Kept (16 page)

There was a better way. Play this right, and Alyssa would come to him.

Blood. It was everywhere. Down the stairs like a torrent. Slicking the floor of the marble entryway. Alyssa struggled up the stairs, pulling herself along the banister as it rushed past her, threatening to sweep her away in a thick red flood. The gamey metallic odor filled her nostrils as she continued down the hall. The blood was up around her knees now as she waded down the hall. The door to the master bedroom pulsed, haloed in white light.

She didn’t want to open it. She wanted to run away, but when she tried to turn, her feet were bogged down, sucked into thick, blood-black mud.

She opened the door, and the blood hit her like a wave, washing over her, soaking her, receding like the tide.

They were on the floor, the wound in her father’s chest still gushing, pumping like a geyser. And her stepmother across from him, her face stretched in a deathly grimace as blood poured from the wound in her head.

Alyssa’s mouth opened in a scream, but the sound strangled in her throat, hissing, high-pitched. She stumbled to the French doors onto the balcony. A man was there, big, hulking, his features indistinguishable. But there was no mistaking the gun in his hand as he turned it on her.

“No. Stop!” But her words were garbled, and the cold barrel of the gun pressed into her chest. “Stop it.”

“You can’t expect it to stop now.” The words, the voice, were Derek’s.

She sat up with a cry, heart pounding, body shaking in the aftermath of the nightmare. The dark was absolute, smothering as Alyssa struggled to get air into her lungs. She fumbled for the bedside lamp and switched it on.

The dim light seared her eyeballs as sharp pain stabbed her head, and nausea roiled in her stomach. The dreams about her father’s death were growing more violent, and now when she woke she always had a piercing headache. Like something was stabbing, probing at her brain, digging around as it tried to get her to remember something.

She put her head in her hands and rubbed at her temples. Despite what she’d said to the reporter, she’d been able to brush off the dreams as nightmares. Horrible, violent, but ultimately meaningless.

Then yesterday she’d received the mysterious text message from someone claiming to know the truth about her father’s death. Probably just a malicious prank, but it unnerved her just the same.

And to top it all off, Derek had shown up, blowing apart her tenuous peace. Denying her even a few days of quiet before she was forced to return home to the storm.

Ignore him. Her head throbbed. As if. Even asleep two doors down, she could feel his presence. He’d barely spoken to her all afternoon, ignoring her in favor of the books he’d found in her friend Raj’s bookshelves and, later, a movie he’d found on cable. She, in contrast, had been on high alert, every cell aware of his presence on the other end of the couch.

They were completely alone. If anything happened between them, no one would ever have to know. The thought tormented, tantalized her until she had to excuse herself before she did something really dumb like throw herself at him. Again.

The words he spoke in her dream, echoing what he’d said in the coffee place, played through her head, bringing on a
fresh wave of pain. She walked on shaky legs to the bathroom, unable to shake the creepy, unsettled feel that lingered from her dream.

She rummaged through her toiletry bag, squinting and cursing as she tried to locate her bottle of ibuprofen. Finally she laid her hands on it and popped the top.

“Everything okay?”

She jumped and shrieked, sending little red pills skittering across the tile counter. She bent to retrieve them, her balance wavering as blinding pain shot through her head. As she stood up her elbow knocked into the glass next to the sink. She made a fumbling grab, watching helplessly as it tumbled, end over end, slamming against the toilet and exploding into millions of shards.

Muzzy-headed from her nightmare and stabbing headache, Alyssa stepped forward, even as Derek shouted for her to look out.

Too late. A sharp pain pierced the sole of her foot, and she started to stumble. Derek cursed and grabbed her under the arms, snatched her off her feet, and carried her into the kitchen.

He snapped on the light and set her down in a kitchen chair. “Don’t move,” he said, his face set in stern lines. “Do you know if this place has a first-aid kit?”

“Raj keeps one under the sink of the bathroom,” she called to his already retreating back. “Be careful not to cut yourself!” The overhead kitchen light did nothing to help her headache, and she squeezed her eyes shut. “Can you see if you can salvage any of my Advil while you’re in there?”

He returned a few moments later, first-aid kit in one hand and her mostly empty bottle of ibuprofen in the other. She grabbed the bottle from him and shook out two pills, so eager for the relief they’d provide she swallowed them without water. Probably just a placebo effect, but the minute the pills hit her tongue she felt the pain in her head ease.

She opened her eyes and saw him watching her. His gaze slid meaningfully to the pill bottle in her hand.

“If you need something stronger, you don’t need to fake it with Advil on my account.” He pulled up a chair across from her, sat down, and lifted her bare foot up onto his lap. He was wearing only a pair of flannel pajama bottoms, his thickly muscled chest bare. Even through her headachy haze she was struck by how gorgeous he was. She’d been with some really good-looking men, actors, performers—men who kept their bodies in perfect condition because their careers depended on it.

He lifted her foot to the light, his muscles rippling under tight, tan skin. A few scars, light streaks against his sun-darkened skin, showed through a dusting of hair that arrowed down his eight-pack abs. An arrow that led to one of the most impressive pieces of equipment she’d ever had the pleasure to encounter; Derek made the hottest men in Hollywood look like a bunch of metrosexual wusses.

So mesmerized was she that it took a few seconds for his words to sink in. “I’m not faking it with Advil. Even if I wanted something stronger for my headache, I don’t have anything in the house.”

He glanced up from her foot, the look in his eyes one of patent disbelief.

“It’s true,” she said, trying to snatch her foot back. He tightened his grip on her ankle, not enough to hurt, but enough to let her know she wasn’t going anywhere until he let her. A shiver of warmth snaked up her leg, penetrating through the pain of her headache. “Go look for yourself. I don’t have any OxyContin or horse tranquilizer or whatever else you all seem to think I’m on.”

“I was there when you got the lab results,” he said, extracting a pair of tweezers from the first-aid kit.

“And I told you I don’t know how they got in my sys
tem!” She winced as he probed with the tweezers. “Ouch! Are you trying to cripple me?”

“Chill out. It’s just a little glass shard, but it slid in deep.”

He probed again, and she gripped the seat of her chair at the needlelike pain. On the plus side, the sharp sting in her foot distracted her from her headache.

“There. It’s out.” He held up the glass for her inspection, a tiny shard no wider than a needle. He went back to the first-aid kit and pulled out a white foil packet and a Band-Aid. He ripped open the packet, and the sharp smell of alcohol filled the air. She hissed as he pressed the damp pad against the sole of her foot. “You really expect anyone with two brain cells to rub together to believe you’re being drugged?”

“I don’t care what you believe. I didn’t knowingly take any drugs.” It scared the shit out of her to know someone could get close enough to her to dose her without her knowledge.

“You know it’s impossible for anyone to believe you.” He peeled the backing off the Band-Aid and stuck it to her foot. But he didn’t release her ankle. His other hand rested on the top of her foot, his thumb stroking absently over the smooth skin.

The brush of his calloused thumb was so arousing he could have been touching her breast instead of her foot. But even her arousal wasn’t enough to ward off the hurt. “What is that supposed to mean? Because the press likes to bring up problems I had in the past? Because making me look like a mess helps them sell magazines?” She looked at him, her stare unwavering as she willed him to believe her.

He stared right back, disbelief evident in the hardness of his dark eyes, in the arch of his thick brows. “Everything the press writes about you is false?” The skepticism was so thick she could have cut it with a knife.

“Was everything the press wrote about your mother true?”

His thumb stilled on her foot, and his fingers tightened around her ankle hard enough to make her wince.

It was a low blow, and she knew it. After weeks of resisting, she’d finally given into curiosity and Googled Derek Taggart shortly after she’d arrived at Raj’s house yesterday. She hadn’t known what to expect, but certainly not what she’d found. His bio from the Gemini Securities Web site had popped up first. He was ex-military, graduated from West Point before becoming an Army Ranger. That hadn’t surprised her. With his hard edges and serious take-no-prisoners attitude, his military background was like an extra layer of skin.

But she’d been shocked to learn he’d been involved in one of the most notorious missing persons cases to ever hit the San Francisco Bay area. She’d been young—only seven at the time—but she vaguely remembered the story of a wealthy housewife gone missing penetrating the celebrity-heavy news in Los Angeles where she’d lived with her mother.

Plagued by morbid curiosity, Alyssa had spent several hours yesterday following the links that led to stories of a beautiful but troubled woman who had apparently decided to pick up and leave her husband and teenage sons without a backward glance. Many of the articles speculated on her motives, ranging from struggles with drugs and alcohol to extramarital affairs.

Something flashed in Derek’s eyes, a nanosecond glimpse of vulnerability, and Alyssa felt about an inch tall for lashing out. Then his face closed up like a door had slammed, and his eyes went dark and expressionless.

He dropped her foot and began packing up the first-aid kit.

Alyssa watched him, her mind flashing to one of the few photos that had accompanied the stories. It showed Derek and his brothers, Ethan and Danny, along with their father, Joe, as Joe spoke to a reporter. Danny stood beside his father, arms folded, face hard, a teenager trying to be a man.
Ethan smiled for the camera, charming, sunny, all-American. Derek had been off to the side, half of his body cut off from the frame, his face in profile as he stood apart from the rest of his family.

She wanted to sink into her chair and disappear.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No big deal,” he said as he zipped closed the nylon case containing the first-aid supplies. “It happened a long time ago. I’m over it.”

She doubted that. She got up and limped after him as he retreated down the hall. “Still, it was a shitty thing to say, and I’m sorry.” She laid her hand on his arm, her fingers closing over the tight cords of muscle.

“It’s okay,” he said with a half smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “But you’re right. Not all of it was true. At least, not that we know of.”

“So you know how things can be exaggerated, even made up.” He nodded, studying her, and she could see his conviction crack. She could feel him giving her the tiniest benefit of the doubt.

It wasn’t a declaration of faith, but, hey, she’d take what she could get.

She was standing so close, she could feel the heat radiating off his bare skin and could smell his woodsy, musky scent. Her fingers tightened around his forearm as desire hit her like a physical force. She knew the second he felt it, too, could sense it in the subtle tightening of his muscles, the slight hitch in his breath.

Derek bent his head, and Alyssa stood on tiptoe to meet him, her lips parting eagerly to accept the invasion of his tongue. She whimpered into his mouth and pressed against him, wrapped her arms around his neck and tried to climb up his body. He lifted her, backing her up against the wall and pinning her there with his hips.

He was rock hard, his cock nudging at her stomach through
his pajama bottoms, and an answering heat bloomed and pulsed between her legs. All he had to do was kiss her, and she wanted him, slick and wet with a need so fierce it scared her. She’d never felt anything like this, the desperation to have a man—
this man
—on her, inside her, making her come until she couldn’t see straight.

With a groan, Derek ripped his mouth from hers and backed away so quickly she slid down the wall and landed with a thump.

“I can’t do this,” he muttered almost to himself. “Not with you.”

“Why not?” she asked, not sure if she should be insulted. “I want you,” she said, knowing she sounded needy and desperate but not caring right now. Why couldn’t she stop throwing herself at him? What was it about him that made her lose every shred of self-preservation?

She reached out and boldly stroked him through the soft flannel of his pants. He sucked in a breath, quivering under her touch like a barely tamed animal. “And I know you want me.”

“That doesn’t matter,” he said and inhaled on a hiss as she flattened her palm against his shaft and shamelessly stroked him. “You’re a client—”

“I’m not your client,” she whispered and leaned close enough to flick her tongue across his flat, copper-colored nipple. His cock jerked in her hand.

“You know what I mean,” he huffed, sounding like he was having trouble remembering what he was talking about.

Alyssa opened her mouth against his chest, sucking and licking his salty skin with teasing swipes of her tongue. “Do you remember the night we met? The first time you took me home?”

“Christ, yes.” His breath was coming in harsh pants now, his hands fisting at his sides as though he wasn’t sure whether to hold her close or shove her away.

She was more than happy to help him decide. She dipped her hand inside his waistband and closed her fingers around his rigid erection. He was so thick her fingers barely met as she slid her hand up and down, stroking, sliding, squeezing as her sex throbbed in anticipation of having his whole thick length shoved deep inside.