by Skye Warren
Was my mother insane? It sounds like paranoia. Diagnoses and treatment of mental illness wasn’t like today. They had less knowledge and far more stigma.
I remember feeling like someone watched me.
Maybe I’m going insane too.
Except someone had written WHORE over the fireplace. That’s not a figment of my imagination, an illness that needs to be treated. And someone took pictures of me.
Geoffrey insists that it’s in my head, but I’m sure it’s not. It’s like the house is alive. Breathing. Whispering. I’m never alone, even when the people have gone.
Unease moves through me. I glance at the shadows around me. I can’t see through them, but I know I’m alone. Don’t I? I remember my terror the night I saw someone outside the window. Is that how my mother felt all the time?
I thought she loved the house. And at the beginning she did.
It turned into something sinister in these pages.
The strangest thing happened tonight. I saw Jonathan at a party for the Alberts’ anniversary. We both pretended we had never met. When he asked me to dance, I said yes so we could talk. I asked him how he got an invitation. He told me he had worked with Ralph Albert, but he refused to go into details.
So the mystery man had a name. Jonathan. Not that it told me anything. I didn’t know anyone by that name, and it’s common enough that it wouldn’t help me if I did.
But Geoffrey acted strange the rest of the night. He kept asking me about my dance with Jonathan, even though we had maintained appearances. It’s almost as if he knows the truth.
He did, because he had followed my mother the night before their wedding.
Now I’m wondering if the eyes I feel inside the house have a name. Geoffrey James.
“Ah, you found it.”
The voice startles me, and I jump from the chair. The diary falls to the rug amid the scattered chess pieces. This is the way he found me weeks ago, at the beginning of our month. Now we’re here at the end. I know him better, but there are even more questions.
Gabriel isn’t wearing a shirt, just low-slung slacks that reveal muscled abs and a trail of dark hair. He looks unrepentant about hiding the diary, about having startled me, but then he always did like to play.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Gabriel crosses the room to the fireplace, kneeling to reveal the bunched muscles of his back. He settles a stack of logs from the metal basket beside the fireplace and strikes a match. The roar fills the vacuum of quiet with crackles and pops of a new fire. When he faces me, the light flickers against his broad shoulders, his muscled arms, leaving his expression an enigma.
I pick up the diary with two fingers, as if it’s poison. And God, it is. How long has it been poisoning that house? How long has it been making me sick without even knowing it? And Gabriel doesn’t seem the least bit surprised.
“How did you know my mother was afraid?”
He settles into the other armchair, long legs stretched out. He’s the king of his domain—and a checkmate against him seems nearly impossible. How had I ever thought I could make him helpless? Abandoned? “Because she told someone,” he says.
“Who?”
“The father of my good friend Damon Scott.” His tone is sardonic. “You may remember him.”
I swallow my shock. “Hard to forget the man who auctioned my virginity.”
“His father, Jonathan Scott. That’s who she was going to see the night she was murdered.”
The night she was murdered…when she was still married to my father. When she wore rubies and a beautiful dress. Stay home, sweetheart. Stay small. That’s when you’re safe.
Stay safe.
“She didn’t have an affair,” I say, not quite believing it.
“I didn’t say that. Only that she didn’t feel safe. She told her old lover. He promised to protect her, and on the night she planned to leave Geoffrey James, she died.”
Cold doubt slices through me. “You think it was my father. That he killed her.”
“It’s more important what you think.”
“You’re just saying that so I’ll abandon him. The ultimate victory, that’s what you called it.” And if I turn away from my father, he will have truly lost. “He couldn’t have been the one lurking outside the house at night. He wasn’t the one who vandalized my house.”
“If you say so,” Gabriel says, sounding unconcerned.
“He wouldn’t have hurt her. He loved her.” Except I remember the way he’d talked about her flaws, with the horrible acceptance. As if he could have blamed her.
“You say that as if it’s a good thing. Love. In my experience it makes everything worse. It makes people do horrible things, things they’d never commit otherwise.”
He isn’t talking about my parents anymore.
He’s talking about himself. “What are you so afraid of?”
“Afraid? No. I think fear is a more rational feeling. Like hunger. Desire. Natural expressions of the human condition.”
“So is love.”
“No, love is a game. Like chess. One you’re going to lose.”
I don’t have anything left—not if I doubt my own father, my only family. Not if I’m afraid of the walls around me. “Like my mother lost?”
“Did she?”
“You know what happened to her.”
“I really don’t.”
The answer has been hovering at the edge of my consciousness for a long time—before I found the diary. Before Gabriel ruined my father. Maybe from the beginning, when I huddled under my covers as a child.
“Someone killed her. It wasn’t a drunk driving accident. That’s what Daddy didn’t want me to find. That’s what you didn’t want me to find either. Everyone’s trying to keep me in the dark. Why? Why can’t I know that she was murdered? Who are you protecting?”
“The only person I’m trying to protect is you.”
The words ring with truth, but I don’t know if I can believe him. This might be part of his plan. To make me turn away from my father. To break the final bond of the James family.
“It hurts me more to keep secrets. That’s the legacy of my family more than anything. Lies. Half-truths. Smiles that hide more than they share. I’m sick of it. Tell me, Gabriel. If you care about me at all, tell me.”
He looks away. “If I tell you, you’ll have no reason to stay.”
“Then love me enough to let me leave.”
A rough laugh. “And you still think love isn’t a game.”
He stands, the glint in his eye threatening to prove his point. And God help me, but I want him to try. If this is all he can offer me, then I want him to play.
With a sweep of his arm he moves the chess pieces.
He pulls me down on the rug, the pile like velvet against my palms. He presses a kiss to my forehead, almost innocent except for the hard length I feel against my thigh. One kiss on each of my eyelids. I suck in a breath at the tenderness in his lips. His mouth moves down my jaw, warm presses that leave a trail of fire. He reaches my neck, and I arch my body to give him access.
Between the valley of my breasts.
“Wait,” I gasp.
My legs press together, but his knee is already between them. He moves inexorably lower, pushing up my nightgown, pressing openmouthed kisses across my stomach, the flick of his tongue a promise of what’s to come.
His hands pull aside the placket of my panties.
A long lick through my center makes me cry out. “Wait, wait, wait.”
He lifts his head to send me a half smile, pure masculine revenge. “Wait for what?”
“It’s just so much, and I need to catch my breath.” I’m rambling, but I can’t seem to stop. “And I don’t know if this is the right place to do—”
His finger stroking down my cleft tightens my throat. Only a strangled sound emerges.
His lids lower. “Time’s up, beautiful.”
The rug that had felt soft a moment ago now feels like a bed of nails, m
y skin impossibly sensitive. And the touch of his tongue to my clit is pure torture, a sharp ache that runs the length of my body. I writhe on the floor, unsure if I want to get away or seek more.
Something brushes my fingers, and I clasp it. Small. Cool.
A pawn. The same one he once used on my body? Maybe. It’s anonymous now, as smooth and shiny as every other pawn. Indistinguishable.
He sees what I’m holding, his eyes flickering with brutal amusement.
A queen on the floor catches his eye. He picks it up, considering.
“No,” I say, not wanting the sharp curves of her crown anywhere near my sensitive places.
He laughs and sets it on my stomach instead, just above my belly button. I breathe nice and slow, moving the piece in a gentle wave. He adds a bishop. A rook.
“They’re going to fall,” I warn him, holding in a breathless laugh. My stomach is flat enough to hold the pieces, but not if I move around, not if I breathe too hard. Definitely not if I orgasm.
“Then you’d better be careful,” he warns, adding another pawn. “If they fall down, I’m going to stop.”
“I can’t,” I breathe, more panicked now than when I told him to wait.
His mouth descends on me, and any tenderness is gone. He’s relentless with lips and teeth and tongue, moving through my folds, licking at my clit, until my whole body feels taut as a wire. “Please, please, please.”
No answer. He doesn’t even pause, his mouth working at a merciless game.
The chess pieces tremble along with my body, wobbling from side to side on my stomach even as I struggle to control my breathing. I’m too close, and the panting knocks the queen to the ground.
He pulls away, his lips still damp with my arousal. “Too bad.”
“Don’t stop,” I say, and like dominoes the other pieces topple to the ground.
A low chuckle. “You should have stayed still, little virgin.”
He can’t leave me like this. “I need you,” I whimper.
“Fuck,” he breathes. “I can’t say no to you.”
I press my hips into the air, silently begging, beyond words now.
He answers by opening his pants. I don’t see him from here, only feel him in blind need, the blunt press of him, the hot stretch. And then his body covers mine, a full thrust that has me crying out into the tall library, the sound captured by the hundreds of books, thousands, their leather spines and old pages, holding my pleasure and pain for eternity.
The silk of my nightgown chafes, driving my arousal even higher.
His mouth touches mine, tongue nudging my lips apart. In his kiss I taste myself, salt and a feminine musk. I taste the need and pent-up fury that he’s been hiding. He can put the chess pieces up like a wall between us, but when it comes down, I see him clearly, feel every hungry thrust inside me, hear every rough grunt he makes on entry, live in every heartbeat that he looks into my eyes, walls torn down for a few priceless moments as the climax hits us both.
Chapter Thirty
Only after he pulls out, after we’ve had sex, does he undress me and himself completely. It’s a new kind of intimacy to be naked when we’re both sated, bare in every sense of the word.
“You’re beautiful,” he murmurs, running his hand over my hip.
Our bodies are a study in contrasts, mine pale and smooth, his made of scars. I copy the motion over him, feeling something small and puckered at his back. I sit up, peeking over his body.
“What happened here?”
“Bullet,” he says casually.
“You were shot? With a gun?”
“That’s typically where bullets come from.”
“Don’t make jokes. That’s horrible. What happened?”
“A customer didn’t want to pay. Or didn’t I mention that? I worked as an enforcer for my father. When a bastard wanted to fuck a girl and then leave without paying.”
“The brothel.”
“The brothel,” he says, voice carefree, but I feel the tension in his body. Muscles hard, pulse beating faster. “That’s a nice word for the dirty old building where men hurt women.”
I swallow hard. What kind of initiation into sex did he have? Mine was unconventional, no doubt. The auction itself had been humiliating. But Gabriel had always been gentle with my body. He showed me pleasure from the very first time.
“How did you lose your virginity?”
A cruel smile. “How do you think? With one of the girls, of course.”
“You paid her?”
“No, that was a gift from dear old dad. I only found that out after the fact. A fourteen-year-old boy doesn’t ask many questions when a beautiful woman shows him her tits. Which is a fucking shame.”
“Did anyone…” I force the words out quickly. “Did anyone hurt you?”
He’s silent a moment. “Not like you mean. My father insisted I work for him, but not with sex. With fists. Knives. Guns. If someone didn’t want to pay, it was my job to convince them.”
“That’s horrible.”
“I was damn good at it. Business was never better.”
“Oh, Gabriel.”
“Don’t look at me with pity,” he says with a harsh laugh. “It was my job to keep the girls in line, too. If one of them mouthed off to a customer or wouldn’t do what they wanted, I had to show them the light.”
I’m afraid to ask, but I have to know. It comes as a whisper, hesitant. “How?”
Our gazes meet. “I hurt them.”
Something in my heart cracks. “No.”
“Yes,” he says forcefully. “I held their wrists too hard, looked into their eyes, and promised to bury their bodies if they didn’t do what we told them.”
Tears stream down my cheeks. I don’t want to think I had illusions about Gabriel Miller, but I know that I must have. Because they’re broken, shattered. Laying in shards around me, glittering reminders that he’s every bit as dangerous as he warned me.
“How could you?” There’s less anger in my voice than I want. More pain.
“Because it was true,” he snaps. “My father would have broken their neck without a thought. And I would have known that I could’ve prevented it. If only I was harder with them.”
It was his way of protecting them. No wonder he was so harsh with me.
“Why did you leave?”
“I left to make my own money, my own fucking way. And no one can tell me who to threaten. Maybe a good man would have stopped hurting people completely, but not me.”
“You did it on your own terms,” I say sadly, understanding him with futile sorrow. That’s why he had to go after my father. It’s why he had to come after me. The one thing he wants more than anything in the world—not money, not things. The ability to choose who he hurts.
I pick up a pawn from the rug. Offer it to him.
He accepts with a solemn expression. “The person who bought your house? Jonathan Scott. That was when I realized the connection. I confronted him, and he admitted the truth.”
“He bought it in memory of her?”
“Or to prove something.”
“To prove what?”
“That she was right all along, that something sinister was happening in that house.”
I move to the carpet, picking up the chess piece. Placing them in haphazard groups on the side table, needing to do something with my hands. The wood is smooth and cool, emotionless. That’s how I wish I could be right now. Instead I’m a wildfire of fear and hope.
Then all the pieces are back on the table. Except the dark wood king, rolled far away.
“How can he prove it?” I ask.
Gabriel looks reluctant to answer. He puts his elbow on his knee, staring at the king. “If I tell you, you have to promise not to go to the house.”
My eyes widen. The same thing that Nina told me. Why do they think I’ll go there? Something must be happening—there. At the house. I stand and cross the room, hand-scraped wood cold against my feet, and pick up the last piece.
Fighting beside him—that’s the ultimate victory for me. Not helplessness.
After a moment he takes the king from me. “He’s holding a ball. Everyone in Tanglewood society is involved. He believes the person responsible for her death will come.”
“My father can’t even get out of bed.”
Gabriel meets my eyes. “Then he won’t be there.”
But I can hear from his voice that he doesn’t believe that. “Even if he could get up, why would he attend a ball? When it would prove his guilt to Jonathan Scott?”
A grim smile. “To face your mother’s lover? In the house he built for her?”
“Pride,” I say, bitter and resigned.
“No, little virgin. Love. It makes men do terrible things.”
“Like taking me to the ball?” I ask softly.
“Terrible things,” he murmurs his agreement. “Like risk his queen.”
Chapter Thirty-One
I helped throw a hundred balls in the house, the hostess on behalf of my father. We had party planners and caterers, florists and valets, but I was the one who welcomed guests to our home. I always loved seeing the house lit by chandeliers, sparkling and brimming with champagne. It made me feel closer to my mother, knowing she would have done the same thing if she had been alive.
Except I know she left. She wore a beautiful dress and glittering rubies so that she could leave us behind. Even if she was afraid of my father, why would she leave me?
Now I arrive on the other side, in a dark limo gliding down the long drive. Someone has done extensive work on the house, trimming the bushes and restoring the front. No sign that it was vandalized only a week before. Yellow light glows from the windows, reflected in Gabriel’s cold regard.
“We don’t have to go in,” Gabriel says softly.
He doesn’t want us to be here when the truth is revealed. Because he thinks it will protect me? I’m already shattered in a thousand pieces, knowing that I was left behind. Unprotected.