“I won’t kill you.”
As far as reassurances go, that one didn’t do much for me. I doubt it would have done anything for anyone, not when it was uttered in Mr. Ward’s cool, emotionless voice and he was barely looking at me, already turning away.
A few hours ago, before setting foot in his mansion as a guest of Miss Delilah—his sister and my boss—for his birthday bash, all I’d known of Morgan Ward was his voice, which I had heard on the phone a few times, and the gossip I’d read on blogs and in newspapers. Now, I knew a lot more.
I knew how dark his eyes were: darker than endless wells.
I knew something was different about him. Not different like a reclusive millionaire bachelor can be, but different in a not quite natural way. Not quite human maybe, but I had a hard time wrapping my mind around that idea even after seeing him and Miss Delilah move with speed that should have been impossible.
I also knew how soft his skin was, the feel of his lips on mine, and the way he moved when he made love. Except it had all been a fantasy; that was what he’d called it. But no fantasy, daydream, or dream of mine had ever felt that real. I’d almost died on that balcony. I’d also experienced two very intense orgasms. That, at least, was no fantasy.
The most important thing I knew, however, was that none of it made sense.
“I don’t understand,” I said before he could walk away.
He turned the faintest of smiles back at me.
“How could you?”
“Explain to me.” It wasn’t the first time I’d asked him to explain, and I suppose, if I’m completely honest, I can say he’d tried. But every word of explanation had only confused me more. Still, I insisted. “What happened here tonight?”
His smile faded.
“Which part? The part about you intruding where you weren’t wanted? Or the part about my dearest sister giving you to me as a gift, also very much unwanted?”
“I’m not anyone’s gift,” I started, and Mr. Ward laughed.
This, believe me, was not a happy laugh. It chilled me down to my bones. For a moment, it was like we were back on that balcony where I’d sought refuge from the bustling party. The December night air had been cold, but my host even icier. At least, at first he’d been icy. In my fantasy, not so much.
“Also true,” he said. “But since, as I told you, I am not inclined to kill you, and since you can’t leave, I guess the semantics don’t matter much. I’ll have Stephen show you where you can sleep.”
And with that, he left the room.
I had a dozen, a hundred questions, but when I said his name, he didn’t stop or look back. He just left me alone.
I tried to leave again, to tell my feet to move toward that same door he’d gone through so I could go down the staircase and back to the party. Back to where Mr. Ward’s guests were still celebrating. Back to where a door opened onto the street and beckoned me to freedom.
As hard as I tried, however, I soon had to resign myself to the fact that, like he’d reminded me, I couldn’t leave. Miss Delilah’s words were trapping me in this house.
“Don’t leave without me,” she’d said. “Not tonight. Not ever.”
I didn’t know how that was possible, how simple words could bind me better than ropes. It was another one of these ‘not so natural’ things I wished Mr. Ward had explained better to me. But I couldn’t deny it was true.
A discreet cough drew my eyes away from my unmoving feet and up to the door again. An African-American man stood there, clad in the livery suit of the staff, observing me through eyes that glinted with amusement, although his expression remained perfectly neutral. I’d seen him downstairs: Stephen.
“Mr. Ward asked me to show you to the guest suite,” he said with a small inclination of his head. “If you are ready, Miss?”
“No, I am not ready.” I couldn’t help the hint of hysteria creeping into my words. “I don’t want to go to the guest suite. I want to leave.”
His steps didn’t make a sound as he crossed the room to the liquor cabinet. He poured a generous measure of the same golden drink Mr. Ward had offered me earlier and I’d refused. This time, when Stephen held out the glass to me, I took it gratefully and downed the alcohol in one go. It burned my throat and made my eyes water—better to tear up because of the drink than because I felt so helpless.
“I understand that you are unnerved,” Stephen said in a slow, calm voice. “But it is also my understanding that you are not able to leave the premises. So unless you intend to sleep in an armchair until Mr. Ward can persuade Miss Stanford to release you, a guest suite seems appropriate. Don’t you think?”
When explained like that, it sounded perfectly reasonable for me to accompany him. Call me stubborn, but I still tried to find a reason not to. I didn’t come up with anything. He took the empty glass from me, set it on the cabinet, then went to open a door on the other side of the room.
“If you would, Miss?” he said in that polite voice again, inviting me to follow him.
“You can call me Angelina,” I said as I walked with him into what turned out to be a corridor.
We passed several closed doors and as many paintings, all of them set in elaborate frames. The length of the hallway was covered by a long rectangular carpet that stopped a few inches from the walls, exposing the gleaming wooden floors.
“Stephen?”
He looked at me, an eyebrow raised questioningly.
“You know what’s going on, don’t you? I mean, you know I can’t leave.”
We’d reached the end of the corridor, or rather, what I’d thought was the end. Instead, a new hallway started on the left, mirrored by another one on the right. Stephen turned right, and I followed.
“Mr. Ward informed me of your predicament, yes,” he said.
“How is it possible?” I asked, and the edge of plaintiveness in my voice made me cringe. “No one can just order someone to do things like that. It’s just not possible.”
When he glanced at me again, I could see that the amusement was back in his eyes.
“Not possible,” he repeated, “and yet, here you are. I take it you do not know what Miss Stanford is?”
The turn of phrase startled me. What, not who. What could she possibly be? At that moment, my mind was blank.
“She’s my boss,” I said, confused.
My boss, a woman accustomed to only the best life had to offer, a socialite, an occasional model, the head of a multi-national company, a patron of the arts, the widow of Emmet H. Stanford the Third, the sister of Mr. Ward… What else was she?
“That’s not what I mean. And it’s probably best if Mr. Ward tells you himself. Here we are.”
We’d reached the end of this corridor, and he opened the door in front of us. He walked inside, turning on the lights before moving out of sight. For a few seconds, I remained in the doorway, unable to make myself step forward. If I went inside, that was it. I was admitting to myself, Stephen, and Mr. Ward that I accepted my situation. I accepted my captivity.
And it was captivity. Isn’t that the very definition of being detained against one’s will?
I was a prisoner in Mr. Ward’s mansion.
And yet I wasn’t Mr. Ward’s prisoner.
Not really.
He’d made it clear that, if it were up to him, I’d be long gone.
If anything, I was Miss Delilah’s prisoner. She was the one who had ordered me to remain in his house. But ‘ordered’ is the wrong word. She had compelled me to stay here. That was what Mr. Ward had called it: compulsion. I could have refused to obey an order. She was my boss, sure, but this, whatever this was, didn’t fall under my duties as her personal assistant. I couldn’t refuse to obey this compulsion. I physically couldn’t, as I proved to myself every time I so much as thought of leaving and found my feet frozen in place.
When it came down to it, though, whether I was Mr. Ward’s prisoner or Miss Delilah’s, it didn’t really matter. I was here, and I didn’t want to be.
“Miss Angelina?” Stephen came back to the door. “Something wrong?” After a beat he added, “Other than the obvious, that is.”
“I want to talk to him,” I heard myself say. “I want to talk to Mr. Ward. I want him to explain… to explain everything.”
“I’m sure he’d be delighted to ignore you,” Stephen said deadpan. “But I’m afraid he left the mansion.”
“Left?” The word felt strangely alien on my tongue, like I didn’t know the meaning of it anymore. “Where to?”
“If I were to venture a guess, I’d say he went to try to talk Miss Stanford into releasing you. Between you and me, I wouldn’t count on him returning with good news. Now, will you come in?”
I did.
I didn’t want to, but what else could I do? Spend the rest of the night in the hallway?
He showed me around the suite. Part of me recognized that the furniture and art on the walls were as expensive and classy as the pieces I’d seen in the lower floors of the mansion. Another part only saw the sitting room, bedroom and en-suite bathroom for what they truly were: a cell. The gilding merely hid the bars.
The one thing that reassured me was that the bedroom locked from the inside, and I was quick to turn the key once Stephen had left.
I dropped my shoes on the floor, my clutch purse and Mr. Ward’s jacket on an armchair, and headed for the bathroom. I tried to freshen up a little, but the woman who stared back at me from the mirror looked dazed. Even washing away my raccoon eyes and the mascara trails on my cheeks didn’t help much.
Returning to the bedroom, I climbed onto the plush, queen-sized bed, right on top of the coverlet, and didn’t care one bit about the state the gown would be in if I slept in it. I certainly wasn’t going to sleep naked, and I didn’t have anything else to wear.
I grabbed a corner of the coverlet, pulled it over me like a cocoon, and went to sleep like that, with the bedside lamp still on, curled up like a kid in a strange bed. Even as uncomfortable as the gown and corset were to sleep in, I was mentally exhausted and asleep in just moments.
I slept until almost noon the next day. That was more than ten hours. I might have slept longer if someone hadn’t knocked on my door.
Normally, I don’t need that much sleep. Give me six, seven hours tops and I’m good to go. Seeing how my job with Miss Delilah didn’t usually require me to be at the office before noon and rarely to stay after eight, that left me plenty of time both in the mornings and at night to enjoy everything the city has to offer.
Coming to New York from a small town, I spent my first weeks terrified of getting lost, mugged, kidnapped, or all those things that happen on TV. Then I made a friend, born and raised in the city. She showed me how to get around, be safe, and have fun. She taught me to love New York. These days, getting lost was something I did on purpose to find new places.
Being confined to the mansion was going to put an end to that.
Another round of knocking finished waking me up.
“Miss Angelina?”
When I recognized Stephen’s voice, it all came back in a flash. Where I was. Why I had slept in a pricey gown. Why I felt like I had a bad hangover even though I hadn’t drunk that much.
“Yes?” I called back.
“Will you be having lunch?”
At the mere idea of food, my stomach rumbled, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten more than a couple of canapés the previous night. They’d been delicious, but not particularly filling.
“Lunch sounds good,” I said, loud enough that he’d hear me. I felt a little silly talking through the door, but I didn’t want to open it and let him see that I’d slept in my clothes. Then again, he’d seen me with my raccoon eyes, so did it really matter?
“Would you like anything in particular?”
I had no idea what to reply. I’m not a picky eater, and I’ll try anything at least once, but the whole situation was just so weird that my mind was utterly blank.
“I was going to make myself a chicken breast sandwich,” Stephen said after a few more seconds of silence. “Would that be acceptable for you?”
“That’d be great.”
“Very well. I’ll bring it to you in a little while. There are clothes in front of your door if you would like to change.”
As I sat up in bed, I heard steps outside the room, then a door closing. He was gone. Some part of me was annoyed; I had questions, so many of them, and no one to ask them to. However, when I stood and caught sight of myself in the mirror above the dresser, I was glad no one was there to see me in my bedraggled state. Changing clothes sounded like a terrific idea, although I couldn’t help feeling some trepidation as I wondered what kind of clothes he had brought me. A striped uniform to match my prisoner status, maybe?
When I opened the door, I found two things. Right on the threshold was a suitcase. My first thought was that it looked just like mine, red with black zippers and buckles. Then I realized it was mine. On my trip to New York, the front pocket had been ripped in transit. I’d fixed it with a few uneven stitches and an apple-shaped ‘I love NY’ patch.
It was my suitcase. The same one I kept at the back of my closet in my apartment.
I was still trying to wrap my mind around that when I noticed the other thing in the room. The other person.
Across from the door, against the wall, was a loveseat. And on that loveseat, still wearing his tuxedo minus the tie and jacket, Morgan Ward sat, watching me.
My heart just about stopped.
I don’t know how long we stared at each other. I didn’t even care that I looked like I’d been on an all-night bender. I simply couldn’t turn away from him and those bottomless eyes that had held me captive the night before. It was different now, and yet, there I was, spellbound again.
He blinked first, and somehow that helped me pull back. I grabbed the handle of my suitcase to drag it inside. Never mind all the questions I had; I’d face him once I was presentable. I meant to close the door again, but a few words from him stopped me.
“Lilah is gone.”
“Gone?” I blurted out, my gaze flying back to him. “What do you mean, gone?”
“She took her private jet last night. By now she could be anywhere in the world. Until she comes back to this house and walks you out…”
He didn’t finish. I didn’t need him to. I understood quite well.
Until she came back and walked me out of the house, I was stuck inside.
Even as I realized that, something else occurred to me.
“She had me clear her schedule until the end of January,” I said, breathless. “She was planning this.”
“Of course she was planning this. She must have been planning this from the moment she hired you. How many years ago was that?”
Close to five years… Had she really been planning all of it for that long?
I remembered the orchids she’d wanted me to find for her, and how she’d authorized me to fund the development of an hybrid that would take years of research. It wasn’t hard to imagine she’d kept me close all those years waiting for the right time. Why she had chosen last night, however, was a mystery. Was it because of Mr. Ward’s birthday? Was there more to it? It was frustrating how much I didn’t know—and even what I knew, I barely understood.
But five years by her side also meant something else, and that realization sent my heart to the pit of my stomach.
“Did she…” My throat was so tight, the words were painful to get out. “Did she do that compulsion thing on me the entire time? Has she been ordering me around for five years?”
He didn’t even hesitate before shaking his head.
“I doubt it. She might have done it a couple times, given you a suggestion to be loyal or something like that, but probably not much more.”
My mind flashed back to our first talk after she’d hired me. She had been rather emphatic about how much she valued discretion in her employees. I’m not one for gossip as a rule, but I had been reluctant over the years when my friends asked about my boss. I talked easily enough about what I did, but once the conversation shifted toward her, I had much less to say. Had that been an effect of compulsion or just my own ethics?
“How do you know she didn’t do more than that?” I asked, trying to look through the past five years to find anything out of the ordinary.
That day trip to Paris, maybe? No. I’d been more than willing. I’d been thrilled.
“Because you wouldn’t have much of a mind left if she’d been doing it regularly for that long. The more someone is compelled, the less independent they become. And besides—”
He cut himself off so abruptly that it took my mind off what he’d said to focus on what he wasn’t saying instead.
“Besides what?”
He didn’t reply.
“Besides what?” I said again, more loudly now. “Why won’t you explain anything to me?”
“Besides,” he said with a heavy sigh, “it would have been in poor taste for her to give me a mindless pet.”
I couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d slapped me. I wavered a little, and he sighed again. I seemed to draw a lot of sighs from him, and not for any good reason.
“You asked,” he said in a blank voice. “And those are her words, not mine.”
“So she… she gave you… pets? Before?”
I felt a little lightheaded and had to press a hand to the doorjamb next to me. The dress suddenly felt too tight for me to breathe properly. Long seconds passed before he answered.
“Not for a very long time.”
He pushed himself to his feet and came to me until all that stood between us was the suitcase. I watched him the entire time, my heartbeat accelerating as he drew nearer.
“Turn around,” he said.
I didn’t move. I only stared at him. I could feel my pulse thudding in my ears. Just from being near him and smelling the discreet scent of his cologne—of him—my mind flashed back to last night. I wanted his hands and his mouth on me again. His cock inside me. His body sliding against mine. And at the same time I wondered how I could have slept with a perfect stranger like that.
I’d felt a connection to him, but that didn’t change the fact that we’d met mere moments before becoming intimately acquainted. Except… it’d only been a fantasy, like he’d told me. But what did that mean, exactly?
“Last night,” I started, but lost my words and had to try again. “Last night, on the balcony. Was it… was it real?”
An eternity seemed to pass before he answered—and his reply, yet again, didn’t explain anything.
“Define real.”
I didn’t want word games. I didn’t want games, period. Miss Delilah had played enough with me already. I grabbed his wrist and raised it, exposing the blood-red gem of his cufflink.
“I remember this being lost over the edge of the balcony last night.” Even as I said it, I could feel my cheeks grow warmer as the memory of losing the cufflink flashed through my mind; or rather, the memory of what we’d been doing at the time. “But obviously it didn’t happen. Did it?”
“What you mean is, did you and I have sex on the balcony?” His voice was so flat, he might have been commenting on the weather. “Our bodies did not, no. But in your mind, it happened.”
It still made no more sense than him calling it a ‘fantasy’ before. If it had happened only in my mind, how did he even know about it? I started to shake my head, but before I could ask anything else, he pulled his wrist free and continued.
“When you disobeyed Lilah’s compulsion and stopped breathing, I entered your mind. I gave you a chance for a do-over. You would have died if I hadn’t.”
It was the same explanation he’d given me the night before, and it was all still so strange—so damn impossible—that I stumbled over every other word.
“So you… you made me… have sex with you? In our minds?”
He clucked his tongue.
“That’s not what I said. I reset your mind back to when you first stepped onto the balcony. Everything you did from that point was your own choice. I just played along.”
When I stared harder, he rolled his eyes.
“Like I said, it was a fantasy. Fantasies are where we can let ourselves do what we usually wouldn’t.”
His voice didn’t change one bit, but his eyes seemed to flare to life on those last words. They were still just as dark, but at the same time… How can I convey what they looked like? It was like flames were dancing behind his pupils, gleaming, burning—and inescapable.
“How is this all possible?” I murmured. “How can she order me to do something to the point that my body shuts down if I disobey? How can you… get into my mind, like you said? How can you move that fast?”
It won’t come as a surprise to you, because I’ve already given away that he and Miss Delilah weren’t humans. I know, I get ahead of myself sometimes, but really how could I have kept something like that to myself for so long?
Still, try to imagine my surprise when he said in that same cool voice, “We can do all that because we are vampires.”
No, it was more than surprise. Shock. Incomprehension. Disbelief.
I wanted to laugh in his face, call him a liar, and ask how stupid he thought I was, trying to tell me tales of supernatural monsters.
But facts—simple, irrefutable facts—kept me quiet. Like the fact that my body refused to obey me every time I so much as thought of breaking Miss Delilah’s order not to leave. Like the fact that I’d almost died on that balcony. That Mr. Ward had entered my mind and shared my ‘fantasy.’ That, when he’d told me to accompany him the previous night, I’d been unable to resist him.
I could refuse to believe him, but what would that help?
“You’re a… a…” I gulped, and without thinking brought both hands up to cover my neck. “Are you going to kill me?”
I’d asked the previous night, and he’d said no. Now that I knew what he was and what Miss Delilah had meant when she told him he could ‘feed’ from me or kill me, I had to ask again.
“I already answered that question,” he said in a low voice. “The answer hasn’t changed. Now. Turn around. Please.”
He wasn’t using that compelling voice of his, but I obeyed anyway. Stupid, I know, to turn my back to a vampire even if he’d said he wouldn’t kill me. I think I just needed to look away from his eyes. They made it hard to think.
Of course, when I did turn away, I still couldn’t think clearly.
I gasped when I felt his fingers at the small of my back and held my breath after that, wanting nothing more than to move but unable to do so as the memory of his touch on my body slid over me again, raising goose flesh on every inch of my skin. In my fantasy, he’d said he hated corsets, and never got around to getting me out of my dress. Now, he was unknotting and unlacing, and as the corset loosened, my heartbeat grew faster again.
When his hands left me and the dress started to fall, I caught it, pressing a hand between my breasts to keep the bodice in place. Very slowly, I turned back to him. My lips felt dry, so I licked them.
“You’d have had a hard time getting out of that thing by yourself, Angelina,” he said without the smallest flicker of a smile, but I thought I heard his voice waver a little when he said my name.
His eyes were still burning, and they dropped to my mouth when I licked my lips again. I took a step toward him. Not even that much: half a step. A minuscule shuffle of my feet until my bare toes met my suitcase between us. I couldn’t tell you what I was doing or thinking.
And then he was gone.
As quickly as when he’d run after Miss Delilah, he left the suite. The door banged shut behind him, and I was alone again. Alone with my thundering heart, my falling dress and my damp, very uncomfortable panties.
*