Gold Mine Page 3
I’m not my father. I don’t want to hold her captive. I want her to be with me of her own free will. It’s only that I can’t take the risk. What if she decides to walk away?
I can’t hold her captive.
I can’t let her leave.
The contradiction is tearing me apart.
“A place I bought for you and your sister to stay until I take care of things with Ian Taggart. He’s too dangerous for you to deal with, and after tonight, he’ll be pissed.”
“Pissed,” she says, her voice hollow. “My sister—”
“Will be safe in the house. It’s your job to make sure she stays put.” And in doing so, it means that she has to stay put. Yes, that’s the secret to keeping Holly. Her sister.
“That means you need the diamonds.”
“I don’t need the diamonds to pay off Ian Taggart.” I have my own money, as well as my own methods of persuasion to make sure he leaves the Frank women alone.
“Well, I don’t want them.”
“You can use them to decorate your T-shirts. Your yoga pants.”
She glances down at her glittering ball gown. “You knew?”
“I know when a woman’s wearing a million dollars in diamonds, yes. Though I am curious about your plan with Taggart. Were you planning on stripping naked in the ball?”
She reaches back and tugs on a few silken ties. The elaborate gown slips from her shoulders, revealing a black sheath dress that hugs her slender body. God, she would have caused a riot in this thing. I’m rock hard just looking at her, my bodily response impossible to control.
She tosses the dress aside. “Good lord, that thing was heavy.”
“The problem isn’t the diamonds. The problem is the coke.”
Her arms freeze in midair where she’d been shaking them out. Slowly she puts her hands on her lap. “My sister is recovering from her problem.”
“Your sister needs professional help.”
“She doesn’t want a rehab center.”
Frustration flares inside me. “So you’re going to become an addiction counselor, is that it? Anything she needs? What if what she really needs is a dealer?”
“I won’t let her slip.”
“This is taking things too far.”
“She’s family. You wouldn’t understand.”
We both freeze, and it takes me a moment to understand the sensation in my chest. Pain. She managed to hurt me, when I didn’t think I had emotions left.
For a long time I had no family.
“I’m sorry,” she says quickly. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, you did. And a year ago you would have been right. I didn’t know my family. I didn’t want to care about anyone. But I’ve gotten to know them, my brother Liam. His ward, Samantha. My other brother Josh. I would do a lot for them, even die for them, but I can’t live for them.”
“I’m not doing that. I’m helping London through a hard spot.”
“And you won’t stop helping until one of you ends up dead.”
She glares at me. “That’s not your problem.”
“Oh yes it is.” I grab her and drag her back onto my lap. Without the heavy fabric, the hard, little diamonds between us, it’s like holding her naked. The silk does nothing to hide her breasts, her stomach, her hips. Lust turns me into something else, something baser. An animal. It’s taking over and winning. “You made it my problem when you fucking ran from me.”
She squirms, trying to escape. It only makes me harder. “Let me go.”
“You should know that running only makes me chase you. It only makes me pin you down and fuck even harder as punishment. I was going to wait until we got to the house.” I palm her breast, not bothering to be gentle. There’s nothing gentle about me right now. “You made that impossible.”
“It’s not my fault.”
I rub my thumb over her nipple and feel it harden. “Not your fault that you’re so goddamn beautiful my chest hurts from looking at you? Not your fault that I hurt, actually hurt with how much I need to be inside you?”
“No,” she mouths, her lips round in the moonlight, the word silent.
“Yes.” I shove her hand, crude and abrupt, to my pulsing erection. She gasps as she feels it. Large. Imposing. Yeah, it’ll probably hurt going in. That doesn’t make me flinch the way it does when she cries. I want her to hurt because of me, only because of me.
CHAPTER FIVE
Holly
He pushes me down to the floor of the SUV. My knees feel the carpet and beneath that—plastic and metal. An engine that’s barreling at seventy miles per hour.
“Now we’re going to play a game.”
His voice rushes over my back, my neck like a cold caress. Goose bumps rise. What’s he going to do to me? No, I already know the answer. There are only a few things a man can do to a woman who’s on her hands and knees. Have sex with me. Spank me.
“Are you going to fight me?” he asks.
“I’m wondering that myself,” I say, proud that my voice doesn’t shake. I’m shaking on the inside. A quivering mess of worry and reluctant arousal.
He grasps the gold dress and rips. The sound of it splits the air in the cabin, and I flinch. It cost a lot to have that dress made and took even more hours for me to sew the diamonds into it. He takes a long strip of the lace and diamonds and wraps it around my wrist—then the other.
In a few deft movements, my hands are tied behind my back.
The time to fight him has passed.
That doesn’t stop me from testing the knots, wrenching my arms to get free.
A sharp pain hits my ass, and I whimper.
“Good,” he says, his voice grim. “I like a fight. Now, the game.”
“I’m not playing.”
“I start a sentence and you repeat after me. Elijah, when I left your apartment, I went…”
I close my eyes and rest my face against the seat. Cool leather cradles my cheek. “What’s the point of this? You’re already angry at me.”
Another sharp pain on the curve of my ass. “Elijah, when I left your apartment, I went…”
I was out of my mind with worry for my sister. Terrified that Elijah wouldn’t help her. That he’d take the diamonds she needed to be safe. “Elijah, when I left your apartment, I went to stay with Marisol and her husband. The French couple. I used the same code you did to seek asylum.”
He stills behind me. “You did.”
“I threw out our credit cards, our IDs. Anything you could use to track us. They gave us a map of other houses we could stay in, a network of safety that took us all the way to Italy. There we stayed with a friend of London’s who’s a model.”
“Hell.” He mutters some colorful curse words. “I went back to the church. I thought maybe you had some kind of Stockholm syndrome, maybe you wanted some closure. And I retraced our steps on the escape, including a visit to the sweet old couple.”
“Don’t be mad at them.”
“I didn’t realize they were such accomplished liars.”
“I’m the one you hate. I’m the one you want to punish.”
“Oh yes.” There’s a smile in his voice. “I’m going to punish you.”
Blunt fingers trace the side of my breast where it’s pressed against the seat, my lower back that curves into my ass, the line of my sex through the thin silk. It’s a coarse invasion, deliberately designed to move faster than he should. It means, your pleasure doesn’t matter.
My body doesn’t care about this message. It finds his touch unbearably erotic, as if he’s awoken something, as if I’ve been hungry for this entire year.
“Elijah,” I say, gasping, needing.
A sharp slap. “I haven’t given you the prompt yet. Eager girl. You’re adorable when you’re horny, you know that? Almost impossible to resist, but I’ll find a way. I’ve been waiting too long for this.”
I can’t help the tilt of my hips, a candid invitation. “Please.”
“Elijah, I left you because�
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My insides shrink from sharing the truth, from the emotions it would reveal. His hand is firm against my backside, and I jump. “Elijah, I left you because you locked me in.”
He leans over me, his lips a breath away from my ear. “Explain.”
That wasn’t what I meant to say. I left because my sister needed me. I left because of family. Those would have been acceptable reasons. They weren’t the real reason I walked away. It was because he locked me in. The same way Adam had. Both men thought of me as some kind of pet. Someone to keep and play with and then put away.
“You didn’t treat me like an equal. Like a partner.” You didn’t love me. I manage to hold in those final, damning words, but they hang in the air anyway like dew in a dark morning.
“A partner. Someone to face down the Ian Taggarts and the Adam Blacks of the world, is that what you mean? Someone to hold a gun and fight battles?”
“No.”
He bites down on my lower lobe. “Someone to struggle when I tie her up?”
A flush creeps up my cheeks. It’s perverse, this game. It’s wrong. “No.”
Cool air wafts over me as he pulls back. I hear the whistle of a belt, the rustle of clothing. Something hot prods my opening, and I know he’s about to have sex with me. He holds himself back, there at the entrance, making me clench around nothing.
His voice comes strained. “Elijah, I won’t leave again.”
My hands fist against my lower back, and I wriggle my ass, shameless and afraid. “I can’t say it, Elijah. I can’t. I can’t.”
A growl of frustration is the answer. He thrusts inside me in one smooth motion, and I cry out. He fucks me hard, almost too hard, and I squirm to get away. Of course I’m tied down and surrounded by him, thoroughly contained.
“So fucking pretty in gold and diamonds,” he grunts, matching each word to a thrust. “So fucking pretty in a room full of men and women who want to fuck you.”
“They didn’t—”
He changes the angle of his thrusts, finding a new place inside me, and my words become strangled. “They did. All of them wanted you. Only I have you. Say it.”
I shake my head as tears stream down my cheeks.
“Say it. Elijah, I won’t leave again.”
But I don’t say it.
When he comes with a roar, hands gripping my hips, that roar pervades every inch of the SUV. Hotness pulses into my sheath, and the knowledge that he’s coming inside me, unprotected, makes me squeeze down hard. I come in sharp, hard bursts, already grieving the coldness I’ll find when it’s over, the pain that comes without a promise.
The aftershocks still run through me when he unties my hands. I turn over and push myself onto the seat, feeling topsy-turvy. I rub my wrists. The diamonds left little indents in my skin, like a constellation for me to map.
He’s quiet as he cleans himself and rights his suit. He rummages through a cabinet and finds a crystal glass and a bottle of amber liquid. He pours a glass and takes a swallow.
He doesn’t offer me any. He just studies me through slitted green eyes.
“So,” he says on another swig. “You do plan to leave.”
It’s strange to have a conversation after he was inside me. Strange to see him so far away. The distance across the SUV could be from here to the moon. That’s how far away he feels right now. “My only plan right now is to pay off my sister’s debts and help her fight the addiction.”
CHAPTER SIX
London
My sister’s in the next car, probably getting great sex.
Meanwhile I’m stuck with a babysitter who has a stone-cold expression.
Liam North sits across from me in the back of the SUV, occasionally scanning the outside scenery as if we’re going through a war zone instead of the beautiful Italian countryside.
The only upside to this situation is that he definitely qualifies as eye candy. A hard body, broad shoulders, and those gorgeous green eyes. Yeah, he’s no hardship to look at.
Unfortunately, my mind is stuck remembering dark gray eyes, almost like silver in the shadows. I’m stuck remembering the feel of strong hands holding me while we danced. Adam Black. What a bastard. I should hate him. I do hate him.
“Are you sure my sister’s safe with your brother?” I ask.
Green eyes study me. He says nothing.
“It’s just that he seemed kinda pissed off. He won’t hurt her, will he?”
“No.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Nothing.
Addiction is not a desire or a pull. It’s a third person sitting in the cab of the SUV. It’s a physical presence, a shudder, a cold breeze where there shouldn’t be.
I turn a ring around my pinky finger, around and around. “The thing is, from what I understand, you haven’t known him that long. You only recently reconnected. So he might be the kind of guy to take his anger out on a woman.”
“He’s not.”
“Violence runs in families. Does yours have a history of that?”
He gives a short laugh. “You could say that.”
The dark shadow of addiction gives me a little wave, and I resolutely ignore it. “I know I’m being insistent, but it’s my sister we’re talking about here. I love her. She takes care of me. I wish I could take care of her, too.”
It’s hard to tell in the shadows but it’s possible his green eyes soften. “We’ll reach our destination in an hour and a half. You can ascertain her safety then.”
“Ascertain,” I say, drawing out the word. “Ascertain. It sounds so formal.”
“Determine. Verify.”
“Still formal. Are you always this uptight, or is it because you’re on a kidnapping mission?”
“We weren’t kidnapping you. We rescued you.”
“Oh, and I suppose if we had wanted to wander back into the party, have another glass of champagne, dance a little, that would have been just fine with Elijah.”
Nothing.
“For what it’s worth, I think you’re always this uptight.”
“We’re operating in a gray area,” he admits. “Private security frequently operates in a gray area. Stalkers we subdue to protect the client. A thief we escort into the police station.”
“Not this gray, though. This is like dark, dark gray.” Like Adam’s eyes. Like the hulking mass of shadows that represents every dark impulse that threatens to destroy me.
“Yes, but in the same way that you want to protect your sister, I want to protect my brother. Even if the danger is coming from himself and his infatuation with—”
I huff a laugh. “Infatuation? Is that what they’re calling it these days?”
“What would you call it?”
“Lust. He wants to fuck her.” I use the word deliberately, but of course an ex-military man doesn’t even flinch at the word. “And once he’s had his fill, he’ll leave.”
“Maybe.”
“Definitely.”
“What about you? Do you have an infatuation?”
“I’m in love.”
It’s startling to hear those words from a man so thoroughly masculine and hard lined. I would have expected him to spit nails and break a crowbar in half before ever admitting them. “Let me guess. Your high school sweetheart. You have two point five kids and a minivan.”
“Not exactly.”
I glance out the window where rows of orange trees pass like flipping through cards in a deck. “Well, we have one and a half hours until we reach our destination,” I say, mimicking his low voice. “Plenty of time for you to tell me how it is.”
“She was my ward. My daughter, according to the state. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t her biological father. I swore that I would protect her at any cost.”
That makes me lean forward. “This got interesting.”
“I noticed her before she turned eighteen.” A hard laugh. “To my shame. And then she turned eighteen and noticed me back. I fought the pull but it was inevitable.”
He nods. “He’s been working for my company while he looked for Holly. He’s a great agent when he’s not distracted by a woman. A real asset to the company.”
“That’s not my relationship with Holl. We’re not an asset-to-company kind of family.”
His lips curve in a half smile. “I won’t make any claims about us being a healthy family that people should emulate. Most of the time, we’re just getting by. You hit the nail on the head about having a history of violence. But Elijah won’t ever hurt Holly. You have my word.”
“How can you promise something like that?”
“It’s a pact we have. All three of us agreed to it. If any of us turn into our father, the other ones will put him down. Like a rabid dog.”
A chill runs over my skin, and I curl my legs onto the seat. Possibly this talking thing wasn’t such a good idea. Like a rabid dog. No, their family is nothing like ours.
It makes me wonder how Holly relates to Elijah. They come from different worlds.
Then again, if it’s only sex, they don’t need to relate.
Maybe Elijah isn’t the only one who needs to get it out of his system. Maybe Holly does, too. The fact is, she’d looked very relieved to see him. This might have started as a kidnapping mission, but Holly had also wanted to be kidnapped.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Holly
I have vague memories of falling asleep. My head bumped against the interior of the SUV as we bounced along mountain roads until someone pulled me against his chest. Those same arms lifted me in the night air, and I glimpsed a thousand tiny stars in a black sky. I smelled lemons as he laid me down on something soft. And then I drifted away.
When I wake up, it feels like an eternity has passed.
Sunlight casts a serene glow on the white sheets. I stretch and feel more rested than I have in months. In more than a year, actually. I haven’t gotten a sleep like this since I was in my loft in Manhattan. Before I flew to Paris. Before I was kidnapped by Adam.