Living in Shadow (Living In…) Page 12

  She spent the rest of the day angry, both at him and at herself. Particularly at the way her body had responded to him and his authority, to those rough, dirty words he’d said to her.

  He unlocked your cage. Are you surprised your body wants to get out and dance?

  Sitting at her desk, marking essays later that day, Eleanor ran a red line angrily through a badly constructed paragraph. No, she didn’t want to fucking dance. She wanted to get on with her damn life and stop thinking about it.

  Which should have been easy, given the mountain of undergraduate essays she had to mark.

  But naturally, enough it wasn’t.

  Perhaps I’ll tie you to my bed…

  Bastard.

  Frustrated, she pushed aside the essay she’d just graded and pulled over another one. She didn’t know what the hell this particular student was trying to do by including some French in their essay on the British legal system, but it didn’t make her any more likely to give them an A.

  Her focus wavered for a second. French. Tu es mon soleil…

  She’d almost forgotten the words he’d whispered in French against her skin. Words she hadn’t fully taken in at the time. She hadn’t studied the language since school and even then had been exceptionally bad at it, but nevertheless she knew what he’d said.

  You are my sun.

  And that wasn’t the only thing he’d said. There had been other phrases, spoken as he’d pushed inside her. As he held himself above her, chasing his own climax after he’d given one to her.

  She stared at the black letters on the white paper. At the lines of her red pen. Everything suddenly blurring.

  He hadn’t meant to say those things, she was sure of it. Yet he had. Did it mean something? Anything? Or was she grasping at straws? Trying to look for meaning where there wasn’t any?

  You are my sun…

  God no, that meant something, didn’t it? That was a piece of himself. A piece she hadn’t noticed, too caught up in her own pleasure. Though, why it mattered and why she’d remembered, she had no idea.

  Sure you do. Because you told yourself he wouldn’t give a shit.

  Eleanor dropped her pen. She’d told herself it was all about the fact that they’d only agreed on one night, but of course it hadn’t been. That night had meant something to her and she hadn’t wanted to stay in case he hadn’t felt the same.

  But he had. Why else had he come after her to demand more? Staring right into her, seeing past all her denials. All her stupid justifications. Looking right into her soul. Seeing her fear.

  She let out a breath and put her head in her hands.

  God, she thought she’d stepped out of that cage, but she hadn’t. Seemed as if the moment she realized she was out, she’d run back to it and locked herself inside.

  Christ, was she ever going to be free of this?

  You could go see him tonight. Show him you’re not a coward.

  Yeah, perhaps she should. Perhaps she owed it to him too.

  Eleanor reached for her phone then leaned back in her chair, bringing up Kahu’s number to send him a text, ask him for his advice.

  Then she stopped. She didn’t need Kahu’s advice. Luc was right. It was time she stopped letting her fear do her thinking for her. It was time she stepped out of that cage for real.

  In fact maybe it was time to get rid of that fucking cage altogether.

  Luc told himself he didn’t care if she came or not.

  He skipped his last lecture of the day and went home, pounding out his frustration and anxiety on the punching bag he’d hung in the second bedroom of his apartment. The room that had absolutely nothing in it except that bag because he couldn’t think of anything else to put in there. It wasn’t like he often had guests, and working out was pretty much his only other hobby. Spending the formative years of his life with a gun in his hand, the power of life and death walking beside him, meant it was difficult to find something else that gave him the same rush.

  Dominating a certain professor helped.

  Luc scowled and landed a hard punch on the bag. But of course, he couldn’t deny the truth. Dominating her was a fucking rush. And that kind of made him question himself and his motivations for demanding a second night.

  Was it really for her? Or was he only indulging himself?

  He swung at the bag again, his knuckles connecting hard.

  Oh, she’d enjoyed what they’d done on Friday night, that had been obvious, but he’d been pretty tough in her office today, propelled by anger and a pretty massive helping of desire. He wouldn’t blame her if she wanted him to fuck off after that.

  Ah Christ, no point pretending to himself he didn’t care if she didn’t turn up. He did care. He wanted her. And maybe that was selfish of him, but hadn’t he earned the right to be selfish these days?

  He’d spent years feeling dead inside. Feeling numb. Some of the other guys in his squad, who’d been with him when he’d escaped the militia during a chaotic ambush, had headed into spirals of drinking and drugs afterwards, tortured by their pasts.

  He hadn’t. Mostly because he was already numb to it.

  But Eleanor, God, she was a bigger hit than any drug. More intoxicating than any spirit. She made him feel and he wanted more of it. Craved it.

  His knuckles hit the bag with a dull thump.

  Shit, if it helped her too, then that was all good, wasn’t it?

  The intercom buzzed.

  Luc stopped, the bag swinging, his heart pounding. He was covered in sweat and his knuckles were bruised and bloody. If that was her, it was fucking bad timing.

  Catching his breath, he stalked down the hallway and went into the lounge, hitting the button that showed him the front entrance of the apartment building on the intercom screen. And sure enough, there she was, standing with her briefcase in her hand. Polished and neat and sophisticated.

  Eleanor.

  The ache pulled tight inside him. She’d come. She’d fucking come.

  He stabbed the button that unlocked the door for her. There was no time to have a shower or take the tape off his hands, or make himself more presentable for her somehow. She’d have to take him as is.

  His heart beat like a drum as he went back down the hallway to wait by the front door of his apartment for her.

  Fucking idiot. It’s like this is your first date.

  Yeah, well, maybe it was. He hadn’t been out on any other dates before, had he? At least not with a woman who really mattered to him.

  The knock, when it came, was soft, and when he pulled it open she gave a little start, as if she wasn’t expecting him to answer so quickly. Her eyes widened slightly as she took him in, standing there shirtless and sweaty.

  “Oh, I… Sorry, am I interrupting?” Her pale fingers shifted on the handle of her briefcase, her attention dropping to his taped knuckles. She frowned. “Shit, Luc. You’re bleeding.”

  He didn’t want to explain. Because that would mean telling her he spent a good portion of most days punching a bag till his hands hurt and his muscles burned, to remind himself he was alive. “It’s nothing,” he said curtly instead. “Punching-bag accident. Come in.” And he held the door open for her, standing aside so she could enter.

  She didn’t say anything, but her gaze flickered down his body as she went past him and into the apartment, as if she couldn’t help herself. And naturally enough his fucking cock started getting hard.

  Jesus, he hadn’t really planned on what was going to happen when she got here, mainly because he hadn’t known if she would come or not. He very much wanted to head straight into Dom mode and take what was his, but his gut wasn’t so sure.

  There was a nervous look to her, as if she wasn’t sure about being here, and he suspected that if he started giving out orders now, she’d bolt. Perhaps it was better to wait and see.

  He shut the door behind her then followed her down the hall and into the lounge, hitching a shoulder against the doorframe as she came to a stop in the middle of the room
, looking around.

  His lounge area was large and airy, windows giving views out over Auckland’s blue harbor. It was dark now, the lights of boats on the water twinkling, the graceful crescent of the harbor bridge off to the left. But the room was as bare as the rest of the apartment, the only piece of furniture a long leather sectional sofa his grandparents had given him. There was nothing else because he had nothing else except books and a set of Bluetooth speakers sitting on the floor that he used with his MP3 player. Oh yeah, and the set of boxes stacked neatly in one corner. Boxes of belongings he hadn’t unpacked. Not that he ever would unpack them since they were his parents’, not his. It was a little strange to keep them, but his grandparents had wanted him to have them, so he had.

  A lover had once told him he should get some pictures, decorate the place, but he hadn’t seen the point in that kind of shit. The apartment was only a place to store his crap, eat in when he could be bothered to cook, which wasn’t often, work out and sleep. That was it.

  “I need to get cleaned up, take a shower,” he said. “Can I get you a drink while you wait?”

  “Yes, okay.” She put down her briefcase near the sofa. “What have you got?”

  “Beer.”

  “Beer it is then.” She glanced around again. “You said your grandparents bought this place for you? They must have serious money.”

  “They do. Mostly guilt money.”

  “Why guilt?”

  “Because my parents died.” Not the whole truth. Their guilt money was also in part for what he’d gone through in Africa. Their grandchild made to kill people…

  “But it wasn’t their fault, surely?”

  “No. But that doesn’t stop them from feeling guilty.”

  She frowned. “You don’t like living here, do you?”

  “Not really.” He never had. The place had always felt as if it should belong to someone else. Someone normal.

  “So why do you? For their benefit?”

  Fuck. He wasn’t ready for this. He turned. “I’ll get you a beer.”

  “Luc, wait.”

  He stopped, his back to her. If she was going to ask him questions, maybe he should be getting his Dom shit on now and to hell with his instinct. “What?”

  “I…” A small pause. “You said something to me on Friday night. You said I…was your sun. I wondered what you meant.”

  It wasn’t what he was expecting. At all. And maybe that was why he gave her the truth. “Because you make me feel alive, Eleanor.”

  “Oh…” She sounded puzzled. “Do you not feel alive at other times?”

  No, he wasn’t going to explain. “I’ll only be a second.”

  The kitchen was around the corner from the lounge and getting the drinks gave him a little space to think. He stopped near the sink and ripped the tape off his hands, chucking it in the wastebasket. Then he leaned his hip against the edge of the counter.

  He’d never told anyone else, other than his grandparents, about his time in the militia. Well, no one here in this country. Only the UNICEF workers who’d rescued him after he escaped and the psychologists who’d helped him as he recovered in Accra, in Ghana.

  But even then he hadn’t told them everything. He couldn’t bear to. The things he’d seen, no one should ever have to, let alone a boy of twelve. And although he’d killed, he’d done so cleanly. He’d refused to do the other stuff. The torture. The rape. It had been his personal line in the sand. The only way he could exert control over a situation in which he had none.

  That and turning off his feelings. It was either that or he would have gone mad. Or died.

  Sometimes he wished his survival instinct hadn’t been so strong.

  “Luc?” Eleanor’s voice came from the lounge. “Everything okay?”

  Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, he pulled open the fridge door and got out a couple of beers. “Coming.”

  He found Eleanor standing by the windows, looking out across the light-strewn harbor, her arms crossed. She took the beer he handed to her and sipped at it, her gaze on him. “Can you wait with the shower for a second?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I’ve got questions about you, but there’re a few things I need to tell you first. And I have to say them now, otherwise I’m not going to be able to do it.”

  Tension began to gather inside him. “What things?”

  “Things about me. My truth. I owe you that at least. It’s not going to be easy, though. I don’t like talking about it, so I don’t want you to push me. Just…let me get there in my own time.”

  He waited, not saying anything, the tension tightening in his shoulders ever further. Whatever it was she was going to tell him, it wasn’t going to be good.

  She glanced away, out the windows again. “When I was twenty-three, I got a scholarship to Berkeley. And while I was there I met Piers. He was my professor, a brilliant, charismatic man, and I thought the sun shone out of his ass. Anyway, the feeling was mutual and since I never got a lot of attention at home, I thought I was in heaven.” She paused. “He seduced me easily—he was the one who introduced me to dominance and submission. I fell in love with him in a matter of weeks.

  It was all great until we were discovered and he lost his job. We got married to put a respectable front on it, but it didn’t make any difference. He wasn’t able to get another teaching position in the States, and since I didn’t have a Green Card, we had to come back to New Zealand.” Her voice stayed flat, emotionless. “He was…very bitter. I tried hard to make it better for him. To make things okay. But nothing I did was right. He blamed me for the fact that he’d lost his job. And…” She stopped and a silence fell. Her jaw looked tight, her shoulders hunched.

  Luc’s fingers closed around the neck of his beer bottle, almost hard enough to shatter it.

  “He took out his bitterness on me.” Her voice was quiet, the cold edge of it becoming rough. “He used the fact that I was his sub as an excuse to hurt me. One night we went to this club. It was one we’d been to before and we usually only watched because I wasn’t comfortable with participating. But not that night.” She bent her head, looking down at the bottle in her hand. “He had a couple of friends and he wanted to share me with them. I didn’t want to. I…said my safe word but he told me I needed to be pushed. That safe words weren’t allowed and that they knew what was best for me.”

  “Fuck, Eleanor—”

  “I was so naïve I believed him. And I wanted to make things better between us. I thought if I did what he said it would make him better. It would make him love me again. So I let him do it.”

  The glass of the bottle was hard against Luc’s fingertips. A bit more pressure and he could snap the neck off it completely. He wanted to break it, expose the broken shards of glass that could be used as a knife. To hurt the prick who’d hurt her.

  “You don’t have to tell me the details,” he said harshly. “Not if it’s too painful.”

  “I have to.” She kept her gaze on her hands. “I have to if I want to get past this.”

  “Eleanor—”

  “His friends blindfolded me. Then they beat me. Quite hard. I really, really didn’t want to have to have sex with them and Piers knew I didn’t, but… He told me that if I gave myself completely to him, everything would be better between us. That it would bring us closer.” She said the words like they were coated in acid. “So I did. I had sex with those guys even though I didn’t want to, because I loved Piers and wanted to make it better. But of course it didn’t. All it did was make things even worse. He got jealous, you see. And then accused me of breaking up our marriage.”

  A burst of complete rage filled him and he had to bend to put down his bottle on the floor before he shattered it. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said roughly, knowing it was a paltry thing to say, but not having anything else to offer her.

  She drained her beer in one swallow. “Oh, I know that. Then again, he didn’t hold a gun to my head. I didn’t have to do it. I only mad
e the mistake of being in love with him.” Her voice was flat, emotionless. And he knew why. She was distancing herself from it.

  Well, no fucking wonder. He clenched his hands into fists, the urge to hurt someone vicious inside him. “It was bad, wasn’t it?”

  Her lashes fell. “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me?”

  She had gone very still. “I don’t want to.”

  He didn’t want to push, because she’d told him not to, and it wasn’t her he wanted to hurt. And yet… She was in pain already. Forcing away his rage, he said gently, “But you’ve told me everything else. And I think that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  Abruptly she put her hands over her face. “I don’t want to.” Her voice was a whisper. “I can’t.”

  Memories hurt—fuck, he knew that. And it wasn’t his place to make her relive hers. But that didn’t mean he had to stand by and let her suffer.

  He reached for her, pulling her into his arms. Giving her the only thing he could—physical comfort.

  Eleanor was shivering and she pressed her palms to his chest as if to hold him off. But then she buried her face in his neck, her body melting against his as if she were the one who was cold.

  He didn’t have any words or advice to offer because, God knew, he was a fine one to talk when he didn’t want to tell anyone about what had happened to him. So he stood there and held her tight. Giving her back the warmth she’d always given him.

  And even though his body responded to her heat and softness in the way it usually did, he didn’t make any moves. Because this wasn’t about sex.

  At least it wasn’t until she shifted her head slightly. And he felt her tongue lick the hollow of his throat.

  Chapter Eleven

  He was hot and smelled of clean sweat and musk. And that was so much better than the memories in her head, than the pain she didn’t want to face.

  So she licked his throat, tasting the salt on his skin. It was delicious. And it didn’t matter that he hadn’t showered. The way his skin had glistened when he’d opened the door dressed in nothing but a pair of sweatpants had sent a bolt of desire straight between her thighs.