My Reluctant Warden (2 page)

Across from the door, against the wall, was a loveseat. And on that loveseat, still wearing his tuxedo minus the tie and jacket, Morgan Ward sat, watching me.

My heart just about stopped.

I don’t know how long we stared at each other. I didn’t even care that I looked like I’d been on an all-night bender. I simply couldn’t turn away from him and those bottomless eyes that had held me captive the night before. It was different now, and yet, there I was, spellbound again.

He blinked first, and somehow that helped me pull back. I grabbed the handle of my suitcase to drag it inside. Never mind all the questions I had; I’d face him once I was presentable. I meant to close the door again, but a few words from him stopped me.

“Lilah is gone.”

“Gone?” I blurted out, my gaze flying back to him. “What do you mean, gone?”

“She took her private jet last night. By now she could be anywhere in the world. Until she comes back to this house and walks you out…”

He didn’t finish. I didn’t need him to. I understood quite well.

Until she came back and walked me out of the house, I was stuck inside.

Even as I realized that, something else occurred to me.

“She had me clear her schedule until the end of January,” I said, breathless. “She was planning this.”

“Of course she was planning this. She must have been planning this from the moment she hired you. How many years ago was that?”

Close to five years… Had she really been planning all of it for that long?

I remembered the orchids she’d wanted me to find for her, and how she’d authorized me to fund the development of an hybrid that would take years of research. It wasn’t hard to imagine she’d kept me close all those years waiting for the right time. Why she had chosen last night, however, was a mystery. Was it because of Mr. Ward’s birthday? Was there more to it? It was frustrating how much I didn’t know—and even what I knew, I barely understood.

But five years by her side also meant something else, and that realization sent my heart to the pit of my stomach.

“Did she…” My throat was so tight, the words were painful to get out. “Did she do that compulsion thing on me the entire time? Has she been ordering me around for five years?”

He didn’t even hesitate before shaking his head. “I doubt it. She might have done it a couple times, given you a suggestion to be loyal or something like that, but probably not much more.”

My mind flashed back to our first talk after she’d hired me. She had been rather emphatic about how much she valued discretion in her employees. I’m not one for gossip as a rule, but I had been reluctant over the years when my friends asked about my boss. I talked easily enough about what I did, but once the conversation shifted toward her, I had much less to say. Had that been an effect of compulsion or just my own ethics?

“How do you know she didn’t do more than that?” I asked, trying to look through the past five years to find anything out of the ordinary.

That day trip to Paris, maybe? No. I’d been more than willing. I’d been thrilled.

“Because you wouldn’t have much of a mind left if she’d been doing it regularly for that long. The more someone is compelled, the less independent they become. And besides—”

He cut himself off so abruptly that it took my mind off what he’d said to focus on what he wasn’t saying instead.

“Besides what?”

He didn’t reply.

“Besides
what
?” I said again, more loudly now. “Why won’t you explain anything to me?”

“Besides,” he said with a heavy sigh, “it would have been in poor taste for her to give me a mindless pet.”

I couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d slapped me. I wavered a little, and he sighed again. I seemed to draw a lot of sighs from him, and not for any good reason.

“You asked,” he said in a blank voice. “And those are her words, not mine.”

“So she… she gave you… pets? Before?”

I felt a little lightheaded and had to press a hand to the doorjamb next to me. The dress suddenly felt too tight for me to breathe properly. Long seconds passed before he answered.

“Not for a very long time.”

He pushed himself to his feet and came to me until all that stood between us was the suitcase. I watched him the entire time, my heartbeat accelerating as he drew nearer.

“Turn around,” he said.

I didn’t move. I only stared at him. I could feel my pulse thudding in my ears. Just from being near him and smelling the discreet scent of his cologne—of him—my mind flashed back to last night. I wanted his hands and his mouth on me again. His cock inside me. His body sliding against mine. And at the same time I wondered how I could have slept with a perfect stranger like that.

I’d felt a connection to him, but that didn’t change the fact that we’d met mere moments before becoming intimately acquainted. Except… it’d only been a fantasy, like he’d told me. But what did that mean, exactly?

“Last night,” I started, but lost my words and had to try again. “Last night, on the balcony. Was it… was it real?”

An eternity seemed to pass before he answered—and his reply, yet again, didn’t explain anything.

“Define real.”

I didn’t want word games. I didn’t want games, period. Miss Delilah had played enough with me already. I grabbed his wrist and raised it, exposing the blood-red gem of his cufflink.

“I remember this being lost over the edge of the balcony last night.” Even as I said it, I could feel my cheeks grow warmer as the memory of losing the cufflink flashed through my mind; or rather, the memory of what we’d been doing at the time. “But obviously it didn’t happen. Did it?”

“What you mean is, did you and I have sex on the balcony?” His voice was so flat, he might have been commenting on the weather. “Our bodies did not, no. But in your mind, it happened.”

It still made no more sense than him calling it a ‘fantasy’ before. If it had happened only in my mind, how did he even know about it? I started to shake my head, but before I could ask anything else, he pulled his wrist free and continued.

“When you disobeyed Lilah’s compulsion and stopped breathing, I entered your mind. I gave you a chance for a do-over. You would have died if I hadn’t.”

It was the same explanation he’d given me the night before, and it was all still so strange—so damn impossible—that I stumbled over every other word.

“So you… you made me… have sex with you? In our minds?”

He clucked his tongue. “That’s not what I said. I reset your mind back to when you first stepped onto the balcony. Everything you did from that point was your own choice. I just played along.”

When I stared harder, he rolled his eyes. “Like I said, it was a fantasy. Fantasies are where we can let ourselves do what we usually wouldn’t.”

His voice didn’t change one bit, but his eyes seemed to flare to life on those last words. They were still just as dark, but at the same time… How can I convey what they looked like? It was like flames were dancing behind his pupils, gleaming, burning—and inescapable.

“How is this all possible?” I murmured. “How can she order me to do something to the point that my body shuts down if I disobey? How can you… get into my mind, like you said? How can you move that fast?”

It won’t come as a surprise to you, because I’ve already given away that he and Miss Delilah weren’t humans. I know, I get ahead of myself sometimes, but really how could I have kept something like that to myself for so long?

Still, try to imagine my surprise when he said in that same cool voice, “We can do all that because we are vampires.”

No, it was more than surprise. Shock. Incomprehension. Disbelief.

I wanted to laugh in his face, call him a liar, and ask how stupid he thought I was, trying to tell me tales of supernatural monsters.

But facts—simple, irrefutable facts—kept me quiet. Like the fact that my body refused to obey me every time I so much as thought of breaking Miss Delilah’s order not to leave. Like the fact that I’d almost died on that balcony. That Mr. Ward had entered my mind and shared my ‘fantasy.’ That, when he’d told me to accompany him the previous night, I’d been unable to resist him.

I could refuse to believe him, but what would that help?

“You’re a… a…” I gulped, and without thinking brought both hands up to cover my neck. “Are you going to kill me?”

I’d asked the previous night, and he’d said no. Now that I knew what he was and what Miss Delilah had meant when she told him he could ‘feed’ from me or kill me, I had to ask again.

“I already answered that question,” he said in a low voice. “The answer hasn’t changed. Now. Turn around. Please.”

He wasn’t using that compelling voice of his, but I obeyed anyway. Stupid, I know, to turn my back to a vampire even if he’d said he wouldn’t kill me. I think I just needed to look away from his eyes. They made it hard to think.

Of course, when I did turn away, I still couldn’t think clearly.

I gasped when I felt his fingers at the small of my back and held my breath after that, wanting nothing more than to move but unable to do so as the memory of his touch on my body slid over me again, raising goose flesh on every inch of my skin. In my fantasy, he’d said he hated corsets, and never got around to getting me out of my dress. Now, he was unknotting and unlacing, and as the corset loosened, my heartbeat grew faster again.

When his hands left me and the dress started to fall, I caught it, pressing a hand between my breasts to keep the bodice in place. Very slowly, I turned back to him. My lips felt dry, so I licked them.

“You’d have had a hard time getting out of that thing by yourself, Angelina,” he said without the smallest flicker of a smile, but I thought I heard his voice waver a little when he said my name.

His eyes were still burning, and they dropped to my mouth when I licked my lips again. I took a step toward him. Not even that much: half a step. A minuscule shuffle of my feet until my bare toes met my suitcase between us. I couldn’t tell you what I was doing or thinking.

And then he was gone.

As quickly as when he’d run after Miss Delilah, he left the suite. The door banged shut behind him, and I was alone again. Alone with my thundering heart, my falling dress and my damp, very uncomfortable panties.

*

Half an hour later, having taken a long, skin-scalding shower, I came out of the bathroom wrapped in the fluffiest terrycloth bathrobe I’d ever worn. I felt a little better, although I was still very aware that the nice surroundings didn’t make this room any less of a cell. I returned to the bed, where I’d left my suitcase. When I opened it, I felt an odd mix of comfort and annoyance.

My suitcase was, as might not be completely unexpected, filled with my clothes. Jeans, shirts, sweaters, and dresses from my closet. Tee-shirts, socks, and my flannel pajamas from my dresser. Underwear, too. The thought of a stranger being in my home, rifling through my things long enough to match up my bras and panties…

It was creepy. I felt extremely uneasy about it. Whoever it was had been trying to help, sure, and they hadn’t been looking at my unmentionables for their own enjoyment, but still. Would you be fine with a random person looking through your underwear drawer?

Even worse: I keep my vibrator in that drawer. That’s not something I care for anyone to see.

The vibrator wasn’t in the suitcase, but a lot of other things were. My beauty bag was wedged on the side, filled with the various make-up brushes, powders, and tubes I had left spread out on my bathroom counter. There was a prescription bottle for migraines, which had been in my medicine cabinet. This month’s supply of the pill. My hairbrush. My toothbrush and toothpaste. The half-finished book that had been on my night table, its bookmark still in place. My netbook computer.

Whoever had packed hadn’t just thrown in a few clothes haphazardly. They’d tried to see my place through my eyes, tried to guess what I would take if I’d packed for myself. They’d done a fairly good job of it, too.

So, creepy but considerate. The jury was still out on whether the considerate part won over the creepy one.

I brushed my hair. Fifty strokes with one hand. Fifty more with the other. When I was done, every curl Miss Delilah had put in my hair before pinning it up was gone, and it fell on my shoulders, damp and straight. I felt a little more like myself.

I brushed my teeth. I slipped on black underwear. Jeans. A shirt. I even brushed a bit of color on my cheeks and dabbed on lipstick, the same way I’d have put on armor, I guess.

And then I realized what my mystery packer had forgotten: shoes. All I had to wear were the sky-high, peep-toe stilettos I’d worn at the party. The shoes Miss Delilah had chosen for me.

Now, I’d always rather liked my boss. She was demanding, that much was true, and took things for granted. Praises from her or words of thanks were few and far between, but they were that much more meaningful for it. I guess what I liked most about her was how she marched to her own beat, leading the way and never following. She was strong. I knew myself enough to realize I didn’t have it in me to be strong in the same way she was, and maybe I didn’t even want to be, but I did admire her for it.