He wanted to make her feel safe.
It was the hardest thing he had ever done, keeping it slow and soft. Her perfume went to his head like a drug, and the candlelight turned her hair to swirls of bronze highlighted with glinting flashes of gold. She was so gorgeous, he could have come just staring at her face. He had to close his eyes, grit his teeth to hang onto his self-control.
She was wet and soft from the last time, and damn lucky for him; he was so desperate, he could never have survived a bout of foreplay. She let out a low, shaky moan as he prodded and pushed himself inside her. Their eyes locked, speechless. He was humbled. Awestruck at the mystery of it. It had never occurred to him before how intimate that moment really was. How enormous the act of trust on her part.
He had never thought of sex in terms of trust. Only of pleasure, his duty to give it, his due in return. A simple and straightforward exchange. He had followed his instincts in pursuit of pleasure all his life, but now they were leading him down paths that he had never trod. Sex with Raine was like nothing he had ever known.
He started rocking inside her, and suddenly they were kissing as if the world were about to end and her arms were wrapped around his neck. His strokes got deeper, and soon she was taking all of him, slick and deep, her hips jerking up to meet his.
He pulled away from that mind-melting kiss, laughing. “Cool it,” he protested. “You said sweet and soft, but if you go crazy on me, what the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Oh, shut up.” She pulled his head back down to hers.
Her hips heaved and bucked beneath him, and he used his weight to hold her in place, letting her churn and struggle and strain against him. Creating something firm and strong for her to break herself against, like a wave crashing on a rock, an explosion of foaming ecstasy, and he was the rock. He held her back, not letting her rush, or panic. Coaxing her towards where she needed to go, not driving her. Letting her pleasure unfold, over and over, blooming sweeter and hotter every time. He made her come, over and over, sweet and slow and careful. The hot, clutching pulses of her orgasm milked him ever closer to his own, but not too close. Not yet. Not until she felt safe enough to let go completely, to launch herself and fly. Not until he had fashioned a net to catch her, as big and soft and beautiful as the whole sky.
Raine lay beneath him, limp and exhausted with pleasure before he finally let himself go. Pleasure rushed and pounded through him, so hard and furious that he lay there, clutching her and trembling for a small eternity before he even remembered who he was.
The last thought he had, after he got rid of the condom, was of how incredible it would be to make love to her without latex. Usually it didn’t even cross his mind. He hadn’t had unprotected sex since he was too young and dumb to know better, two-thirds of a lifetime ago. How amazing it would be to bathe his naked cock in her scalding heat, to explode inside her. To fill her with himself, his seed.
Seth refused to let himself examine that thought, electing instead to slide into real, deep sleep. For the first time in what felt like forever.
At first, it was the classic contradiction; the horror of surprise side by side with a terrible sense of inevitability. Her father, pointing. Herself, leaning to look. Blood oozing out of the marble, like the credits in old B-grade horror movies. She looked up, and it was not her father, it was Victor, smiling. He grabbed her braids and yanked on them hard, making tears spring into her eyes. “Toughen up, Katya. The world is not kind to crybabies.” His voice boomed in her head, loud and metallic.
She was at the Stone Island dock, dressed in the green frog bathing suit. Her hair was braided tight for swimming, and her mother was wearing a yellow sundress, laughing. The big dark man with the mustache plucked her green frog glasses off her nose, and was holding them too high for her to reach. Taunting her, dangling and yanking. Dangling and yanking. The sunglasses were prescription, and without them everything was blurry. The mustached man was laughing like it was all so funny, but it wasn’t at all. Tears of frustration gathered in her blurred eyes, no matter how she tried to blink them back, and Victor was sure to scold her again if he saw them.
Her father’s sailboat was floating away from the dock. He was waving good-bye, and even with her blurred eyes she could see the bleak sadness in his eyes. It crushed her to see him so defeated. He gestured at the three laughing adults, getting smaller and smaller.
“Remember.” He was too far for her to have heard him, but the word reverberated in her head as if he had spoken it directly in her ear.
This was it, she knew it. She would never see him again. He was getting smaller, only his shadowy eyes could be seen, like the eyeholes of an aged skull. Panic exploded, and she was screaming after him, begging him to turn back, come back, she would save him, she would think of something, she would do anything if only he would please, please come back and not leave her all alone—
“Raine! Jesus, wake up! It’s only a dream, baby. Wake up!”
She struggled wildly against the strong arms that were holding her. Then it all slipped into focus. Seth. Sex, chocolate, candle flames guttering in a pool of blood-red wax. The island. Another dream.
She collapsed against his warm chest and dissolved into tears, but they didn’t last as long as usual. His fierce embrace radiated heat through her body, relaxing her. The tears subsided, and she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry I woke you,” she said.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “That was a hell of a nightmare.”
She nodded, resting her hot forehead against his chest.
“You want to tell me about it?” he prompted.
“No, thank you.”
He hugged her tighter. “It might help. So I’ve heard.”
She shook her head. He kissed the side of her face that wasn’t pressed against him. “Suit yourself,” he said. “If at some point you change your mind, I’ll still be interested.”
“Thank you,” she whispered.
He pulled her back to him, fitting her into the crook of his shoulder. “Are you going to be able to sleep?”
“No,” she admitted. “Not for a while. Maybe not at all.”
“So this is a chronic thing.”
His matter-of-fact voice made the whole thing seem less dreadful. He flipped on the bedside lamp and studied her damp face, his eyes somber. “Can I help? Is there anybody whose ass I can kick for you?”
She snuggled deeper into his warmth, kissing the thick bulge of his bicep, and shook her head. “You can’t save me from this problem, Seth,” she said quietly. “But I love you for wanting to.”
He stiffened beneath her, and she realized, with a twinge of alarm, that she had used the scary L-word. She’d heard that it made men panic, when used prematurely.
Stop clinging to an illusion of control, she reminded herself wryly. He wasn’t running or screaming. That was promising.
“So,” he said, his voice elaborately casual. “What happens now?”
She kissed his chest. “Now you sleep, and I stare at the ceiling.”
“No. I mean, with us.”
She propped herself up on her elbow and smiled at him, threading her fingers through the hair on his chest. “You can start by promising to never leap out of the dark and scare me, ever again.”
“Give me a key,” he suggested. “When you come in, just say ‘Honey, I’m home,’ and if I’m there, I’ll say ‘How was your day, dear?’”
She was taken aback by the bold request. “It seems almost redundant to give you a key, Seth,” she hedged.
“Your neighbors might get nervous if they see me picking your locks all the time. Besides, official boyfriends get issued keys.”
“They do?”
He frowned. “Hell, yeah.” He looked annoyed at her hesitation.
Raine stared down at the pattern of hair on his muscular chest, contemplating the idea. It flew in the face of all the rules, but those rules didn’t correspond to the crazy reality she inhabited. She was desti
ned for chaos. She took a deep breath, and followed her heart, not her head. “I’ll give you the keys that Victor gave me,” she offered.
He jerked up onto his elbow. “What?”
“He was waiting for me when I came home last night,” she said.
He gestured impatiently. “What did he want?”
“He wanted me to spy on you,” she said. “He’s curious about you.”
“So? What did you tell him?”
“I told him no,” she said simply. “I told him to leave. What else could I do?”
“You could quit,” he said curtly. “You could tell him to fuck off. You could get the hell out of town, that’s what you could do!”
She looked down and shook her head.
He cursed, and flopped down onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. “You’re driving me nuts, Raine. Bad nuts, not good nuts.”
She studied his scowling face, puzzled. “Doesn’t it bother you that Victor wants to spy on you?” she inquired.
He slanted her an impatient look. “Not particularly. I’d do the same if I were him. I knew the guy was a sleaze. It comes as no shock to me. Want me to dream up some stuff for you to tell him, just to keep him off your case?”
“No, thank you. I don’t want to play his game at all.”
His face hardened. “Then what are you doing here?”
She shook her head again. “Seth—”
“I have to know. You don’t want to play Lazar’s dirty little games, and yet, you can’t leave. You say you have your reasons. So what are they?”
His voice slashed across her nerves, already jagged from the nightmare, and her fragile calm began to crumble. She thought of her father’s sad, hollow eyes as he drifted away. Tears came, in a hot, uncontrollable rush, and she covered her face with her hands.
Seth made an impatient sound. “I’m not going to be put off by sniveling, Raine. What the hell is it with you and Lazar? Out with it.”
The words came out of their own volition. “He killed my father.”
He didn’t react, or exclaim, or look shocked. He just studied her, his eyes thoughtful, for a long moment. He reached out and brushed the tears off her cheeks with his knuckle. “You want to run that by me one more time, babe?” he asked gently.
She pressed her hand against her mouth as she tried to sort out what she dared to tell him. One wrong word and the whole thing would burst out of her, uncensored. “It was years ago,” she whispered. “I was eleven. My father…worked for him. I don’t know the details. I was too small. It was passed off as a boating accident. We ran away, never came back. My mother refuses to talk about it.”
“So what makes you think that Victor—”
“This damned nightmare!” Her hands fell, and she let him see her tear-blotched face, her humiliating desperation. “I’ve been having it ever since my father died. He shows me his gravestone and the letters start to gush blood. I look up, and there’s Victor, laughing at me.”
“No proof? Nobody else accused him at the time?”
“No,” she whispered. “We just ran. My mother and I.”
He gently smoothed away her tears with his knuckles. “Sweetheart,” he said carefully. “Could this just be about grief?”
She flinched away from him. “Do you think I haven’t asked myself that question for seventeen years? At this point, I no longer care. I have to do this, or I’ll end up in a mental ward. It’s that simple.”
He scowled. “Do what? What exactly do you have to do?”
She threw up her hands. “Find out what my father knew that got him killed. Look for clues, motives. I never said I was Wonder Woman.”
“I thought your parents lived in London.”
She shot him a startled glance, and he shrugged impatiently. “I hacked into your personnel file,” he explained.
“Oh,” she murmured. “Hugh Cameron is my stepfather. After my father was killed, we wandered all over Europe for five years. Then my mother finally calmed down enough to settle in London with Hugh.”
“What’s your father’s name?”
This was the one detail she wasn’t ready to tell him, or anyone. Some instinct blocked the words at their source. She tried to hide the tremor that went through her. “His name was…Peter Marat.”
It was true, as far as it went. Peter Marat Lazar.
“You studied literature and psych at Cornell, right?” he asked.
“You really studied that file, huh?”
“Of course I studied it. My point is, what does a secretary who studied lit in college think she’s doing investigating a seventeen-year-old murder? Do you have the slightest idea how to go about it?”
She looked away from him. “I’ve done some reading,” she said.
“Reading. Huh.”
Exhaustion rolled over her, in a crushing wave. “I’m not doing this for fun, Seth,” she said. “I’m compelled. Maybe I’m mentally unsound after all those traumatic nightmares. I wouldn’t be surprised, but it wouldn’t change a thing. I’ve still got to do what I’ve got to do.”
“What have you got to do?” he demanded. “What’s the plan?”
She hesitated. “I’m sort of making it up as I go,” she admitted. “It’s a good thing that Victor has taken an interest in me—”
“Like hell it is,” he snarled.
“For my purposes, it’s excellent,” she corrected. “I was lucky to get called to go to Stone Island yesterday. I’m looking for memories, for clues and signs. I’m present, I’m paying attention. I’m doing my best. The dream won’t let me do anything else.”
“So what you’re saying is that you’ve got no plan at all.”
She let out a doleful sigh. “That’s about the size of it.”
His hand slammed onto the pillow, hard enough to send feathers wafting into the air. “That is the craziest, stupidest, most totally fucked thing that I’ve ever heard in my life.”
He was glaring at her, angry enough to spit nails, and she felt wonderful. Telling him had raised a crushing weight off of her. She was as light as air, about to float up off the bed. “Oh, yes,” she agreed cheerfully. “It’s really stupid. Believe me, I know.”
“Lazar is a killer shark,” he said roughly. “How can anybody be so stupid and naïve and still be walking around alive?”
She smothered a giggle, then tried to look thoughtful and serious. “That’s a question I’ve asked myself more than once,” she said. “The only answer I can come up with is pure, blind luck.”
“Luck doesn’t last, babe,” he growled. “You need backup.”
The brief rush of euphoria began to fade. “I’ll think of something.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll be on the first plane out of SeaTac tomorrow morning. No way am I letting you—”
“Seth.” She cut him off, putting her hand against his hard chest. “You’re forgetting something important. It’s not up to you.”
Their eyes locked. She grappled with him, on a plane of awareness she had only discovered since they had become lovers, and realized something surprising about herself. Seth was extremely strong, but she could bear the weight of his disapproval, even his anger.
Seth’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “No butterfly, huh?”
She shook her head. “Not anymore.”
“Forget about the bastard, Raine. Cut bait and run. Find someplace where you can live a normal life.”
She blinked for a moment, and let out a startled laugh. ‘What’s a normal life, Seth?” she demanded.
He looked blank. “Um, a house in the suburbs?” he offered. “Two point four kids, PTA meetings, summers on the lake? Mini-malls, multiplexes, bake sales, Little League? Credit card debt?”
Her lips curved in a rueful smile. She shook her head mutely.
He shrugged, defeated. “Whatever. I give up,” he muttered, pulling her close. “I wouldn’t know normal if it bit me on the ass.”
“We’re two of a kind,” she told him.
He buried his
nose in her hair. “I like the sound of that.”
“I’m glad something pleases you, at least.” Her voice was muffled, with her nose squashed against his collarbone.
He pushed her down onto the bed and rolled on top of her. “Nothing I can say will make you get on that plane tomorrow?”
“I’ve already tried running away,” she said simply. “For seventeen years I’ve tried it. I promise you. It doesn’t work.”
“OK, then. This is how it’s going to be tomorrow.” His voice was hard and businesslike. “I’m taking you to work tomorrow, and I’m picking you up. You’re not leaving the office without telling me. Call me, e-mail me, beep me, whatever. Do not set foot out of that place without letting me know, not even for a cup of coffee.”
“But I—”
“Lazar wanted you to spy on me, right? Go for it. Seduce me, sleep with me, spy on me. Study every inch of my body, count every hair on my head. You’re just trying to make your boss happy, right? The perfect excuse. That’s what I call a win-win scenario.”
She was dismayed. “Seth, I think you’re overreacting.”
“My clueless girlfriend tells me she’s trying to single-handedly take down a powerful, ruthless guy for murder. Then she tells me she has no proof, and no investigative experience. Then she tells me I’m overreacting. Tough shit, babe. This is the price you pay for confiding in me. Do as I say, or I will make your life so difficult, you’ll end up giving in anyway, but you’ll be exhausted and pissed off, too.”
A foolish smile spread helplessly across her face. She didn’t mind one bit how protective and paranoid he was. She would work out the thorny details of coping with him as she went along. It was worth it, for that warm, soft feeling in her chest. “OK,” she said, rubbing her cheek against his scratchy jaw. “I’ll keep you informed, if you want.”
“I want,” he growled, sliding back under the duvet. He arranged her so she was draped over him, her hand resting on his heart.
Behind Closed Doors (The Mccloud Series Book 1) Page 21