Chapter 3
Dixie
The front door of the log cabin snicked open, and from the sofa, I peeked over at the man entering the darkened living room.
Tyler took me in. The guest in the clean, warm, well-stocked house. A perfect cage for a girl like me.
“I half expected ye to be waiting with a bat to knock me out.” He paused for a beat. “Would’ve been fair.”
I raised a shoulder. “I’m not strong enough to hurt you. Even if I wanted to.”
He hung his coat on a hook and removed his boots, leaving them by the front door. “Ye don’t want to?”
“I should. You kidnapped me, hun.”
He didn’t deny it. Only prowled closer, a dark shape against the moonlit window.
A ghost indeed.
Tyler settled into a leather armchair with the sigh of a man who’d been on his feet all day. Not that I felt sorry for him. It had been his choice to take the long trip to snatch me.
Outlined in the faint glow from appliances in the kitchen, he rested his elbows on his knees. “Are ye hungry?”
“Just breezing on past the prisoner detail, huh?”
His lips twitched in a grimace. “I only want to keep ye safe. Even if ye don’t believe me yet.”
“Can I leave?”
I’d tried the doors. Searched for keys. For any other exit. Trust Tyler to have designed an impenetrable fortress dressed as a log cabin.
Silence again.
Irritation gathered in my muscles. “That’s what I thought. This is a very pretty jail, gotta say.”
“There are a lot of people trying to find ye.”
“Oh no, competition. Sucks to be you.”
To my surprise, he laughed. Once, a short bark of amusement. God help me, my lips curved into an answering smile. I flattened it, because his words revealed a truth.
“You found out the Marchant thing, huh?”
I hadn’t wanted to ask this. I didn’t want to say the name or summon my past. But in the few hours he’d been gone, this bitch didn’t panic.
I was all out of stock of it. Nothing in the tank.
Instead, I’d forced myself to sit and calm then work through my life in a way I hadn’t since I’d run from the warehouse.
Yet Tyler’s inclined head chilled me to the bone.
“Who else knows?”
“The skeleton crew leadership. The skeleton girls.”
“Be specific, hun. Name them. Every one.”
“Arran, Genevieve, Shade, Everly, Cassie, Riordan, Manny, Lovelyn, Kane, Convict, and Mila.”
So many. My heart hurt over one in particular. “Mila?”
My sister.
Tyler continued, “She and Convict are a couple. Did ye ever meet her?”
I clamped my lips together, my gaze fleeing to the floor.
He said my name. I ignored him. It was his movement that had me lurching up straight with a fast intake of breath.
But he wasn’t coming for me. Tyler crossed to the kitchen and snapped on the overhead spotlights, flooding the room with a warm, bright glow.
From my darkened haunt, I drifted a few feet to watch him take food from the fridge.
“I’m going to make dinner. Are ye vegetarian?” he asked.
I didn’t answer.
He held up a tray of meat. “Beef stir-fry okay?”
“I won’t accept food from a man who’s going to sell me to the highest bidder.”
Tyler heaved another sigh. He set down the packet and reached for a knife block, pulling out a blade. He brought it to the open doorway, handle out, offered to me.
His gaze was deadly serious. “If I ever do that, ye have my permission to use this on me. Bury it in my back. I won’t stop ye.”
It was a trap. Of course it was.
I didn’t take it.
“I’d prefer you didn’t,” he added mildly. “But you’d be justified.”
Tyler stabbed the blade into the back of the sofa, leaving it embedded there. He retreated to the kitchen and got busy prepping the food.
A few minutes on, he continued chatting. “There’s a killer loose in Deadwater. Did ye know?”
Despite myself, I moved closer, lured by gossip and the scent of the meat as it hit the sizzling pan. I was starving. Couldn’t remember the last thing I’d eaten. Nothing today anyways. Well, yesterday. It was long past midnight. “No. Who died?”
“A lass named Esther Eavis and another named Karla. I’m naw sure of her surname.”
A warning played out in my mind. “I knew a Karla. I worked with her briefly at a club I went to.”
“Same woman. She came to Deadwater in search of a job. Was she a friend?”
God. We’d never spoken about my previous place of work, so she couldn’t have followed me, but poor woman. “I barely knew her.”
“Sorry all the same.”
“How… How did they die?”
“One strangled, one hanged, at least it looked that way.”
Involuntarily, I touched my neck. My scar. “No cuts?”
“No.”
Then it wasn’t the same as what happened to me. Besides, my attacker had been caught. Tension still infected my body.
I curled my fingers around the knife handle and tugged it free. Though he’d joked about finding me here with a baseball bat, I truly hadn’t considered hurting him. Only to talk about why I was here. Or…use the only leverage I’d ever been taught worked.
At the hob, pitch-black patio doors behind him, Tyler glanced over and noticed how I’d armed myself. The bastard smiled. “Convict called me on the drive back to talk shop. Mila was with him.”
“Tell me about her,” I ordered.
“Have ye really never met her?”
I managed a slow shake of my head. “We were kept apart. I knew she existed, though.”
“How?”
I hovered in the doorway. Not entering the room, but close enough to see him better. I pointed the blade. “You’ll answer my questions. What’s she like?”
He found a bottle of sauce from the fridge. Ignored my threat. “Determined. Single-minded, maybe. Reasonable.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Several weeks ago, Convict asked me to help her. Your grandmother had cut her off, and Mila believed outsiders were trying to influence the business. At the beginning, she was fully Team Marchant. She believed your grandfather could do no wrong. That’s what I mean by single-minded and determined.
I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. Hence reasonable. ”
A small piece of pity broke away in my chest for what Mila must have felt with all the shit that had come out. They wouldn’t have made the same mistakes with her as they had me.
Tyler tossed vegetables in with the meat. If he’d been working with her on the family business, he probably knew more than I did.
He pointed a spatula at me. “Your turn.”
“I don’t owe you anything.”
“Never said ye did. Remember, I’m on your side.”
Yeah, right. How could he say that? “Does she know I’m here?”
“I told ye, nobody does. Only me.”
Anger came swiftly on the bed of calm. A rush of flood water over dry ground. For hours, I’d been locked up here. Hours of knowing I couldn’t get out, and waiting, just waiting, for him to cause me pain.
“What am I doing here?” My words came out as a shaky little snap. I brandished the knife in front of me again, both hands gripped around the handle. Still, I didn’t enter the kitchen. “What do you want with me? What am I to you?”
Tyler turned off the burner.
He stepped away from the food, raising his hands like I had any hope of besting him. But it was his expression that socked me in the gut. Something twisted and unmasked. He looked haunted.
I drew a shuddering breath. “If it’s money, I have some. I can pay my way out of this.”
Not a flicker. It wasn’t that.
“You going to blackmail someone with me?”
“No. I would never.”
“Start your own crew? Bargain with me to help Mila in some way?”
A headshake in the negative.
“Then the Marchant solicitors? Or my grandmother?”
“I don’t give a flying fuck about that family.”
My temper crested. “Then what, Tyler? If it isn’t to do with my fucked-up history, then what do you want? I’ve got nothing else. At best, I’m a bargaining chip. At worst, a sex doll. Is that it? You have a buyer for me?”
Anger rippled over his features. “We’ll get one thing straight. If ye never want to fuck another person in your entire life, ye don’t have to.”
On the precipice of doing something rash, like rushing him, like screaming at him with the knife aimed at his thick neck, I hovered over that reaction.
At that glimpse under the hood. The protectiveness over my body.
I took a step from the wooden planks of the living room to the tiled kitchen floor. Into the light. Closer to him.
“Wanna make me your sex doll, Tyler?”
The bastard shivered. “No.”
“Liar.”
He wanted me. This was it. My out.
It hadn’t been one-sided, the stolen glances and building crush. He’d felt the same as I had, or something in that realm. I couldn’t believe it was so simple, and my hands trembled with the realisation.
It showed how out of practice I was that I hadn’t spotted it sooner.
Still holding the knife in one hand, I hooked the neckline of my top with the other, tugging it aside over my collarbone. “This?”
His gaze followed the touch and reveal. The so-tame hint of flesh.
Oh God, this should’ve been the easiest act around.
Seduction had been my bread and butter for years.
Any girl could make herself pretty. Clothes, makeup, surgery.
I’d perfected them all. But getting a man to part with his cash for an hour of your time took skill that was rarer. Much harder to learn.
I’d been an expert.
I knew how to do this. That didn’t mean I could. My brain was short-circuiting. I couldn’t do this slow.
Grasping my hem, I stripped the top right over my head, throwing it away to reveal my pretty bra and even prettier titties. Tyler’s gaze dipped to my chest.
I knew I was hot. I’d spent cash on my flesh to ensure it. The panic I hadn’t been able to feel earlier came back in spades.
I shook so much that I dropped the knife.
“I can’t.” I backed away, my fingers coming up to cover my mouth. “I can’t do that. I don’t do that anymore. I haven’t since…”
Since the client tried to rape me.
Tyler hadn’t moved. He did so now, a hand coming up in a gesture of calm though he breathed as hard as I did. “I’m not asking that.”
Through tear-filled eyes, I stared at him.
“You want me,” I spluttered. “You went to all this effort. Why don’t you just take me?”
He clamped his jaw.
I couldn’t stop. “Put me on the floor. Fuck me. Then let me go. I’ll get over it. I won’t tell a soul.”
He cursed and stripped his shirt. “Put this on.”
I could swear his hand shook. And I had to be freaking out more than I registered, because that tiny act of humanity nearly broke me. I shrugged on the t-shirt to cover myself, shivering in his warmth.
When I was done, Tyler brought his focus back to me. “No one will ever touch ye again unless ye want it. Me included.”
“I… I don’t understand.”
“Because everyone has always treated ye like ye don’t matter. I promise it. Tyler’s rule. Now, we’re going to eat, and after we can talk. One step at a time.”