away, leaving me sweating and panting and utterly changed.
I lifted my head from where I’d buried it and looked around for the phone, which I’d knocked from the pillow to the edge of the mattress.
Now what? I thought, trying to catch my breath. I had no idea how long that took. What he might have heard.
A hot wave of mortification practically lifted my skin right off my body. I was light-headed with shock at what I’d done. At how far that had gone.
Despite wanting it, despite manufacturing the moment, despite actually doing it—the reality was too much. Like my body had traveled far too fast for the rest of me and now I was yanking it ruthlessly back.
Without checking to hear if he was there, without saying thank you. Without any of that.
Cowardly, ashamed and buzzing, I hung up.
And I quickly turned off the power and threw the phone in the drawer.
This was dangerous on every level. That man—Dylan—undoubtedly knew where I was. He could find me. He could find me.
God, I couldn’t think of that an hour ago?
Quickly, I flew off the bed and went to check the locks on my door. And then made sure the windows were closed. So that not even fresh air could find me. I turned off all the lights, pulled the blinds until the moonlight was filtered and dim.
Mom caught me when I was ten, rubbing myself on the edge of a chair. She took me right to church. Every day after chores. I didn’t go to school for the week. I prayed for forgiveness in the church, in my pastor’s office. Under my mom’s careful eye and the pastor’s terrifying sermons about hell, I prayed those feelings right out.
In a cerebral way I understood that I didn’t deserve that. But I had a set of mixed-up scales in my head that told me over and over again that what I deserved was what I got. This awful belief was reinforced every day with Hoyt. Every moment.
And I couldn’t shake it. In my lowest moments, when everything was stripped away, that was all I had left.
I got what I deserved.
No, I thought.
I am better than this, I thought, squeezing my eyes shut. I’d run so I wouldn’t feel this way.
But somehow I couldn’t quite stop it.
The shame was old and familiar.
And unstoppable.
A tide that rolled and rolled and rolled, over me.
DYLAN
Dylan was a rich, distrustful son of a bitch. So rich he owned the mountain where he lived and worked. So distrustful his employees—just to get to work—had to pass through an iron gate.
Clients were dealt with by Blake, who did all the face-to-face stuff. Dylan handled steel and engine schematics. The garage employees.
All of which meant it had been a very long time since Dylan had been surprised.
And tonight he had no fucking idea which surprised him more.
That Layla had called him for phone sex.
That she’d just gone from never having touched herself to having what sounded like a pillow-biting orgasm.
Or that she’d hung up on him.
Despite the raging hard-on nearly boring a hole in the zipper of his jeans, he tipped his head back against his chair and laughed.
What the hell just happened?
Part of him was suspicious, as he’d been taught to be, over and over again by hard experience. No one was that innocent, and that eager at the same goddamn time.
But somehow he knew, down in his gut, that this wasn’t an act with her. Or a game. And she was undoubtedly sitting out there embarrassed by what they’d done. Maybe punishing herself.
The thought just brought him to his knees.
Because what he heard in her voice told him everything he needed to know about her. That she was scared, but she was trying; in order to get what she wanted she was pushing past her own bullshit fears and being brave. In her voice, he could hear every dark and forbidden thing she craved. And he wanted to give it to her. Everything she wanted and the things she didn’t know to want, yet.
How far would she go?
She wanted dark? He had all the dark. All of it. And he’d show her every midnight corner of it.
The shiny surface of the phone in his hand reflected his face, macabre and twisted, back at him.
He wanted to call her. Well, that was bullshit. What he really wanted was to drive down off his mountain and find her in that shitty trailer park and get a front-row seat for what he’d