Chapter 18

18

Aubree

Standing inside the poor excuse of a bathroom, I tore the bottom hem of my dress to mid-thigh, where it’d been shredded in my scuffle with Nick two days before and had begun to fray, catching on everything I passed.

Nick.

I hadn’t expected him to give me his name. I’d expected him to storm out of my room, telling me to fuck off, like he had a couple times before. Perhaps I’d caught him in a vulnerable moment, because kidnappers didn’t often get personal like that.

Could’ve been a fake name, Aubree.

Probably was, but at least I didn’t have ‘my kidnapper’ running through my head every time I’d thought about him. I had no idea what the man had planned for me, but just as he’d said before, if he’d wanted me dead, he’d have already killed me.

After shortening a good six inches from my dress and tossing the extra fabric into the trash, I slid my panties off and threw them in the sink I’d filled with water and hand soap. Decorum be damned.

What the hell kind of OCD kidnapper set out hand soap, anyway? Like he couldn’t stand the thought of me not washing my hands after peeing.

Scrubbing the small bit of fabric, I felt strangely exposed, not wearing panties. I’d spent most of my time living with Michael not wearing any—a very specific request of his, which often resulted in humiliation.

In Michael’s home library, I’m sitting across from the stranger, who can’t seem to stop staring at my legs, and when I look away, I catch a glimpse of Michael’s gaze, flitting between the man and my thighs.

My stomach sinks.

“Tell me something, Patrick.” Michael shifts in his chair beside me, crossing his legs. “Do you prefer bare pussy, or do you like hair?”

The stranger clears his throat, and my muscles tense. “Excuse me?”

“Pussy. Bare or hair?” Michael chuckles.

The stranger’s stare falls on me then back to Michael. “Bare, I guess.”

Michael’s arm clutches me at the same time he begins yanking my dress up.

I place a hand over his, snapping my head in his direction.“What are you doing?”

“Move your hands, darling, or I’ll remove them all together.” The glint in his eyes is as evil as his words.

Embarrassment has my cheeks burning while my dress rests across my stomach, revealing that I’m not wearing panties. I want to crawl out of my skin.

“What do you think of her pussy, Pat?”

The stranger’s Adam’s apple bobs with a swallow and he licks his lips. “It’s lovely. Perfect. You’re a lucky man.”

“I am.” He squeezes me and kisses my temple. “Lick her.”

“Pardon?” The stranger’s voice cracks at the question.

“I want you to lick her pussy. Right here. Right now.”

Panic slams into my chest, closing off my airways, the waves of heat pulsing beneath my skin as embarrassment twists my stomach into tight coils. “Michael, please. Don’t do this.” My begging is worthless. Michael does as he pleases, and somewhere in this, a dangerous outcome waits to unfold.

“The man just called your pussy perfect, darling. Don’t be rude.” He waves Patrick over. “C’mon. She tastes as divine as she looks.”

“I … I’d rather not.”

“Oh, don’t be a pussy yourself! I’m offering you my beautiful wife and her delicious pussy.” Michael lowers his voice to a whisper. “It’s just the three of us. It’ll be fun.”

Patrick’s gaze slides back to mine, as if to question if I’m okay with it. I keep my expression as stoic as I can muster, knowing something bad is about to happen. I can feel the electricity in Michael’s grip, can sense the tension in his voice, in spite of the feigned pleasantry.

Without making eye contact, the man rises up from his chair and crosses the small space separating us before lowering to his knees in front of me. My thighs tremble, muscles taut. I’ve never had another man’s tongue there. Michael licked me once, when we dated, and hasn’t touched me since.

“Michael, you—” I give one more effort to halt this embarrassment, the flush of heat burning my cheeks, as I remain splayed in front of the man below me.

“Hush, Kitten.” Michael’s nails dig into my arm. “Patrick has been dying to see your pussy all night. Haven’t you, Patrick?”

“I’m … sorry?”

“You’ve been staring at my wife’s thighs all night long.” Michael shrugs, and a sense of doom washes over me. I had a feeling he’d noticed. He always noticed. “I’m assuming you imagined your tongue buried between them.”

“I apologize—”

“No apology. I’m happy to share her. Now, please, have a taste.”

The stranger can’t seem to look at me again. His gaze only lifts to the level of my stomach and refuses to meet my eyes.

He leans forward, and the kiss to my inner thigh feels like an apology. A ball of tension curls inside my stomach, and I push back, halted by Michael’s arm, locking me to the chair.

When the man’s tongue glides along my cleft, invading me against my will, I cry out. “No! Stop!”

“That’s it,” Michael coos beside me.

Patrick continues his assault, massaging the stiff muscles in my thighs, as every corner of my soul screams in protest. I’m numb there, so lost to the horror that his tongue doesn’t feel like pleasure to me but a wet irritation that leaves me wanting to curl into myself and push away.

His movements turn fervent, and he grips my thigh, sucking, perhaps lost to the act, mistaking my agonized whimpers for moans.

Stop! Stop!

“Didn’t I tell you, friend?”

A flash of silver strikes the corner of my eye, and at once the licking stops. Patrick lifts away from my sex, falling back on his heels. Blood pours from his throat in pulses that likely mirror the waves of shock beating out the last seconds of his life. Eyes wide, mouth agape, he gasps for air.

Michael leans forward, his mouth to Patrick’s ear. “Her pussy is to die for.”

I cringed at the memory. After watching the man bleed out his neck, Michael had simply rolled him up in the carpet and burned his body. Poof! Gone. It was the first time I’d seen how easily my husband could kill and get away with it. No one asked about Patrick. No one cared.

As a result, I learned to become charming in the face of horror. To wear a mask of indifference and carry the same wicked undercurrent behind my smile. I’d come to understand one very important survival mechanism: Do not blink when looking the devil in the eye. So, I’d taught myself to make him believe he was staring at his own reflection.

I would eventually become Michael’s protégé in an effort to survive him. Bend just enough to please him, but keep my spine intact to challenge him. Build compartments on top of compartments, to protect the soft parts inside me that I’d never allow him to touch again.

Lock it up. Not here. Not now. Put it away.

I’d grown accustomed to smoothing over those images, tucking them away into the darkness burrowed in a place inside of me that I tried not to visit. Still, they haunted me sometimes. Drudged themselves from the black swamp of my soul, and left me feeling weak, dirty.

I wrung the panties out and hung them on the rack above the toilet.

Two days had passed in my new prison, and aside from tying me to the bedpost the first night, my captor hadn’t laid so much as a hand on me. Not my captor— Nick. Nick hadn’t touched me. Hadn’t hit me, even when I thought I’d broken his nose and kicked him in the nuts.

Sure, his eyes had gone wild, and perhaps he wanted to string me up and knock me senseless. He didn’t, though. Had that been Michael, I’d have been punished for nearly ruining his perfect face.

I rubbed the back of my neck as I made my way out of the bathroom, noticing, for the first time, that the string of constant tension I’d become accustomed to, that kept me on my toes and helped me stay alert, had dissipated. The knots I’d worked out night after night had dissolved, loosened into soft muscles.

Yeah, not knowing what was going to happen to me still weighed heavy on me, but I’d felt the same thing with Michael every day for years, all while enduring his abuses.

I sat down on the bed facing the prison window, its thick black bars mocking my freedom, and traced the scar on my inner thigh. That had been my punishment for Patrick’s staring. For allowing him to put his tongue inside of me, as Michael had accused. I tipped my head back as the small rays of sunlight hit my face. So warm. When I opened my eyes, a speck of green at the corner of the window caught my attention, and I stood to check it out.

From the exterior rotted wood, a small sprout of the fern climbed and had worked its way through a tiny gap in the frame. As if it’d peeked inside to see me. I smiled, rubbing my finger over the tiny leaves. Even through destruction, life could continue to bloom in the oddest places.

The perfect metaphor for my life.

At the click of the door, I spun around to find Nick standing in the doorway, wearing a white tank and jeans, holding a plate of fruit and what looked like orange juice. Broad shoulders, pared down to a slim waistline, gave some indication that he had a nice package going on beneath all the concealing clothes he’d worn every time I’d seen him.

“Are you hungry?”

Call me a masochist, but the question left me wishing I could cross my thighs. With a nod, I rounded the bed, taking a seat at the edge.

Cords of muscle covered each of his arms, and ink decorated them in skulls and script. Not overdone or trashy, but tastefully and artistically etched in a way that gave him the ultimate bad boy appearance. A black tribal, pissed-off looking scorpion with red eyes covered his shoulder, over the ripple of muscle, its stinger snaking up the right side of his neck. I couldn’t help but think of the way a scorpion stunned its prey before consuming it, reminding me of those striking eyes of his. Poisonous venom in one glance. As he approached, small white scars could be seen beneath the ink, as if he’d tried to cover them up.

Damn he looked good. Really good.

What was wrong with me? This guy had kidnapped me, tied me to a bed, and sicced his crazy, hulking dog on me.

At the same time, in an ass-backward universe, one could also say he saved me from my psychopathic husband, fed me with his own hands, and told me his name. Whether it was his or not didn’t seem to matter in my mind. He also hadn’t tied me to the bed in two days, not that I’d been keeping track of pros and cons, or anything.

Beyond him, Blue lay down just outside my door, as though an imaginary threshold existed between us. Good. I hoped he suffered some kind of seizure if he happened to cross over.

Nick handed me the plate, slipped inside the closet-slash bathroom, and the faucet turned on. Once it’d turned off, he appeared at the door a few moments later, drying his hands, and he threw the towel over his shoulder. Good God. He leaned against the doorframe, and I did cross my legs for fear I might stand up to a telling wet spot on the bed. The man defied any previous standards I’d ever conjured inside my head for what a beautiful male specimen might look like.

Arms crossed, he glanced over his shoulder and back to me. “Am I to assume you’re not wearing anything beneath that dress?”

Seriously, what the hell was wrong with me that my nipples popped like a set of turkey timers at his question? “I refuse to wear dirty underwear. Captive, or not, I’ve got standards.” Boom. Argue that, mister. The new me refused to take anyone’s shit.

His head jerked forward. “You tore your dress?”

“It was getting in my way.”

He tugged the towel from his shoulder and tossed it somewhere inside the bathroom. “You don’t need to be walking around here without panties.”

“Making you nervous?” Bold, Aubree. Bold.

Those icy blue eyes shot to me. “If you think tempting me is your ticket to freedom, lady, you’re wrong.”

“Aubree. My name is Aubree. Lady is reserved for women over the age of sixty. Nick.” I tipped my head. “Is that your real name, or the name you offer up all your victims, to make them feel special for a minute before you slit their throats?”

With a slight lift his chin, just enough to assert his dominance, he stared down at me, his tongue making a slow sweep across his teeth, and sweet Lord, the man had my pelvic muscles in a frenzy. “You think I want to slit your throat?”

I shrugged at that. “Just a guess, unless you’re the sensitive quiet type under all that ink and muscle.” In the moments that his eyes narrowed on me and he seemed to study my face, I stole the opportunity to avert a potentially abrupt exit and cleared my throat. “I could use a shower. I tried to take a bath in the sink, but it’s a little cramped.”

The twitch of his cheek told me he wanted to smile. “A shower.”

“Yeah. I don’t suppose you’ve got an extra razor.” I had a feeling he didn’t, but the comment allowed me to focus on the sexy scruff of his face. Some guys just couldn’t pull that look off. Either too much hair or uneven lines that just made them look homeless. Nick had me cataloguing new features of sexy by the minute.

Stop. He’s a kidnapper. For Christ’s sake, stop.

His eyebrow winged up and his gaze landed on my arm, where the scar practically screamed from my wrist.

“N … not for that. I typically wax, but in a few days, I’ll be looking like Sasquatch. Should you decide to kill me, I’d like to keep my dignity intact.”

His jaw shifted back and forth.

For crying out loud, man. Laugh!

“Anything else?” He didn’t ask as though he genuinely cared to jot a list, more like he was irritated that he suddenly had to entertain a shower and a razor.

Yeah, a new pair of underwear, a fluffier pillow, some socks to walk around in, a bottle of wine—what the hell is asking too much? “Paper and pencil for sketching. Maybe a book?”

“Book?” he echoed.

I held both palms up, butterflying them in mocking. “You know, like reading. Words on a page. Some semblance of a plot. A book.”

“What kind of book? One of those romance books with a vampire and wolves?”

His laughter, whether fake or not, took me by surprise, and for the first time I noticed that, beyond those perfectly smirky-looking lips, he had a set of beautiful teeth that made up an adorable smile, complete with dimples.

Dimples. Hardly the vision of a dark and disgusting kidnapper.

“I’m not picky. I’m a pretty voracious reader. As long as it captures my attention. Classics are good, too.”

He paused, eyes tracking slightly to the side, and without a word, left the room.

Blue’s head perked up as he passed, as though even the dog didn’t understand the sudden exit.

Brow furrowed, I stared after him, replaying the last few seconds of conversation through my mind, wondering if I’d said something wrong.

Within minutes, he returned, carrying a book whose jacket looked dusty. Worn down. He handed it to me and stepped back, crossing his arms again.

The Grapes of Wrath. “Oh, my God, this is a first edition!” I turned it over in my hands, marveling the relic. “It was one of my favorites in school.”

“You like old books?”

“Yes,” I said, cracking it open, inhaling the aged pages.

“You always smell your books?” At my nod, he nudged his head in my direction. “What’s this one about?”

“You never had to read The Grapes of Wrath in school?”

Arms still crossed, he leaned against the doorframe. “I didn’t go to school for long. Dropped out when I was sixteen.”

“You dropped out? Why?”

He shrugged. “Wasn’t my thing.”

“Kidnapping just seemed like a more promising future for you, huh?” I clutched the book to my chest, waiting for his response.

“I liked computers. Games. Piecing puzzles. I worked on graphics and storylines for a game.”

“That sounds …” Weird. “…incredible.”He didn’t strike me as a black turtleneck, computer geek type. “What happened? Why didn’t you pursue it?”

“Shit happened.” He straightened his spine as if I’d dipped into sacred territory again.

Rather than risk his silence, I dropped my gaze to the book. “It’s about a family, the Joads, who lose everything and trek from Oklahoma to California, in search of a better life. Along the way, they face challenges, loss, suffering, pain. They find that what they’d hoped would be a better life, isn’t. Tom Joad ends up killing two police officers, who killed his friend, and goes into hiding. Bad things continue to happen to this family, and through it all, they fight to survive.”

Scratching the scruff on his cheek brought his chiseled jawline to my attention. He crossed his arms again, snapping me out of my musings. “Sounds depressing.”

“It’s about maintaining dignity in the face of tragedy and prejudice.”

“So, that’s what you believe?” He pushed himself off the wall and, with his boots set apart, took on a clearly defensive stance. “Those who suffer and face prejudice are supposed to prove themselves worthy and maintain their dignity in the presence of people like you who continue to oppress?”

I reared back at his words. Where the hell did that come from? “No … wait, what? People like me?” I frowned at the accusation. “Contrary to whatever preconceived ideas you may have about me, we’re on the same side, Nick.”

“No. We’re definitely not on the same side, Aubree. We’re so opposite of each other, it’s not even funny. You may have scars, but that doesn’t mean you know the kind of pain and loss that could make you give two shits about dignity and earning anyone’s approval.” Just like that, he strode out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

Numbness crept over my body, threatening to penetrate my shield. Fuck him. Fuck him and whatever he thought he knew about me. He knew nothing. The stranger hadn’t walked in my shoes, had no idea what I’d been through and survived. My scars were the markers of my pain and loss.

I rubbed my finger across the scar on my wrist, pushing back the tears forming in my eyes. I’d been to the bottom. Been broken. Stomped on. I got back up. Scraped what little self-respect I had left inside of me, and picked myself up. He didn’t know that. And I didn’t have to tell him—the guy meant nothing to me.

He was right—I didn’t need his approval.