Grievous (Wanted Men #5) - Nancy Haviland Page 0,11
with nothing so the few things she had now meant everything.
“Does it extend to all your things?”
“I don’t have many things.” Her tone combined with the disparaging glance at the goth monstrosity behind him let him know her views on overindulgences.
His fingers burned the skin at the base of her throat when he lifted the pendant she put on when she was going for a sedate look. With a lazy yank, he snapped the chain and slipped her jewelry into his pants pocket. Like a dolt, her mouth fell open, and she brought her hand up to feel around her neck as though checking to make sure she’d just witnessed that. Empty.
She didn’t even know what to say. Or if she should bother. “How dare you?” she settled on because it usually encompassed pretty much anything.
A low sound came from deep in his chest. It was distinctly sexual in nature, and it slithered hotly around her erogenous zones in a way it shouldn’t. “Come into the house. And save that look for when I do something that warrants it. Believe me, over the coming weeks you will have plenty of opportunity to use it.” He turned on his heel and ascended the stone steps to enter the castle through an arched door. He was already shrugging out of his overcoat.
The coming weeks? She saw her future go up in a wisp of smoke and wanted to…to…she didn’t know what. She wasn’t sure how to keep straight the reactions she was having to this nightmare. In fifteen minutes, she’d raced through being terrified, angry, helpless, worried, insulted, furious, turned on.
“He will not harm you,” Sorin said at her back.
She wasn’t sure she believed him. “But I’m here.” She was embarrassed when her eyes filled with tears, but she couldn’t stop them. She had to get back to New York. She hadn’t worked her ass off, sacrificing so much, right down to her pride and morals, to get where she was today just so some grieving rich guy could comfort himself by kidnapping and spending a couple of weeks forcing her to have sex with him.
She made a quiet sound that sadly lacked fear and affront. She ignored the reason for it and continued to blame the wetness she could feel between her legs on her need to use the restroom.
“He will bring you back to your life when he has this disease under control. For now, since you are here, you will help him. Consider it a vacation.”
She turned. Up close, Sorin’s hooded eyes were the darkest brown she’d ever seen. Darker even than hers. “What disease?” Her stomach had just become an empty pit. “I didn’t know he was sick. Is it serious? Is he in treatment?”
She held her breath and didn’t want to feel what she was feeling at the thought of Lucian being ill. Despite what he was doing to her, she found herself praying there was a cure he could buy.
“No. There is no cure. He is strong enough for it not to be fatal, but it is still debilitating, and as you just witnessed, it is fucking with who he is as a person.”
She shook her head, at a loss, and had the staggering urge to ugly cry. “Which disease are you talking about?”
Sadness settled over him as he looked beyond her to the open door. His voice, too, came out a mere whisper. “Grief.”
THREE
Lucian watched Yasmeen enter his home with Sorin at her back. She took only a few steps into the foyer and stopped, her dark gaze darting around. She was clutching that handbag of hers with long, graceful fingers, the knuckles of which were white. And that was all she allowed him to see of her anxiety, which pleased him. He hadn’t brought her here to witness her emotions.
As Sorin left them alone, she drifted closer to him. Was she aware of it? She had one eye on him, and the other on her new surroundings. It was no wonder he’d chosen her. Such beauty. She had lustrous hair of the darkest mahogany that fell in a thick curtain down her back, and brown eyes interspersed with streams of honey to give them the warmth he’d thought about during many a boring meeting over the last twenty-four months. Her skin was a flawless bronze and silky to the touch. And her body? Perfection. Utter. Fucking. Perfection.
He couldn’t help it. He closed the distance between them. Moving slowly when he saw her eyelids flutter,