Stealing Kathryn (25 page)

“Kat, please…I was different when I took you. Selfish and brutal and, yes, uncaring of how it would affect you. I wanted a treasure to complete my collection. You want me to admit that? I will. It’s the truth. But I’m not that thing that took you anymore!”

“How do I know that? You know where everything is, what everything is for. You’ve gotten your way. You’ve taken everything precious left to me. Wasn’t that your plan all along?”

He could hear the tears in her voice, though she struggled valiantly to keep them at bay. She got out of the bed and broke into a run, but since he was on the side near the doors, she had to get past him first and he wasn’t about to let that happen. He got to his feet and caught her arms in his hands, holding tight when she struggled against him.

“No! You’re not running away from me, Kat! You stand here and you yell at me or tell me off or any number of things you might want to do, but you will not run away from me! That’s the trick you pull with your father, isn’t it? Never argue. Never confront. Never demand what you want or what you deserve. Isn’t that right?”

“What do you know about it? Leave me alone!”

“I know everything about it, sweetheart. Everything you can’t resolve in your waking world comes with you into your dreams. Every single frustration you felt at your father’s hands I felt too. You don’t remember half of it, but you always came and talked to me. You railed and fought like you could never do when you were awake. You have a hell of a lot of fire wrapped up inside you, but the only thing it burns is your delicate insides because you never let it out!”

“Shut up! Stop talking like you know me! Oh my God, I can’t believe I let you…Oh!” She hauled back and slugged him hard in the shoulder, immediately feeling the impact in her wrist when his much stronger body wouldn’t give way.

“Wouldn’t you rather your first time have been with someone who knows you, Kathryn? And knows you not from secondhand sources but your own lips and mind? Do you want me to tell you what else I know? Do you really want to talk about deception?” His temper was getting the best of him because of his fear that she would leave him. The statement was out before he could check it and he regretted it instantly. Her head perked up and her eyes narrowed warily on him.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Forget I said anything. It was a mistake.” He turned, running both hands through his hair in agitation. But she was hot on his heels.

“No. It’s not nothing. You know something that has to do with me. Tell me what it is.”

“Kat.” He shook his head vehemently. “You don’t want to know. Believe me.”

“Tell me or I’m walking out of here!”

“And where are you going to go?” he railed back at her. “This plane is dead. There’s no one here to take care of you or help you or anything. It’s just you, me, and my sister. I’m sorry to say it, sweetheart, but we’re all you’ve got.”

“Oh! You…you monster! You plot my kidnapping for months, possibly even years,” she corrected herself as she took in the scope of the things he had collected. “And now when you have a chance to do one honest thing for me, you won’t do it!”

“Because I don’t want to hurt you!”

“Too late!”

She tried to push past him, but he wasn’t going to let her get away with that.

“Are you telling me you are going to hold against me the things I did when I was half mad with rage and lust and every evil emotion you can possibly imagine? Are you really going to treat me like that is who I am?”

“If you aren’t that same monster still, then just what the hell are you? You’re still keeping me a captive here. You’re still treating me like a freakin’ doll you get to dress up and make pretty.” She threw the necklace at him and he let it fall to the ground. It wasn’t important to him. Not if it wasn’t important to her. “The only thing that’s changed is I bought into it for a little while. Long enough for you to finally get your rocks off. I hope you had fun, because it won’t be happening again anytime soon!”

“Hey! I seem to recall us both getting our rocks off, sweetheart,” he snapped at her, grabbing her hard and giving her a shake. “Do not conjure up reasons to be mad at me because you’re having second thoughts about what you did with me!”

“I’m…I’m just mad! I feel like I never have any control! Everything is always about what everyone else wants out of me! When is it going to be my turn to do what I want?”

“Honey…honey, listen to me,” he said, making her look at him squarely. “This is all about you doing what you want. If I had kept my head about it I would have preferred to wait before taking you. I would have preferred to have more honesty and more trust between us. More understanding. Thing is, I didn’t think we were going to be able to make love at all, remember? I was terrified I was going to hurt you. That we wouldn’t fit right. Remember I said that?”

“Yes,” she sniffed, not looking at him. “That just means you got lucky you didn’t hurt me.”

“No, it doesn’t. If I’d thought for a moment during our lovemaking that I was going to cause you any real harm, I would have stopped. Look at me, Kat.” He gave her a shake and she turned her angry eyes up to him. He was terrified she was going to leave him, destroy what little trust they’d earned with each other, but he still had to take delight in that anger. She repressed so much, let people push her around all the time, and it was good to see her finally fighting. She would need that fight in her if she was going to survive outside of the Earth plane. “I make no excuses for myself for the way I brought you here. I did it for all of the most selfish reasons you can accuse me of. But surely you can see how different I am?”

“I can see it,” she agreed sullenly.

“Then why are you holding against me things I cannot change?”

“Who else am I supposed to hold it against? Changed or not, the fact of the matter is you brought me here. You trapped me here. And you planned it for a long, long time. There is no one else to blame.”

“You could put a little of that blame on yourself,” he said smartly. “Let me remind you of how many times you cried about getting away from home. ‘Take me away. Take me far away.’ Over and over again, crying on my shoulder about how miserable you were. If I could take you back right this second, Kat, would you really want to go? Would you want to go home to a father who was suffocating every single dream you ever had right out of you? He was beating you down with your responsibilities, using your sister to make you stay as long as he could keep you. In the end, he would have broken your spirit and you would have spent the rest of your life on that ranch.”

“That’s not true!”

“Oh, really? Then why didn’t you go to college, Kat?”

“We didn’t have the money,” she said by rote. It stung, though, to hear him talk about it like he knew her so damn well.

“Are you sure about that? Connor had you doing every damn thing on that ranch you could, but the one thing he kept from you was what?”

“I don’t—”

“You do know. What’s the one thing he wouldn’t let you do, Kat?”

“Th-the books,” she stammered, shaking her head to negate the understanding she’d always known on some level.

“The books. Because he didn’t want you to see just how flush the ranch was. That he could have easily hired a hand to replace you. That he could afford college not just for you, but for Jillian too. And he was such a damn tightwad he’d rather squeeze all the life out of you than ever spend so much as a dime helping you.”

“No, that’s not true.” But the huge tears dripping down her face told him she knew exactly how true it was.

“Hate me for telling you the truth if you must, Kathryn, but it is the truth. And you know it is.”

She sobbed into her hand, trying to find a way to turn so she wouldn’t have to face her pain. But there was nowhere for her to go. It would follow her everywhere. Anywhere. Even across planes of existence.

“Oh my God. Why? Why would he do that to me?” she wanted to know.

“He needed a mother for his youngest daughter. He needed a wife to keep his house. He never once considered whether or not he needed a happy daughter.”

“How do you know all of this?” she asked him as she leaned into him for support, crying her pretty eyes out and breaking his heart.

“Because his guilt ate him up at night when he slept, sweetheart. He did love you on some level, just not enough to let you go. He had horrible nightmares about you getting fed up and leaving him to manage on his own.”

“Nightmares you gave him?”

“No. I didn’t need to create those. And he knew right and wrong when it came to you, he just actively chose wrong every time. This is what I didn’t want to tell you before. I didn’t want to hurt you like this. Your ignorance was protecting you. But I won’t let you think you weren’t already in a prison long before I brought you to this one, because you were. And that doesn’t make me right for taking you, either. It just is what it is. And I am what I am. A different man. One who still wants you with every fiber of his being. One who will do just about anything to keep you. Anything but hurt you. I promise I won’t ever hurt you on purpose ever again. I’ll be possessive, I’ll be a little crazy now and then, and I know I’ll lose my temper, but I won’t have nightmares at night about the way I’m treating you.” He tipped up her chin and made her look into his eyes. “I swear, I’ll never hurt you.”

“You can’t promise me that.” She hiccupped. “People always hurt each other.”

“But I won’t hurt you. And I can make that promise because I know if I do, you will have every right to walk away from me. For good. And because you are my kindra that would be a fate worse than death for me.”

“Oh, don’t say that.” She wept, striking her hands over her tear-streaked cheeks again and again. “I don’t want to be responsible for that.”

“But you are. The glowing in my eyes proves it just as much as the perfection of our joining does. We’re meant to be together, Kat.”

“But it’s just another prison. Someone else telling me what to do.”

“No, not this time.” He lifted her face in his hands. “This time you’ll be the one to tell me what to do. My job is to take good care of you, your job is to take us wherever you want to go. Anywhere in the Barrens or Beneath, it’s all open to you. I reserve only the right to protect you from something too dangerous…and even then it will be a discussion, not a dictate. Agreed?”

“B-but…”

“But what? Tell me what you want. Let me give it to you.”

And the moment he said it, he knew exactly what she would ask for.

“I want to see my family.”

Chapter 12

Kathryn couldn’t believe she was standing in front of that awful mirror again, contemplating what she was contemplating. Whose idea was this, anyway?

Oh. That’s right. It had been her idea to begin with. And true to his word, Adrian had found a way to make it happen.

“Come with me,” he said gently, taking up her hands and leading her toward the mirror. This time they were both completely naked.

“Why do I have to be naked again?” she asked uneasily.

“It helps you to walk seamlessly through dreams. If you wear a set style, then it might look out of place if someone is having a medieval fantasy or thinks they’re a caveman from the past. This way when you enter the dream you will end up wearing exactly what they expect you to be wearing.”

“All right,” she said, shyly uncrossing her arms from in front of her breasts as he drew her toward the huge mirror. “I hate this thing. It gives me electrical shocks.”

“Only when I’m not here with you,” he corrected her. “I’ll absorb the worst of the shock. At most you’ll feel an energizing tingle. Although you may not like the sensation since the mirror is polarized so negatively.”

“Great,” she muttered as the glass loomed closer.

“Hey.” He stopped and tipped up her chin, making her meet his eyes. “I’m here and I am going to protect you. Nothing will hurt you.”

Maybe she was crazy, but she actually believed him. After all, wasn’t this dream thing his area of expertise? He’d done this thousands and thousands of times. Of course, it had also warped him into a demented monster that had kidnapped her ass and…Whoa. Time to jump off the thought train.

He let go of one of her hands and reached out to touch the mirror. Or caress it was a better descriptor. He ran his hand over it to awaken the magical energy within and it woke with a vengeance. Blue arcs of electricity shot out to connect to his wrist, following it everywhere it went as it traveled broad strokes across the mirror. Once his wrist was ringed with the reaching arcs, his hand slipped through the portal. She gripped his opposite hand fiercely with both of hers, imagining just how much the surge was going to hurt him once they crossed through. And then, with a swift yank on their hands to bring her close to his body, he swept them into the mirror.

The thick rolling smoke and fog consumed them almost immediately. But Adrian kept her hand in his and pulled her through it with confidence in where he was going. She couldn’t see how he could tell one part of the plane from another, never mind how he was going to locate the dreams of a specific person.

“You’re not going to suddenly appear again out of nowhere and start groping me, are you?” she asked him.

“Do you want me to grope you?” he asked.

“Um…” That was definitely a trick question. He laughed at her hesitation.

“Well, that’s good to know,” he said with a grin. “Just keep your mind focused on what you really want. If you let it stray to things like passing desires, you might find them coming true.”

“So that’s what happened last time? It was one of my desires coming to life?”

“You had a strong expectation of finding me here, so you found me. Then you had expectations of how I would behave, so I behaved that way. I’m sorry I gave you the impression I was a…a…”

“Groper?”

He laughed. “Yeah, a groper. But perhaps I’d say more of an opportunist. If the chance presents itself, I’m going to be more than happy to grope you.”

“I’ll bet,” she said, making sure her bare body didn’t come into contact with his. Just the thought of him putting hands on her was distracting her thoughts and she knew just how dangerous that was in this place.