“Fuck. You’ll make me come.”
She wanted to, more than anything, to feel him give in to her, give up to her, to feel herself respond to his desire, to feel the way she hadn’t in so long. His cock swelled under her touch, his breath grew quicker, and she grew wet just from the sound of him, until there was nothing else she wanted but him inside her.
“Isabella?”
Shit. Kira wrenched her hand away. She grabbed her top and yanked it over her head. Steele buttoned his jeans, wincing with the effort of zipping up.
“Isabella? Are you in the parlor?” Miles’s voice wavered in the darkness.
“Yes, I’m here.” Shit shit shit. She fumbled for her pajama bottoms, found her panties too late and shoved them under one corner of the carpet. “Can you give me a minute?”
Steele chuckled in a low voice.
“Not funny.”
He caught her mouth in a quick kiss. “It kind of is. It’s like we’re kids that got caught after curfew.” He buttoned his shirt and stood. A moment later, she joined him.
Miles appeared in the doorway, balancing a candle in a silver holder. His gaze moved from her tousled clothes to Steele’s and back again. He didn’t say a word, but he didn’t have to. The entire room pulsed with sex.
“Everything all right?” He cleared his throat, and Kira thought she saw him smile. “Francesca was asking about you, wondered where you’d gone.”
“Ah, yes. We’re fine. Everything’s fine. I’ll be right up to see her.” She cupped her elbows in her hands. Miles disappeared again.
“Does this place have a generator?” Steele asked.
On her feet rather than her back, Kira’s brain snapped into gear. Darkness. No power. “It used to.” She pulled open the drapes to let in moonlight. “I have no idea if it still does.”
“What about the security system? The gates?”
“They’re on a separate generator. Far as I know, Simon makes sure that one works at all times.”
“Good.”
She stared across the lawn. Nothing but fuzzy outlines of trees and beyond them, the bulky forms of news vans and SUVs.
“Damn.” Steele was looking at his phone. “Almost dead. Yours still have a charge?”
“I don’t know. Why?” She arched a brow. “Want to take some naked selfies? Or a video?” He had to be aching for release.
“Actually, I would love that. Tell me you’re into kink, and I might just get down on one knee and ask you to marry me.” Then he sobered. “No, I meant what about your dad? Don’t you want to check and see what’s going on?”
Just like that, a pall fell back onto everything. “No. Yes. I don’t know.” It had been almost an hour since she’d last looked. Since she’d thrown the phone across the kitchen and Steele had crawled under the table to retrieve it for her. “I can’t do it.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and handed it to him. “You look.”
He sat on the sofa beside her. She wanted to run her fingers over the slight bump in his nose, his thick brows, the lips that made her shiver when they moved across her skin. Instead she buried her hands beneath her thighs and bit her bottom lip. Total lack of judgement. Probably a big damn mistake. Yep, all things considered, getting naked with the reporter assigned to her father’s kidnapping was probably a poor idea.
“Hum.”
“‘Hum’? What does that mean?” She leaned over. “What does it say?”
“They’ve—ah—stopped negotiating.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure.”
She clutched his arm. “It means they’ve given up. Right?” Her voice shook. But it couldn’t. Authorities, hostage negotiators, whatever they called them, they were professionals, right? It was their job to figure out a way around the senseless demands of crazy people. Not just give up and stop.
“I really don’t know.” He scrolled down. “It doesn’t say anything else. Nothing specific.” He returned the phone. “Maybe they’re regrouping, trying to figure out a different strategy.”
“No. They’re done trying. They’ve weighed the pros and cons and decided he isn’t worth saving.” She followed the news. She’d seen what could happen. Ordinary people were executed without mercy and made examples of. She knew that as well as anyone.
“It doesn’t necessarily. I’ll call my father, if you want. He might know something more.”
But Kira jumped up. She had to get out of this room. She couldn’t breathe.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to do something. Upstairs. And you can’t come with me.”
“Kira, wait. Let me help.”
But she left his voice behind her and climbed the stairs. It didn’t matter what they’d just shared. Her father might not survive this night. She’d come home for one reason, and that meant she had to put the distraction of Steele behind her. If she didn’t, if she let her head get messed up the way everyone else’s did when they thought about sex, she’d be no better than—
She stopped outside Francesca’s bedroom door. Downstairs, the grandfather clock chimed; the late hour had cracked the next day open. She knocked, but no one answered. She tried the knob. “Francesca?”
Don’t open closed doors, Isabella. Not in this house. Respect other people’s privacy. Do you hear me?
Her courage vanished, and her hand dropped away. She’d never been allowed inside Francesca’s bedroom, not as long as she’d lived here. Only twice she’d snuck through the door left unlocked by mistake. The first time she found nothing but an empty bed and rumpled sheets. But the second time...
A picture of her father flashed in her mind’s eye. The second time, Edoardo had been sitting on the bed, shirtless, and he’d looked at Kira with a gaze that seemed broken in two.
She slammed her palm against her forehead. “Stop it.” She couldn’t let that be the last thing she remembered of him. She backed up a few steps, leaned against the balcony and gulped in air. Again she saw her father sitting on the bed. Again she heard his voice, thick with emotion. She closed her eyes as another memory joined the first.
Francesca, appearing in the open doorway between bedroom and office. A lit cigarette in her fingers. A flush on her cheeks. “Eddie.” Her gaze snagged on Kira for a brief second. “Eddie, come here.”
In that moment, he’d looked at Kira with such pain and confusion that her teenage radar crackled with warning. She’d looked from her father to her grandmother and back again, trying to process their expressions. She’d tried to come up with an explanation herself. Then she asked the question aloud, and her world shattered with their answer.
Kira steadied herself. She’d come back to Napa Valley for two simple reasons: to make sure Francesca didn’t spill her secrets to the press, and to make sure the only proof of the Morelli family mistake remained under lock and key. The first she’d managed to control so far. But the second remained a mystery, which meant she needed to get inside Francesca’s office. By herself. Before any more time passed.
She knocked one last time, and when she heard nothing from the other side, she turned the knob and pushed.
1:00 a.m.
Steele stretched and cracked his knuckles. More than anything, he wanted to follow Kira, not just because he was curious, but because he sensed she needed it. She was hurting. She was also afraid—but of what, he didn’t know yet.
He felt like he’d lived a year or more in the last eight hours, like he’d grown up and stopped thinking about himself for the first time in his adult life. What had just happened in the parlor had been a surprise, a fucking amazing one, but if he was honest with himself, it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d let him touch her or not. He’d been telling the truth; she intrigued him, and he wanted to know more about her, about her details, the ho-hum as well as the exotic.
He studied the paintings in the foyer. In the shadows cast by moonlight, he could just make them out. He imagined the parties the Morellis must have thrown here years ago, the glanc
es and whispers and affairs that must have taken place inside these walls. He imagined a little girl exploring corners and slipping through cracks, a man with foreign good looks trying to outrun his past, a woman doing everything in her power to protect him.
Steele had stayed here tonight to get the story of a lifetime, but he’d also made a fatal error, the one his father warned every Chronicle employee about—don’t get personally involved with your subject. It’s a story, plain and simple. Don’t take it home with you at night. Well, it was a little too late for that. And he wondered whether the thing that made his father such a successful journalist was the very thing that built a wall around the rest of his life.
I don’t want to be like him.
The thought came from nowhere. He’d always admired the intangible qualities his father possessed, the ability to walk into a Hollywood function and be known by name and face. To be revered. To possess the power of language and be able to change a person’s life simply by the words you chose to print on a sheet of paper. To rise from nothing and become someone.
Steele had chased fame, and the feelings of comfort and security that came with being a Walker, for his entire life. He knew it had shaped him in ways both desirable and reprehensible. He also knew it was making him into the kind of man who’d be powerful and well-known, at least in certain circles. Pulling back the curtains on the Morellis would accelerate his rise to success. But did he really want to end up like his father? For the first time in his life, he thought the answer might be no.
Pacing the length of the foyer, he tried to ignore the need that screamed from his groin. Again he felt Kira beneath him; again she opened her lips to his. He tried to remind himself the reason he was here at all. Not to bed the daughter of Edoardo Morelli. Only to get an interview. And a picture.
Yeah, right.
That had changed hours ago. His gaze moved to the second floor. Steele stuffed his hands into his pocket and resumed his pacing. How long would she be up there? Should he follow her? Should he try and help?
Kira screamed.
Pure terror echoed through the house, and the hair on his arms lifted. She screamed again, and he thought he heard his name. He took the steps two at a time.
“Kira? Where are you?” He’d never been allowed up on the second floor. The door at the far end of the hall swung open, and she bolted toward him.
“What’s wrong?” He hurried forward and caught her as she stumbled.
White with terror, her face seemed enormous. “Oh, God, you have to come. You have to help her.” In the next instant, she ripped herself away from him again, tugging at his hand. “Please.” She nearly fell into the wall as she barreled down the hallway.
Steele followed her but stopped as soon as he got inside. Blood. Everywhere. The bed, the carpet, the walls too. His mind reeled, and he took a step back. Had someone gotten inside this room and killed Francesca? Or had she killed herself? He couldn’t make sense of what he was looking at, and it took every inch of his composure to remain standing in the doorway. One detail at a time, Walker. After a minute, the floor righted itself beneath his feet.
Miles appeared with a flashlight. “Miss Isabella? What’s happened? Is she alive?”
Steele hadn’t noticed Kira’s disappearance until she reappeared from the bathroom with washcloths in both hands. She bent over the unconscious woman and wrapped one hand around each thin wrist. Then he understood.
“She slit her wrists?”
Miles moaned. “Oh, sweet Lord. She tried this once before. Years ago.”
“Call nine-one-one,” Kira said. She’d stopped crying. A stoic expression replaced the lost one that had broken her only a few moments earlier. She rubbed one hand over her nose and sniffled, but her expression remained calm.
Detachment, Steele noted. Or an amazing acting job. He let himself glance down at Francesca. Whatever had happened between the two of them, Kira clearly still bore some kind of devotion to the woman. And the only way for her to get through the next few minutes was to pull herself away and leave her heart out of it. Steele knew the practice of dissociation well. He’d spent a lifetime doing the same damn thing.
“Hey!” Kira spit out, when he didn’t answer right away. “Call them. Please.” Her voice wavered on the last syllable.
He pulled out his cell phone and hoped for a signal. Holding it close to the flashlight beam, he saw two bars flicker in and out. The battery read five percent.
“No. Wait.” She brushed the hair from Francesca’s forehead. “I don’t want anyone coming to the house.”
“It’s the quickest way to make sure she survives,” Steele said.
“I said, I don’t want anyone coming here.” Her voice grew icy.
“We could take her to the clinic downtown,” Miles said quietly. “Dr. Meadham would meet us there, if we could get out without anyone noticing.”
“Yes,” Kira said. “That’s the only choice, I think.”
“How the hell are you going to manage that?” Steele asked as he put his phone away. “There’s a half-dozen cars and cameras outside.” And what was he supposed to do in the meantime? Keep his own mouth shut? He’d made no promises. They knew he was a reporter. With one text to his father, he could reveal a Hollywood star’s suicide attempt. A runaway daughter’s sudden reappearance. His name would appear next to the stories and be shared a million times around the world. People would know him. Finally.
But again he felt Kira’s breasts, her tiny waist, the taste of her melting on his tongue. Again he heard her answering his questions in the kitchen, telling him her true name. He was torn. He wanted both. For the first time in his life, Steele had no idea what to do.
“You could help us,” she said in the quiet. She looked up at him from eyes so wide he wouldn’t mind falling inside them and never coming up for air. “Please,” she added, and his world tilted.
“Okay. What do you want me to do?”
KIRA’S FINGERS ACHED from the pressure of clasping Francesca’s wrists. God, she was pissed at the woman for taking the coward’s way out. And she was terrified that in one night, she might lose the only two people she’d ever called family. This can’t happen. She and Dad can’t both die.
She kneeled on the carpet and pushed away everything except the blood and the flashlight and Steele’s presence behind her. She had to focus on small pieces of the picture, the things she needed to do from minute to minute, or she’d lose her mind.
Call Dr. Meadham.
Find slippers for her feet and a robe for her shoulders.
Press down hard to stop the blood.
She squeezed harder, until she thought she might bruise Francesca’s wrists. She’d be angry about that, Kira knew. Francesca prided herself on perfection, her own looks most of all. Even age and a reclusive life hadn’t stolen that away. When Kira peeled away the washcloths, she saw with relief that only the left wrist looked raw and open. “I need bandages.”
Miles tottered into the bathroom.
She remained sitting on the floor and felt a hand on the back of her neck. Without thinking, she leaned into it. She couldn’t let herself trust Steele, not completely. He was still a stranger in so many ways. But she didn’t have anyone else to rely on right now. He was here, whole and alive and strong, and helping her move Francesca to the bed and waiting with her for a return call from the doctor and watching out windows to make sure the press didn’t suspect something had happened inside the locked doors.
When she looked at the clock, she was stunned to see that less than ten minutes had passed since she’d found Francesca. Not an hour. Not a lifetime. Just ten fragile minutes. She focused on layering Band-Aids on Francesca’s wrists and breathed thanks that the wounds weren’t deep, weren’t still seeping blood, weren’t staring up at her.
Steele’s cell phone buzzed, and she jumped. He glanced at the screen before tossing it to her. Private.
“Dr. Meadham?”
“Hello, Isabella.”
She�
�d never get used to that name, not after abandoning it so many years ago. But she didn’t correct him. The man had known her since she came into this house as a newborn. He was the only one outside these walls who knew her secret. In the shadows of this awful dawn, she had no choice but to trust him.
Kira babbled out what had happened. “...can you treat her at the clinic?”
“She’s stable enough to move?”
Kira looked at the bed. How could she tell? She couldn’t keep Francesca here, that much was clear. “I think so. She isn’t bleeding anymore. I don’t think the cuts were that deep.” Thank God.
“Then yes, I can treat her. At least take a look and stitch them, if necessary.” The doctor paused for what felt like an eternity. “You won’t have a problem getting her here?” He was probably watching his television set as they spoke, eyeing the ring of paparazzi lights that hemmed in the house from all sides.
She looked at Steele, who stood with his back pressed against the bedroom door. “I’ll figure something out.”
“Then I’m on my way. I’ll meet you there in half an hour.” The man’s voice, calm and low-pitched, soothed her.
“Thank you.” Her bottom lip trembled as she hung up. “I need your help.”
“No problem.”
“No problem?” She thought that was probably the understatement of the year. They stood in a stuffy, airless bedroom surrounded by problems. Edoardo kidnapped by radical terrorists. Francesca suicidal and in shock. Kira herself desperate to protect a secret. If she left this house and trusted a reporter, she feared the world she’d worked so hard to build would shatter around her.
Yet what choice did she have? “You drove here, right?”
“Yes, but I told you. I’m not leaving. Especially not now.”
“I need to get her to the clinic downtown.” Kira had been there only once before, but Simon would know the address. “Simon can take her out the back. You drive away from the front of the house. The media will only see your car, and they’ll follow you. Not Simon.”
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