Hellbent, page 2
The brightness in her eyes sparked a restless, uneasy stirring inside him. Lust, fear, all mixed together, way down deep.
Yeah, that was Fi. There was no mistaking that defensive, screw-you-too look in her eyes. The sexy shape of her full mouth. Those high, sharp cheekbones. She was no longer the skinny waif with the thick red braid. She was taller now, still lean and slender, but filled out. She looked lithe and strong. Her lips were painted hot red.
She faced the camera head on, with an aggressive, wide-legged stance like a comic book gunslinger. A glittering belt of crystal studded links hung low on her hips. She stuck out her chest, hands on her hips, elbows out. Staring him down.
After a minute or two, she lifted her hand, fluttered her fingers at him, and blew him a kiss. Her dark eyebrows were arched up high. As if she could see right through the camera, all the way to where he stood, frozen and dithering.
What are you waiting for? You scared? Of me? Awww.
What the fuck was she doing here? Tonight of all nights? He was still all wound up about what had happened to Eric back in Shaw’s Crossing. Dealing with Fiona would put him right over the top.
Besides Anton and his two brothers, Fiona was the only other survivor of the lethal shit-storm that was their childhood. Everyone developed his or her own fucked up coping mechanisms for dealing with massive trauma. Evidently Fiona’s had been to morph into a drop-dead gorgeous, man-killing femme fatale.
Damn. There were worse strategies.
“Tell Wong to bring her up,” Anton said.
He turned to the viewing window, checking his own reflection before he could stop himself. He’d changed a lot in the thirteen years that had gone by. The last time Fiona saw him, he’d been almost eighteen. No tats. His hair a long, shaggy, dark blond mane. He’d looked very different.
His current bad boy DJ vibe was edgy and hard. Hair buzzed off tight on the sides, longer on top, gelled up into an artful, spiky mess. A bespoke designer jacket hung open, flaunting his eight-pack abs and putting the tattoo art that covered his shirtless chest on full display. A garish, jewel-studded pendant dangled over his heart. His professional look was carefully cultivated, and definitely not for everyone.
Nate didn’t miss a trick, goddamn the man. He caught Anton checking his reflection and snorted under his breath as he turned to the door.
“Smile, lover boy,” he said. “I’ll tell you if you have spinach in your teeth.”
“Fuck you, man.” Anton slammed the door after him, cutting off Nate’s laughter.
2
Fake it till you make it, Fi. That’s what we all do. Don’t think you’re so damn special. Imagine they’re all naked. Everyone feels scared and awkward. Not just you.
That was her cousin Patti’s standard lecture from the old days, when she was teaching Fiona how to navigate the “normal” world. The post-GodsAcre world.
She’d tried to practice Patti’s advice, but it hadn’t been much comfort to her then.
Nor was it now. Every thought of what happened to Patti caused intense pain.
Focus, damn it. Fiona followed the burly Asian guy up the stairs to the lofted space above, grimly intent on keeping her ankles from wobbling in her ridiculous boots. She’d chosen them for the girls-gone-wild sex-bot vibe, but they practically crippled her. If she needed to fight or run, she’d be meat. And she was intensely conscious of the deadly threat hanging over her. Every second of every day.
And damn. If just staring into a video camera that might or might not have Anton Trask at the other end made her knees turn to jelly, what would the real, flesh-and-blood Anton do to her?
Hoo, boy. Her mind could keep itself happily entertained for hours with that idea.
It took all the nerve she had to get all glammed up and slutty like this. It wasn’t something she did often. Or ever. Not for years, anyway, and she’d only ever made the effort on Patti’s insistence. Patti’s pet project had always been Fiona’s beautification.
Though ‘domestication’ might actually be a better word.
Fiona had done her best to play along. Patti was only trying to help. But she had to fight conflicting inhibitions to do it, and it had not been easy.
Jeremiah Paley, the leader of the survivalist cult where she’d grown up, had insisted that women and girls dress in modest, feminine clothing. Fiona had dressed according to his dictates, but modesty hadn’t done her a damn bit of good when Redd Kimball arrived at GodsAcre. His hot stare had felt like spiders crawling over her skin.
She’d tried to fade away and evade his notice. It hadn’t worked.
A deep hesitation to invite male attention had stuck with her ever since. When she tried to push back against those deep-rooted fears, she ended up overcompensating, egregiously. She overdid it and went all-out sexpot. Put out confusing messages. Got into all kinds of embarrassing trouble.
The whole thing was more hassle than it was worth.
Patti had despaired of her. She’d tried so hard to teach her awkward, tongue-tied country mouse cousin to pass for a normal California girl. The hair, the make-up, the clothes, the laughter, the lightness. Hah.
Fiona gently pushed away her memories of bouncy, friendly, giggling Patti. Later for that. The pain would wait for her. Pain was endlessly patient.
Today’s goal was to face Anton Trask and ask for his help. Enough shivering and sighing. The guy’s only sin was in being gorgeous, talented and charismatic.
He was her hero. Quite literally. But for Anton, she’d have been married off to that sleaze-bag Kimball when she was fifteen. Which would have killed her.
‘No’ had not been an option at GodsAcre. What Jeremiah said was law.
The bouncer was pushing open a heavy door and gesturing for her to enter. The time for frantic second-guessing was done.
Fiona walked into a large, wood-paneled room. It had sleek, essential furniture in black leather and steel. Banks of monitors and electronic equipment were smoothly incorporated into the walls, like the bridge of a luxury intergalactic space yacht.
“Ms. Garrett?”
She jerked around, startled, but the guy who had spoken wasn’t Anton. He was very tall, striking in his own right, his lean, muscular body dressed in a tailored white shirt and black dress pants. Black hair. A big, hooked nose, a strong jaw, scruffy, dark beard shadow. His keen, deep-set eyes looked her over with great interest.
“Nate Murphy,” he said, extending his hand. “Anton’s head of security.”
She shook his hand. “Did Anton ask you to check me out for deadly weapons? I do tend to inspire terror in the hearts of men.”
“Not exactly.” His eyes flicked over her body. “I don’t know where you’d keep deadly weapons if you had them. I won’t search you. Anton said you guys go way back?”
“That’s right.” She just waited, offering no more details.
“So do we,” Murphy offered. “I met him in Vegas a long time ago. He got me a job as a bouncer at a club he worked at on the Strip after I got out of the Marines. I can’t even imagine Anton Trask as a kid.”
She made a noncommittal sound. Of course not. That was because Anton had never been a kid. Neither had she. But that was nobody else’s business.
When she made no further comment, Murphy opened the door behind him and beckoned her in. “He’s waiting,” he said. “Go on in.”
Fiona took a long, deep breath and jacked up her attitude-o-meter to its maximum setting. The more nervous and scared she was, the more invincible she had to act.
Shoulders back, chest out, chin up. Proud, regal and unafraid. She strutted past Nate Murphy in a hip-swaying, take-no-prisoners saunter.
The room was dim and long, a black leather living room set at the far end in front of a bar. Low black couches and armchairs, a wide, low wooden coffee table, a dimly lit geometrically designed hanging lamp over the furniture that was a modern art piece in itself. A floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the dance club dominated the first half of the room. Pulsing lights from the club flickered against the far wall. She glimpsed the gyrating throng on the dance floor below as she walked in.
The pounding music was barely audible. It seemed a physical impossibility to insulate a room from music that loud and that close, but somehow, they’d done it.
“Fi.” She froze at the sound of his voice. Even deeper and richer than she remembered. Anton had always been slow to talk and soft-spoken, but everyone always leaned in and listened to every word.
She forced herself to turn. Her heart thudded heavily in her chest.
Anton sat at a huge desk set into a niche in the back of the room. The dim light from the hanging lamp painted his starkly sculpted face with shadows. His shadowed eyes gleamed, unreadable. She tried to speak, but he beat her to it.
“It really is you,” he said.
You doubted it? Who else even knows I ever existed? They’re all dead. Words whirled in her head, but she couldn’t pick out what to say and what to discard.
Keep it simple, like Patti always said. Keep it light. Hi, Anton. Long time no see. Looking good. How’s life treating you. Nice place you got here.
But no. She couldn’t. She had fuck-all to say to him. Mind blank.
She coughed to shake her voice loose. “Hey,” she croaked. “Anton.”
She’d been afraid of this. That she’d freeze, tongue-tied. Just her own frantically beating heart deafening her from the inside. She’d hoped that adulthood would help.
No such luck.
Memories rolled over her. Memories she’d buried deep and then ignored, just to keep herself sane. And Anton was splashed all over them.
How he’d broken her out of GodsAcre just in time. Led her through the woods on steep, tortuous paths where no one could follow them through the mountains, down to the town of Shaw’s Crossing. In the end, she’d been in such a daze of pain from the flogging, he’d carried her on his back. He got her to the bus station. Bought her a ticket to California, God knows where he got the cash. Guided her to the right bus.
And before she climbed on, he had kissed her goodbye.
That kiss was burned into her mind for all time.
She still remembered looking down through the tinted window of the bus. Anton’s long, dark blond hair blowing back in the wind as the bus pulled away. Those beautiful, muscular arms, tanned to deep gold. His intense, deep-set eyes, locked onto hers. Willing her to be strong, tough. Like him. Silently telling her to never give up.
He was just as gorgeous now, despite all the changes. She missed the long hair, but the dark shadow of stubble on his chin cast his chiseled male beauty in sharp relief.
She’d been following his career since he burst on the scene years back as an up-and-coming DJ. His rise to fame had been swift, at least to outside viewers. He’d graced the covers of Billboard. He’d been featured in articles in BPM, URB, Vogue, GQ. He was splashed all over any publication, online or print, where people talked about music, fashion, celebrity, or pop culture in general.
She had read all of it. Every word of everything that had ever been published about him. He’d kept the lurid story of his childhood out of the press, God alone knew how, but he’d become even more infamous last summer after his highly publicized fling with a red-headed Hollywood starlet. The latest It Girl.
The affair ended badly. The starlet had complained bitterly. He was emotionally unavailable, she bitched. He was elusive, detached, remote. She’d felt lonely and used.
Bad Boyfriend, the tabloids blared. Fiona had read every word, avid for more.
And there were all his videos online. Shows, festival clips, interviews. And the ads. Commercials for athletic shoes, whiskey, champagne, luxury cars, men’s cologne, high-end sports watches. She watched them all obsessively, sucked into his hypnotic, complex rhythms of his dance mixes. She had her favorites saved on the desktop of her computer for quick and easy reference. Her secret addiction. He was wickedly talented.
Anton leaned back in the chair, his gaze inscrutable. As was his custom, according to the magazine articles, he was bare-chested beneath his jacket. His smooth, heavily muscled chest was densely covered with tattoos. The black satin jacket was cut perfectly for his broad shoulders.
Jeremiah Paley had hated tattoo art with a fiery, unreasonable passion. Interesting.
Anton opened a desk drawer and took out a remote, pointing it at the glass viewing area overlooking the club. She heard the muted hum of a motor, and hanging vertical blinds marched across the window, sliding into place to cover it completely.
The colored flickering light vanished. The room felt suddenly smaller. Breathlessly intimate. Another gesture with the remote, and a pool of light flicked into being all around her. A recessed bulb in the ceiling, right above her head.
Like a spotlight. As if she was the floor show, performing for an audience of one.
Patti’s advice flashed through her head again. How to talk naturally to men. How to combat being shy and tongue-tied.
Just pretend he’s naked.
Oh, man. Oh, no, no, no. In this case, Patti’s classic advice was a terrible idea. Once she thought it, she couldn’t unthink it. And her brain just went apeshit with it.
“What’s with the outfit, Fi?” he asked. “It’s over the top.”
Fiona glanced down at her ensemble. He was absolutely right, but she would die before she’d admit it. “It’s a dance club,” she said. “My general uniform is jeans and a tee-shirt. That would’ve stuck out like a sore thumb in here. I wanted to blend in.”
His mouth twitched in an ironic smile. “You overshot the mark.”
She shrugged. “What if I did? I don’t consider other people’s opinions when I dress myself. I got plenty of that crap back at GodsAcre. Enough to last a lifetime.”
“So this is rebellion? A fuck-you to the Prophet’s tight-ass memory?”
She was silent for a moment, trying to put it into words. Her trashy sexbot look was like a force field. A bizarre, counterintuitive sort of armor. She couldn’t look vulnerable. She couldn’t afford to show doubt. She had to look fearless, shameless, in-everyone’s-face, to jack up the nerve to come here and ask for Anton’s help.
But there was no way to explain it that wouldn’t sound silly. Or worse, crazy.
“I don’t make decisions based on the past,” she said. “My choices are not a reaction to what happened to me. That would grant them power over me even after they’re dead. I refuse to give it to them again.”
He nodded. “But you’re not comfortable in it.”
She couldn’t in all good conscience deny that, but goddamn him for noticing. She resisted the urge to tug the skirt further down over her thighs. Since there was nothing to tug.
“It doesn’t matter,” she muttered. “I’m never comfortable anyway.”
His eyes turned her inside out. No one looked at her that way. She was used to being checked out, but guys mostly looked at her ass, her lips, her chest. She had her standard force field for that. Shields up, and whiz-bang, it bounced right off her.
Her shield didn’t work on Anton. His eyes sliced through her defenses and penetrated straight into her soul. Anton knew all the things she couldn’t bear to let herself remember. She could hardly look him in the eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Anton said.
“About what?”
His eyebrow tilted up. “That you’re never comfortable.”
Crap. She didn’t want him feeling sorry for her. She wanted to have this interchange from a position of strength. And standing in front of him under the spotlight like merchandise on sale at a brothel did not help. “Could we go sit down?”
“I’m good here,” he said.
Hmm. So much for common courtesy. “Well, I’m not.” She threw her shoulders back and refreshed the attitude, ratcheting it up a few notches as she strolled around his desk. “I’ll just sit down right here.” She perched her butt on the desk in front of him.
Anton shifted back, one leg crossed over the other. Black lace-up boots. Faded jeans clung to his strong muscled legs. Bigger and harder than the boy she had known years ago. The boy who had saved her sanity. Probably her life.
At this range, his male presence was overwhelming. She could smell his cologne. Feel his body heat warming her skin. He exuded an aura of things about to happen. Combat readiness. Raw, seething vital energy, buzzing against her senses.
Exactly the qualities she needed on her side, since her world had gone to shit.
If she could make him believe her. If he even wanted to help her again, after all these years. That was a lot of ifs.
Maybe he wouldn’t want to be bothered. He’d done his part to save her bacon years ago, and his life looked pretty sweet just as it was. If she were him, she wouldn’t willingly trade in fame, fortune and luxury for a crusade into the nightmarish hellscape that was Fiona Garrett’s miserable life. Why the hell would he? He wasn’t stupid.
She was spellbound by the sensual shape of his unsmiling lips. His bearded scruff glinted, a mix of brown and dark gold. His keen, wary dark eyes studied her intently. The thick, dark slash of his eyebrows. That strong jaw. Everything she remembered about him, just bigger, stronger, bolder, hotter. Too much for her senses to process.
“Hello, you,” he murmured.
His silky tone made her shiver. She braced her hands on the edge of his desk, fishing desperately for a logical, coherent entry point into the story she had to tell him.
“I was hoping to catch one of your sets tonight,” she said. “They say you do at least one set at one of your own clubs every week. I read that in Billboard.”
“Not this week,” he said. “I took time for personal business.”
She just waited for a moment, but after a moment, to her surprise, he actually answered her unspoken question. “I was in Shaw’s Crossing for a couple days. With Mace and Eric.”
That startled her. “For real? God, why on earth would you go back to that place?”
“A funeral,” he said. “My foster father, Otis Trask. He’s the one who took me and Mace and Eric in after the fire. He died last week. A stroke.” He paused. “So they say.”
