Chapter Eight
Abigail
Islept late.
There was no clock on my bedside table, but I knew it when I woke up.
I had that sticky, sludgy feeling you get when you sleep too long after too much wine, worse because I hadn't brushed my teeth or washed my face before bed.
Sliding from beneath the heavy duvet, I stumbled into the bathroom and stepped into the shower. I didn't have to wash my hair again. Long and thick, it took forever to dry, so I didn't wash it every day, but the rest of me needed more than a quick rinse.
After a few minutes of standing beneath the spray of steaming hot water, I felt like a new woman.
Teeth brushed, light makeup, and my hair in a messy bun, I put on the camisole and stretchy pants that went with the violet cashmere cardigan and ventured out of my room.
The penthouse was silent. When I got to the kitchen, the clock over the stove told me that it was ten thirty-seven. I couldn't remember the last time I'd slept that late.
My first order of business? Finding coffee. Since I couldn't leave the building, I hoped Jacob kept coffee in his kitchen.
The coffeemaker on the counter indicated he did, but it took me a few minutes of searching to find the filters and the canister of ground coffee in his well-hidden pantry.
With coffee brewing, I turned to study the items on the kitchen island—a note, an envelope, a brown box, and a small white shopping bag.
The note read:
Abigail,
You have a laptop and a phone. In the envelope is a credit card under my name. As discussed, use it to purchase anything you need, within reason.
DO NOT use either the laptop or the phone to contact anyone but me. Both have been equipped with monitoring software and will report unacceptable activity to both myself and my security team.
This is for your safety. Do not take it lightly.
Rachel will be by later today with a doctor. He will give you a brief exam and draw blood for some tests. Cooperate with him. I'll provide the results of my own tests.
You are free to use any room in the penthouse with the exception of my office. I have a service that comes to clean, so don't bother with that.
In the envelope, along with the card, is my account information for a grocery store that delivers.
Plan whatever menu you prefer to cook. Stock what you need and instruct them to deliver the groceries to my office. Rachel will bring them up to you. DO NOT open the door for anyone but me or Rachel.
Jacob
I wouldn't have expected a love note, not from Jacob.
It sounded exactly like him—clear, to the point, and bossy. So he was going to spy on me? He said it was for my safety.
I guess I'd see if the spying would continue after the danger from Big John was gone. And the doctor? I didn't have to think too hard to figure that out.
I was on the pill, and John and I hadn't been using condoms. Before he died, sex had been infrequent, but it probably wasn't a secret that by that time, he'd been nailing half the women in town.
In John's world, fidelity was for wives. The husband's job was to screw anything that moved, as often as possible.
I doubted Jacob would want to use condoms with me, and he was smart to verify that I was clean. I'd had a checkup recently and had asked the doctor for the same tests that Jacob's doctor would likely run.
By some miracle of fate, if John had picked anything up, he hadn't passed it to me.
But telling Jacob that, admitting what my marriage really was, would be more humiliating than just letting his doctor do what he had to do.
It meant something that he wasn't going to make me ask for his own results.
But hey, I had a computer and a phone. And carte blanche at what was probably a pretty nice grocery store. On top of that, aside from the doctor's visit, I didn't have a single obligation all day except to plan dinner.
Fortunately for me, not only did I like to cook, but I kept all my favorite recipes in an online database I could access from anywhere.
At the time, I'd done it for convenience. Now, it was comforting to know that I hadn't lost one of the few good parts of my marriage when I left home.
I poured myself a cup of coffee, added a little cream and sugar, and set off to explore Jacob's penthouse.
I'd already seen the kitchen, the living room with its comfortable couches and big TV, and of course, the dining room and my bedroom. But down the long hall where my room was located were a few doors I hadn't opened.
I walked through the living room first. Though I'd been in it the night before, I hadn't exactly been paying attention. His flat screen hung on the wall, framed like a painting over the gas fireplace.
On either side of the fireplace, he had built-in shelves with cabinets on the lower half. A quick look revealed stereo equipment, a DVD player and some other black boxes I couldn't identify.
A set of heavy double doors were set into the wall to the right of the fireplace. I was betting that was Jacob's office. It was tempting to peek, but I thought better of it, remembering the cameras.
I couldn't say that I hadn't enjoyed my punishment the night before, but I had a feeling that had been a gentle introduction. I wasn't ready to push the boundaries of what Jacob considered 'punishment'. Anyway, there was more penthouse to explore.
Down the hall that led to my bedroom, I found more closed doors. The first was a powder room, its custom porcelain sink set into a repurposed antique chest. Above it hung a gilt-framed mirror.
I've been in some nice bathrooms before, but not many that had chandeliers.
This one was perfectly sized for the small room, but the glittering crystal reflecting the gilt of the mirror frame made me feel as if I were in an English manor house and not a penthouse apartment in the middle of the city.
The next door was my bedroom. Nothing new to see there. On the opposite side of the hallway, I discovered a game room, complete with a pool table, wet bar, poker table, and a screen that covered most of the far wall of the room, framed on either side by red velvet curtains.
In front of the screen, Jacob had a semicircle of movie theater seats in black leather that looked so soft and comfortable I thought you could sit there all day. This was a serious man cave.
Back in the corner beside the wet bar and behind the pool table, I spotted an old school pinball machine. I loved pinball.
I hadn't had my hands on one of these in years, but when I was younger, I used to sneak off to the town arcade with one of my cousins and waste quarter after quarter chasing the sounds and lights, trying to rack up as many points as I could.
I'd never been very good, but I didn't really care. To my delight, I quickly realized that Jacob had set the machine to work without quarters, and I killed a good half-hour losing myself in the game.
When I was done, I headed back to the kitchen to pour out my cold coffee and replace it with fresh. Then back to my search. The next door past the man cave turned out to be a workout room.
Jacob had said he never had enough time, so it made sense to have a gym at home. I was thrilled. I missed working out. I'd never been an athlete, but I'd always been fairly active.
In the last few years, John had stopped my going to the gym in town, claiming he didn't like me out in public, sweating in tight clothes.
I used to do yoga at home, but as Big John and his business acquaintances started to drop by the house unexpectedly, I wasn't comfortable getting caught alone, in yoga pants, in the middle of downward-facing dog.
It looked like I could do almost anything here. Jacob had a treadmill, an elliptical, an impressive rack of free weights, and open space with a padded floor and yet another enormous, wall-mounted flat screen TV with a DVD player on top of the cabinet in the corner.
Now that I had a laptop and Jacob's credit card, I could order some yoga videos and some workout clothes. Putting aside the way I was earning my keep, I was starting to feel like I could get fragments of my old life back. Or at least fragments of the old me.
The last stop on my self-guided tour was the doorway at the far end of the hall. I opened it slowly, aware this could only be Jacob's bedroom.
He'd said I could explore any room except his office, so his bedroom was fair game. Still, sneaking in felt naughty.
I don't know exactly what I expected. I'd already learned that Jacob favored the old over the new, so I didn't think his bedroom would be filled with chrome and black leather.
Given his appetites, I guess I thought there'd be something to give him away. Chains attached to his bed? Handcuffs on the dresser? I didn't know.
The king-size, four-poster bed in warm, polished chestnut with matching dressers and armoire wasn't it.
Actually, his bedroom was similar to mine, except larger and with a little more furniture. On the far side of the room, most of the wall was taken up by windows and a panoramic view of the city.
In front of the window, he had two comfortable looking armchairs with an ottoman and a small table between them.
The dresser opposite the bed had the expected wall-mounted flat screen above it. For a guy with no time on his hands, Jacob had a lot of TVs.
I imagined him lying in bed after a long day of work, catching a few minutes of SportsCenter before passing out for the night.
Did he wear pajamas to bed?
No, definitely not. My imaginary Jacob was shirtless, and I realized I hadn't seen him fully naked yet.
I'd seen his cock. I was intimately acquainted with that part of his anatomy. But the night before, in the dining room, he hadn't gotten undressed. In fact, he'd barely pushed his pants down.
Maybe that should have made me feel degraded, with me naked and Jacob not bothering to remove his shirt. It didn't. Instead, it made me feel wanted, as if he'd needed me too badly to bother taking his clothes off first.
Shrugging off the thought—no sense in getting all worked up thinking about naked Jacob when I wouldn't see him for hours—I went back to the kitchen and brought my laptop, the envelope with Jacob's credit card, and my new phone to the kitchen table.
The phone was already charged and powered up. The only numbers in the phone were Jacob's—his office and his mobile.
Not a surprise.
The laptop was. It had been set up with most of the programs I usually used, as well as a new email address. One I was sure someone on Jacob's security team was monitoring.
It was a little creepy that they were watching me, on the cameras as well as on my laptop and phone, but I'd gone to Jacob for protection, and if he thought this was necessary, I wasn't going to argue.
The truth was, Jacob knew my former father-in-law and his business associates far better than I did. It seemed sensible to trust his judgment, at least for now.
Just the thought of Big John's reaction to my escape sent a shiver of fear down my spine. I was more than willing to hide myself away until Jacob was sure that Big John had lost interest in me.
For the next few hours, I occupied myself browsing on the Internet. Jacob had said to cook him my favorites, so I pulled up my recipes for pot roast and lemon icebox pie.
Not gourmet, by any standards, but they were both delicious, and I loved them. If he didn't agree, I'd find out soon enough. Those would do for tomorrow, since they took a day of prep.
Tonight, we'd have salmon with a light Dijon sauce and fresh green beans, along with the leftover chocolate cake from the night before.
Once I had my shopping list and had placed my grocery order online, I picked up a few of my favorite yoga videos as well as some cute matching yoga outfits, a pair of sneakers, and some other clothes I thought I'd need.
I was leaving the best for last. Books. Reading was another thing that had been curtailed by my husband. He preferred that I read literary fiction, the kind of books you showed off on your coffee table and dropped in the conversation at cocktail parties.
I liked those books well enough, though they could be depressing and a little boring. My favorite type of fiction was romance.
Needless to say, the husband who had married a 'perfect lady' did not approve of my reading books with half-naked men on the cover.
I was fairly sure Jacob wouldn't give a damn. In fact, I thought he'd be perfectly happy if I got myself an e-reader and filled it with books that would keep me thinking about sex.
I already knew he wouldn't be in favor of the 'happily ever after' part of romances, but I could compartmentalize.
I had almost soothed myself into thinking my new life was going to be almost normal when I heard a knock at the door.
Panic hit first, my heart thumping in my chest before I remembered we were in a secure building.
I sat frozen in my chair for a long moment before a second knock reminded me that I had a visitor. I rose and went to answer it, knowing it couldn't be Jacob and hoping it was all the same.