Cason
No dinner, thanks to Lily and that asshole Nate. He needs to stay the fuck away from me or risk me sending him off to his maker like I did Creighton.
Stripping out of my clothes, I toss them on the floor in the bathroom along with my blood-stained jacket and kick my socks and boots into the corner. Maybe a shower will make me feel better.
Ten minutes under the scalding hot water and I can at least think straight again. I hate that walking in on those two made me so crazy. Why shouldn’t I be happy that she’s bothering someone else with all her useless chatter?
It’s that Nate shithead. He’s the problem. I don’t give a fuck about who she talks to, but just having him in my space pisses me off. He needs to go back to wherever he and the rest of the security guys spend their time and leave us alone.
She’s a hostage, for Christ’s sake. It’s not like it’s supposed to be a vacation at fucking Club Med for her this week.
Maybe I should call my father and tell him we need to return to my place. I can keep her tied up for the next six days and be sure she stays out of trouble.
As I rinse the shampoo out of my hair, I remember why staying there was a problem in the first place. She already tried to get that woman on the second floor to call the cops. She’ll try again if I take her back there.
Fuck. So we’ll have to stay here, unless I can take her back to the estate and give her to Victor. Then she’d be out of my hair and out of my life for good.
Pushing my wet hair back off my face, I tilt my head to crack my neck. He doesn’t want her at the estate. She’d only cause problems there, too.
I lean against the white marble shower wall and sigh as the smoothness of the tile presses against my back. We’ll have to stay here. Fine. But if that’s the case, Nate has to go back to where he belongs. I don’t need to have to watch out for two people for the next week.
I don’t trust him. That jackass being around might end up with him thinking he can score points by doing something with her. The two of them together spell nothing but trouble. I feel it in my gut.
Turning off the water, I step out of the glass shower enclosure and look straight ahead at the mirror, but it’s covered from the steam. I grab a towel and wrap it around my hips before leaning forward to wipe my hand across the mirror to clear it. It’s a strange action since I already know what I look like. It’s not like I’ve forgotten since the last time I checked myself out in a mirror.
“Cason?”
I turn to see Lily standing near the doorway to the bathroom staring in at me like I’m some kind of zoo animal on display she’s never encountered before. Her dark eyes are wide like saucers, and her mouth is hanging open.
“What?” I answer, not sure if I should be bothered by how shocked she looks right now.
“I was calling your name. I didn’t realize you were in the shower. I didn’t mean to bother you,” she explains and then looks down at the floor.
“What do you want?” I ask as I push past her into the bedroom.
When she doesn’t answer me, I repeat myself. “Did you come up here for any particular reason or just to see me getting out of the shower? What do you want?”
She lifts her head but avoids meeting my gaze. “I wanted to tell you I fixed everything and dinner’s ready. It’s waiting for you in the kitchen.”
“Good. I’ll be down in a minute.”
“Okay. I won’t bother you while you’re eating. I’ll stay in my room.”
Lily makes a move to leave, but I grab her arm, my wet hand catching on her soft skin. “Nope. You’ll be there, too. But not good old Nate, so if he’s still around, tell him to go back where he belongs.”
After a few seconds of hesitation, she says quietly, still not looking me in the eye, “Why do you want me there when you eat?”
“Because you’re my hostage, and I need to keep an eye on you.”
Finally, she looks up and I see the confusion written all over her face. “And Nate? What’s wrong with him staying? He doesn’t seem to have a problem with my talking as much as I do, so he’d probably be a good person to keep around if you don’t want to have to deal with all my senseless gibberish.”
“I’ll decide what I want to do with your gibberish. Just make sure he’s gone before I get downstairs.”
As I let go of her arm, she shrugs like all of this means nothing to her, but I know she’s still confused. To be honest, I don’t know why I want her around. She can’t escape the property, and her talking does get on my nerves. After the day I’ve had, I don’t want to think too deeply about anything, though, so whatever the reason is to keep her close, I’ll figure it out some other time.
“Okay. I’ll tell him to go.”
We stand there silently looking at one another, and I wonder why she isn’t leaving. Then it dawns on me. I just told her she’s my hostage. She thinks she needs to wait for me to tell her to leave.
I grab hold of the knot in the towel near my right hip and smile. “Unless you want to see me as God made me, you can go.”
Her eyes grow wide after a moment, and then her gaze zeroes in on where my hand rests as my meaning becomes clear. A deep pink blush instantly covers her cheeks, and she shakes her head, embarrassed.
“Oh, okay. I better go.”
As I watch her scurry away into the hallway, I can’t deny she’s much cuter when she’s like this. Not as difficult and definitely cuter.
At least my cock thinks so.
Lily waits at the kitchen island where she and jackass were sitting when I came back from the job. Thankfully, Nate is nowhere to be found, so I can eat in peace.
Well, relative peace. Even though she’s silent as I eat my first forkful of spaghetti, I know that won’t last for long.
As if she can read my mind, a second after my thinking how nice the quiet is, she starts in with the questions. I swear it’s like a disease with her.
“Do you know that some people cut their spaghetti instead of twisting it like that?” she asks like it’s the most interesting goddamned fact she’s ever learned.
I stare at her for a moment, unsure if I want to encourage this conversation, but then I nod as I begin twisting my spaghetti around my fork for a second time. “They sound like animals if you ask me, but I guess it takes all kinds.”
Her shoulders sag like my answer in some way deflates her. She returns to being silent for another few minutes and then brightens up to ask me yet something else.
“Do you like it? The spaghetti and sauce, I mean.”
The food’s not bad. I probably have had better pasta meals, but she is a good cook like she claimed earlier today. I look up and see her dark eyes full of hope staring at me as she waits for my answer to her question, and for the first time, I don’t want to be cruel to her.
“It’s very good. Thanks.”
And with just those four simple words, her face lights up. “I’m so happy you like it. I wasn’t sure if you were a sweet sauce person or a more bitter kind, so I tried to walk a line right between them. My mother always loved very sweet sauce. My father says every time I make mine that it needs more sugar. I guess I tend toward the more bitter kind.”
I watch as her emotions dart from happy to worry in a flash as soon as she mentions her father. Her eyebrows draw in toward her nose, making her look like at any moment she’s going to cry.
Although it’s not my nature at all to be nice to anyone, that expression on her face makes something inside me want to do whatever I have to so it will go away. It’s a strange feeling I don’t exactly know what to do with, so I stuff more spaghetti into my mouth and wait for the next thing she says.
And when she speaks, her words barely reach a whisper, like she can’t bring herself to say them any louder.
“Have you heard anything from your boss about my father paying him the money yet?”
Only someone so completely innocent about the world could even think of asking that question. Her father asked for a week or two because it’s going to take him at least that long to raise the money. He didn’t just pick a number out of thin air.
I shake my head but don’t answer because she doesn’t want to hear the truth. Or maybe she does and I don’t want to be the one who has to tell it to her right at this moment after I’ve finished a plate of spaghetti and for the first time today I don’t feel like shit.
“Would you tell me if you did?” she asks.
It seems like an odd question. Why wouldn’t I tell her if her father paid off his debt?
“Yeah. Why not?”
Shaking her head, she gets that expression again that makes her look like she’s about to burst into tears. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about this kind of thing. I’ve never been taken away from my home, tied up, and kept hostage, Cason. I don’t know how to act to make sure you don’t kill me for doing something wrong or saying something stupid. Well, I guess that’s obvious, isn’t it?”
I push my plate away from me and take a step back from the island. “I’m not going to kill you for doing or saying something stupid, Lily.”
For a moment, I silently congratulate myself on being kinder than I usually am, but she can’t let that be. She needs more.
“But you are going to kill me, aren’t you?”
Christ. Why can’t she just let that be something that stays unspoken?
“Not if your father pays back the money he owes my boss,” I say flatly, hoping my obvious disinterest in this topic makes her stop.
“But if he doesn’t, that’s what you’ll have to do,” she continues, refusing to let this go.
I’ve never been someone to want to protect people’s feelings, but even now as I try to, she’s making it impossible. I don’t want to look at her and tell her that yes, I will have to put a bullet in her fucking skull if her father is so stupid to not pay his goddamned debt, but as she stands there staring at me and waiting for my answer, I have no choice.
“That’s what I do. It’s who I am. Let’s hope that I won’t have to do that with you, okay?”
She seems to be satisfied with that and silently takes my plate and fork to the sink to wash it. As much as I don’t want to keep going with this conversation, I don’t leave. I can’t explain it, but something about her makes me want to be around her now. Maybe it’s because I’ve accepted all her talking.
Fuck, that didn’t take long. One day and I’m a convert.
I don’t know what it is, but I feel like I don’t want to leave our time together with me explaining I’m a fucking killer. It’s true that I am, but for a few seconds, it felt nice to be something else.
When she finishes washing the dishes from dinner, she turns around and looks at me with shock. “I didn’t realize you were still here. I didn’t mean to be rude. I would have said something if I knew.”
This thing with her and talking suddenly strikes me as funny, and I laugh for the first time today. “It’s not rude to be silent. If that’s the case, I must be the rudest person in the world.”
“Well, your manners leave a lot to be desired, speaking as someone you tied up and gagged not an hour after you met me,” she says with a tiny smile.
“If I had the sense that you wouldn’t run down to my second floor neighbor and try to get her to call the cops, I wouldn’t have had to do that.”
Lily’s mouth opens and closes once and then twice before she shakes her head. “I don’t even know what to say to that, to be honest. Punishing me because I want to escape being a hostage seems pretty fucked up, but what do I know?”
The way she says that makes her seem like she’s more experienced with the world than a few minutes ago when she naïvely asked about her father paying the money back early. One minute she sounds like a child, and the next she sounds like a grown woman.
As my brain tries to process this difference, she asks yet another question. “So what do we do now here in this place in the middle of nowhere?”
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “I’ve never been here for more than a few hours at a time. At least not recently.”
“Isn’t this your boss’s house? You don’t get to come out here regularly?”
And there, once again, she sounds so innocent, like I’m some businessman and my company has me out here regularly on some ridiculous retreat with other businessmen.
With a chuckle, I shake my head. “Not exactly.”
Lily narrows her eyes in confusion and tilts her head. “Then why did he send you out here with me now?”
Victor’s words run through my head, and with a smile, I repeat them to her. “He sent me out here to play house with you.”
“What does that mean?”
I consider explaining my father’s intention but decide against it. Nothing good can come of that anyway.
“Nothing. I think this place has TVs in each room, so I’m sure you can do that for the rest of the night.”
“What are you going to do? Are you going to watch TV all night and then go to sleep?” she asks with a hint of something definitely not innocent in her tone.
I take a step toward her and stop. She tilts her chin up defiantly, like she wants me to see she isn’t that weepy girl who was just standing at the kitchen island with me a short time ago. I can’t deny she’s beautiful. Even after the day I’ve put her through, she’s still stunning, and in her eyes, I see a curiosity growing that wasn’t there before.
It would be nothing to do exactly what my father suggested for the next few days. But she’s eighteen and only a girl, no matter what she likes to pretend. At that age, I knew more than she did but definitely not what I know now at twenty-seven.
Still, she’s legal and my prisoner.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I say as I take another step closer to her. “It’s been a long time since I had a few days off. Maybe I’ll just lay around in bed for the next few days.”
Lily’s eyes open wide and then narrow as I suspect she begins to understand my meaning. Pursing her lips, she smiles in a way that’s perfectly wicked.
“Well, then maybe I’ll do the same. I am stuck here for the duration, so I don’t really have a choice, do I?”
I shake my head as my brain fills with thoughts of what it would be like to play house with her. Glancing down her body, I silently admit I have nothing else I’d rather do for the next six days than take advantage of what’s right in front of me. I don’t generally make it a practice to sleep with the people I may have to kill just days after fucking them, but then again, maybe her father will do the right thing and pay his loan off.
Walking past her into the hallway, I hear her make a sound like her breath hitching in her chest. Someone else seems to have more than watching TV in mind for the next few days too.
