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“Shut up,” he hissed, shaking her so hard that she bit her tongue and cried out in pain. “I heard what you had to say, Maris. Every single word. Brave speech. I was impressed.
“But now let me tell you how it’s going to be. Our marriage has been and will remain on my terms. You don’t order me out of your life. You don’t order me to leave. I leave you only when I’m goddamn good and ready. I hope you understand that, Maris. Your life will be so much easier if you do.”
“You’re hurting me, Noah.”
He laughed at that. “I haven’t begun to hurt you yet.” To underscore his point, he squeezed her arm tightly, cruelly, his fingers mashing muscle against bone. Although tears of pain sprang to her eyes, she didn’t recoil.
“In the meantime, I’ll fuck Nadia, I’ll fuck whoever I want to, and I don’t care if you watch. But you’ll stay the obedient little wife, understand? Or I’ll make your life, and the lives of everyone dear to you, a living hell, Maris. I can, you know. I will.” His eyes glinted with an evil light as he leaned even closer and whispered, “I will. I promise you.”
Then he released her so suddenly she staggered and fell against the iron fence that enclosed trash receptacles, painfully banging her shoulder.
As he turned away from her and started back toward the brownstone he shared with Nadia, he called cheerfully, “Don’t wait up.”
Too stunned to move, Maris watched him go and continued to stare at the empty doorway long after he had disappeared inside. She wasn’t so afraid as dumbfounded. Incredulity kept her rooted to the concrete. Although her arm was throbbing and she could taste blood in her mouth, she couldn’t believe what had just happened. Noah? Threatening her? Physically threatening her with an icy calm that glazed his threats with certainty and made them terrifying?
She shivered then, violently and uncontrollably, her blood running cold with the sudden but unarguable realization that she was married to a total stranger. The man she thought she knew didn’t exist. Noah had assumed a role, that’s all. He had mimicked a character in a book because he knew she’d been infatuated with that character. He had played the part well, never stepping out of character. Not once. Until tonight.
She was jolted by the fact that just now, for the first time, she had been introduced to the real Noah Reed.
“Envy” Ch. 15
Key West, Florida, 1987
“Roark?”
He rubbed sleep from his eyes as he juggled the telephone receiver in the general direction of his ear. “Yeah?”
“Were you sleeping?”
It was four-thirty in the morning. He hadn’t gotten to bed until after three. The nightclub where he and Todd worked didn’t close until two. One of his responsibilities was to close out the registers, and he couldn’t do that until the last customer left. After writing all day, then putting in an eight-hour shift, he hadn’t merely been sleeping, he’d been comatose.
“W
ho is this?”
“Mary Catherine. I hate to bother you.”
He swung his legs over the side of the bed. His bare foot knocked over an empty drink can and it noisily rolled across the concrete floor toward Todd’s bed. He growled a protest into his pillow.
“What’s up?” Roark asked in a whisper.
“Can you come over?”
“Uh… now?”
The strip joint was only a few doors down from the nightclub for which he tended bar and Todd parked cars. Occasionally, during their breaks, they could catch their neighbors’ acts. He and Todd had come to know the girls well enough to be admitted gratis. A bouncer let them in through a rear entrance. They watched from backstage. Sometimes they went together, sometimes separately, and they were rarely able to stay longer than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, but those few minutes relieved the drudgery of their lives.
Their limited budgets had reduced dating to a bare minimum. Thankfully, the trio of exotic dancers had been “neighborly” to them in more ways than giving free peep shows.
One day Roark had volunteered to take Starlight’s car to a garage for an oil change and tune-up. What the mechanic did for the car’s engine was nothing compared to what Starlight did to Roark’s. As thank-yous went, Starlight beat Hallmark all to hell.
But this telephone call didn’t have the tone of a come-on, and, much to his regret, Mary Catherine had never shown any romantic interest in him. She’d treated him in a brotherly fashion, while she flirted shamelessly with Todd and had graced him with several sleepovers.
“Could you, Roark? Please? I’m here by myself and, well… I need a favor.”
His heart thumped with optimism. “Sure. Be right there.”
“Don’t mention it to Todd, okay?”
