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“You are going to be fun,” he says with a reckless, sexy grin. He’s hot. Hotter than any man I’ve ever dated. He’s like a rockstar crossed with a ruthless criminal. It’s a pity he’s clearly insane.
“Please, be reasonable.”
“Reasonable has never really been one of my strong suits,” he says. “Sorry about that.”
That was my mistake. I am asking someone who believes in angels and demons to be reasonable. He’s obviously not capable of that kind of thought. I am being abducted by a madman. What can one do under such circumstances?
I start screaming. I scream and I scream and I do not stop. He’s forced to pull the van over to deal with me or risk a ruptured ear drum.
“Okay. Okay. Christ!” He slaps a hand over my mouth and leans in toward me. He still smells really good, and up close his eyes are lit with the kind of sinful dark intensity that makes good girls wake up wondering what happened to them. “You have to settle down. I know this all sounds weird, but it’s true, and even if it wasn’t true, going off like a fucking fire alarm isn’t going to change anything. You get free of me and go to the police, I guarantee you someone shows up within a day with another ceremonial bleeding knife. You are on Fleisch’s radar now. Trust me when I tell you that I am the lesser of the evils.”
He lets go of my mouth. I start screaming again. Now that I have started, I am not completely sure I know how to stop. I have been terrified for the past three hours and I have barely peeped a word. Now it feels right to scream.
Cosmos slaps his hand across my mouth again.
“You’re sort of a slow learner, aren’t you. Don’t make me spank you.”
His words send a bolt of shock and excitement right through me. When he takes his hand away, I seem to have forgotten how to scream.
“Good girl,” he praises. I feel another bolt go through me, this one is hotter and cozier. Why do I care about his approval?
“Now,” he says. “I’m going to take you back to my hotel room, and you’re going to get cleaned up and changed into something that’s not pajamas and then we’re going to drive to England. It’s a ten-hour drive, so don’t wear anything fancy.”
He really assumes I am just going to go along with all of this.
I do seem to be going along with all of it, though. I sit quietly as he drives me to the hotel. It is a nice hotel. A five-star hotel. A hotel with a rear entrance that allows him to take me up so nobody sees a blood-stained woman. I wonder what other sins this back entrance has hidden over time.
“I will get a doctor to look at that wound,” he says. “You may need stitches.”
“I don’t like doctors. Or needles.”
“So you must have really not been fond of that knife, I imagine.”
“No,” I say.
By this time he has me in his suite. He doesn’t look like he belongs in a place like this, with clean carpet and expensive wallpaper. He looks like he should be in some back alley doing a photoshoot for Vogue. Every time I look at him, I feel butterflies erupt in my stomach.
“That wedding, that wasn’t real, was it? That’s just some kind of ritual to appease your idea of what God is?”
“That’s what all weddings are,” he says.
“Well, no, some are legally binding and come with obligations.”
He shrugs, as if the concept of the law doesn’t apply to him. I half believe that it might not. Since he rescued me, I have found myself inhabiting a twilight world of perfect strangeness. I’ve been wounded, and yet the wound hasn’t bothered me since he bandaged it. The adrenaline and the arousal has kept me from being bothered by little things like sliced flesh. I don’t know myself when I am in this man’s orbit, and that might be the most frightening thing about this entire ordeal. It’s not only that he is a stranger to me, it is that he seems to make me a stranger to myself.
“I’m ordering room service. What do you like to eat for breakfast?”
“I don’t eat breakfast.”
“You do from today.”
I don’t reply to that. I’m not having breakfast if I don’t want to. I do want a shower, though, and to get out of these disgusting blood and now semen-soaked clothes. I grab the clothes I packed in my bag and I go to the shower, locking the door behind me.
I should be at home, in my shower there, getting ready for work. Instead, I’m getting ready for a road trip with my abductor. I turn the shower on and wait for it to get hot, taking my bloody pajamas off. I’m working on a strange sort of auto-pilot. I don’t know how to mentally deal with being stabbed, but I do know how to take a shower.
