I clenched my fist to try to stop my hand from trembling, and then knocked lightly on the door.
“Come in,” an achingly familiar voice called out.
I sucked in a breath and opened the door.
Angelo stood behind his father’s desk which was positioned in a bay window looking out onto the rear of the property. His body was angled away from me as I entered, and I realized the view looked down onto where I’d been taking in the sheets. So had he been watching me? Maybe it hadn’t been my imagination after all. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
“You asked to see me?” I kept my gaze cast down, just as I was always supposed to among the men.
He turned toward me. “Yes, Catalina. Thank you for coming. There’s something I need to speak with you about.”
His presence overwhelmed me, like it filled up the entire room, pushing out the oxygen and leaving me struggling to inhale. There was no doubt he was a man now. The softness of his childhood had faded, the roundness of his cheeks now hollowed cheekbones and a chiseled jaw with a permanent five o’clock shadow. His hair was still the same, though, those same dark waves cut short. The sort of hair that made your fingers tingle with the urge to rake your hands through it. His eyes were the same, too, swirling browns and golden flecks. Deep and intense.
My heart fluttered just by being in his presence. It always had, even when I was little and I worshipped him. He was my angel. I hadn’t intentionally called him that name, but it had stuck. He’d been the sunshine in my world, the main thing I’d looked forward to every day. He could destroy me with a simple stern look or harsh word. I knew I’d annoyed him, following him around like a lost animal. There were times when he’d be relaxed and happy to play with me, but as he’d gotten older, those times grew farther apart. What older boy wanted a young girl trailing around after him? But at the same time, we only had each other.
Things were different now, though, or at least they were for me. I was sure he didn’t see me as anything more than that annoying child who had followed him around when we’d been kids.
I stepped farther into the room, my stomach a twisted knot of anxiety. “Of course.”
“My father has gone away on business for the week.”
His fingers drummed a tribal beat on the side of his thigh. Inwardly, I frowned. So, he was still doing that. I thought he might have grown out of it by now. I knew him well enough to understand what the tapping meant. He was nervous, anxious about something. But what did he possibly have to be nervous about around me? I was just some girl he didn’t talk to anymore.
I’d always been taught to keep my gaze averted when a man spoke to me, unless they specifically requested that I look at them, but I found it hard to do with Angel. In a way, he felt like both an extension of myself and a complete stranger at exactly the same time. It was a strange combination that I wasn’t totally sure what to do with.
I wasn’t sure what he expected me to say. “Okay.” I was cautious, uncertain.
“And in less than a week you’ll be leaving this place.”
My stomach flipped with nerves, and I swallowed hard. “The master reminded me of that yesterday.”
“My father—the master—asked me to come here for a reason, Kit—” he stopped himself and corrected the name he’d been about to call me. “Catalina.”
I said nothing, waiting for him to finish what he was trying to tell me. Was it going to be something bad? By the way he was drumming his fingers, I thought it was. I lifted my gaze briefly and saw the tension in his face, the tightness of his jaw, the way his cheeks were almost sucked in as he fought against the desire to count the number of taps his fingers made against his thigh. My heart cried out for him, wishing I could tell him that whatever it was would be all right. He didn’t need to be anxious or nervous around me, and if he was, he could just take the time to count until he felt better again. But I knew that wasn’t our relationship anymore.
Besides, I had the unsettling feeling that he was nervous about something on my behalf, rather than his own.
“My father has gone away, and I’m in charge of the compound while he’s gone.”
I gave him a small smile, trying to make him feel better. “That’s good.”
He cleared his throat, another nervous tick. “But there’s something he wants me to do while he’s gone.”
“Oh?”
“It has to do with you, Catalina.”
My gaze flicked to his and caught his eye, my heart missing a beat. God, he was so beautiful, it made me want to rip myself in two.
“It does?”
He nodded and shoved his hands in his pockets, perhaps trying to stop the tapping. “He doesn’t believe you’re ready to be handed over to Mr. Torres. He thinks you’re too naïve and that you won’t... please him.”
Worry tumbled inside of me. “I’ll do my very best. I won’t let the master down.”
He nodded. “I know that, Catalina, but there are things you haven’t experienced yet. You know what the women in the rooms do for the men who visit them.”
A strange tightening low down in my core, uneasiness dancing with arousal. “Yes, of course. They pleasure them.”
“Exactly. My father believes you won’t know how to do that, and then Mr. Torres will get angry with you. He paid a lot of money for you, and for you to not be able to give him what he wants wouldn’t be good.”
Tears of shame swirled in my eyes, and my cheeks burned. He thought I wasn’t as good as the other women—that I was less of a person. That I was so lacking made me want to curl up into a ball and squeeze myself smaller and smaller until I vanished altogether.
“I thought that was how he wanted me. I thought the reason he paid so much money for me was because I was untouched.”
“Yes, it is. But remaining intact and being completely inexperienced are two different things. Men might imagine they want someone pure, but what their fantasy is and what that reality actually looks like are two different things.”
“I would try my best,” I said, my voice strangled. “I wouldn’t let you or your father down.”
“It’s not just that it would look bad on my father, Catalina. He might also hurt you for it.”
The tears trembled. “Then perhaps I deserve to be hurt.”
His tone was sharp. “Don’t say that.”
The certainty of how I’d be spending the next week sank in. I was to be given one of the rooms with the other women, I was sure. Just as they did, I’d be given the revealing clothing and the makeup and the sprays of strong perfume, and I’d be expected to pleasure the men who visited them. Maybe they’d put one of the other women in with me to show me what I was supposed to do. If they did, I prayed it wouldn’t be Bianca. She’d only been here a year or so, but she’d never liked me. The moment she’d set eyes on me, she’d decided I was someone to make an enemy of.
I swallowed down my fear and revulsion. This was something I needed to do. I was to be sold to another man in less than a week, and I wasn’t so naïve to think he would keep me pure. I would be his to do with as he pleased. Once he’d taken what he wanted from me, I was sure I’d be offered around to his friends and business acquaintances, just as the women here were. I was nothing special. I wasn’t any better than any of them, and I needed to get my head around that. I’d been a child for the past eighteen years, but now I was to be an adult, and in our world, this was simply what grown-up women did.
“My father asked for me to be the one to teach you.”
My heart leaped into my throat, my soul soaring. “He did?”
I knew I shouldn’t want this. He already meant the world to me, and to be physically close with him was something I’d been craving for years. It was dangerous to get more attached, but at the same time it felt right. After all these years, we should be allowed those few days of intimacy, just some time to say goodbye to each other.
But Angel hadn’t finished. “But, of course, I can’t do it.”
My stomac
h plummeted free fall, dragging my heart down with it. Forgetting all I’d been taught about being subservient to men, my gaze shot up to his. “What? Why not?”
He stared at me in confusion. How could he possibly not see how much his words hurt me?
“It wouldn’t be right. We grew up together.”
“And we’re grown now. Both of us. We’re both adults.”
“You still have a couple of days.”
“So? A couple of days is nothing, and it’s not as though I’m even allowed to have sex. Some stranger who paid for me is going to be the one to do that.” His messed-up moral code infuriated me. It was okay for someone to buy me, but not okay for him to teach me what I needed because we’d been children together. How the hell did that work?
“It makes a difference, Kitty,” he argued, slipping into his old pet name for me. “I can’t think of you like that. I mean, just seeing you like this—” he waved his hand up and down my body. “...is weird for me.”
“Seeing me like what?” I glanced down at my old sundress, trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about.
“Seeing you with hips, and breasts, and looking like a woman.”
I jammed my hands on the hips he was referencing. “I’ve had these for years, Angel. And it’s not like I could help it. I grew up. That tends to be what happens when multiple years go by.”
I realized I’d completely forgotten all my decorum. The meek side of me I always kept in check seemed to have fled the room at the mention of him not wanting to do what his father had asked him. Angel always did what his father asked him. I couldn’t think of another time—or at least not a recent time. And this was big. This was important.
“So would you rather I go to Mr. Torres and be beaten, like your father believes?” I wasn’t going to let him off the hook so easily. I was hurt at his rebuke, and now I wanted him to hurt, too.
“No, of course that’s not what I want.” He wouldn’t meet my eye now, pacing away from me, his fingers tapping against the outside of his leg. If he didn’t want to show me himself, but he also didn’t want me to go to Mr. Torres untrained, what other options were there? My heart dropped as I realized my first imagining of this scenario had been the correct one.
“You’re going to get someone else to do it, aren’t you?”
He scrubbed his hand over his face and sighed. “This isn’t easy for me, Catalina.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I snapped. “’Cause it’s so much fun for me.”
I cowered, thinking my words probably deserved a slap, but none came.
“I mean, I have to pick someone I trust. It’s vital you remain intact until Torres comes to collect you. That’s the whole reason my father wanted me to do it. He’s worried someone else might not be able to control themselves around you. That they may become too aroused teaching you how to pleasure a man, and that someone else would take things too far.”
“And then I’d be worthless,” I said quietly. It occurred to me that once my new owner had taken what he wanted, he’d probably consider me worthless as well. My virginity was the only thing that made me special right now, and as soon as that was gone, I’d be no different than the women who lived in the compound. Not that I ever thought badly of those women. Of course, there were some I didn’t get along with, such as Bianca, but some of the others were like best friends and sisters to me. Yolanda was the closest thing I’d ever have to a mother. I’d never dream of looking down on any of them.
I stared at him in horrified earnest. “Please, Angel. Don’t give me to another man.”
His voice was hard. “I don’t have any choice. And my name is Angelo.”
His words cut me to the core.
He wouldn’t meet my eye, and I had the bizarre feeling our situations had been reversed. I’d always been the one taught to lower my gaze for the more dominant person. Who was this man? Where was the sweet, funny, attentive boy I’d grown up with?
“I’ll be making some calls now, but you can expect to spend tonight alone. I doubt anyone will be able to get here before then.”
I blinked back tears and bit on the inside of my cheek hard enough to hurt in my effort to hold them back. Crying wouldn’t get me anywhere and would only serve to remind him more of the child I’d once been. “Yes, sir.”
“You’re dismissed.”
I turned and fled from the room.
Chapter Nine
Present Day
THE PHONE AND COMPUTER taunted me like a bully.
How was I supposed to do this, especially after seeing her like that? My entire chest ached with a pain I refused to acknowledge.
She’s not yours. She never has been. She belongs to someone else.
It made sense to bring someone else into this and let them have their fun and do what I couldn’t bring myself to do, but the pain in her eyes when I’d told her what I planned was too much to bear. She hadn’t been hurt at the thought of another man touching her; she’d been hurt because I said it wouldn’t be me.
I knew I needed to pick up that phone, my fingers hovering above it, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“Fuck!”
I slammed my fist down on the desk beside the taunting phone then lowered my head and locked my hands in my hair.
What the hell was I going to do?
NIGHT HAD FALLEN.
I should have been asleep hours ago, but my mind wouldn’t shut off. I tossed and turned in my old childhood bedroom, though the bed had been upgraded since I’d last slept in it. I didn’t think I’d fit in a single bed anymore.
It would have felt weird to have slept in my father’s room. Even though I knew he wanted me to become the same man he was, I didn’t like the idea of quite literally stepping into his shoes... or bed, anyway.
Sudden shouts and the crack of gunshots jolted me upright.
“What the fuck?”
My stomach flipped. That didn’t sound good. The compound was generally a quiet place. There was the occasional time a client would go too far with one of the women—slapping her hard enough to make her bleed, or they’d take a choking too far—and we’d be forced to step in and deal with it, but otherwise things ran smoothly. Besides, it was the early hours of the morning now, and I thought all of our clients had gone home already, which meant it must be one of the women who was causing the trouble.
My thoughts instantly went to Catalina. It wouldn’t be her, would it? Maybe she’d decided enough was enough.
I swung my legs out of bed and yanked on a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt and grabbed my gun from where I’d left it beside my bed. I didn’t want to have any problems to deal with, mainly because I didn’t want to have to explain anything to my father on his return, but I also couldn’t pretend like nothing was happening.
I shoved my feet into a pair of sneakers and left the room, my weapon held at my side. Moving cautiously, in case the shouts and gunshots had originated inside the house, though they’d sounded like they’d been in the grounds, I navigated my way through the building until I reached the front door. It remained shut, so I reached out and cracked it open and peered out into the courtyard.
The gates which divided our compound from the forest beyond were open.
Shit.
My fingers fluttered against my thigh. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. The tapping and counting allowed me to breathe again, to clear my head and process the scene in front of me.
One of my father’s men, Rufus, guarded the gates, his gun dangling from his fingers at his right side. He didn’t have the stance of a man who was expecting to be shot at any moment, and I allowed myself to relax a fraction. I pushed through the front door and marched across the courtyard toward him.
“What’s happened?” I demanded.
He jerked his chin toward the open gates. “The new girl, Dani, has gone over the wall.”
“What? How?” I glanced up at the high stone wall, topped with metal spikes an
d coils of barbed wire, that surrounded the compound.
“Looks like she used a pair of pants to loop around one of the spikes and then used it like a rope to haul herself up and over.”
I lifted my eyebrows and tried not to be impressed by her feat. It must have taken some strength and determination to pull herself up there, and she’d been lucky not to impale herself on one of the spikes.
“Have people gone after her?”
“Yeah, Paul and Bruno. They must have caught a glimpse of her—I guess that’s what the gunshots had been about—but they’re still not back, so I assume they missed.”
I compressed my lips into a line. “I don’t want her dead.”
“If it’s their only way of bringing her back, they might not have any choice. You know we can’t let her go free.”
I nodded. “I know that.”
Though I was concerned about the girl’s wellbeing, I also didn’t want to lose one of the women on my watch. This kind of thing happened from time to time—not everyone was going to settle here after they arrived—and plenty made escape attempts, but not many succeeded.
“If she gets too far into the forest,” I continued, “we might never find her.”
Rufus shrugged. “She’d die of thirst and exposure before she reached anyone that she could tell about this place.”
“Maybe, but I’d rather not take the risk.”
If something happened, I’d need to contact my father, and I never willingly wanted to be in touch with him, but especially not if I was delivering bad news. I hated that even after all this time, I still wanted to make him proud of me.
Some of the women had emerged from their rooms, worried expressions pasted on their faces.
“Go back inside,” I shouted at them. “And stay there.”
There was no sign of Catalina, and I hoped she had the sense to remain in the house and away from trouble.
“Guard the gate,” I told Rufus. “Make sure none of the others try to get out.”
For Him: The Complete Series Page 5