Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
TAMSYN
Something pricks my consciousness, demanding that I wake up. I groan and roll over, burrowing deeper under the covers because it’s the dead of night. The last thing I want to do right now is wake up. But I wouldn’t mind a snuggle. So I reach out for the heat of Lucien’s body lying next to me, wrapping my arm around his waist and gliding my leg over his.
Only this body is too small to be Lucien. Too soft. Too curvy. And all this flowing hair—God, it’s so silky and smells like the sophisticated and expensive shampoo that I could never afford at Sephora—definitely doesn’t belong to Lucien. I register all these facts with distant puzzlement, but no alarm. I’m way too languid for that. A warm body is a warm body, and this is still a good fit even if I’ve never been attracted to women before. So we lie there together for a perfect moment, my palm circling lower on her belly and her ass rubbing against my lap.
Until the owner of this delicious body lets out a breathy sigh and turns within the circle of my limbs, facing me with eyes that are unnaturally bright in the faint moonlight filtering in through the blinds.
It’s Ravenna.
It’s a surprise, but not an unpleasant one. “Ravenna?” I say with more of that distant puzzlement. “What are you doing here?”
Those eyes crinkle at the edges, a smile without smiling. “I’m always with you, Tamsyn.” Her voice sounds so soothing. So safe. “Don’t you know that?”
That’s when the smile comes, a humorless stretching and widening of those lush lips until her jeering face?—
I cry out, jerking myself awake and scrambling upright until my back thumps against the headboard. Then confusion sets in. A pounding heart. Uncatchable breath. Prickling skin. Aching nipples and pussy. Frustrated desire.
Was that…was that a dream? Was I dreaming about something?
Was I dreaming about… Ravenna ? Was I dreaming then? Or am I dreaming now?
I’m still waiting for answers when I hear a sound. My bleary brain takes a minute to process and analyze what’s going on. I listen harder, and there it is again. Angry voices somewhere outside. I frown into the darkness. Until I hear the roar of a powerful engine, the screech of tires and see the shocking slash of headlights as they slice through the filmy curtains at my bedroom window.
I stiffen, my heart thumping with dread. I’m awake now. Definitely and irrevocably awake. By the time I click on the light and slip on my flip-flops without bothering to throw a robe over my tank top and knit shorts, my dread is tiptoeing along the edge of panic. Ackerley in the middle of the night is isolated and forbidding enough already. The last thing we need around here is omens of more disturbing stuff to come.
I hear more angry voices as I hurry to the front door. A smarter woman would take a second to peek out the window and survey the scene before she flies outside. But I’m the only one here, and I’ve already recognized Lucien’s low rumble and Ravenna’s shrill response. And there’s no way I’m standing around inside if Lucien needs me out there.
It’s ridiculous. I know that. Lucien is the biggest and most powerful man. He can protect himself. Plus, it’s not like I’m bursting through the door and into the courtyard with backup from Seal Team Six, a canine unit or even a trusty kitchen knife. I don’t know what I think I’m going to do. But for Lucien? I plan to do it.
Strategically placed landscape lights and a sliver of moonlight above illuminate the scene for me: the main house as a backdrop, silent and looming. A pair of Lucien’s uniformed security guards several feet back, watching the scene play out with wide-legged ready for action stances. And center stage in the middle of the driveway? Ravenna standing by the open driver’s-side door of a sleek red Jaguar, dome lights on and engine idling, squaring off against a granite-faced Lucien standing several feet away. He’s got an overnight bag in his hand—maybe the bag from her hospital stay?—but drops it to the ground and kicks it aside.
They both look at me as I emerge. Lucien shoots me a fleeting and narrow-eyed head shake. A small gesture with a screaming message: Stay there. Don’t get involved. Don’t say anything.
So I stand there and do nothing, as much of a frozen spectator as the guards opposite me.
Ravenna also frowns as she sees me, but then her attention swings back to Lucien and they lock in on each other. She’s wearing a white silk robe with wide strips of black lace running around the neckline. It’s loosely belted, but the edges don’t quite come together in front, leaving swells of her cleavage on full display. Her dark nipples are plainly visible and erect. She wears fancier flip-flops than mine, but her legs are bare and I have no doubt that if she takes half a step in any direction, we’re all going to discover that she’s also naked below the waist.
Seeing her like this invites a new visitor to my middle-of-the-night emotional party: searing jealousy. I don’t know what’s been going on with her and Lucien alone in that big house, but I know I don’t like it.
“Your girlfriend’s here, Lucien,” she says as she turns back to him.
Lucien doesn’t spare me another glance. “This is between you and me, Ravenna.”
“You’re right,” Ravenna says. “Is this what you want? For me to leave like this ?”
“I’d prefer for you to put on some clothes first.” Lucien’s face is pale in the relative darkness, his voice deathly calm now. “But you can’t stay here. Not after the stunt you just pulled.”
Wrong answer. Ravenna’s face contorts. “ Is this what you want? ”
Her shriek galvanizes the guards, who take a step closer. So do I. But Lucien waves us all back without ever looking away from Ravenna. He’s the picture of controlled calm. “You can leave on your own. One of the guards can drive you wherever you want to go. Or I can call the police. Your choice.”
Ravenna scoffs with what looks like genuine amusement. “ Police ? You don’t want the police here at your precious Ackerley. What would the neighbors say?”
“Don’t care,” he says. “What’s it going to be?”
“Hmm.” Her head turns in my direction. The next thing I know, she’s zoomed in on me with absolute, unblinking focus. Something about the way the shadows hit her face with only a glimmer of light on her eyes freezes me down to the marrow of my bones.
Something about her, I suddenly realize, is not right. I don’t know how I missed it before.
I hold my breath, waiting. I don’t need to see Lucien to sense his new stillness as well. I don’t know what I expect in that long moment as she watches me. Possibly more tears. Maybe a little hysteria. I suddenly remember a young couple that lived in our apartment building back in Bushwick. They had weekly epic fights that involved broken crockery, police runs and ultimately the husband’s arrest. Maybe Ravenna is prone to violence like that couple was. Maybe she’ll lunge for the nearest potted plant and aim it for my head. Or Lucien’s.
But Ravenna does none of that. She just stands there and envelops me in a chilling silence that’s infinitely scarier than anything else I can imagine.
Then she turns back to Lucien and smiles. Smiles . No teeth. No warmth. Pure malice. And the fleeting relief I felt to be released from the force field of her attention careens into stark fear. I’m betting a woman who smiles like that is capable of things I don’t want to think about.
“I’ll go to a hotel for the night, but you’re not going to divorce me, Lucien.” She sounds melodic now. Hypnotizing. If Hollywood calls looking for someone to play a siren in their latest summer blockbuster, this is the woman they need. “I’ll die first.”
The words hang in the air. No one moves a muscle.
“You and I are going to stop being married, Ravenna,” Lucien finally says, unblinking. Unsmiling. Absolutely uncompromising. “How that happens is up to you.”
I don’t know if that’s a threat or not, but the guards and I all gasp.
Not Ravenna. She laughs. I mean really laughs. I’m talking a genuine belly laugh that comes from the bottom of her soul. It’s throaty and unabashed, the worst sound I’ve ever heard. When the laugh ends, it’s not because it fades out so much as because she kills it in the middle, leaving nothing but that cold stare again. “My darling husband. I’m never letting you go. Don’t you know that by now?” She turns to me. “And you should know. Lucien and I are a package deal. It doesn’t matter if he throws me out. There’s no getting rid of me, little girl. I’m already inside your head, and we both know it.”
I do know it. I’ve known it since the day I met him. But fuck her.
“I think I’m inside your head, Ravenna,” I say, matching her poisonously sweet tone.
All those beautiful features twist into a gargoyle’s rage and she lunges toward me, but Lucien quickly steps between us, fists clenching at his sides. “Get. Out.”
She peels her attention away from me and faces him again. Their negativity toward each other swells in the ringing silence. If local temperatures drop by fifty degrees overnight, this is the reason why. Then she takes all the time in the world to climb into the driver’s seat. There’s a flash of her endless legs and, just as I suspected, her bare pussy.
She doesn’t say a word, but there’s something vaguely triumphant about her now. I get the feeling she wants all of us to see all of her. I get the feeling she revels in the attention. She’s like Taylor Swift mid stadium concert.
With a final daggered look at Lucien, she slams the door and zooms off, spewing gravel in her wake.
The guards and I unfreeze as her fiery red taillights disappear around a curve in the driveway. “Everyone okay?” says the older guard.
Lucien gestures at the younger, taller guard. I take a closer look at him and realize that he’s the guy I met with Maddie the housekeeper earlier. What was his name? Ted? Ted Winwood. That’s it. “Take the Range Rover,” Lucien tells him, grabbing the overnight bag and thrusting it at him. “Follow her. Make sure she makes it safe to the hotel. She doesn’t have any money or her purse, so make sure she gets her bag. Report back ASAP.”
“You got it, Lucien,” the guy says, hurrying off toward the garage.
Lucien turns to the older guard. “I want you at the guard station with your eyes on the monitors. She’s not allowed back on the grounds for any reason. Ever . Understand? Any sign of her—any whiff of her—and you call me.”
“Understood,” the man says grimly.
“Go,” Lucien tells him.
The man takes off just as the other guard reverses out of the garage and speeds after Ravenna, leaving Lucien to hurry over to me. “You okay?” he says, his voice hoarse.
“Am I okay? Oh my God, are you okay? What happened?” I reach for him. That’s when he does something he’s never done before. He backs up a step and holds his hands up to keep me from touching him. The rejection hits me like a gut punch. “Lucien…?”
“We’ll talk in the morning.” Oh, God. He can’t even seem to force himself to look at me now. He’s focused on some elusive point off to my left as he backs up a step. “Go back to sleep.”
“Go back to sleep? Are you joking?” I reach for him again. He holds me off again. That scares me worse than anything else that’s happened today. My fear intensifies, scorching its way up my throat. “How am I supposed to go back to sleep when you won’t even let me touch you? What about Ravenna?”
He faces me again, all hard lines and sharp edges. There’s more give in Mount Rushmore than there is in his stony expression right now. “She’s gone. It’s over. She’s not going to bother us again. If she does, I’ll take care of it.” A grim pause. “One way or the other.”
I don’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean?”
It takes him forever to answer. “I mean that everything’s going to be okay. I promise you that.”
I’m not ready to let it or him go, but he’s already striding off toward the guard station. And my pride can only take so many rejections per night. So I stand there for another second or two, seething in my impotence as I watch him have a few more words with the guard, before finally trudging back to the cottage with only my simmering anxiety and frustration to keep me company.
I flop onto the sofa and stare up at the ceiling wondering what the hell I’m supposed to do now. A quick glance at the display on the range reveals that it’s going to be an even longer night than I feared. It’s only three fifteen.
Wine. I need wine.
I head for the kitchen and help myself to a glass of something fruity and white from Lucien’s supply inside the fridge. I sip. I pace. I grab my phone from the nightstand to check the news. I toss my phone back on the nightstand and return to the sofa, where I try to read a few pages of my romance novel. It’s no surprise that I’m way too antsy to focus. The words immediately blur together in a collage of letters, so I toss the book and turn on the TV. I’ll watch a show. But by the time I cycle through a lap of all the channels, my bleary mind has come to one inescapable conclusion: I can’t see anything other than Lucien and Ravenna and the intensity with which they interact. Oh, sure, he just kicked her out. That’s a good thing, right? She’s gone from Ackerley and hopefully soon to be gone from his marital status. So, yay , I guess.
But…why is he still so angry at her? Isn’t anger another form of passion? And speaking of passion…
Ravenna was nude beneath her silky robe. Lucien, as I know from my own intimate experience, sleeps in the nude. So what were those two spouses doing in the middle of the night in their nude adjacent states?
My stomach clenches at the thought because my brain can’t generate any G-rated ideas.
Worse, there was something weird about Lucien at the end. Something…I don’t know, off . Beneath the anger I got the feeling that he was wounded, maybe. Damaged in some way. And since when does he back away when I reach for him?
I grab another glass of wine and sip it while telling myself that whatever happened between them in the house ended badly and with her ejection. That’s a win for me. But it’s no consolation. I hate to agree with Ravenna about anything, but it doesn’t seem like they’re done with each other. Not really.
That’s normal, right? They’re married. They need to work through their feelings. Maybe they need closure.
That’s when my dad makes an unexpected appearance, crowding into the other images jostling for space inside my head: Be a good girl, Tamsyn. Do the right thing.
Meaning that if Lucien asked for space, I should give him what he needs and wait till the morning to talk. I can live with a little impatient frustration. I won’t die. But I’ve never felt less like being a good girl in my life. And the proof of that is my nonverbal but vehement response: Be quiet, Dad. No one asked for your opinion.
With that, I down the rest of my wine in a couple of hasty gulps and head straight for the big house.
The place is quiet and deserted at this hour, with nothing but jagged shadows and echoing creaks as I cross the foyer and start up the staircase. A hooting owl somewhere outside adds to the general gloom. A fragile beam of light coming from Lucien’s ajar bedroom door guides me once I hit the second floor. I don’t bother to be quiet and let my flip-flops make their normal racket as I close the distance, not wanting to startle him. But I’m the one who’s startled as I stand in the doorway and survey the scene.
The vast room is tropical rainforest steamy and scented with Lucien’s clean and woodsy body wash. There’s an open bottle of scotch and a crystal tumbler with three fingers in it on the nightstand. As for the man himself, he’s over by the bed with his back to me and a white towel wrapped around his waist.
The lamps provide enough illumination for me to see that his skin is a lurid red, the kind of color you expect when you fall asleep on your beach chair and wake up several hours later to discover that the sun has shifted beyond your umbrella’s reach. I don’t know how long he must’ve been in the hot shower for his skin to look like that or for the room to feel this humid. But those are questions I’ll have to tackle another time. Because I’ve got a bigger mystery to solve now. I want to know why Lucien, a man with enough domestic staff to run a nice boutique hotel back in the city, is yanking the sheets off his bed with single-minded focus while also wearing an expression that suggests the entire house will implode if he doesn’t get it done in the next three seconds.
I stand there, desperately trying to come up with some benign explanation as I watch him, but I can’t quite jam those square puzzle pieces into the round holes I’m working with. Sudden bedbug infestation? Sand from the beach? But those are ridiculous ideas. My thundering pulse and woman’s intuition have already told me everything I need to know.
“Oh my God,” I say, startling him. “You fucked her, didn’t you?”