Page 43 of Take Her

And then thirty goddamned seconds later he burst back out. “Why were you late?” he demanded.

I blinked, utterly disarmed. “I had a bad morning.”

“Why?” he pressed.

“I—I just overslept.” He kept staring at me strangely, and I was suddenly worried that he could really see me—the real me that lived underneath my designer clothes and my makeup and my long sleeves, the me that’d been hiding in her bed half the night talking herself out of doing something stupid, like taking a knife from her kitchen and cutting at herself or other things she owned.

I had coping skills.

It was just that they were woefully inadequate.

I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to center myself, and was surprised to find him there still when I reopened them.

“Don’t let it happen again,” he said. But his tone was kinder now, even if his gaze was not.

“I won’t, sir,” I apologized bashfully, and he nodded once, before really leaving me alone.

19

RHAIM

“Why were you late?” I mocked myself, quietly, after sitting behind my desk and turning the chair so that I could look out the floor to ceiling tinted window that viewed the city’s skyline.

Why the fuck was I pretending to give a shit what had happened to her?

Maybe because I actually did.

I closed my eyes and growled at myself. I had actual business to conduct, now that I was certain the FBI wasn’t closing in, and I’d done myself no favors taking off all last week—but something had happened to her, and I didn’t think it was just that she’d stayed up too late reading.

I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure why Lia sicced a PI on me. I believed the man that he didn’t truly know, and he was too potentially useful to me currently for me to rat myself out by asking her.

But if she wasn’t going to try to blackmail me, and she wasn’t working for a letter agency, I found all of the other options worrisome.

In an attempt to understand her last night, I’d pored over every single fucking thing she’d put online, and between that and Sable’s information today, I’d pieced together the life of a girl woefully out of sync: with her age, with her peers, with her location. I’d met sixteen-year-olds—on the street, not in the bedroom—with more venom and capabilities in them than it seemed she possessed.

I would say she was sheltered, but her entire life attested otherwise. Her father’s reputation and money had thrown her into the deep end, but instead of it making her wicked or cunning...she’d simply just drowned.

Which would explain why she was always looking at me with those amber save me eyes. They were somehow an even worse temptation than her small high breasts and the curve of her full lower lip.

But save her from what? From a life of luxury and attention? From all the comfort that money and the Ferreo name could buy?

I didn’t understand—and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

Because when I’d come back to the office and seen her looking fragile, it did bad things to me.

Primarily, it made me jealous that someone else had beaten me to hurting her, although hurting was perhaps not the best verb.

After all, did clay hurt when it was molded?

Did carbon hurt, when pressure and heat made it shine?

No.

What I wanted—and what was a particularly bad idea, seeing as it was Nero’s daughter we were talking about here—was the opportunity to control her.

Especially as I ought to know better—because I’d done that once before, and it was why Isabelle had died.

I’d timed Isabelle’s cycles, then took her on a trip to a remote island in Mauritius and threw her birth control away. I wanted kids, and I knew we could afford the best of everything, nannies, schools, help—so I’d decided it was time. She was so pissed she couldn’t stand looking at me for two days, but after that, when she knew I wouldn’t budge, and how I’d kidnap her for longer if I had to, her anger faded and we spent three weeks having the intense, madly personal fucking that came from knowing you were doing it for a reason—that each time you thrust, you were binding yourself to someone else for life. We made love every day, beneath the mosquito netting on our bed, against the walls of our cabin, even out in the ocean, but if we did, I’d take her roughly again once we were on the shore, where the water couldn’t wash me away from her.