“The men work in shifts. I don’t keep them chained to my side.” With a sly grin, he slices into a cucumber.
“Ah. I see what you did there. Clever gangster.”
“I am.” His grin fades, leaving a dissatisfied look in its place. His voice lowers. “Except when it comes to you.”
I say softly, “Yeah, I know the feeling.”
Our eyes meet. There’s something so raw in his gaze. Raw and unhappy.
“What are you thinking right now?”
“I’m thinking…” He pauses long enough to look down at the knife in his hand as if he doesn’t know how it got there. He resumes slicing the cucumber. “It’s nice having a woman in my home. Not that I’ve forgotten you’re really Dearg-due, but I’ll call you a woman for simplicity’s sake.”
“What’s a Dearg-due? Something super cute, I bet.”
“She’s an Irish female demon that seduces men and drains them of their blood.”
“Blood? Yuck. I’d rather drain them of their will to live.”
When he glances up at me, I’m grinning. “Go ahead. That’s a gimmie.”
When he fails to take the bait and insult me, I know something’s wrong. I mentally rewind to what he said a minute ago about having a woman in his home.
Does that mean he doesn’t usually have women here? Though I give him an awful lot of shit about being old, that’s baloney. The man is as hot as they come. Handsome, virile, and downright sexy. With a fatty in his pants, to boot. There’s no way he isn’t swimming in women.
What is that awful twisting in the pit of my stomach?
Don’t tell me it’s jealousy. I’ll never be able to look myself in the eye in a mirror again.
“Are we still doing the honesty thing?”
“You know we are. But if you’re about to lay another of your Grand Canyon speeches on me, let me know and I’ll set the knife down first. I don’t want to accidentally kill myself when I fall on it, sobbing.” He goes back to slicing.
“Ha. You’re not the sobbing kind. I bet if you tried to cry, it would just look like you were constipated. You know. Like usual.”
Now he’s trying not to laugh, which makes me feel better. I don’t like it when he’s unhappy.
Man, I’d like to kick myself in the face.
“Okay. All joking aside.” I take a breath and look down at my hands. “I know I keep saying I don’t like you. I don’t want to, and I shouldn’t, but I do. I mean, when you’re not being an asshole.”
He doesn’t say anything. I don’t dare look up. I just take another breath and continue.
“I’m telling you that because I never like men. That sounded wrong. I’m not a man-hater. I think men are pleasant distractions. If the rest of my life is the main course, men are desserts. Enjoyable, forgettable treats. That’s a deliberate choice, based on some bad stuff that happened to me, and it’s served me well for a long time. It’s protected me. Until you.”
When I glance up, he’s staring at me in total stillness, a look of intense concentration on his face. That muscle in his jaw flexes. He grips the knife like he’s about to plunge it into someone’s chest.
Holding his gaze, I say quietly, “I think you and I are the same. I think we both have secrets, and those secrets made us who we are. I think that’s why this feels different to me. And why it’s so dangerous. So I’m going to say this with the full knowledge that it might sound ridiculous, but I want you to promise me that you won’t keep me here too long.”
His voice gruff, Declan says, “Why not?”
“Because you feel like quicksand to me, and I’m already sinking.”
He slowly sets down the knife. “I thought I felt like the Grand Canyon.”
“You feel like both. Which is worse. You’re a Grand Canyon filled with quicksand.”
After a tense moment, he says, “So now you know how I feel. Except the quicksand in my Grand Canyon is laced with poison and swimming with man-eating sharks.”
My hands are trembling. There’s a good chance I’m about to fall off this stool. I moisten my lips and whisper, “Then maybe you should let me go right now. It’s probably best for both of us.”
Blue eyes glittering, he says in a throaty purr, “I’m not letting you go anywhere.”
The way he’s looking at me makes my heart pound and my stomach clench. I feel trapped. Panicked. Gripped by a sudden and overwhelming urge to bolt, like a mouse that knows there’s a hungry cat creeping up behind it.
So I do the only thing I can think of.
I jump off the stool and run.
25
Sloane
Declan catches me before I’ve gone twenty feet.
He tackles me from behind. We crash to the living room carpet. He rolls on top of me.
Then he kisses me, hard and hungrily, his mouth fused to mine.
The fear I feel is overpowering. He’s only kissing me, not killing me, but it feels like I’m fighting for my very life.
It feels like I’m drowning.
I gasp, twisting my head away and squirming underneath him. “Get off me!”
“You’re forgetting who’s in charge here,” he growls, pulling my head back so my throat is exposed. He bites my neck, chuckling when I scream in frustration.
“You said I was in charge!”
“I lied. Submit, captive.”
“Go to hell!”
“Submit.”
“No! Stop saying that!”
My bound arms are pinned between our bodies. He reaches down, grasps the short chain that links the handcuffs, and yanks my arms over my head. Then he gives me all his weight, flattening me.
This time when he kisses me, I taste victory on his lips.
Victory and something darker.
He breaks away, panting. “Don’t run away from me. You’re braver than that.”
I’m not, though. I always thought I was tough, but he’s proven I’m nothing more than a big fat coward. I’m so scared he’ll see more than I want him to see that I can’t even look at him.
Into my ear, he says, “Cat’s already out of the bag. You can’t hide from me anymore.”
“I take it all back! I was lying!”
That infuriates him.
With a snarl that’s more than a little scary, he makes me look at him, his hand gripped around my jaw. “Bollocks. You were telling the truth, maybe for the first fucking time. Weren’t you?”
When I don’t respond, he insists, “Weren’t you?”
Shaking all over, I close my eyes and whisper, “Stop. Please. This was a mistake.”
“No, lass, it wasn’t. I’m betting this is the first real thing either of us has had.”
He takes my mouth again. When I try to break away, he doesn’t let me. He doesn’t let me move my arms, or end the kiss, or wriggle out from underneath him. He doesn’t try to command me this time, either, he simply forces me to submit.
I fight him, but he’s too strong. Or I’m too weak. Either way, in a few moments, all the fight is drained out of me. I lie limply underneath him, sucking in short, hard breaths through my nose as I’m washed over a cliff and out to sea.