Chapter Four #2
Gray eyes met his, widened in something far smokier than simple shock, and then it was her turn to suck.
The way he had in her bedroom, learning each of her fingers. She sucked on him, and he felt her tongue move over his thumb, and slowly, the dryness of her mouth abated.
He told himself that had been his only aim.
But there were other distractions when he pulled his thumb back, and then, with a swift glance at the concrete garage, swept her up into his arms.
Rux looked startled, but she slid an arm around his neck. And then he was carrying her into the house, for all intents and purposes a parody of a romantic clinch.
He could not account for the effect this one had on him. He would have considered her a sorceress or this some kind of witchcraft—but he believed in neither.
The consequences of real life were too dire and impossible to escape. What little magic he’d ever known had died out, long ago.
Jovi almost stopped short at that, because he never thought about such things on the job.
He tried not to think of such things at all.
But he kept carrying her, taking her up the narrow stairs and then into the first room they encountered.
Inside there was nothing but a sturdy chair. It sat in the center of the tiled room, and above it, two thin wires were bolted to the ceiling. At the end of them were leather cuffs.
“If you feel you must relieve yourself, the bathroom is through there,” he told her, and nodded at the door on the other side of the room.
He did not need to go and check it, because he already knew there was nothing inside that she could use as a weapon, to hurt him or herself.
The window was boarded over and bolted shut.
“Such courtesy,” Rux murmured as he set her bare feet on the ground. “You are truly the consummate host, Jovi.”
The part of him that wanted to punish such flippancy was overruled by the part of him that couldn’t believe she talked to him as if he… She wasn’t afraid of him at all.
As if he wasn’t a monster.
He thought he felt a rib crack.
She disappeared inside the bathroom and he tried to empty himself of all these odd thoughts and impulses, all this noise and clamor. He preferred stillness. He preferred solitude. He preferred a true emptiness within—
But instead he heard the toilet flush. Then the running taps. And then, inevitably, the low rattle that told him she was trying to pry open the window.
He decided he wouldn’t have respected her much if she hadn’t made an attempt.
When she opened the door again, she paused in the doorway. “What a remarkably scoured-clean and sanitized bathroom,” she said brightly. “It looks like it’s never been used by a human.”
He indicated the chair before him with a jut of his chin. Rux walked toward him, his ribs sustaining damage as his heart went wild, and Jovi had to accept that the unthinkable had really and truly happened.
She was getting to him.
She already had, when in his whole life, attractive women had been nothing but interchangeable. There were too many, there were always more, and they flitted about his family like so many foolish moths to an open flame. An endlessly renewable resource, his uncle liked to declare.
Jovi had never allowed himself to be distracted.
But there was something about Rux that made his bones suddenly seem to sit wrong inside his body.
There were those clever eyes in that serious shade of gray, particularly notable in such a pretty face.
There was all that glossy dark hair that made her look moody and mysterious, and made him want to bury his hands in it to see if it felt as good as he thought it would, like raw silk.
There were her cheekbones that made him want to trace them with his mouth.
And there was her mouth that hinted at an overbite and now made him think about the way she’d closed her lips around his thumb and sucked him in deep.
He had the disturbing and unwelcome realization that he was attracted to her. Specifically. Not because she was a very pretty woman by any measure, but because she was Rux.
If he had been anywhere else, doing anything other than this, he was certain this revelation would have made him leave. At once. And never return.
But she drew closer and there was that scent again. Flowers, perhaps. Something sweeter, like dark brown sugar. He watched as she obediently sat in the chair and found himself looking more closely at what she was wearing.
Pajamas, that was all. They should have been unremarkable right along with everything else, but like everything else, they were…not.
The trouble was, he’d seen them on her as she’d writhed about on that bed. He’d seen the swell of her belly and the hint of all that smooth skin. And he’d seen the lower curve of her ass when he’d bent her over the bed, and when he’d laid her face down to work on those fingers.
He’d seen too much, that was clear.
And he’d been paying attention to the parts of her that he’d seen instead of the pattern on the pajamas themselves. Jovi frowned now as he made out the tiny little evergreen trees, festooned in Christmas colors, all over the smooth cotton fabric.
“Christmas was last month,” he said darkly, as if she had perhaps gotten confused.
“I wanted to feel festive,” she replied in that way of hers that managed to be insolent and intriguing all at once. “And behold my success. This certainly seems like a party, doesn’t it?”
He moved closer, stepping between her legs so he could reach up and pull one cuff down, then the other, fastening each around her slender wrists in a way that could not be undone with one hand. The movements were like breathing to him, all muscle memory and no conscious thought.
But now when he breathed, he breathed in her scent.
And he wondered about that flush on her cheeks, what it meant and whether or not it extended into softer, sweeter places.
And he was putting together a fairly detailed mental schematic of the precise size and shape of those breasts he’d felt flush against his back—
It wasn’t only his heart that was going rogue, Jovi realized then.
His cock was so hard it, too, hurt.
Never before in all of his life had he ever confused work with play.
Rux was getting to him in ways he could not understand.
He did not want to understand.
She was secured. It didn’t matter what feelings were assaulting him—all that mattered was that simple truth. She was secured, as intended, and he underscored that by stepping back, crossing his arms over his chest, and gazing down at her as impassively as possible.
Maybe he was proving to himself that he could.
A thought that made him feel—
He stopped himself right there and reminded himself who the fuck he was. Then did his best to act like it.
As if he was still the man who hadn’t felt his own heartbeat in longer than he could recall.
He watched as she tested the cuffs, and, again, understood that something in him respected that. Only a fool accepted that a door was locked without testing it himself.
When she was finished, she let her arms hang so that the wires held them aloft instead of fighting against them, he found that interesting, too.
Once again, Rux seemed more relaxed than he would have expected.
More relaxed than most could have been, given her predicament.
Certainly more relaxed than any other person he’d had in a position like this.
But the last time he’d asked her why she wasn’t afraid, it had changed something in him. It had fundamentally altered something in him that he couldn’t name, but he could still feel it, like one of those hangovers his cousins joked about.
Jovi had never experienced one of those, either. His entire life was about maintaining control and wielding it in service of his uncle.
And here he was, standing in a bare, stripped-down room where he held every last scrap of power there was. Where he controlled every single thing that had happened or could happen.
There was no reason that he should feel drunk, or what he assumed drunk must feel like, having witnessed it so many times in others.
He thrust that aside.
“Now we will decide how much of an actress you are,” he said in a forbidding voice—his usual voice, he corrected himself. “I will take a video. In it, you will beg and plead for your father to save you.”
He expected her to burst into tears, but instead, she laughed.
Perhaps he should have expected that, he thought. Most people were so terrified of him they did whatever he asked, but Rux had already proved that was not her.
“That’s a colossal waste of time,” she told him.
“I beg your pardon?”
“He wouldn’t care. That’s the point, right? To get him to care? To make him feel badly about something? Anything?”
“The point is to impress upon him that his own child is suffering for his decisions,” Jovi said. Repressively.
But she only laughed again, this time jangling the wires enough that they swung and made noise. “What makes you think that would bother him?”
Jovi gazed down at her. “Of course it would bother him.”
It would, he was quite certain, offend the man on every level, since he seemed to think himself the master of all he surveyed. This would take the message left behind in Rux’s bedroom and underscore it.
“No,” Rux said, quietly, and there was something so grave in her gaze.
“It won’t bother him. He doesn’t care if I’m hurt.
I suppose that he might be enraged that I’ll fetch a lower price, or be taken off the market entirely, because that would affect his bottom line.
” She did not seem upset when she said this.
There was no resignation, no hint of pain.
She sounded certain, that was all, and it was the kind of certainty that took years to reach this level of calm.
“My father has more emotional attachment to the packages he has delivered.”
It wasn’t only that she was saying these things. Certainly, Jovi had met others in the course of the work he performed for his uncle who went out of their way to make it clear that they were not a strategic source of pressure against anyone, especially not the given target.
But none had ever stated it so matter-of-factly. Or while laughing.
In point of fact, Jovi could not recall very many people laughing in his presence, ever.
He had always assumed that was because they all knew what he did. What he was—a monster on a leash.
What did not make sense was that he knew Rux was aware of this, too. She’d known exactly what he was the first moment she’d seen him. And still she laughed.
She laughed again now. “Besides,” she said, sounding something more like rueful, “I will never beg him and I do not cry. I would rather die than let him see me so diminished.”
It reminded him of his mother’s brief defiance on that terrible night, her attempt to fight the inevitable—
But he did not think about his mother. He did not think about that night. He certainly did not equate these people he met because of his job with his lost family, because that would make him—
Something inside Jovi cracked at that and he had the strangest notion that it was his ribs. The ribs that should have been holding that wild heart of his in place. That wild, excessively beating heart seemed to know things about him—about her—that he did not.
It made him furious.
He blamed her for that, too, because it was another fucking feeling. He never, ever, bothered with those.
He never had to bother with those because he never felt them in the first place.
But nothing about this had been right, not since the first moment she’d lifted her gaze from that book of hers and fixed it on him.
The parallels to his mother were bad enough, but that wasn’t all it was. It was a one-two punch of unwanted memories and something else.
And he had told her he was honest, so he was honest with himself, too.
The truth was that he wanted her. That he had never wanted anything else, not in any of his life that he could remember—and he had locked that other part of himself away.
He had hidden it. It was as dead as his family was, and it told him something he didn’t want to know about himself that he used that word to describe the traitor Donatello and the necessary casualties of the choices he’d made.
Jovi wanted.
And he knew better than anyone else that if he gave in to that, the price would be unbearable.
“Did you hear me?” she asked, and he wondered what she saw in his face.
Because he knew, somehow, that in addition to all of her other offenses tonight, she was the only one who had ever managed to read him.
It was another hint that all of this would end in despair.
“I told you that I would rather die,” Rux said again, with a little more heat behind it. “And I mean it.”
“Luckily, you foolish woman,” Jovi growled back at her, “that is the point of this entire exercise.”