Dark Heart of the Sun (Dark Destinies Book 1) (5 page)

That she would be terrorized by a strange man appearing in her home dressed in leathers and his hair caked with blood was a given.

Chapter 5

The Way of the French

There was a naked man in her house.

Cassidy looked up from her dinner and laptop as he emerged from the locked room at the end of the hall. He stretched at leisure, yawned, and scratched the back of his head. Just when she thought the vision couldn’t get any more bizarre, the naked man smiled.

She stopped breathing.

“
Bonsoir
, Cassidy,” he said in a velvety French voice. With a little wave, he disappeared into the guest bath. The door clicked shut. The shower came on.

A clump of mac ‘n’ cheese plopped to the table from her halted fork. She sat back and put the fork down, but didn’t clean up. “What. The. Hell.” If not for the water running, she would have doubted her own eyes. “What the hell?”

She shut the laptop, silenced Radio Denver, and marched down the hall. A split second before she knocked on the bathroom door, she thought better of demanding explanations of a strange man in the shower. Instead, she peered into the gloom of the back bedroom. The light filtering down the hall from the kitchen revealed little more than a twin bed. Black leather clothes lay piled on top of unmade cartoon character bedding, and silver-buckled boots accompanied a pair of flip-flops on the floor. Hot, stale air squelched from the interior, heavy with old wood and creeping mildew and something almost out of place. Something . . . cool?

In the bathroom, the shower cut off. Cassidy rushed back to the kitchen on bare toes, unwilling to be caught snooping even if she did feel justified in trying to figure out what was going on under her own roof. Had he been in there all day? Was he there yesterday when she all but turned the place upside down scrubbing it and evicting the wildlife? And the maid service this morning? They’d made enough noise to wake the dead. Answers. She needed them, and he better be able to cough up some in a hurry.

She hovered by the table, food forgotten, wishing she wore something a little less revealing than her running shorts and sports bra. She still felt damp from her run on the beach earlier to burn off the mounting anxieties about her job. Her future hung by a thread—even after her heart-felt discussion with her editor—and now this. A naked man surfacing in her house like a mushroom popping up on a lawn. Was there no end to the wacky twists and turns of this day?

The stranger didn’t even bother with a towel when he returned to the back room. Cassidy tried—and failed—not to stare. Even in the low light, she noticed him move with a fluid grace full of confidence and strength, an impression reinforced when he reappeared wearing only a pair of black exercise pants that rode alarmingly low on his slim hips. He was long-limbed and all muscle, not an ounce of fat anywhere in sight.

Cassidy averted her eyes from the bump at his groin. Judging by the unenthusiastic state of his male assets, rape wasn’t on the agenda. The unbidden thought made her mouth go dry. Suddenly she was far too aware of being alone with him. Only the sound of rolling surf swelled through the open windows, together with the cool, wet smell of the ocean at night. Out here no one would hear her scream.

A soft crack and hiss snapped her back to the present. The stranger in her house now stood in the kitchen drinking the bottle of Perrier he’d just opened. She studied his face for clues. It was as lean and refined as the rest of him, full of angles and shadows, and dusted with a couple of days’ worth of whiskers. Jet-black hair clung to his neck in damp tendrils. A smug smile curved his full mouth, and she realized that he watched her with as much interest as she him.

“Are you enjoying the view, Mademoiselle?” he wondered, sounding mildly amused.

“I wasn’t . . .” she spluttered and his smile stretched a little wider.

“Surely you have seen a naked man before,
non
?”

Cassidy’s face flamed. There was naked man and then there was
him
, and he knew it. Men like this graced magazine covers and fashion runways. They did not walk out of locked bedrooms in the middle of nowhere. His dark eyes danced with obvious delight at her embarrassment, and his smile exploded into an eager grin that touched an icy finger to her spine. In spite of the oppressive heat in the cottage, she shivered and hugged herself.

“Who the hell are you? What do you want?” she said, shocking herself with how helpless she sounded. Something was wrong with her lungs. A vise had clamped around them, squeezing the breath out of her. The surf roared in her ears. Her thoughts scattered like startled birds. His grin faded, replaced by something much more ominous.
Hunger
, she thought for no reason she could name. Written all over that model-perfect face.

“I-if you’re going to rape me, at least be q—quick about it.”

“
Merde,
” he hissed under his breath.

Great going, Cass,
she admonished herself as her eyes frantically cast about for potential weapons. If he hadn’t thought about it before, he was thinking about it now.

“No,” he snapped as her hand went for the discarded fork. He spun away, retreating to the far end of the living room that adjoined the kitchen. There was frantic rustling and a muttered stream of what must have been choice French profanities. Then something new hung in the air, acrid, familiar, and sickening. Cigarette smoke.

Cassidy sank into her chair and held her head in both hands, wheezing, her heart pounding in her throat, tears streaming down her face. Like evil ghosts summoned by the smoke, countless angry, grief-stricken memories slammed into her, taking her panic to a whole new level. Her lungs all but disappeared.

“
Écoutez!
”

Startled, she looked up and found herself pinned by his gaze. Her breath came in fast, shallow gasps, like the panting of an animal caught in a trap.

“Listen to me,” he said with an obvious attempt at being soothing, though he still sounded terse, his accent clipped. Leaning onto the back of the chair opposite her, he sucked at the cigarette trembling in his fingers without taking his eyes off her. Twin streams of smoke blew from his knife-blade nose. “I will not rape you. Do you understand this?”

She tried to nod because she did understand the words. But she couldn’t get enough air, and her head started to feel like a helium balloon with its string cut. Her hands convulsed around the table edges to keep her tethered. The room spun. The panic had its teeth into her too deep for her to do anything but fight for breath.

“Breathe,” he ordered. “Deep. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
Lentement.
Slowly. More slowly.”

Something about the timbre of his voice reached straight down her throat and into her chest. Her lungs obeyed and expanded with precious air, for all that it stank of cigarette smoke. She sat back, drained, feeling the drumbeat of her heart ebb.

He stayed where he was, still pulling at the cigarette, but his hand was steady now. Ashes dropped onto the table, the floor, unheeded. He looked almost as relieved as she felt. “I will not do this thing, Cassidy. I will not force myself on you. Nod if you understand.”

This time she nodded.

“Do you believe me?”

Another nod. He would not rape her. She believed it because if that were the plan, she was sure he wouldn’t bother talking her down from a panic attack that would have sent her screaming into the night. But that didn’t rule out a whole lot of other unsavory ideas he might have up his non-existent sleeve. It didn’t matter. As long as it wasn’t
that
, she could deal. If she kept her wits about her. Gathering them up, she straightened in her seat and placed her hands flat on the surface of the table.

“How did you know my name?”

“I saw your papers last night.” He gestured at the pile in question, which contained her rental agreement. “You were out.”

Out grocery shopping. She almost got clipped by a phantom motorcycle rocketing out of the mule trail when she got back. Remembering the leathers in his room, she put two and two together and added lunatic to her list of observations, along with rude, crude, French, and no respect for privacy. She’d be packing her bags if not for her self-respect and the two free weeks she was due in this dump.

“So who are you? And what are you doing in my house?”

He hesitated before shrugging one bare shoulder. It was adorned with a tribal style tattoo of the sun. “I am Dominic Marchant.” Leaning forward, he made the cigarette butt disappear in her bowl of mac ‘n’ cheese. “And this is, in fact, my house.”

She stared at her ruined food, the dish her mother used to make for her from scratch when Cassidy needed cheering up. Like today. “And that was my dinner.”

“That is shit.”

So it was true what they said about the French being rude. His striking good looks paled beside his arrogance and disappeared altogether in light of that filthy cigarette habit. She looked up, her jaw clenching. That glimmer of amusement was in his eyes again. Deep, warm hazel eyes. Alive with an unspoken challenge.

She raised a brow. “So what you’re saying is you live in this pig sty?”

He turned a chair around and straddled it, folding his arms over the back and propping his chin on his forearms. A shock of his dark, overgrown hair fell across his forehead, lending him a playful, mischievous air. “
Oui
. I do.”

“With no AC?”

“I do not need it.”

“No food?”

“I eat out,
chèrie
. Every night.”

“How nice for you.” This brought no comment beyond a wry curl of his lip. “At the rental agency, they don’t seem to know you’re here.”

“They don’t. I did not expect anyone to rent this . . . pig sty, during the summer.”

“Pig sty is all I can afford,” she said drily. If he decided to send her packing, she’d be out of options. Again. Not that she relished having a rude, crude, snooping, lunatic Frenchman for a roommate, but only yesterday she was willing to put up with anyone who would give her a room and tolerate a cat. Besides, he did promise not to rape her. She heaved a small sigh. Could the bar get any lower?

Dominic glanced at where her fingers fretted with the Striker engagement ring. “The man who gave you this can afford to keep you much better than this,
non
?”

Cassidy stopped fidgeting. “Well, maybe I don’t want to be
kept.
No?”

He searched her face. Flecks of gold glinted in the clear depths of his eyes where gears tumbled into place. “So he is the reason you are here.”

“I don’t see how . . .”

“Is he also the one who bit you?”

Her hand flew to the mysterious bruise on her neck, visible now with her hair up and all the makeup sweated off.
Oh, my God, he’s right. It does look like a bite
, she thought, aghast. But out loud she blustered, “That’s none of your business.”

“
Au contraire
,” Dominic murmured. “This is my house. The reason you are here disturbing my peace
is
my business.”

“Does that mean you’re okay with me staying?” Encouraged by his silence, she continued, “It wouldn’t have to be long. Just until I get some funds saved up.” Or get a raise or better offer, neither of which appeared on the horizon.

“That depends. Are you here because of that bite?”

“You don’t know when to quit, do you? What’s your kinky fascination with a bruise on my neck?”

“What do you remember of how you got it?”

Her hesitation was slight. “It’s a bite. Want me to draw you a freaking picture?”

“No. Tell me.”

Exasperated, she pushed her chair back and got up. “You’re unbelievable. No, I’m not going to tell you or anyone else. It’s private. Got it?”

“Cassidy,” he said, his tone softening. “Tell me what happened. Tell me everything.”

That voice. It had a tangible presence, a vibration that resonated somewhere deep inside her, caressing her with warmth and understanding. Yes, she did want to tell him. The need to talk to someone bordered on the desperate. About how she had no idea what happened to her, that she could no longer trust a man she loved and wondered if she was losing her mind, and about so much more bottled up in her heart and soul—grief and disappointment, anger and frustration. Pour it all out in a giant heap to someone who genuinely wanted to know, to him . . . to this gorgeous and haughty bastard who ruined her food, stomped on the memories she nursed in it, showed way more interest in her personal life than he had any business having, and was bound to throw her and Eddie out without a second thought.

“I don’t think so.”

Dominic sat up as if she had slapped him. His face shuttered into a blank nothingness worthy of any pouty runway model. He got up and stalked around her, his presence encroaching on her like a force of nature. Cassidy watched in disbelief as he leaned in and sniffed at her shoulder. She fought the impulse to step away, determined to stand her ground unless he touched her. Then he’d have to contend with her nails on that pretty face of his and her knee where it would hurt the most.

Tension rolled off him in waves, but he didn’t touch her. Not physically anyway. The blow he delivered came in the form of a snarling command. “By this time tomorrow, you will have found another place to stay. You will be gone from here.”

Then he left the house and slammed the door behind him.

Dominic cursed all the way to the beach. The si
tuation with Cassidy Chandler could now be classified as a full-blown fiasco. It missed being a complete failure—resulting in her death—by only the slimmest of margins. When she seethed with fear from one instant to the next, the beast had torn his guts to bloody ribbons in its frantic need to live up to every one of her worst expectations of him—and more. If not for the cigarette smoke grinding through his lungs, distracting the hunger, he would have lost even his last shred of control.

So much for his clumsy attempts at a casual approach. Clearly even his most dazzling charm could instill terror.