Sit, stand, eat, sleep.
A brush of rough fingers across my cheek. His firm grip on my nape. Fingers skimming across my stomach. All of it possessive, all meant to show dominance, and every touch leaving me breathless for more because that was his purpose.
But he’d never given me more.
Only promises.
So here I knelt, my bruised shins on hotel carpet, my feet bare, my soul splayed. With my head down and my hands on my thighs, I waited.
And waited.
The air didn’t shift. It became alive.
As sure as the hushed anticipation of a full audience when the lights went out before I sang the first note, this room, my nerves, they crackled with that same heavy, eager, weighted expectation because he was doing something he didn’t do before.
He was staying.
Not walking out, not dismissing me, he didn’t turn his back. The black leather of his heavy boots buffed to a perfect shine, he stood there.
And that’s when it hit me.
This, more than any smile that had ever graced his beautiful face, was his seduction.
Ronan Conlon was more dominant silent than any man I knew who barked orders, and that spoke to places deep within me that I had yet to understand.
My heart rate erratic, a need I had no lyrics for burning low in my belly, I continued to wait. Just like I waited for him to make me his all those years ago, I waited now. But this time, I was patient.
Quiet, like the softest of raindrops on a hot summer evening, he finally graced me with his voice.
“Your clothes in your suitcase, Sanaa, who put them there?”
Hearing my proper name pass his lips made fear twist in my stomach. Before I could answer, he asked another question.
“Who chose the dress you’re wearing right now?”
Defensiveness slid in. “My wardrobe is taken care of by my management team.”
Ignoring my response, he asked another question. “Who arranged the flight here?”
I opened my mouth, but he kept going.
“Who got you to the airport? Who arranged this hotel? Who picked out the shampoo in your bathroom? The cut of your hair? The scent on your skin?”
Rash and sudden, the ego that comes from fame gripped me, and anger propelled me to my feet. “How dare you.”
The heat of his palm flattened on my chest as his thumb swept across the bruise on my collarbone. “Who told you that you needed to learn how to fight? Did he promise it would reduce stress? Give you control? Make you feel better?”
Humiliation coated my existence. Vance had said exactly all of those things and more. “You have no right to insult me when I made a name for myself.”
“I’m not insulting your success. I admire every one of your accomplishments. I’m asking who chose this color on your lips.” As if to prove his point that I let every one of the things he was suggesting happen because I relinquished control over myself, his thumb dragged across my lower lip.
His words making me feel small, I shoved his hand away and spit out ugliness I couldn’t take back. “So what if I didn’t pick out my makeup. What did you do? What did you ever do besides blame me?”
Calm, still, his amber-green eyes holding me hostage, he reduced me to my own lies. “You were always submissive, Sanaa. I did not make you that way.” Dismissing me, he turned toward the door.
The girl who first laid eyes on the beautiful golden boy next door, the boy who made her heart come alive and sing at first sight, she frantically pushed her way to the surface and bled out desperation. “I wasn’t alive until I met you.”
Ever so slightly, he paused, but then he took another step.
The pendulum that was my emotions around him swung the complete arc away from anger and whipped past desperate as it hurdled toward panic. “Wait. Please.”
His next step didn’t come.
Frantic to keep him, I dropped back to my knees because it was the only way I knew how to show him what I wanted. “I was living, but I wasn’t alive.” Memories of another life dripped pain on my heart. “I didn’t use my voice for song. I didn’t know hope. I didn’t know life could be full of colors that made my heart sing.” Colors of his rich, dark hair and dusty lips and sun-kissed shoulders. Shades of turquoise ocean days and navy, star-dotted nights. Being with him had made everything brighter, and he’d given me the courage to sing arousing, seductive songs about a kind of love most people only dreamt of. But now I was an empty shell who performed on stage like I knew what I sang of. With both nothing and everything to lose if he walked out that door like this, I begged. “Please.” Please. “Give me my heart back.”
His broad shoulders tensed, but every other muscle in his military-hardened body froze.
Fearing what I would see in his eyes if he turned around, terrified I wouldn’t get the chance, I fueled the incineration of my demise. “Make me your Songbird.”
He turned.
As if he knew I was on my knees, his hard, cold gaze was already angled down to meet me. “My Songbird,” he stated.
“Yes,” I dared to answer.
“Mine,” he ground out, hardness creasing little lines by his eyes and bringing his eyebrows down low.
Terrified, determined, I didn’t drop my gaze. I waited. I waited for him to decide exactly what our future would be, because he was right, I was submissive. And with him, that had always felt safe. But once I fell into the real world and hit the impossible, dizzying sphere of fame where my feet never touched the ground and I didn’t have a single guiding hand, but a thousand every second of every day, nothing had felt safe.
So I waited.
I waited for the one man who truly knew me.
I waited with strained vocal cords and crushing anticipation while he held my heart in his impossibly hardened countenance.
But then my Ronan, the boy who was a man, the only calming influence in my life, he robbed me of any hope of refuge. “What exactly do you want from me?”
I only thing I’d ever wanted. “Just you.”
He started to turn.
“I want attention and safety and control,” I stupidly blurted. “I want emotion and feelings and dominance and protectiveness.” I wanted everything.
“You have my brother for that.” Controlled and smooth, his voice suddenly like thick caramel, the blow hit harder than if he’d yelled at me.
But then I recognized it for what it was. Jealousy. Deep seated and significant in ways I was only beginning to fully understand after his brother’s admission.
Tempering my voice, I tried to alleviate fears I was responsible for. “Your brother never brought me joy. Your brother never owned my smiles.” I briefly wondered how big of a mistake I was making with my next words, but I said them anyway. “Your brother never felt like you.”
“Yet you still mistook him for me.”
I knew he wanted real answers. We had never discussed this. Not rationally. Me throwing desperate apologies at him wasn’t an explanation. I’d always wanted the chance to explain. I’d cried for it. But now that I had the stage, my reasons a decade ago were trivial.
All but one.
“I feared if I didn’t give myself to you before you left, you wouldn’t come home to me.” And I feared if I hadn’t signed that contract, and if he hadn’t come home, I would’ve been left with nothing. I didn’t want to ever be in the same position again that I was in when my mother died. My seventeen-year-old self didn’t think I could survive a second loss, not one that involved him. Signing that contract was more than a financial decision and a dream. It was an emotional security blanket.