shook like a leaf. I wanted to take you in the back and fuck you right then. Sometimes, that fear still controls you."
My brain was extremely slow to process his words, stopping in segments as feelings warred with a fleeting comprehension. He was right about my acrophobia. Realizing we were going to the roof had my knees knocking against one another. That he had wanted to fuck me so early into my joining the executive support group momentarily pushed the fear aside as other parts of my body began to warm. Then the elevator doors opened and I was flung toward a feeling that approached pure terror.
Dylan had brought me to the roof knowing I was afraid of heights, that I could sometimes manage that fear, but that it controlled me at other times. And fear, for some strange reason, turned him on.
"It's an ego trip," he said, pressing the stop button so that no one could recall the elevator to a lower floor.
He started to advance on me. I backed my way into the corner. A shimmer of heat replaced the shadow that had darkened his face in the conference room. Two small roses of color dotted his cheeks.
"Which will dominate the woman, the primal drive of avoiding death reflected in her phobia or her need for my touch?" Placing his palms flat against the elevator walls on each side of me, Dylan crowded against my body. "Your fear is freezing you in place right now because you know I want to take you to the edge. Can I get you to move?"
With a rough swallow, I shook my head.
"Once upon a time," he started, his face angling down towards mine. "You wanted me. Your panties were wet from just the thought of me."
Terrified as I was, my body still reacted to Dylan's proximity. His hands began to move along the wall, framing my body more closely until, inevitably, we came into physical contact.
"I wanted you, too," he said, his fingers digging into my hips as his torso pressed against mine. I felt the push of his hard cock against my lower stomach and then his lips brushed mine. "I
still do. But I never wanted to bring you to this -- to your eyes alight with fear that I was forcing upon you."
He took a backwards step toward the door, tugging me with him. I wanted to grab the side rails but I had twisted my hands around the lapel of his jacket and couldn't bring myself to let go of him. He smoothed a palm across my bottom to firmly squeeze my ass. He repeated the motion with his other hand and cinched me against him, lifting me slightly so that the hard cock now pressed insistently against my mound.
He sought my mouth again, this time invading it with his tongue as his fingers roughly kneaded my backside, grinding me upward against his erection. When he stopped the kiss, his breath rushed hot past his lips to steam my face. Through it all, he had continued to maneuver me toward and then through the elevator door.
Reaching behind me, he freed the elevator and sent it down. He swiped the pass card along the security panel and punched in a few numbers. I could only guess that he was somehow denying me an easy escape from the rooftop.
My hands searched the surface behind my back for something I could hold onto should Dylan try to drag me toward any of the building's edges. My pussy might have been flooding with need, but it wasn't winning the battle against my phobia. I could fly if I didn't look out, or even toward, the windows, I could stand on balconies up to the fourth floor.
This? At twenty stories up? My body turned to stone, inanimate except for the quaking flesh.
His step casual, Dylan left me clinging to the small structure that housed the elevator and walked to the three-foot high concrete lip that ran the perimeter of the rooftop. He sat down, facing me against a backdrop of blue sky and clouds broken only by the large tower of Cite du Lignon that ruled over the rest of the city. He glanced left, then right. Noticing a spot where the lip had weathered badly, he raked at it with his fingers. Fat chunks of gray concrete spilled onto the rooftop to leave a hole the size of Dylan's fist.