Chapter 18
KEELY
I jerk awake in the middle of the night. I’m disoriented for a minute in the pitch blackness. As memory hits, my eyes flash wide open.
I’m alone.
When I put my hand on his pillow, Mason’s side of the king-sized bed is cold.
I try not to freak out at the crazy thoughts swirling through my head.
After what happened to me six years ago, I’ve never fallen asleep with a stranger.
And although he told me a few eyebrow raising, deeply personal things last night that I suspect very few people know, he’s still a near stranger.
Which makes falling asleep in his bed, in his house, a stupid thing to do.
I move around in the darkness and turn on the bedside lamp, then make sure I’m really alone in the room.
There may be a perfectly good reason why Mason’s not here. Maybe he woke up with a crazy idea for another contraption or sexy robot assistant, and he just had to get on it before he lost it. I get like that sometimes.
Or maybe he’s an insomniac. Seriously, there could be a thousand different benign reasons why he’s not in here with me.
Chill, Keely.
I sit up and look around the stylishly minimalist room. Nothing in here tells me what time it is. My purse and phone are both downstairs so there’s no way to check. I slowly lie back and put my head on Mason’s pillow. His scent fills my nostrils, and I smile at the delicious aches in my body.
After my five-month long dry spell and a good few years of mediocre sex, I’ve well and truly hit it out of the park with Mason.
He’s given me the sort of sex women write in girly fonts in their diaries and brag about to their less lucky girlfriends over cocktails.
Bethany is going to get an earful the moment I’m out of earshot of Mason Sinclair and his sexy, eavesdropping robot.
Crap, the robot…
I jerk the covers over my nudity when I realize Mason only mentioned audio files earlier. I never thought to ask him about cameras. Surely he wouldn’t do something so intrusive?
Reassuring myself doesn’t work, especially not when my mind throws up our conversation in the kitchen. The cold and clinical testimony of his deliberate cruelty toward his family sends another shiver down my spine.
The man who fucked me so thoroughly on the sofa was the kind of man to gossip to girlfriends about. The man in the kitchen was capable of just about anything . Including secretly recording our sex for whatever purpose he might choose somewhere down the line.
The thought disturbs me enough to send me out of bed. Since my clothes are still in the wash, I grab a cashmere blanket from the bottom of the bed and wrap it around my shoulders.
Mason gave me a brief tour after our shower earlier, but the mansion is immense, easily big enough to accommodate five families, and I get hopelessly lost several times before I decide to give up.
Making my way back to the central staircase, I hear a sound coming from a room at the end of the second-floor hallway.
I approach quietly, not wanting to disturb Mason if he’s working.
Lights flicker from beneath a heavy closed door, but I hear the sound of faint laughter before it stops.
I bite my lip and toy with retreating back to bed.
The clock I passed in one of the many hallways reads 3a.m. It’s early morning haunting hour, and I decide that whatever Mason has gotten out of bed for is none of my business.
I start to turn away, but the repeated sound of laughter stops me. A child’s laughter, joyous and unfettered. A few seconds later, it cuts off again.
My heart pounds as I put my ear to the door and shamelessly eavesdrop.
The irony doesn’t escape me that I’m doing the same thing I ripped into Mason for doing the first time we met.
When the door swings an inch inward, my heart jumps into my throat.
I freeze and wait for Mason’s inevitable appearance and the reciprocal ripping to follow.
Nothing happens.
Fuck it .
I refuse to cower behind the door like a naked, spineless thief. I knock lightly. “Mason?”
Nothing but silence greets my knock. I take a deep breath and push the door open wider.
The outer edges are shrouded in darkness, but the center of the room is bathed in sky-blue light reflected from the screen. My gaze skates across what turns out to be a cavernous cinema room to the single occupant in the large club chair.
Mason is seated upright, staring dead ahead at his screen, a remote clutched in his fist.
“Mason?” I try again.
He doesn’t respond, but my instincts tell me this isn’t one of his mind-fuck silences. He has no awareness that I’m here.
My gaze darts to the screen, and I see a freeze-frame of a boy of about five or six with dark brown hair. His head is turned away from the camera, but by the curve of his cheek and chubby chin, it’s clear he’s laughing.
My breath catches as Mason lifts his hand and points the remote at the screen. The picture jumps forward in jerky slow motion, and the boy’s face gradually swivels toward the camera.
He’s gorgeous, with warm hazel eyes, a button nose and a mischievous expression. He’s missing one front tooth, but his smile is so broad it almost splits his face. My insides twist painfully as I stare at the screen.
A sound rips through the room and cuts like a knife through me, drawing my attention back to Mason. With each frame, I watch his face morph into a mask of raw agony.
But that’s not the only expression on Mason’s face. My heart stops as I read the other emotion: murderous, incendiary rage.
The boy’s face fills the screen and Mason presses the button to hold it.
I’m not sure how long we all stay frozen.
My brain tries to grapple with the myriad reasons for the naked anguish blanketing him and the tears filling his eyes.
None of them are good, and I’ve known enough anguish of my own to accept that, in this case, Occam’s razor will prevail.
I’m staring into the heart of a worst-case scenario, and I die inside as I stand there, knowing I can’t offer the man who saved me from an icy death anything worth a damn.
When I finally force my legs to work, I retreat silently and make my way back to the bedroom.
I lie awake, torn between sneaking downstairs to hunt down my clothes so I can make a quick, cowardly getaway, and waiting for Mason to return.
I’m not sure what I’ll do when the latter happens, but it seems like the better thing to do.
Creeping away in the middle of the night because I don’t want to confront potentially heart-shredding revelations reeks of self-preservation, and I’m well within my right to do so, especially in light of actively fleeing my own secrets.
But leaving feels wrong.
I stare at the exquisite crown moldings that decorate the ceiling, my hands gripping the sheets hard enough to cause my palms and knuckles to scream out in pain.
I don’t let go because I don’t want the pain to go away.
I don’t want to swap this superficial pain for the one that lies beneath the surface of my mind, seeping poison.
But it’s already rising.
It’s too late.
I see his face. The cutest nose. His tiny, perfect hands.
Eyes of indeterminate color framed by the most perfectly tipped lashes.
I remember the absurd thought I had looking into his eyes.
How glad I was that they were nothing like mine.
Because then he wouldn’t see into me, wouldn’t know the dark, horrific thoughts lurking in my heart, eating away at the fierce love I felt for him the brief time I held him in my arms.
He screamed as the thought grew. Loud enough to attract concerned nurses to find out if he was okay. I wanted to join in the screaming, shout that of course he wasn’t okay. How could he ever be?
How could I?
Come to think of it, I may have screamed.
Because that blessed pinprick took everything away to a land of fluffy clouds dripping red rain.
And by the time I woke again, all was well.
My mind was as empty as my arms, and the only thought causing me the briefest discomfort was deciding which shade of Jell-O to have.
Pressure builds in my head and chest and I jerk to the side. My breath explodes from my lungs in sickening gulps as I try not to cry out. But one sob emerges, followed by a dozen before I force myself to stop crying. I have no right to tears. I have no right to grief.
How can I, when I gave my own child away seconds after he was born?
* * *
Sunshine pours through half-open curtains the next time I open my eyes. My face is tight from dried tears, and I’m still alone in Mason’s bedroom.
I debate whether to take this turn of events in my stride, like the tough take-no-shit Brooklyn girl I’ve falsely projected all these years, or curl into a pathetic ball and feel sorry for myself.
I suck in a breath and opt for the former.
I knew coming into this that it wouldn’t be sustainable for more than one or two brief encounters, three tops.
Clearly, I didn’t account for the swiftness with which we’d go from banging each other’s brains out to me being huddled under the covers, eating my sobs.
I erroneously believed that the electrifying connection between us was purely sexual in nature.
Now I know it’s our shared pain that keeps us riveted to each other.
That hellish self-loathing and murderous rage I sense in him is the yin to the yang of the twisting, helpless blackness that bloats my soul and slams on my self-destructive button whenever I lower my guard.
We may not know the minutiae of our dark and monstrous pasts, but it knows us . And as surely as I know how to bullshit my way into a first-class seat on any airplane, I know that talking myself into prolonging any further contact with Mason will end me.