by Skye Warren
Then why did I hear such longing in his voice?
Gabriel’s power, both in the business world and his physicality, makes me think of an older man. His vitality makes him younger. I don’t know exactly how old he is, but how is it possible he’s never had a serious girlfriend? Why would he be talking about Hannah when he’s drugged if she didn’t mean something more?
Anders shakes his head. “I told you once that Gabriel was dangerous for you. You didn’t believe me then. I don’t really expect you to believe me now.”
“I thought you said you were wrong about me.”
“About you, maybe. Not about him.”
“Then Hannah—”
“Forget about her. I don’t know who she is, and I don’t fucking care. The person you need to worry about is lying right in front of you, unconscious. If you’re smart, you won’t be here when he wakes up.”
I blink, uncertain what he’s implying. “Gabriel wouldn’t hurt me.”
A rough laugh. “What does he call you? His little virgin? I’m pretty sure he already has.”
Chapter Eleven
I drift off with my arms on the sofa, my knees curled underneath me. There’s a bed upstairs, another sofa across the room. And I can’t make myself leave his side, not when he’s vulnerable like this.
In my dream the earth crumbles to dust, only to form again in the shape of the woman. Soft grass covers her body, delicate white flowers dusted over her lush curves. She’s made of dirt and vitality, darkness come alive.
Water laps at her skin, nourishing at first. Surrounding her. She’s an island, alone.
The water keeps rising, rising, creeping over her skin before she realizes what’s happening. By the time she’s submerged, it’s too late. She can only press her mouth to the surface, one final gasp.
And then she drowns.
I come awake with a painful intake of breath, my lungs burning.
It takes a second to orient myself—to the sleeping man under my arms, to the strange sounds coming from the hallway. My limbs still heavy from sleep, I stand and peek out the doorway. It sounds like rain. Like thunder. Like a wild battle.
The heavy oak door to the Den stands open, dark slashing rain a grim backdrop for Damon Scott. I’ve seen a hundred different smiles from this man—the mercurial enigma, the joyful deviant. Never have I seen the features of his handsome face etched into grief.
Rain darkens his suit, dampens his black hair around his temples.
He holds a girl in his arms, her skin sickly pale, almost blue, kicking the door shut.
I gasp. “Is she—”
“Dead?” Damon asks, his voice tighter than I’ve ever heard him. He auctioned off my virginity to a roomful of sadistic billionaires with ease, but he looks like he’s about to crack. Whatever he’s just come from has nearly broken him. “She’ll wish she was.”
I can’t tell whether that’s a threat. He isn’t going to hurt her, is he? She looks bad enough. “What can I do?”
“Blankets,” he mutters. “Every single one you can find.”
A breath of relief fills me. He’s going to help her.
I follow him upstairs but continue to the end of the hallway to a closet. There are plush down comforters and creamy knitted throws. With my arms full I find him in a bedroom decorated with antique cherrywood. A high bed sits on a platform in the center of the room.
The girl lies on top of the sheets, her legs bare. As I watch, Damon tears away sodden blue fabric from her skin. I can see the blue veins in her breasts. She must be freezing. What happened to her?
Part of me is horrified, but the other part springs into action. Taking one of the throws, I approach and use it to dry her skin with invigorating strokes while Damon yanks away the rest of her clothes.
Her hair is a limp mass, turned pitch-black from the rain. I wrap the blanket around it and squeeze. She doesn’t stir, even when I accidentally catch a lock around my pinky. She feels like ice to the touch.
I glance back to ask what happened, only to stop, my mouth open. Damon’s suit jacket lies in a wet heap behind him, his shirt half-unbuttoned. As I watch, he pulls the soggy fabric apart, ripping the rest of the buttons. His hands move to his belt before I can speak.
“What are you doing?”
He gives me a dark look. “Fucking her limp body. What do you think?”
I look back at the helpless naked body on the bed. I have no idea who she is or what she’s been through. Was Damon Scott the one who did this to her?
He isn’t really trying to have sex with her. I see the line between his eyes, the tension in his body, rippling through muscles I never guessed were under those finely tailored suits.
That doesn’t mean she would want his naked body around hers.
“I can do it,” I say, reaching back for the zipper of my dress.
Damon gives a caustic laugh. “As much as I’d love to see the two of you in bed together, I don’t want to see what happens when Gabriel finds out I saw you naked.”
“You saw me naked at the auction.”
“That doesn’t count. You weren’t his then.” Damon tosses the belt aside and pushes down his pants.
I know I should be worried about the poor girl on the bed. I should be worried about Gabriel being shot. And I am, but there’s another part of my mind reserved for the words: You weren’t his then.
Do I belong to Gabriel now? He bought my virginity, my body. Not my soul.
And definitely not my heart.
I manage to look away in time, hearing the sounds of him climbing into the bed. “I’ll go find Anders.”
“Really intent on making this a threesome, aren’t you?”
“He’s a doctor.”
“He lost his license.” I watch as Damon wraps the girl in his arms, their intimacy obvious despite the heavy down blanket covering them. The tenderness in his movements makes my breath catch.
“Gabriel said it was fine. Anders stitched his gunshot wound.”
Damon’s dark eyes sharpen. “Gabriel was shot?”
“Grazed. On his neck.” I’m silent a moment before confessing. “The bullet was meant for me.”
“You don’t know that,” comes a low voice from behind me.
I whirl to find Gabriel leaning against the door frame. His skin is paler than usual, the bandage stark white. His golden eyes swirl with sleep and drugs and pain, liquid gold.
“You shouldn’t be standing,” I say, accusing.
“And you shouldn’t be in Damon’s bedroom.”
My eyes widen. The room is certainly large and opulent. And completely devoid of personality. “This is his bedroom?”
“I heard you almost died,” Damon says lazily, not seeming concerned that we’re in his personal space, that he’s naked next to a girl almost blue with cold. “Did you lose…what? A whole teaspoon of blood?”
At least he sounds more like himself right now, amused and uninterested.
“A quarter cup, at least,” Gabriel responds drily. “We should talk.”
The air in the room thickens with words unsaid—words about guns and enemies. Words about Jonathan Scott. “You can talk in front of me. I want to know.”
Damon glances down at the girl in his arms. “In private.”
My heart speeds up. “Why? What happened to her? Does it have to do with your father?”
Damon slips from bed and bends to pick up his pants, revealing more than I expected. I make a squeak of surprise and turn my face to Gabriel. Embarrassment heats my cheeks.
Gabriel gives a low laugh. “Are you shocked, little virgin?”
It is shocking, even when Damon has his pants on. The black hair on his chest contrasts with the light brown on Gabriel, both of them naked from the waist up. Damon is a little leaner, more streamlined grace to Gabriel’s muscled power. My whole body feels tight with a strange kind of anticipation. And I think my naïveté is more than coincidental. I think Gabriel likes keeping me in the dark—about his body, about his bu
siness. What else is he keeping from me?
“Tell me what’s happening,” I murmur, not far from begging. Maybe I’m already there.
Gabriel studies me for a moment. And in that moment I can almost believe he’ll let me in, that he’ll bring down the walls between us. That ivory tower I’m in keeps me apart from the city, but it also keeps me apart from him.
Then his golden eyes harden. “No.”
“Don’t do this,” I plead.
“Stay with her,” Damon says, brushing past me. “Her name’s Penny.”
“What happened to her?”
Neither man answers me as they walk down the hall, intent on their mission. I have half a mind to follow them, to demand they let me listen, to make them lock me out if that’s what they’re so intent on doing.
But I can’t really leave the girl—Penny—alone. A few minutes in Damon’s embrace isn’t going to fix whatever made her ice-cold and catatonic.
And so the footsteps rumble down the stairs, taking Gabriel away from me, along with his secrets. Secrets I’m more convinced he’ll never share.
Chapter Twelve
The girl lies in the bed, her eyes wide and unblinking.
“Are you okay?” I whisper.
She doesn’t move, not even when I climb onto the side of the bed. I take her hand, surprised to find it warm. Her hair had felt coated with ice when she came in. How has she warmed up in just a few minutes? Whatever help Damon was to her body, her mind doesn’t seem improved.
“Penny?” I squeeze gently. “You’re okay now. You’re safe.”
No answer.
I don’t undress, but I do climb into the bed with her. If I can’t offer words of comfort or medical help, at least I can give her body heat. Her hair still feels cold and wet against my arm. I can’t help but shiver as I curl myself around her.
“No,” she whispers.
I push up on my elbow. “Penny?”
“Don’t leave me here.”
Her eyes stare at nothing. I’m not sure if she knows I’m here, if she knows she’s safe. It seems like her mind is still back in whatever horror Damon took her from—which must be the worst curse of all.
Her body is here, but her mind isn’t.
My chest constricts, the situation too familiar for comfort. I’m tucked away into an ivory tower, but that doesn’t mean I’m safe. Not while I’m hearing voices.
“I won’t leave you,” I say, almost fierce. The way I would want someone to promise me.
Like they mean it.
She begins to shiver. “Please don’t leave me.”
“Not going anywhere.” I press my forehead against her temple, the way Gabriel did to me in the restaurant. That feels like a lifetime ago, even though it was earlier tonight. I had been hopeful about the future then, cautiously optimistic, excited to spend the evening at my favorite restaurant.
Now I’m grateful to be alive.
I wrap my arms around the girl—how old is she? From the brief glimpse of her body she looks fully grown. A woman. Except the frail body in my arms doesn’t feel big enough, strong enough. Not with shudders racking her slender frame.
We stay like that for long moments, only her halting breaths breaking the silence.
“So dark,” she murmurs, her voice almost dreamlike. She doesn’t sound afraid, only lost. “And cold. And heavy. That’s what you don’t realize about water. How heavy it is.”
My throat tightens. “Did you fall off the docks?”
My dad used to have a yacht on the lake outside Tanglewood, but we didn’t spend much time on it. A few company parties with his executives, lots of suits and hearty handshakes. One time the VP of Commercial Development, drunk on bourbon and his new promotion, went overboard.
She shakes her head, voice small. “The west side.”
I blink, unsure what she means. The lake is to the east, and besides, the west side usually refers to the jumble of tenements that house Tanglewood’s poorest population. There are no lakes there. No rivers. Barely any trees. Only miles of broken concrete.
So how did she end up drenched and shivering?
“Did you go swimming?”
A violent tremble shakes her small body. She burrows her face into my chest, and I pull her close.
It feels strange to comfort someone like this. The closest friend I have is Harper, and even though we could talk about anything, she’s a force of nature. Too powerful to ever need solace.
For so long I didn’t have a mother to do this, to hold me, to stroke my hair.
To whisper that everything would be okay.
And I find it gives me a kind of peace to hold her, as if we’re both helping each other. I’m not sure how long we stay like that, in that place between past and present, in the hazy shadows of trauma and relief.
It feels like the world might be passing us by, one of those fast-motion videos of the sky with clouds migrating across the city. This might not be the ivory tower Gabriel keeps me in, but it’s a safe house all the same. A building without time, without even reality to intrude.
Penny shifts slightly, and I know she’s awake.
“Are you one of them?” she asks.
“One of who?”
“One of the girls. The ones Damon collects when someone can’t pay the loan back.”
“Do you mean the strippers?” Damon owns clubs around the city. I could have ended up onstage in one of them, working off my father’s debts, lap dance by lap dance. I should be grateful that I’m with Gabriel instead—and I am, but I can’t shake the feeling that I don’t know everything.
My father kept secrets from me. On good days I think he was trying to protect me. Then I remember that he sold me to Gabriel Miller as part of a shady business deal well before the auction.
Regardless of his intentions, the fallout from his crash destroyed my life.
“Are they strippers?” Penny asks, her voice drowsy. “I thought he kept them for himself. I imagined a harem of girls, one for every day of the month.”
The only time I’ve seen another woman at the Den was the night of my auction. Candy was there to help get me ready. And a few other men brought women on their arms, mistresses or sex partners. Temporary guests in a purely male environment. Is that what I am?
“There aren’t other girls. At least not here.” And apparently this is Damon Scott’s bedroom. Where else would he keep a harem but nearby? “What made you think there were?”
“He threatened to take me. If Daddy didn’t pay.”
My hope dims. I don’t want to depress her, but I don’t want to lie either. “Maybe he wanted you to work off the debt.”
I don’t mention that he might auction her off to one of the men who bid on me.
“No,” she says, voice slurred with sleep. “He told me what he wanted to do. Him and me.”
My eyes remain wide open even as Penny drifts off. At least right now her expression is peaceful. No nightmares like the ones that plague me. Him and me. That didn’t sound like a business arrangement. And he brought her to his bed. That didn’t look like business either.
And in that brief glimpse of Damon’s body when he got out of the bed, he was aroused. Even with her body cool and unconscious, he had been hard.
Then again it might not mean anything.
I know better than anyone how business and pleasure could mix.
Chapter Thirteen
As a little girl my favorite cereal was Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Even when I got older, my father let me eat that for breakfast every morning. His eyes would crinkle. Never grow up, he said.
If I imagined anything, it would be making coffee before a full day of research, catching a few minutes with my husband, Justin, before he left for work.
No amount of forethought could have prepared me for this morning.
A Southern breakfast spills across a long walnut table. Steam rises from a pile of fresh biscuits, a saucer of dark gravy beside it. Heaping bowls of fruit contain grapes and orange pieces an
d rosy strawberries. A stack of bacon could feed an army.
I have a small plate of scrambled eggs and cantaloupe slices. I would have thought I’d be queasy after the events of last night, but my stomach firmly reminds me we didn’t actually eat dinner.
The men pile their plates high with waffles and fried chicken, digging in as if the calories are consumed by their intensity alone. And judging by the abs I saw on both men last night, that would be true. They speak in low tones, their words too cryptic to decipher.
At the moment I’m too tired to try.
The strangest part of the breakfast is the girl sitting across from me. Someone brought over a duffel bag of clothes for me last night. A few pairs of yoga pants and slouchy tops, so I loaned some to Penny.
By loaned I mean that I dressed her like a doll.
She stares at the pool of lukewarm tea in her cup, her expression blank.
We spent the night in the same bed. There’s a kind of kinship that comes from recovering together, even though I know basically nothing about her. I know her daddy got her into trouble.
If she lives in the west side, her daddy doesn’t have a lot in common with mine.
Except that he sold his daughter, too.
“So I’ll bring Avery back,” Gabriel says, catching my attention.
Damon nods. “We can meet this afternoon.”
My eyes narrow. “Can you maybe talk to me instead of about me?”
“I’ll bring you back to my house,” Gabriel says in a dry tone. “And then meet with Damon this afternoon.”
“What about Penny?”
Both men look at the silent girl, as pale as a ghost, her strawberry-blonde hair in unruly curls. “What about her?” Gabriel finally asks.
I shake my head, impatient. “Who will take care of her?”
“I’ll find someone,” Damon says with that uncharacteristic solemnity.
And I would break my promise to her. “I’ll stay with her.”
“Absolutely not,” Gabriel says. “My house is the safest place for you, especially when both Damon and I aren’t there. The security team is already installed there.”