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“I’m going to get fat.”
He laughed. “Not with all the work you’ll be doing here.”
She picked up the burger and took a small bite. He gave her a disappointed look, not impressed with the effort.
“You weren’t free there,” he said. “You had to work for money to pay your bills to live. Working wasn’t an option you did just because you liked it. You were a wage slave. Just because it’s packaged up like free will doesn’t mean it’s the recipe for happiness. What about your debt?”
“What about it?”
“How much do you owe?”
“Close to two hundred thousand,” she mumbled.
He let out a low whistle. “Damn, woman. In some parts of the country, that’s a house.”
“I know.”
“Well, you’re free of that for now. I mean, I’m not about to call them up and say I have you.”
Veronica looked up slowly from her plate as the realization that the crushing debt that had weighed on her couldn’t be collected if they couldn’t find her. Freedom. Or freedom after a fashion, yet somehow this seemed like a robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul scenario.
“You don’t have bills here. I’m not going to fire you. If you disobey me or I’m dissatisfied with your work, I’ll just punish you, but you’ll have a place to sleep and you won’t ever go hungry.”
She hated the nonchalant way he spoke of punishing her, the way he continually reiterated the dynamics and power structure of their relationship. But it wasn’t enough for him to stop there.
“I rescued you. And very soon you’re going to show me how grateful you are for it.”
She crossed her legs, trying to push away the arousal his words created, spoken in that rumbling, gravelly tone. She’d meant to fight him more, but it had been so much easier to distract herself with the list of things he’d given her to do. But she’d pushed that out of her mind almost as soon as she’d seen it, as if she were forcing her brain to reboot. It was less scary to just cook the meals and do the laundry so when he came back to the house he didn’t take his belt off.
That thinking made her sound like a battered wife, but so far he hadn’t lashed out for no reason. Maybe he wasn’t that crazy. She startled when his hand moved under her skirt, stroking her thigh. The words he’d spoken still hung in her mind. She’d wanted to be the girl who fought and clawed and screamed, the girl she’d thought she was that day in the diner when she’d acted as if he were some country bumpkin beneath her notice.
If things had been different, if she were still that Big Deal ad executive with a penthouse without a drop of debt, she would have fought harder, but he was right. There was nothing to fight to get back to. The only real fear was that he might kill her or harm her, but God help her, she believed his story about the previous woman. Veronica didn’t even care that he’d taken her to fulfill the deluded fantasy of bringing the woman he’d loved back to life. All she cared about was that she didn’t have creditors hounding her and the fear of homelessness hanging over her head.
She knew that one way or another, her body would be forfeit to someone, better Luke than random nasty men driving pastthosestreet corners.
“Okay. I’ll do what you want.”
He laughed. “That was never in question, princess. The only question was would it be the easy way or the hard way? I’ve broken horses. I have never ending patience with women.”
After dinner, he took her into the living room. “Sit.”
She picked a spot on the sofa and sat, unsure of what was coming next. She’d assumed they’d be going to bed soon. She wasn’t sure if she’d be joining him or not. The idea tied her stomach in knots.
“I want to show you something.” He pulled out a box with some old VHS tapes. Veronica hadn’t seen anything but DVDs in years. It was an anachronism as if she’d fallen through a hole and had been transported back to the eighties.
From the couch, she could see that they had the labels on them that meant they weren’t commercial videos bought from the store, but either things recorded off the TV or home movies. He thumbed through them and pulled one out and popped it into the VCR.
He went to sit on the stairs where he had a good view of Veronica, but none of the TV.
“Aren’t you going to watch?” she asked, still not sure what she was about to see.
“No. I can’t watch it. I need to watch you watching it.”
He stood for a moment to flip the overhead lights on. Before, the room had been lit only by a dim floor lamp. He tossed her the remote.
“Push play and don’t take your eyes from that screen, no matter what you see.”
Okay, now he was starting to scare her. It hadn’t occurred to her that giving in and saying she’d do what he wanted might speed up whatever his plan was. While he might not kill her, whatever he would do might have taken longer to work up to if she could have managed the will to fight him more, but a part of her had been afraid he’d get tired of her attitude and toss her out. It would be like biting the hand that was feeding her. The very idea that she didn’t want her kidnapper to throw her out where she’d be subject to the whims of the elements was enough to make her stomach turn over.
