21. Elle
ELLE
Lorcan fills the dishwasher, stacking all the plates and glasses neatly and lining up the cutlery in the basket by height. He is a control freak, and he likes order. These are two things I know about him. The rest is a mystery.
“Where do you live?” I blurt out, expecting rejection, but my mouth has decided for me.
He pauses for a fraction of a second. If I hadn’t been waiting for it, I wouldn’t have seen it. “Around the corner.”
“Oh,” I say.
He turns at my flat tone. “In a house in Belgravia.”
“Why didn’t you take me there? Too personal? Have a wife or girlfriend you’re hiding me from?”
The bite comes out harsher than I meant, but it hurts even though I should know better.
He carefully closes the dishwasher, and it whirs to life. “The penthouse is contained. Fewer exits.”
“Is that all?” I notice he didn’t refute my accusation.
“I don’t have a wife, Elle. I don’t have a girlfriend. I have interests and assets. Right now, you’re both.”
He walks toward me, his movements slow and stalking. He stops inches from me, the dark, heavy weight of his power clinging to him. He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t have to. The air between us is thick enough to choke on.
“Belgravia is my home,” he says, his voice low. “This is where I keep the things that need my full attention.”
“The things you want to break,” I whisper.
“The things I want to keep.” He reaches out, his thumb dragging over the line of the diamond necklace. The stones are cold, but his skin is fire. “You think privacy is about secrecy. For men like me, privacy is about security. You aren’t a secret, Elle. You’re a priority.”
I want to laugh at the absurdity of it, but my throat is too tight. He says it with such conviction that I almost believe him. I almost forget that I’m a stripper he plucked out of my crap flat and locked in a glass box.
“You fail to understand your importance, Elle. Any one of my enemies, competitors, anyone who wants anything from me—and I can give you a list that goes on for days—knows about you, you are leverage to use against me.”
“Leverage?” I frown. “Why?”
“Because if you are taken from me or hurt in any way whatsoever, I will make it my life’s mission to hunt the fucker down who did it and make them pay in blood and screams.”
I gulp at the intensity in his eyes, in his words. “But why? I’m a nobody,” I whisper. “Just a dumb stripper with nothing.”
“No,” he says, with enough force to make me jump. “Stop degrading yourself. I won’t stand for it.”
“What are you going to do? Kill me?” I murmur, wondering what hell he is doing to me. He is obsessed with a person he knows nothing about.
His smile is ice-cold, more so than usual. “I’m going to make you understand exactly what you are.”
He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t have to. The quiet finality in his voice is a thousand times more effective. “To them, you’re a weakness. To me, you’re the only thing in this city that doesn’t have a price tag.”
He bridges the tiny gap between us. A scoff forms in my throat but dies there, strangled. My body refuses the command to retreat, every muscle locked under the weight of his claim. The air is too thin; a frantic, fluttering panic beats against the cage of his stare.
“You don’t even know me,” I whisper, my voice trembling.
“I know enough.” He brushes a stray lock of hair behind my ear, his fingers lingering on my skin. “I know how you taste. I know how you sound when you’ve lost every bit of that stubborn control. I know I’m not letting anyone else touch what belongs to me, except my brothers.”
He leans down, his mouth hovering just an inch from mine. I can see the flecks of dark ringed around his pupils. “You think you’re small, Elle. But you’re the gravity in this room. Everything else is just noise.”
“I don’t understand what you see in me,” I press. “Why are you really doing this? And don’t lie that it’s about your secret club or for my protection.”
“It is about both and more. What do I see in you, Elle? Everything you don’t. I know that under that fragile exterior, you were forced to become this person. This life of taking your clothes off for men to get off to wasn’t your destiny, Elle. Was it? Tell me I’m wrong.”
His phone buzzes on the counter where he left it. I try not to look at it.
He doesn’t look either.
“I don’t think it’s anyone’s destiny,” I say quietly. “Women don’t dream of growing up and taking their clothes off for money, and doing worse.”
He smiles. “No, maybe not. But you were meant for greater things, Elle.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Keep denying it, but when I find out what broke you, you won’t be able to hide anymore. You will be stripped bare, and that is how I want you. You can tell me, Elle, or I can find out on my own. I know which one I prefer.” He curls a lock of my hair around his finger and stares at it.
I look at the phone again. The vibration rattles against the marble, a rhythmic, mechanical buzzing that makes my skin crawl. Lorcan doesn’t glance at it. He stays focused on me, his finger still tangled in my hair, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw.
“You think silence is a shield,” he says. His voice is a low vibration I feel in my bones. “It isn’t. It’s just a delay.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. My past is full of things I don’t want him finding, secrets that stay buried for a reason. I can’t let him see how much his words affect me.
“I have nothing to tell you.” My voice is steadier than I expected.
He pulls his hand away. The sudden loss of contact makes me feel colder. He picks up the phone and swipes the screen. His expression goes from dark heat to something clinical and dangerous. He reads the message, and his hand tightens on the phone.
“What is it?” I ask, despite myself.
He looks over at me, eyes narrowed. “Nothing you need to concern yourself with. It’s business.”
“Oh.”
He pockets the phone and takes my hand, pulling me closer to him. “What do you want, Elle?”
“Nothing.”
“Everyone wants something. Name it.”
“Freedom.”
He chuckles. “Apart from that.”
I stare into his deep blue eyes and lose myself for a moment. “I want to be loved.”
He searches my eyes for a long time. I swallow and nearly choke because my throat is so dry.
I wait for him to mock me or tell me how delusional I am.
He doesn’t flinch. His hand moves to the back of my neck, his fingers threading through my hair to pull my head back. He forces me to look at him, to meet the raw, unyielding intensity in his gaze.
“Love is a fairy tale for people who don’t have to fight for what they own,” he says, his voice a jagged rasp. “I don’t do love, Elle. I do obsession. I do protection. The kind of devotion that burns cities to the ground.”
“That sounds like a nightmare,” I whisper.
“It is,” he agrees, leaning in until his forehead rests against mine. “But it’s the only thing that lasts. I will give you everything you need. I will give you more than you ever thought you were worth. But I can’t love you. I’m incapable.”
“Is that a challenge, Lorcan?” I ask, my voice so quiet I barely hear myself over the dishwasher.
He kisses me, a hard, bruising claim that is full of dominance and possession. He pulls back after a moment, his eyes on my mouth. “It’s not a challenge, Elle. It’s a fact.”
“Then what am I doing here?”
That question takes him by surprise, as much as it does me. What am I asking him? For him to love me? It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever thought.
He doesn’t answer. He pulls away and walks out without so much as a look back.
“Right,” I say. “Question answered and uselessness reinforced. Got it.”
Lorcan comes storming back into the kitchen a second later, his expression like a thunderstorm about to break. “Don’t,” he grits out, “ever call yourself useless again.”
“Give me a reason not to,” I challenge him, seriously knowing I’ve lost my mind.
“I will give you a reason, Elle. I will give you a hundred million of them.”
“I don’t want your fucking money or possessions, Lorcan,” I snap.
“I know, and that’s why I want you so badly it makes me lose every single ounce of self-control,” he snaps back.
We glare at each other across the kitchen.
“You are making me say and do things that are forbidden in my life, Elle,” he accuses with a look of utter hatred.
But it’s not aimed at me.
I don’t know what it is aimed at, but it’s definitely not me. He isn’t even looking at me. He is staring at the fancy floor.
“Don’t you dare gaslight me into thinking this is my fault,” I growl, tears pricking my eyes as the memories I hold at bay flood back.
“I may be weak and fragile in your eyes, and maybe I am, but do not gaslight me. I won’t fall for it.
Not ever again.” I storm past him, my hands shaking with rage, the tears sliding down my cheeks as I remember Harry telling me this was all my fault, that I made him seduce me, that I got myself pregnant on purpose to break up his family and keep him for myself.
The memory of my parents coming together as a united front against me, telling me I brought shame to them on purpose, that I was rebelling to hurt them and the family name, before they told me it was best that I leave and didn’t look back.
It takes every ounce of strength I have not to believe Lorcan that this is all my fault.
I don’t realise I’m running until my bare feet hit the cold marble of the stairs.
I need the bedroom. I need a door between us, even if he can open it.
The air in my lungs feels like jagged glass.
Every breath is a reminder of the life I tried to bury.
“Elle!” Lorcan’s voice booms from the bottom of the stairs.
I don’t stop. I reach the landing, my vision blurred by the heat of my tears. He has no idea that there’s nothing left inside but ash and a determination never to be blamed for shit I didn’t do ever again.
I slam the bedroom door shut. A heavy weight hits the wood from the other side, and the doors fly open. I stumble back, hitting the edge of the bed as Lorcan stalks in, having kicked it in. He looks feral, his composure stripped away by the very thing he claimed he didn’t have—emotion.
“Don’t touch me,” I sob, holding my hands up. “Don’t you dare come near me.”
He stops, his breathing controlled but heavy. “Who fucking hurt you, Elle? Tell me now, and I swear I will hunt them down and destroy them.”
“Why?” I sob. “Why?”
“Because that is who I am now. I am the man who stands between you and whoever wants to harm you. Even if it is in your memories.”
“I hate you!” I scream, turning from him and rushing to the bathroom.
I remember only when my hands blindly fumble for the lock that there isn’t one, and now I’ve trapped myself in a porcelain kingdom with the frightening king on the other side of a door that he will kick in like he did the bedroom one.