by Olivia Gates
He’d had questions sometimes, what would have led to discussing her past and dissecting it. She’d diverted him every time. But he kept going back to her name, the one she’d chosen for her latest, and she hoped, last identity. It was as if he was trying to grab the end of a thread that would help him unravel her mystery. A person’s given name might not say much about them, but a chosen one said a lot, could be a clue that would lead to their truth. What she never wanted him, of all people, to find out.
But instead of evading the question again, she decided to give him a measure of truth. “I did choose the name because it would make people think my parents picked the obvious name for a redhead. But it’s just a coincidence, since it has personal significance to me, what no one else would ever figure out.”
His focus became absolute. “What is that?”
She gave him another piece. “It reminds me of my mother.”
His eyes smoldered. “Did you lose her long ago?”
“Over twenty years ago.”
He frowned. “You must have been too young to remember her.”
“I was old enough to remember everything.”
His gaze grew more probing. “I wouldn’t give you more than twenty-five or -six.”
“I’m older than I look.”
She was actually almost twenty-nine, had been seven when she’d lost her mother. Or rather, when she had been lost to her mother.
But she wouldn’t pinpoint her age. She drew the line at giving him specifics. But she’d appease his curiosity with one more truth.
“The first fairy tale my mother ever told me at night was Little Red Riding Hood. It remained my favorite bedtime story. But since I couldn’t have named myself Red, I went for Scarlett.”
As soon as her lips stilled, he bent and took them in a long, drugging kiss. As if rewarding her for satisfying one of his curiosities about her.
Pulling back, she noticed a touch of something she hadn’t seen since they’d met again, but had seen a lot five years ago when he’d thought she’d been the fictitious Hannah McPherson, the normal woman who’d lost her parents as he had. Empathy. Even tenderness.
Could she be imagining it? She shouldn’t.
“I was two when I lost my parents. But you know that already.”
She nodded, her throat tightening as she imagined the lost boy he’d been. She realized it was the first time he’d talked about it. She’d never thought he would share any of his scars with her.
He started sweeping her from head to hip in caresses as he talked, his gaze fixed on her eyes but seemingly looking into his own memories. “In the two years I spent in the shelter, no one ever told me that my parents were dead. They probably thought I was too young to understand what that meant, or they weren’t really sure they were. There were thousands still missing and unaccounted for.”
Like after the last and most powerful earthquake and tsunami to hit Japan. Years later, over twenty-one thousand people were still missing.
“After The Organization took me when I was four, it took a long while to understand I was imprisoned and that I’d never see my family again, the family I barely remembered anymore. It was twenty years later that I managed to escape.”
Unable to hold back, she pulled him down to her and sealed his lips with her own, as if she could absorb his remembered pain and abuse.
Letting her drink deep of his essence, he swept her around to bring her beneath him on the gigantic couch. He stretched over her, his daunting hardness pressing where she needed it through their clothes. He was clad only in black pants. The rest of his body was a poem of defined, elegant muscles, packing unimaginable power, flexing and straining their hunger over her. How she’d soon have to live without this unbridled joy of feeling him like this, she couldn’t begin to think. She’d done it once before, falling into the suspended animation that had been the only way she could survive. She had no idea if she’d be able to seek its refuge again.
Her heart thudded painfully as Raiden pulled back from their kiss and started to rise. Unable to let him go, she clung to his arms. He let her, surrendering to her caresses like a great feline inviting and luxuriating in a worshipper’s petting.
Then his eyes took on that reminiscing cast again. “I was always angry that I didn’t even remember my family. I wished I had been older when I lost them so I’d at least have the memories. It made it so much harder finding their trail.” His gaze focused back on her, that gentleness entering it again. “But just now as you said you remembered everything about your mother, I realized that I got the better deal. Memories are far more painful than their absence.”
Feeling her throat closing over what felt like barbs, she struggled to keep her eyes from filling with tears.
Before she lost the fight, he speared his hand in her hair at her nape, pinning her head down to the couch, tilting her face up to him. “So you’re not a real redhead, either.”
“No.”
His other hand threaded through her hair, combing it over and over. “You made a very convincing blonde, too. Any shade suits you so much it looks as if you were born with it. Until you try the next shade and it’s just as incredible on you.”
She stored away the praise he lavished on her, saving it for the barren years ahead. Even if it was mostly about her looks, which weren’t hers anyway anymore, she would hold on to it.
She shrugged. “Blond colors were the best to turn into others at short notice. Now that I have no need for changing colors, I can maintain a darker one.”
“But now that you don’t need to change colors, why not just go back to your original one? Wouldn’t that be more convenient? Or do you like how this shade makes you stand out here?”
She couldn’t tell him she continued dying her hair obsessively because she couldn’t bear seeing the thick white lock that had grown in her crown after she’d left him. A glaring souvenir of the most mutilating period of her life.
So she told him the reason she’d chosen this shade instead. “This was actually my paternal aunt’s hair color. I loved her so much, thought she looked like a fairy queen with that hair. And I made my face look like a childhood friend. At least, what I think she would have looked like as an adult.”
“Are your aunt and friend dead, too?” At her difficult nod, the empathy she thought she saw in his gaze grew contemplative. “So you’ve created this new identity from the memories of the people you loved and lost, becoming a living memorial of them.”
Surprise at his analysis made her lose the fight, hot, stinging tears rushing to her eyes.
Averting them, she whispered, “I never looked at it this way. It just comforted me to look in the mirror and see a reflection of the ones I loved, to hear the name that reminds me of my mother’s soft voice telling me stories in the dark.”
Bringing her eyes back to his with a gentle hand on her cheek, his fingers wiped away the tears that had escaped, his gaze lengthening, deepening, until she felt he’d fathomed her every secret without her needing to tell him any more details.
Suddenly he asked, “How many disguises did you have in your life?”
Blinking to clear her eyes, she attempted a mischievous smile. “Aren’t you all questions tonight?”
His answering smile was equal parts hunger and self-deprecation. “You fascinate me. I thought I was undetectable until you. I’d give anything to pick your brains.”
“Anything?” She ran a finger down his chest, then the groove separating his defined abs, then lower.
“Name your price.”
“Any price?”
He just nodded, his expression avid, his irises looking as if they had the sunset at his back trapped in them.
God, how could anything be so absolutely beautiful?
Sighing, she arched up into his length, ran greedy hands down his muscled
back. “You know my price.”
“That’s not a price, that’s a privilege. One I’ll take full advantage of, as soon as you quench my curiosity. So how many?”
“How many personas have I played, you mean? Many.”
“I’m sure you have an exact number.”
“Sixty-seven.”
His eyes snapped wider. He must have expected her to prevaricate, and probably couldn’t imagine someone could have played that many roles.
At length, he said, “Counting the two personas I know?”
“No.”
At her immediate answer, he pursed his lips. “Why not? They are very well-drawn and distinct personas.”
“Just in their different names and life stories.”
“Still claiming you never acted with me?”
“You be the judge of that.” She took one of his hands, guided it beneath her panties. As his fingers slid between her swollen, melting flesh, his erection grew so hard, it hurt poking into her side. “Can this be an act?”
“Not this, for sure.”
Moaning, she opened herself to him, and those long, powerful fingers caressed her feminine lips apart, sawed through her molten need, knowing exactly where and how to press, how hard or soft to rub, how fast or slow to go. She keened, lurched with sensations almost too much to bear. And that was before he dipped two fingers inside her. It again made her feel so acutely how empty she felt. How only having him inside her had ever filled the void.
“Take me, Raiden. No foreplay...please.”
In answer, with movements that bordered on magic in their efficiency, he rid her of her every garment, had her naked beneath him in under ten seconds. Before she could fumble with his zipper to release him, clutch him to her and bring him inside her, he slid down her body.
Protesting weakly, yet unable to do anything but surrender, she arched helplessly as he triggered her every erogenous inch, which under his hands was every last one she had. Again and again she tried to drag him up to her until his magnificent head settled between her thighs and his lips and tongue scorched the heart of her femininity. The sight and the concept of what he did to her were even more incapacitating than the physical sensations.
Through the delirium, she watched him cosset her, drink her, revel in her essence, in her need and taste and pleasure. Then, as always, he knew exactly when she could take no more.
His lips suckled her nub, his teeth grazing it even as his fingers strummed her inner trigger. But it was his command that snapped the coil of unbearable tension inside her.
“Let me see and hear how much I pleasure you, Scarlett.”
Shrieking with the recoil of sensation, her body heaved in a chain reaction. She held his eyes all through, as he always demanded that she did in the throes, letting him see what he was doing to her.
Finally subsiding, unable even to regulate her breathing, she watched through drugged eyes as he began again, varying his method, renewing her desperation, deepening her surrender.
She knew there was no point in begging for him again. He’d do with her as he pleased. And give her pleasure beyond endurance while at it.
It would be wise to save her breath for the screams of soul-racking ecstasy he would inflict on her all night long.
And if a voice in her drugged mind told her this would end with a far worse scar than in the past, she didn’t care.
The end was still weeks away. And she was savoring what she could have with him until the very last second....
* * *
The first thing Raiden saw as soon as he opened his eyes was Scarlett. He had to blink to make sure he actually saw her. Nowadays he saw her whether she was there or not. She was all that filled his mind’s eye, his every thought and fantasy.
But she was really here this time. Barely. She’d already showered, dressed and packed her famous overnight bag. Her bag of tricks, as she’d once teasingly referred to it. She did have it filled with stuff that tricked his senses into catapulting to a higher realm. Lingerie, oils and an array of surprising enhancers of her own concoction.
Not that those things were what affected him. They did only because it was she who wore them, who wielded them. Now the bag was over her shoulder and she was about to walk out of his bedroom.
Since they’d started their arrangement six weeks ago, this was the first time he’d woken up before she’d left. Which was unbelievable. Not that he’d woken up this time, but that he’d actually slept through all the other times. As someone whose senses had been conditioned to be on full alert all the time, he’d never relaxed around anyone so fully, not even his brothers, to let sleep claim him so completely.
But against all the reasons he had to distrust her, Raiden’s instincts told him otherwise. They trusted her implicitly, turned off his every built-in alarm system, to the point that they made him sleep—deep, blissful, rejuvenating sleep—only while beside her. And to continue surrendering to slumber even as she puttered around his domain, knowing he was his safest with her around.
But it never failed. She always left first thing in the morning, never once waking him up to say goodbye. He’d hoped today would be different, since he’d told her he wouldn’t go to work before noon today. He’d hoped she’d take this as what he’d meant it to be, an invitation to sleep in with him and have a late breakfast together.
But then why should he feel so disappointed that she hadn’t heeded his implication? Beyond the relentless demands he made on her sexually, in anything else he maintained a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. She probably didn’t even realize there’d been an invitation hidden in his words.
But his attitude was just a front. In reality, every second he spent in her company, the bad memories of the past faded, as if they’d happened to someone else. He could no longer see her through their tainted prism. He believed he now saw through to her core self, the real woman. He believed he felt what she felt. Though she was vocal only in passion, he could swear he sensed that this was no longer purely sexual to her. If it had ever been.
And he wasn’t deluding himself about this. He’d been feeling this even before learning the truth about her current work made him radically change his opinion of her character.
When he’d first investigated her activities in Japan, he’d thought her humanitarian work with UNICEF was just an ingenious way of wheedling herself into major businessmen’s pockets, like Hiro, for donations she’d pocket herself. Then she’d asked for the hundred million, stating it would all be used in her work. He hadn’t been in a condition at the time to care why she’d asked for it, had vaguely thought she’d had to at least be exaggerating about the money’s intended use. But after he’d given her the money, and she continued working harder than ever, he had to revise his suspicions, since he’d given her more than ten years’ worth of donation drives could raise.
Further investigations had revealed the incredible results she’d been consistently getting for the past three years, fifteen months of those in Japan. Everything fell into place in the light of his new time with her. And that was before he’d discovered her most ambitious project was being funded by her own money. The money she’d taken from him.
He’d then realized she’d asked him for it only so it would free her from dependence on donations and other sources of official funding. Those had been limiting the scope of what she could achieve, and she was always threatened by being forced to stop her projects altogether if she ran out of money. He’d even traced parts of the previous sum he’d given her to more of her humanitarian efforts. He now had no doubt the rest of it had been put to very good use, as she’d told him that first night. He’d thought she was being provocative, but she’d only been telling him the truth. And expecting him to believe the worst.
But even doing so, with the way he’d been feeling, he would have given her a billion dollars had she asked. T
he way he was feeling now, if she asked, he’d sign over all his assets.
Now he watched her from slit eyes as she paused at the door of his expansive bedroom and looked back. In her utilitarian clothes and ponytail, she looked so practical, so young. So fragile. She’d lost a lot of weight in the past six weeks, and he could sometimes swear she was reverting to what she’d been before.
She hadn’t realized he’d woken up. And the expression that came over her, the emotions that gripped her features when she thought she was safe from his scrutiny, speared through him.
Such wistfulness, such pervasive dejection.
Long after she’d closed the door and he heard her leave his penthouse, he lay there on his back in the bed in which they’d shared indescribable intimacies, staring at the ceiling.
Why was she feeling that way? Did she feel that way?
He couldn’t tell for sure. Not as long as he didn’t know everything there was to know about her.
What he knew now was just feelings, observations and information about her current status. Her past remained as inaccessible as ever.
After that night three weeks ago, when she’d told him why she’d chosen the name Scarlett, her red hair and that specific face, she’d gone back to evading his probing. Beyond being candid about what she thought in the moment, and explicit about what he made her feel physically, she gave him nothing more that could make it possible to reconstruct her past.
A past he could no longer bear not knowing about.
It was no longer to tie up everything about her neatly, so that when their time together came to an end, he’d stow away her memory in a closed file and move on, with no lingering uncertainties keeping her alive in his memory. Not that he’d ever wanted that. He now admitted it to himself that when he’d hit the first dead ends in his search into her past, he’d convinced himself she was untraceable. He’d unconsciously wanted to avoid finding out what would disturb him more. Or worse, what would irrevocably eradicate her from his mind.