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He opened his mouth to say something else but I cut him off with a sharp flick of my hand. ‘I can’t, okay? I just . . . can’t.’
Dornan didn’t argue. He went to my suitcase at the end of the bed and unzipped it, my skin crawling as I remembered the baby suitcase. I shook my head to try and get rid of the memory, my neck screaming in protest. I watched as Dornan lifted a grey knee-length dress and a blue scarf from the bag, bringing them over to me.
Dornan basically dressed me in the new dress, as if I were a child. He sat beside me and watched silently as I applied heavy foundation to my bruised neck before working on my face. I was red and blue from my wrists to my head, and although I tried my best, when I was done I still looked like shit. I needed a shower and about three weeks at home, where nobody could see me.
John. What was he going to say when he saw this?
‘You should have told me about your family,’ Dornan said, shame burning in his eyes.
I shook my head, resisting the overwhelming urge to roll my eyes. ‘How long are we staying in Vegas?’ I asked him.
He shrugged, standing up so that he was in front of me. ‘How long do you want to stay?’
Oh, yeah, almost get killed, and now I get to decide how long we were staying.
Suddenly I felt like a little girl. Not a happy one. I felt powerless. Scared. Exhausted. ‘I want a shower and some food and I want to go home,’ I whispered. ‘Can we please just go home?’
Dornan stared down at me for a long moment before nodding. ‘Yeah,’ he said, and I wondered what was going through his head at that moment. The phone was seemingly forgotten, the urge to murder me on hiatus for the time being. He looked remorseful. I didn’t care.
He picked up the room service menu and handed it to me. ‘Whatever you want,’ he said.
How generous of you, I wanted to snap, but I bit my tongue, taking the menu silently. ‘I think I’ll shower first,’ I said, putting the menu to the side and sliding off the bed, the room spinning as I straightened on my feet. Dornan put his hands out to steady me, and I looked at them like they were cockroaches on me. I pushed him off, making my way into the bathroom with him hot on my heels. Guess he didn’t want me to lock myself in here again.
Without speaking – I was still coughing – I turned around, motioning to the zipper in the back of my dress. The room spun around me like a vortex of patterned tile and dark green wallpaper. And him.
Dornan unzipped me and I let the stupid dress fall to the floor, vowing to burn the fucking thing as soon as we were back home. I didn’t want any lasting reminders of this trip. I’d have to find a way to lose the ring, too. Maybe I’d cut my finger off in a ‘freak’ accident in the kitchen. I could live just fine with nine fingers, right?
I wrapped my arms around myself and waited, staring at the wall, as Dornan turned on the shower and adjusted the temperature. He held out a hand to help me in, but I side-stepped it, practically hugging the tiled wall as I inched under the hot water. Avoiding any eye contact, I shuffled to the far corner of the shower, as far away from him as I could get, and slid down the wall, sitting underneath the high-pressure shower head with my knees drawn up to my chest. I covered my face with my hands, parting my fingers slowly so I knew where Dornan was. Because, more than the fact that I couldn’t trust him, I could also no longer even try to predict what he was about to do next.
I peered at him through a river of mascara and my webbed fingers and saw his erection clearly bulging from his jeans. I wondered how it could be that a man could find such erotic thoughts while looking at the woman he’d almost just killed, as she sat naked in the bottom of a shower and wept.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MARIANA
I didn’t even know what time it was. I’d showered, wrapped myself in a fluffy robe, and come back out to the bed, where I now sat. My stomach was empty and growling for food.
‘I’ll order us some food,’ Dornan said. To go from such violence to total normality in such a short span of time was frightening, but a relief all the same. I’d almost died just now by Dornan’s hand – literally, his hand around my throat, cutting off my oxygen – and it was time to form some kind of escape plan.
An immediate one.
First, though, I had to survive the here and now. My stomach grumbled insistently, so loud that Dornan heard it. ‘You want eggs?’ he asked. What a fucking gentleman, this guy. A whirlwind (forced) wedding in Vegas, almost murdering me, and now he was offering to get me eggs.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, waving my hand dismissively. ‘You go shower. I’ll order for us. What do you want?’
‘Surprise me,’ he said, and I cringed. Surprises were bad. I didn’t ever want another surprise in my life again.
I waited until the shower was running and grabbed the room service menu. I did briefly contemplate the idea of running while Dornan showered, but it would’ve been for nothing. I had no money, no ID, I was an illegal immigrant, and I didn’t know Vegas. I could call John, sure, once I found a pay phone somewhere, but he’d get caught. We both would. The grip of the cartel was just too powerful.
I decided to stay in the room and avoid having to think about any of this for at least another twenty-four hours. I settled on what I wanted to order – eggs and bacon for me, eggs and steak for Dornan – and was about to pick up the phone when the fucking thing rang so loudly, I almost fell on the floor. I answered the phone as Dornan poked his head out of the bathroom door, a towel around his waist and dripping water everywhere.
‘Who is it?’ he asked.
‘It’s room service,’ a familiar male voice on the other end said.
‘It’s room service,’ I parroted back to Dornan. Oh, shit. I knew that voice. Velvet-smooth and cunning. Somebody who was looking for Murphy.
‘Act normally,’ said FBI Agent Lindsay Price. ‘You’re going to meet me downstairs in one hour, do you understand? Say yes so Dornan hears.’
