Glow (Glimmer and Glow #2) Page 4

  “Say it out loud, Alice,” he ordered tensely, holding her hips firmly.

  “I’ll never forget.”

  He plunged his cock into the heaven of her. Her whimper segued to a loud wail.

  “Oh God. I’ll never forget this. You. Never. Never,” she chanted as he began to drive in and out of her sleek body, and their mutual, volatile passion was broadcast like a blazing beacon onto the dark window.

  HE saw the light and the figures and immediately plunged into the hedge to hide himself, alarmed he’d be seen. Cautiously, he looked again. A sweat broke out on his brow and neck. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  Thad Schaefer didn’t want to believe it, but he couldn’t look away nonetheless. It was something no man should ever be forced to witness: the woman of his dreams being utterly sexually consumed by another man.

  Damn Fall.

  He’d been ordered here for a specific purpose. It’d never been his mission, but hadn’t life proved to Thad so far that he’d always be at the mercy and bidding of someone else? Although he’d been labeled a natural born leader on many occasions, the truth was he’d been bred into the role of follower. Not the follower of just anyone. He performed optimally when the disapproval or approval of a single alpha male was at stake, all thanks to his damn father—the original alpha.

  Thad couldn’t complete his assigned task if he left, no matter how much part of him longed to run until he collapsed from exhaustion. Another part of him couldn’t have walked away even if he’d used every ounce of his will.

  He’d known what Alice was doing at the castle night after night with Dylan Fall. But he hadn’t guessed this. It was one thing to experience the simmer of jealousy at the thought of Alice in another man’s bed. But what he was watching at the present moment flayed him down to the bone.

  Her naked body rocked and shuddered as Fall took her from behind, her breasts bouncing at the crash of flesh against flesh. Fall’s possession wasn’t violent, but it was forceful. Precise. Total.

  To think you ever thought you had a fucking chance.

  Her arms were suspended above her head on the frame between the two windows, but he could see the majority of her naked body through the glass. The skin over her ribs was stretched tight, her breasts a full, succulent contrast to her slender carriage. She was amazing; beyond even what he’d fantasized. But it wasn’t just her exposed body that held him spellbound. It was what he could see displayed on Alice’s face: the pure unadulterated lust and abandonment to the eroticism of the moment.

  He thought he saw her wince as Fall became even more demanding. Thad started impulsively, nearly spilling forward onto the stone path and breaking his cover. Was Fall hurting her? He stilled, holding his breath, a snarl shaping his mouth.

  No. His worries were for nothing. Alice reached between her thighs, still bracing herself with one hand, seeking the relief of release from intense pleasure, not pain.

  No sooner had she buried her fingers between her thighs than Fall was grabbing her wrist and putting her hand back on the frame. Bastard, Thad thought, although his scorn didn’t begin to fracture his focus on the unfolding scene.

  Then Fall’s hand was between her thighs, and he was thrusting powerfully again. A strange combination of respect and flaming jealousy tore through Thad. Fall had wanted to be the one to make her climax. Or he’d been worried about her getting hurt if she didn’t support her body adequately, as hard as he was taking her.

  Or both, Thad acknowledged with a sinking feeling. It was bizarre and unprecedented for him to feel both sick and sharply aroused at once. Leave it to Alice.

  Leave it to Fall, he thought bitterly. Why couldn’t Alice see how he was controlling her with his allure of power, money, and sex? He’d been learning a lot about Fall’s ruthlessness. His skill at manipulation. Everyone in the business community knew he was used to getting precisely what he wanted. Previously, Thad had respected that characteristic . . . until he’d understood Fall had set his sights on Alice Reed.

  Fall’s hand moved faster between her thighs, and Alice tilted her head to the side. Thad could almost feel her peaking arousal. The night was pitch dark. Deep cloud cover remained after the storm, obliterating starlight. He could see the erotic tableau with surprising clarity in the lit large bay window. Alice’s eyes were shut, as if her entire consciousness had narrowed down to the sensation of Fall taking her by storm. Even at this distance, Thad sensed her focus was absolute. In mixed dread and fascination, he watched as her lush lips parted and her face went tight.

  Distantly, he heard her high keen of pleasure.

  The sound was like a sharp screw twisting straight through flesh and bone to his very core. Thad wasn’t sure how he survived that novel, distilled form of torture. But he stayed.

  Until the bitter end.

  HE was rocking her so hard, slaking his lust on her, pounding his essence into her deep. Alice wanted it. She loved it. At the same time, it was almost too much pleasure and emotion for her to withstand. It hurt in a way that was beyond pain, such a sweet, unbearable agony. She reached with one hand between her thighs, desperate to end it.

  “Your job is to keep yourself steady,” she heard him rasp. Her eyelids sprung open. Both her palms pressed against the solid frame again. He removed his hand from her wrist and slid it down her belly between her thighs. His cock jumped inside her. She whimpered, arousal cutting at her, as he rubbed her lubricated clit.

  “It’s mine to give you pleasure,” he added hotly near her ear as she crested.

  “Oh God,” she moaned.

  He thrust again. She turned her head to the side, the tense friction mounting with his hand and his pounding cock forcing a high cry from her throat. She climaxed, her raw emotional state and Dylan’s effect on her too powerful to suppress. She quaked as he continued to take her hard, hearing his tense erotic praise as if from a distance.

  As she quieted, he slid his hands over her belly and ribs, firmly grasping her breasts in his hands. He slowed some in his possession of her. He molded her flesh to his palms. She sagged slightly against the wood frame, panting.

  “I told you to watch in the window, Alice,” he said, his voice low, a rough threat that both aroused and soothed somehow. “I told you I wanted you to remember.”

  She opened her eyes sluggishly, turning her head, seeking his image in the glass. His eyes were as black as the night outside the window. Still . . . she made out the glitter of lust in them, the spark of feral possession. His stance—one long leg planted on the floor, the other one bent, his foot on the bench next to her knees, only added to his aura of stark dominance.

  “Tense your arms. Hold steady,” he said quietly, molding her breasts to his palms, his fingertips gliding over her rigid nipples, pinching them lightly, before he slid his hands to her hips. He waited until she’d firmed her sagging muscles, bracing herself for him. She couldn’t take her eyes off him as he began to fuck her again. He owned her in those moments, perhaps more than her past did. Her present.

  Maybe even her future.

  ALICE felt wrung out by the time Dylan turned out the chandelier in the room and closed the door behind them. His luxurious, mussed bed was a familiar delight, his weight next to her sublime. Sex with Dylan had that effect on her. Afterward, she was usually too sated and exhausted to think.

  Or so she’d thought. The past few days had changed her expectations about herself, even about the most basic workings of her mind and body.

  A thought kept squirming around in her brain, preventing her from succumbing to sleep.

  “Dylan?” she mumbled, her lips brushing against his hard chest.

  “Yeah, baby,” he replied drowsily, his fingers moving against her scalp. She loved the sound of his deep rough voice in the darkness.

  “What about the gong?”

  His fingers stilled. When he didn’t reply immediately, she elaborated. “There really was a gong, wasn’t there? Once? I’ve been meaning to ask you. Did Addie Durand
play with it or something? You know . . . when she lived here?”

  She referred to an incident that had occurred when she’d first come to Castle Durand with the rest of the Durand managers and counselors for a dinner party. Alice had left the rest of the group upon hearing a gong struck, walking alone through the large ornate home. The sweet, mysterious note had drawn her unerringly. Dylan had found her in the dining room. At first, Dylan had insisted she couldn’t have heard a gong sounding, furthering Alice’s humiliation at being caught wandering around his house alone. Later he’d made up a story about his cook, Marie, being responsible for the mysterious sound. A few days ago Alice had discovered his lie about the gong and confronted him with it, which had eventually led to Dylan telling her the truth about Addie Durand.

  “Yes. There really is a gong, but no one has struck it in a very long time,” he said quietly after a pause. “Alan found it at an antique store once while he was on business in China and gave it to Lynn as a gift. Addie liked some of the unusual items he’d bring home from his trips—”

  “Like the knight knocker,” Alice said, her voice just above a whisper.

  Dylan lifted his hand and then plunged it back into her hair, rubbing her scalp. “Like the knight knocker,” he agreed, both of them referring to the unique brass doorknocker on the entryway door to Castle Durand. “He brought the knocker from a trip to Scotland, when Addie was three years old. Addie took a liking to it because of some of the fairy tales about knights Lynn and Alan read her. But the gong?” he asked quietly, his fingers against her scalp creating a drugging effect. “You can’t guess what it meant to Addie?”

  “I have no idea,” she insisted. She fastened on another topic that had been bothering her. “Dylan . . . are you sure that there wasn’t any truth to Matt’s ghost story at the campfire tonight? Are you sure Lynn Durand wasn’t there when Addie was taken?”

  She tensed when she felt him sit up slightly in bed. “I’ve told you what happened that day. I was the only one with Addie when she was taken in those woods. Why?”

  She hesitated. She shouldn’t have brought it up, but her curiosity had gotten the best of her. “It’s nothing. I just . . . I had a bad dream tonight. It was different than ones I’ve had before, though. Maybe it was just a nightmare.”

  He waited intently. She sighed, knowing he expected to hear the details.

  “In it, a woman who looked like Lynn Durand was telling Addie to run and hide. She looked kind of banged up, and there was . . . blood on her.” She twisted her chin over her shoulder when Dylan didn’t immediately respond. He cupped her hip.

  “It was just a dream,” he said quietly. “That story by the bonfire got to you tonight. Given everything you’re going through, that’s not too shocking. But I assure you, the story that kid was telling is an urban legend, a ghost story that’s been built up and embroidered until only the tiniest part of reality remains. I’ve asked Kehoe to try to quash the telling of that story, but it always seems to resurface, usually with some sensationalized new twist to it. But what I told you is what actually happened,” he said steadfastly. “What you had was definitely just a nightmare. Addie never saw Lynn like that. Never. Okay?”

  “Okay. Night,” she said softly after a pause. His mouth covered hers in a brief, hot kiss. She twisted back around and held her breath. Thankfully Dylan remained silent. Still, she sensed his sharp attention on her. He didn’t entirely believe that she wasn’t remembering other things.

  Or that she was “fine.”

  He should believe her. Alice only had a few ephemeral snatches of memory that seemed to relate to Dylan’s story about Addie Durand. Those snippets didn’t really feel like personal memories at all. It was more like she’d undergone some science-fiction surgical technique for having another person’s memories stitched into her brain. That handful of tiny, jagged bits of memory created a jarring contrast to the billions of other Alice recollections she’d accumulated through the past two decades of her life.

  Sometimes, she felt like a computer that had downloaded a virus. What would happen if those fragments of another’s person’s mind—of another person’s world—began multiplying and expanding inside her?

  Would Alice Reed disappear altogether?

  The thought terrified her in the most primitive way, a way she couldn’t convey to Dylan. It was hard to put it into words.

  And there was an elusive feeling that kept mounting in her. A suspicion rose in her that if she tried to communicate to Dylan what that amorphous feeling was, it might take shape and solidify even further.

  Maybe the feeling would become tangible memory?

  Leave it in the dark.

  Addie Durand and Alice may have been joined once, but the rift was complete. They were two separate people now. Alice was a mathematician, after all. Numbers cleaved, they carved out clear-cut, rational, predictable realities. That was how Alice Reed saw the world. She was overreacting in regard to her fear.

  Of course you can discover a few interesting facts about Addie Durand without losing Alice. Don’t be so nutballs about this.

  Feeling relieved by her self-scolding, she allowed her heavy eyelids to drop. She sent up a silent prayer for dreamless sleep.

  UNFORTUNATELY, a sound night’s sleep was just not in the cards for Alice or Dylan that night.

  She startled awake at the jarring sound of a loud, high-pitched alarm. Before she could utter a single stunned syllable, she felt Dylan leap out of bed.

  “Dylan, what the hell—”

  “Stay right there. I mean it, Alice, do as I say for once,” he growled tensely. She gasped in disbelief. Did the man have night vision? How else had he known that she was untangling her legs from the sheet in order to jump up and follow him? She thought she heard him moving in the room in the fractions of the seconds between the swelling shrieks of the alarm.

  She blinked when the bedside light switched on. She squinted at the vision of Dylan standing next to the bed. He’d pulled on a pair of dark gray pajama bottoms with stunning speed. His face and torso looked tense and hard as he handed her the phone.

  “I want you to get up and lock the door after I leave.”

  “But—”

  “There’s someone in the house, Alice. If you don’t do exactly what I say, I swear I’ll—”

  “All right, all right,” she said in a beleaguered fashion, convinced by his snarling intensity. She threw back the sheet.

  He started toward the wood-paneled door. “Call nine-one-one as soon as you lock the door after me,” he said over his shoulder. “The police should be on their way since the alarm was triggered, but see if you can have them inform the officers that I’m downstairs in the house. I don’t want to be accidentally mistaken for the intruder by the police.”

  The reality behind his words penetrated. What if the police shot Dylan? What if the burglar did?

  “Dylan, wait, no—”

  “I can take care of myself,” he said, pausing briefly with his hand on the doorknob. “Now lock this door and stay in this room until I come to get you. I’ll be distracted if you don’t do exactly what I asked you to do. Alice.” He said her name like an ominous warning. She realized he saw her defiance stamped on her face. The heavy crease of worry on his brow and his fierce glare nudged at her.

  She nodded in agreement. He disappeared.

  She knew what he said was true, even if it didn’t calm her any. Dylan had grown up on the streets. He was no stranger to confrontation or violence. He was no fool. She didn’t want to be responsible for him worrying about her safety, distracting him, while he investigated the potential break-in.

  She hurried to the heavy carved door and locked it. A few minutes after she’d called nine-one-one and yanked on her robe, she heard approaching sirens mixing with the screeching alarm. She jogged to the window and pulled back the curtains, her nerves crackling in anxiety. Over the top of the long, steep road leading to the castle, she saw the pulsing reflection of red lights against the opa
que night sky. Not three seconds later, two police cars topped the rise and zoomed onto the circular turnabout in front of the entrance, their sirens wailing. Alice saw one cop get out and run around the house while the other—a big man—approached the front door. Straining her ears, she thought she heard the sound of banging, and then distant male voices.

  The teeth-grinding wail of the security alarm abruptly ceased. A heavy, suffocating silence followed. Remembering her promise to Dylan and feeling like a trapped animal, Alice hurried to the locked door, pressing her ear to the wood, desperate for signs of what was happening below.

  After a tense minute of hearing only her own pounding heartbeat, her few remaining threads of control snapped. She jogged to Dylan’s walk-in closet. Flinging open the door, she found the light. The room was illuminated fully to her eyes for the first time—and it was a room not a closet, at least in Alice’s limited experience with luxury. She sought among immaculately organized cedar shelves and what seemed like hundreds of hung suits and tuxedos. Her gaze latched on a potential target.

  Several seconds later, she padded silently on bare feet down the enormous, curving grand staircase, a golf club gripped in both hands.

  THREE

  Dylan conferred quietly with Jim Sheridan, the sheriff of Morgantown, in his den. Alex Peterson, one of Jim’s deputies, was still doing a cursory check of the house and grounds. Jim was convinced it’d been a false alarm, however. Every point of entry was intact, and everything appeared to be in order.

  Jim was an old friend, despite the disparity of their ages. He was in his late fifties while Dylan was thirty-four. Jim had been the sheriff back when Addie Durand had been taken. Under those stressful and nightmarish weeks and months that followed, Dylan had gotten to know Jim quicker and more completely than most people become familiar in years.

  Jim Sheridan had been an all-state linebacker back in his high school days and still had the heft of one—more so, now that the years and his love of the food at the local diner had put sixty pounds on a once lean frame. Jim wore both the experience and the extra weight well. He possessed a friendly, craggy face and a down-to-earth warmth that might initially fool some into thinking he was just a good-old-boy small-town pushover with a badge. Others might be tricked into thinking it was his physical stature that earned Jim so much respect around Morgantown, but Dylan and those closest to the sheriff knew differently. The fact of the matter was, hidden beneath that amiable quick grin and the fading glory of a high school football star, Jim Sheridan was a shrewd observer and a damn good cop.