“What are you going to do?” Dani immediately regretted the question. What am I, an idiot? But as Rand pulled her into position in front of the cross, she could practically hear her heart thudding. Her hands felt clammy, which of course he wouldn’t know since he was holding on to her wrist, but there was no way he couldn’t feel her pulse skittering out of control.
She focused on Rand’s chest as he lifted her right hand high. “I’m going to strap you to the cross, Dani, just as we discussed.” He said this without looking at her, his voice way too calm, as if he was reminding an intern of the proper way to address an email. Dani pursed her lips as the first cuff slid home, suppressing her panic, willing her mind to stay fully present, to center on this man here. This man who just wanted to make her feel good, wanted to sink her into herself until all that she felt was pleasure so exquisite it bordered on pain.
But that’s not what her mind was serving up to her, unfortunately. Those weren’t the images she was seeing.
“I—I’m not sure I can do this,” she whispered, and that did make Rand stop, at least for a moment. He looked at her, and she knew he was looking at her, but she couldn’t raise her face to his.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Dani. No one can hurt you ever again,” he said, and his voice was so quiet, almost tender as he said the unexpected words, that a tear somehow sprang free of her eye and ran down her face.
What was her problem? She used her still-free hand to wipe her cheek, hard, praying he didn’t understand why she was doing it.
As if taking her movement as some sort of acquiescence, Rand began moving again, his fingers sliding down her bound wrist to skim along the outside of her arm. He placed both hands on her body, setting her back against the thick pad at the center of the crossbars. Then he dropped to her left leg, his palms sliding down her thighs. He unhooked her boots and drew them off.
“You don’t need to brace my ankles,” she said quickly. “I won’t move them, I promise.”
“Dani.” Rand leaned back to stare up at her, his gaze unreadable. “Do you think I’m going to do anything that you won’t like? That I wouldn’t make sure you were enjoying every step of the way?”
The pain started up in her throat again, the cry she refused to let out. “No,” she whispered. Then her voice gained more strength. “But I’m not enjoying this, honestly. I’m really not.”
His smile wasn’t what she expected. It was almost understanding, and another wave of panic seized her. “We haven’t even started yet,” he said easily. “So let’s try it, just for a little while. It’s what you said you would do.”
And that did shut her up. Because he was right, after all. She’d told him she would do this, and she had a million really good reasons for following through. And Rand wasn’t going to hurt her. This wasn’t about her past, or that tenement building at the edge of the battle-scarred playground. This was about Rand, whose gorgeous shoulders worked and flexed as he moved to her right ankle, the action so fluid she almost didn’t realize that he’d already secured her left. She focused on the thin tracing of scars on those shoulders. He’d endured that, she thought. The least she could do was let him tie her up in fancy purple cuffs for a few minutes. Like he said, he wasn’t going to do anything to her she didn’t want him to do.
Rand looked at her again as the shaky laugh escaped her lips. He stood, taking her face in both of his hands, forcing her to look at him. “You’re okay?” he asked. And she thought of his body pressing up against hers, the scene at Darke where he was so intensely focused on her pleasure. She nodded her head quickly, willing it to be so.
“Good,” he said. He leaned in and kissed her, and she almost sagged into him with a sigh she hoped masked the strange, rough sob she was desperate not to let out. His lips parted over hers and she felt his tongue snake out, tasting her, the thrill of his touch made more intense by the knowledge that he wanted her—wanted her so much that he would pay any amount of money to have her by his side, would agree to her every wish, bow to her every demand. And even though she knew that some of those agreements and bows were part of a larger game to him, a twisting, turning game of seduction that she suspected she was on the very edge of losing completely, she still, deep down, felt the power that she held in this exchange. That he would take and take but only because he needed something, too, something he wanted her to give him, something she was beginning to expect that only she could give him.
That knowledge steadied her, revived her, almost, and when Rand pulled away again, she offered him a stronger smile. She could do this. She would do this.
The moment Rand shifted to her left arm, easing it up along the pole, however, Dani felt her eyes clench shut reflexively.
In front of her, Rand went completely still.
“Dani,” he said. “Look at me.”
Her eyes flared open, but she didn’t see Rand in front of her. She knew he was the one clamping her hand to the pole, but the image that flashed across her field of vision wasn’t him—it wasn’t.
“Let me go, let me go,” she breathed, only it wasn’t her voice that was speaking, not really. This voice was higher, thinner, far more scared than Dani’s actual voice.
“Dani,” Rand said again. His voice was stronger now, more authoritative, and Dani blinked, hard, drawing her head back. Her gaze cleared, and she focused on Rand—saw his beautiful face, the hard planes of his jaw, the intensity of his eyes.
“Who hurt you, Dani?” he asked in measured tones. “Who tied you up?”
She was shivering uncontrollably now, and there was no way that she was going to get out of this, no way that she could avoid Rand’s glare. Just say it, she thought as a surge of something new opened up within her, the need to speak these words once and for all—out loud and for real.
“I wanted to run away from that place, that apartment. That disgusting, awful apartment,” she whispered, feeling her eyes stretch too wide. And now she did see that other face again, thick and hard with flat, mean eyes and dirty-blond hair. “She caught me when I tried, the very first time. Swore she’d teach me a lesson, that I’d never try it again.” She licked her lips, which suddenly seemed cracked, dry. “She was right.”
“She tied you to a pole?”
“Chair.” Dani was breathing heavily now. “The first time was the worst. After that, she only did it to remind me of her power, that the option was always there. That no one could stop her.” Dani smiled grimly. “It was a lesson she loved to teach.”
“How—how long did it go on?” he asked, and she heard the echo of her own words in his. She’d asked him the same questions, in this very room.
Still, she couldn’t, wouldn’t go there. Not again. Certainly not now, in front of Rand. Unaccountably, however, tears surged up behind her eyes, impossible to stop.
“Let me go,” she whispered, her voice almost broken. She closed her eyes tightly and a tear slid out from beneath one lid, but Rand still wouldn’t ease up. His grip was locked on her upper arm, pinning her to the cross, even as her entire body trembled. Her hand clenched into a fist. “Please let me go.”
“I’m not going to let you go until you tell me everything, Dani,” Rand said, his words floating over her like a soothing wave. They were calm; they were even reasonable. But for some reason, that made her want to cry even more, just hearing the sound of his voice, feeling the touch of his hand on her wrist, sensing the heat from his body holding her, just holding her, letting her grief and rage and impotence well up like a toxic soup and spill out of her in tears, in gasping sobs, in the words that still couldn’t quite come out but were so very close. “Just tell me, sweetheart, let it go,” Rand said again. “How long?”
Rand continued to hold Dani as she shuddered again, violently. In truth, his own heart was beating so loudly that he thought it might hammer out of his chest. He’d been right, horribly right. But the reality had still caught him by surprise, still hit him like a blow to the gut, to see Dani’s beautiful face blind with fear, with pain, with horror even for one brief and shattering moment.
Who had done this to her? She’d mentioned an apartment, a woman—it had to be a foster parent. Someone she was supposed to trust. Someone who was supposed to take care of her.
The irony wasn’t lost on him. How much had both of them been trapped by their pasts? He thought he’d broken free of his, and yet how far had he really come, that he would push Dani so far just for some insane need of his to take control…
Dani shifted beneath him then, clearing her throat. He said nothing to prompt her, but his gaze narrowed sharply, willing her to speak when she felt ready, when she felt safe.
“Sor—sorry about that,” she finally rasped, her first attempt at speech seeming to set her off again. Her shoulders shook against the new onslaught of tears, but she kept talking, slowly and firmly. “I guess I probably should have mentioned why I invoked that hard no the other night.”
“You shouldn’t have had to invoke it in the first place,” Rand said, his own voice harsh, and that drew a short laugh from Dani. She fixed him with a confused stare as he shook his head. “I should have known.”
“Oh, give me a break, Richie Rich,” she said wearily. “Not even you have enough money to dig that far back into my past.” She shook her hand, hard, and this time he did release it, only to have Dani lace her fingers in his, gripping his hand as she looked into his eyes. “You asked how long, and the answer is a couple of days the first time, I think. No food, no water, no bathroom breaks…” She flattened her lips. “After that, she used it whenever she was feeling mean, but never for more than a night. Then she figured out that I had taken a kind of personal responsibility for Jimmy, and she realized she had way better leverage all of a sudden. After that she just used Jimmy to keep me in line.” Dani blew out a tremulous breath. “I’d learned my lesson well, though. Or well enough. I kept my head low till we got assigned to a new caseworker, who got us free after she found Mama J’s stash of drugs in the apartment.”
Now it was Rand’s turn to stare. “Your foster mother was using? They don’t check for that kind of thing?”
“They do,” Dani said, the first note of satisfaction creeping into her voice. “And she wasn’t. Not really, not so she’d notice. But the combination of the Baggie of drugs and the hash I’d cooked into her butter and greasy food, which had the good grace to show up on the tox screen they finally did on her, was enough to get us reassigned to a new household quickly enough.”
“The one on Barberry Lane,” Rand said. “That didn’t seem much better.”
Dani snorted another laugh. “So you did poke around a little. Nosey-ass bastard.” She shook her head. “Trust me, though, it was better.” Her voice was steadier now, her body looser. She relaxed even more, resting their entwined hands against his chest. “But we didn’t last there too long either way. Not bad people, just at the end of their rope. After that, we only had one more stop in the system, and then we were out.”
Rand nodded, leaning down to press his forehead against hers. The last stop on her tour of Boston foster care had lasted three years, and the couple was still helping out kids even today—but living in a much larger house. A house given to them by a bogus charity that it hadn’t taken very long for Rand to figure out led straight back to an unemployed barista making a bare living on bartender tips and petty thievery. He still wasn’t sure how Dani’d pulled that off, and he’d looked forward to finding out, probably by tricking her into revealing that hidden part of her, getting her to slip up, to betray a secret or let drop a detail that she’d never intended to share.
But he didn’t want to learn things about Dani that way anymore, he realized. He didn’t want to trick her, to push until she broke, to press until she let some weakness show through. He wanted to learn everything the way normal people did—by having a conversation. By asking her a question and letting her choose to answer it the way she wanted to, with as much or as little as she was willing to share.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Dani?”
“Didn’t want to lose the game,” she said, her frank honesty making his heart turn over in his chest with a hard thud. The idea that he’d ripped a painful childhood memory out of her as part of their constant battle of one-upmanship didn’t exactly make him feel like a hero. That’s what you get for asking a direct question.
“And it was stupid, really, to be hung up on something that was a totally different situation in a totally different world.” She shrugged. “It was a thousand years ago. In the end, I thought I could handle it.” He moved away as she shook her head with derision, the twist of her lips self-mocking. “I guess I lost the game anyway.”
“You didn’t lose,” he said. “You fulfilled your part of the bargain. You agreed to let me tie you up, and look.” He reached up to tap her right wrist, which was still manacled to its beam. “I did.”
She snorted, but her gaze shot to his, her eyes still naked with too many emotions for him to sort out. Still, they were good emotions. They were emotions he wanted to see more of. She tilted her head, resting it on her long, outstretched right arm. “You didn’t do a really awesome job of it, it looks like.” She wiggled the fingers of her left hand against his. “I’ve still got one loose hand.”
“Not so loose as that,” he said, gripping her fingers more tightly. “I’ve still got you.”
Her eyes flashed, something dark and uncertain in their depths, before it was chased away. “Right. So what do you plan on doing with me, then, Richie Rich? We just going to hang out here all night?”
“There are worse ways to spend an evening.”
“Yeah, well…” She looked up at the gleaming metal and then lowered her gaze to his again. “I’ll agree with you on one thing. It sure seems a shame to waste all the money and time you put into hauling this thing up here.”
Rand’s gaze narrowed even as Dani’s face creased into a wide smile.
“So whattya say, Rand,” she murmured, leaning a little forward in her restraints. “How ’bout you let me strap you in and take you for a ride?”