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“That’s the way I feel right now. Dead.”
“Anyone would in your situation.”
He glanced at her, then turned toward her. She stood completely naked. He reached for a second towel and brought it to her. “What are you saying, Angelica? Because what I’m getting from the chain makes no sense to me.”
“We have to do this, Reyes.”
He shook his head. “No. We don’t. I’ve changed my mind completely.”
She moved closer to him. “I had some time to think while I soaked in the tub, about you and what you’ve been trying to achieve. And earlier, I felt the level of your relief, when the slave from that club went through the door and crossed your threshold, moving from slavery to freedom, because you know what that feels like.” She held his gaze. “I don’t, not really, except for what I can experience through you. I don’t want to diminish how hard this would be for me, but I do want to move it out of the ‘unacceptable’ category and into ‘shit that must be done in order to achieve the impossible.’ ”
He shook his head, a frown forming on his brow.
Putting her hands on his shoulders, she said, “What you’re doing here, Reyes, no one else would dream of doing, of infiltrating the Starlin Group in order to destroy it. That doesn’t even make sense by any kind of logic, except that sometime in the next twenty-four hours a young Russian woman, torn from her life, will be dead, just like hundreds of thousands of others who have perished, maybe even millions. And all I have to do to help you try to stop it is let you tie me down and make love to me in front of the head of Starlin, the man you’ve been trying to get to for decades. From that perspective, Reyes, it seems like a small sacrifice.”
He grimaced. “You don’t really know what this would be like.”
“Actually, I take issue with that.” She drew in a deep breath, wanting her next words to carry weight, a sense of her resolve. “If we did this right, it would be just you and me. I think we could block out our audience and engage in what I’ve been wanting to do with you from the beginning.”
His eyes widened. “You’re actually serious.”
“On every count.”
He turned away from her, forcing her hands to fall away. “Shit. You almost tempt me, but you still don’t understand.”
“Then make me understand.” Again she moved close to him.
He whirled on her. “I don’t want Engles to see you like that.”
She shrugged. “He’s already seen most of me. I did bend over your lap earlier in order to distract him with an eyeful of my ass.”
At that Reyes’s lips curved, but he quickly closed his eyes and suppressed his sudden amusement. “You’re missing the point. I don’t want him to see you aroused, to watch you experiencing pleasure. That’s for me.”
Her heart missed a beat or two. She loved this unexpected admission that he saw her as belonging to him, that he cared about her.
“There’s just one thing I want first,” she said.
“And what’s that?” She felt his sadness like a stone he carried around in his heart. She wanted to smash that stone.
She slid her arms around his waist and held him but kept her gaze pinned to his. “I want you to make love to me first, before we do anything else or make any more decisions about how to move forward. No matter what happens, I want our first time together to be just you and me.”
He stared at her as though stunned. “You want to make love with me?”
“More than anything.”
He frowned as he slid a hand through her damp hair, easing his fingers through. “You amaze me. I hardly know what to say. I suppose more than anything I’d expected you to be freaking out; instead it was me.”
She felt nervous suddenly. She had to tell him about the vision. “There’s something else, Reyes.”
“What is it? Because my blood-chain is telling me you’re really upset when you weren’t before, not even about performing a sex show in front of Engles. What the hell is it? What are you holding back?”
She felt Reyes’s answering panic as though on some level he must have known. “I want a drink first.”
She released him and moved past him to the closet. He followed the moment the chains tugged on her neck. She grabbed a dark-green silk robe and wrapped herself up, then led him to the sitting room.
Grabbing two tumblers from the silver tray, she poured out his Bowmore, two fingers for each of them.
Turning back to him, she handed him a glass, then sipped her own. The whiskey burned and might not have been the best thing to put on top of the wine, but this seemed necessary.
She met and held his gaze but didn’t know how to tell him what she knew.
His nostrils flared. “It’s the vision, isn’t it? The one you had back in Engles’s library. You said it involved him.”
“It did. Oh, God.”
###
Reyes had a premonition that what he was about to hear would change things for him forever. Quietly he asked, “So, what did you see?”
She closed her eyes and drank deeply from her tumbler but came up sputtering. She dabbed at her lips with her fingers, then set the glass on the nearby end table.
Taking a deep breath, she began, “Do you remember how you told me you felt odd about Engles’s home, that you knew you’d never been there, but felt like you had, sort of a powerful déjà vu?”
He nodded slowly. He didn’t like where this was headed.
“Well, if what I saw was real, and I have no reason to doubt it, then I think Engles had taken us both into the older part of that cavern because you’d been in that space before and, by my estimation, many times.”
His gaze moved slowly around different objects in his sitting room, the sofa and matching brown leather club chairs, the painting of his Venezuelan home, the carafe that held his Bowmore, a stack of books on the table between the chairs. He never stopped studying, reading, learning. When Sweet Dove hadn’t been chaining him up he’d kept filling his mind.
Sweet Dove, always Sweet Dove.
“She was there, wasn’t she? My captor.”
“Yes.”
He held Angelica’s gaze. “Tell me everything. Tell me exactly what you saw.”
Angelica straightened her shoulders, then recounted the vision, dwelling especially on the unusual waterfall as the definitive marker.
Sweet Dove and Engles. They’d known each other all those years ago. Engles had apparently owned Sweet Dove at one time or had found a woman with his proclivities and had trained her.
