Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Savannah…
I was warm, and slept on a cloud, but it definitely wasn’t my bed at home, and it definitely wasn’t a familiar arm around my middle pulling me back into an equally unfamiliar hard chest.
It was, however, a familiar voice in my ear as a man nuzzled my hair just behind it.
“Welcome to your indentured servitude, Ms. Kittridge.”
I closed my eyes and went very still in Corbett Prescott’s arms.
“So, you learned my legal name, so what?”
“Why did you hide it?” he asked, and I rolled my eyes and twisted in his grasp to meet his whiskey-colored gaze.
There was a coldness to them, an empty guardedness, that set my teeth on edge.
“I’m a woman who lives alone in Savannah, Georgia, with my face and name splattered in the paper, and on bus stop benches. What woman in their right mind in this day and age wouldn’t operate under an assumed name under those set of circumstances?”
He chuckled lightly and said, “Touché.”
“Why can’t I remember how I got here?” I demanded, and a thread of panic threatened to choke me.
“You had a rough night,” he said, and I swallowed hard.
“So did you,” I observed, and he lifted one shoulder in a shrug and let me turn in his grasp.
I lay on my back in his bed, and had no idea how I’d gotten there, no matter how hard I tried to think.
It was like a gray-black haze, worse than the time I’d gotten blackout drunk on a pilfered jar of my pa-paw’s peach shine.
“It wasn’t rough for you at all, was it?” I accused.
“I’ve been through rougher,” he confessed, and I blinked.
“I don’t know what to say,” I finally said after a protracted silence in which we simply stared at one another.
“’Thank you,’ is a good start,” he said dryly.
“Thank you for saving my life.” I could concede that one. “But what the hell did you just say? Indentured servitude?” I raised an eyebrow.
“For a while,” he said.
“So, I owe you for saving my life?” I demanded and tried to remain focused on his impassive face and those cold and contemplative eyes that should have been so warm for their color.
He smoothed a hand down beneath the comforter over me, and up under the shirt I wore underneath.
The feel of his hand on my skin sent a conflicting wave of sensation through me.
I shuddered, and I swear every hair I had stood on end.
He pressed over my solar plexus, and I cried out with the pain of it, “Ow!”
“Let me see,” he ordered as I pushed his hand away and he pushed back the blankets. I immediately covered my chest, and he chuckled.
“Suppose you don’t remember these hands all over you in the bath last night,” he said. “You didn’t complain then.”
I felt myself blush violently, as the memory, faint as a whiff of perfume from another room, passed through my head behind my eyes of those hands buried in my hair, thick with suds as he’d washed it.
I swallowed hard and said, “I told you my name… You drugged me!”
“A little GHB to calm you down and make you compliant. Rest assured, it’s out of your system by now.”
“Who are you?” I demanded, aghast, and those eyes of his turned molten with his… anger? I didn’t know what to call it, but the look he gave me made me fear and feel all of three inches tall.
“Right back at you. Now let me see,” he ordered, and I moved my hands.
He popped the three buttons holding the shirt I wore closed and parted the expensive fabric just enough to see, but kept two sides closed enough to cover my breasts.
There was a terrible purple-red bruise down low, in the notch below my sternum, where things went soft and my ribcage met in the middle.
I tried to strangle my gasp, but it came out as this sickening little noise that made it seem like I was about to throw up.
“He got you good,” he murmured, and he didn’t sound happy about it.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Let me spell it out for you then.” He quickly buttoned the shirt I had on, and I blinked, wondering how he’d done it one-handed and so swiftly, as he still lay beside me, his other hand propping up his head.
“You saw a side of me that no one should see, last night. You’re privileged enough to live to tell the tale – but you won’t,” he said. “If you talk, and I’ll disappear you, just as quickly as I disappeared your assailant.”
“Okay,” I said carefully. “So, you’ve bought my silence.”
“I want more than just your silence,” he said.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“You,” he said. “At least until I grow bored enough to let you go. If I grow bored enough to let you go. You know how indentured servitude works, don’t you?”
“It’s a form of slavery,” I answered. “Lasting for a period of time, traditionally seven years, until your debt is paid off, and then you receive your papers, and you are free to go…”
“Yes, well, that was how it worked,” he said.
“This isn’t that,” I said. “There’s no such thing as slavery anymore.”
“Oh, that’s not true,” he said, and he sniffed. He’d been holding his free hand, just above me, trailing it over my body as though he were feeling the nervous energy coming off me.
“What are you talking about?” I demanded.
“You’re mine to play with, to lick, to suck, to fuck as I want to until I get bored,” he said. The way he said it had part of my libido sitting up and saying, uh, YES please! While the rest of me positively recoiled in horror. It was an interesting dichotomy.
“You don’t know anything about me!” I argued.
He grinned, an almost feral thing, and said, “You’re right, I don’t, and I don’t care. I like what I see, and I take what I like.”
He rested his hand on my hip, and I batted it away, off me, like it was a spider crawling on me, which made him burst out laughing – loud and raucous like a murder of crows, the timbre of his voice richer and deeper somehow.
“This is sick,” I whispered aghast, and he gave me a lopsided grin.
“Then I’m a sick man,” he said. “But don’t pretend you aren’t aroused, or that you aren’t squeezing those thighs together at the thought of me getting between them. Because I may be a sick man, but I’m an honorable one, mostly, and honor abhors deceit, and I really don’t like liars.”
“If I say no?” I asked.
“You’re in no position to say no,” he said. “Or did you forget you’re an accessory to murder?”
“I didn’t kill anyone!” I chirped in objection.
“No, I did, but you didn’t exactly call the cops, did you?”
I remained silent because, well, he wasn’t wrong.
“I’m not going to pin you down and fuck you right here, right now,” he said. “So loosen up.”
There was a sparkle of mirth in his eyes, and I felt myself relax, incrementally, until he seemed… pleased.
“I don’t know what to do,” I murmured.
“You don’t need to do anything, except make yourself available when I call.”
I swallowed hard and felt my eyes well, and the whispered words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. “I just want to go home.”
He looked thoughtful for a minute and said, “First things first.” He rolled onto his back and reached down beside his side of the bed and brought up a black bag from one of the boutiques downtown.
“Clothes,” he said, and reached into the bag and pulled out a new phone. “And a new phone to replace the one that broke.”
“I can’t afford—”
“Hush,” he countered. “You’re mine for the time being, and I didn’t get to the part where I tell you that comes with some perks.”
“Like what?”
“Like a new phone to replace yours. Who’s your carrier?” he asked.
I named the carrier I was with.
“Easy,” he said. “Let’s get that sorted, first…”
I blinked in amazement as he brought around his phone and my broken one from his nightstand, and we sat up in his bed.
He bizarrely fixed my phone. Using his to call the carrier, while he did the work of switching SIM cards and used my computer and my old phone to download apps and transfer data like he was born to it, politely kibitzing like my granddad would with the representative on the line until everything was securely moved over and operational.
He hung up with my carrier, which I guess happened to be our carrier, and handed me my new phone. It was several models newer than my old one, and I didn’t have a case for it, but that was a relatively easy fix.
“Thank you,” I murmured.
“You’re welcome,” he said simply, and then he got out of bed and disappeared into the bathroom up here. I swallowed hard as I heard water hitting water, and I listened to him sigh.
I peeked into the bag and found an elegant black dress inside. Something sheer over a flowered material beneath.
I lifted it out and found a dress that might fit me.
Divesting of his shirt, I pulled the dress on quickly. It fit, hitting me below the knee, but it clung to my figure and gaped dangerously if I bent over, showing everything if I wasn’t careful. As though it was meant for someone with a much bigger chest than mine.
The toilet flushed, and he stepped back out into the room with me.
“Where are my clothes?” I demanded, and he stopped, mid-stretch, and the play of his muscles beneath his skin was both a sight and an intimidating one at that.
“Burned them,” he said with a shrug.
“What?” I blinked.
“They might’ve had evidence on them.”
My knees weakened, and I was absolutely mollified by the gravity of my situation.
I sank to the edge of the bed and blinked slowly. “What if someone comes looking for him?” I asked. “I don’t know what to say…”
“That part is easy. You tell them you showed him the house, you parted ways, and he told you to put in an offer. You do that today, and you do all the things you’re supposed to do, and then you call him.
And then you call him again, and then you call him again, and you do that for a few days, and then you drop it. ”
“Why would I call him when I know he’s already dead?” I asked.
“Because you don’t know that. You do it to establish your alibi. You’re the last one to see him alive, but to not do those things now? It will point right at you later on down the line.”
I nodded slowly in understanding.
He held out my new phone. “Call him and leave a voicemail. Tell him you’re putting in the offer today, as promised. Put on that fake-ass accent of yours and lay it on thick, girl. I’m going to go make us some coffee.”
I blinked, long, slow, and stupid, and he winked at me and went out the door. I heard him thunder down the steps a moment later.
I called Hal Lindstrom and waited, and waited, and waited, through what felt like endless ringing until his voicemail picked up.
I held my breath, waited for the beep, and, acting as though my life depended on it – which it did – I left a message.
“Hi, Mr. Lindstrom! It’s Savvy Savannah, and I just wanted to let you know I’ll be putting in that offer on 14 West Duffy later on today for you. You have a great day, now, Sugar! Bye-bye!”
I hit the red button with shaking fingers and felt like I was going to throw up. I was flying blind as a bat here, and I knew if I didn’t do it right, I was likely going to die, too, and then where would the Kittridge line be?
I dragged myself to my feet and thought to myself, I just want to go home. Instead, I squared my shoulders and took myself downstairs to face a monster in his kitchen and drink coffee like a civilized person when there clearly wasn’t a civilized bone in Corbett Prescott’s body.