She’d straightened in her hospital bed. “How did your knowing help anything?”
“You thought letting me think that he simply didn’t want me was better than letting me know who and what he was?”
“He was involved with dangerous things I didn’t want you involved in. He still is.”
“I want his name.”
“No. I will not die knowing he might drag you to the grave with me.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, guilt assailing me. She’d been dying, and I’d confronted her with anger. But what was I to do? She’d smoked and taken horrible care of herself. She was dying and leaving me, and still she wanted to deny me my only other family member? The bite of more memories, of her dying, of the casket, of the pain, overcame me. One after another, I relived the moments that had left me alone in this world.
“Are you okay?”
I blinked to realize I was on my knees and “he” was actually there with me. How had I ended up on the ground? “Yes.” I pushed to my feet and he helped me. “I’m okay. I’m done here.”
“Is your father here, too? Do you want to visit him?”
I’d told him I didn’t know my father, but “he” had not listened.
That hurt. It hurt badly, reminding me how alone I am. “He’s not here,” I bit out. And apparently my Master had never been “here,” as in fully present in our relationship, either. I charged toward the car.
Once we were on the road, I thought of how bitter my mother was about men. How much I now think my father affected everything she was and everything she became. Maybe she’s warning me from the grave that I am headed there, floating in the dark, miserable waters of my own creation. Or maybe it’s just my mind using her as a tool to warn me of the same.
He drove us to some oceanside café, and the instant he placed the car in park, I turned to face him. “I won’t sign another contract. If you want to see me, ask me on a date.”
He just sat there, unmoving as stone, his expression an emotionless mask, until finally, he said, “You know that isn’t how I operate.”
My stomach clenched and I faced forward. “Yes. I know.”
More silence. More unbearable silence. “Why don’t we go inside and talk about the contract?”
“No. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to go home.” I cut him a look. “To my apartment. My home.”
His eyes narrowed; his jaw clenched. He looked like he might refuse, but he put the car in gear and backed away.
At my apartment, he walked me to my door. I turned to face him. “Thanks for . . . everything.”
“I’m coming inside.”
I shook my head. “I need to be alone.” And it was the truth. It was time I learned how to embrace taking care of myself again.
“We can make the contract work.”
I opened my door and stepped inside before facing him again. “I don’t want to make it work.”
He grabbed me and pulled me to him, kissing me with wild, sultry passion before setting me back from him. “This isn’t over,” he said, and turned and walked away.
I shut my door and leaned against it, hugging myself as I slid slowly to the floor. I had never wanted him to be right more than I did now.
I didn’t want “us” to be over, and yet somehow, I found myself reaching down and sliding the delicate rose-shaped ring he’d given me from my finger. I could no longer be his unless he was truly mine. And he isn’t. I’m not sure he ever will be.
Click through for an exclusive sneak peek at Lisa Renee Jones’s sizzling next installment to the Inside Out trilogy
Being Me
Available June 2013 from Gallery Books
The idea that I’ve convinced myself he is less controlling than he is has my heels colliding heavily on the driveway. I charge toward his car, the same car I’ve let myself drive instead of holding on to my own identity. I don’t look his direction but damn him, I can feel him all over, everywhere, inside and out, and in intimate places I can’t convince my body he isn’t welcome. It’s beyond frustrating to know that anger this potent isn’t enough to stop the thrum of awareness that just being near him creates.
Not for the first time, I feel Rebecca’s words from that first journal entry I’d read deep in my soul. He was lethal, a drug I feared. I relate to her, and I understand the inescapable passion she felt and lost herself inside. I don’t want to be her. I’m not her. And for the first time since my initial first few encounters with this man, I wonder if I am drawn to him because I’m self-destructive, and he to me for the same reason.
Suddenly he is there, at eye level, as he had been the first night we’d met, when I’d spilled my purse. My gaze lifts and meets his, and a blast of awareness shakes me to the core. My breasts are heavy, my thighs achy. My skin tingles. A fine line between love and hate, Alvarez had said, and I understand the words in this moment. I stare into his eyes and I wonder if he too is thinking about the night we met and the many ways we’ve made love. The many we have not and I want us to, when I should not. I should be seeking space, independence, and my own identity, which he is threatening by taking over my life. It makes no sense how I feel in these eternal moments. How can I be this furious with him and still powerfully, completely lost in him?
“We have a lot to talk about, don’t we?” he asks, breaking the spell. His tone is low, and the rasp of anger in his voice is impossible to miss. It jolts me back to reality. He showed up at my client’s house and he’s angry with me?
My temper overpowers all other emotions in me and I reach for the key. His hand closes over mine and heat races up my arm and over my chest. “Don’t do what you did tonight ever again, Sara.”
The sharp command in his voice hits a bull’s-eye on every physiological male dominance issue I own, of which there are many. I try to pull my hand back but I am captive to his grip, leaving me with words as my only weapon. “Ditto to you. And yeah. We have a lot to talk about—somewhere other than my client’s front yard.”
His eyes glint fire a moment before he releases my hand and helps me to my feet. There is a possessiveness to his touch that has me leaning into him when I should be shoving him away. He notices, too; I see it in the slight narrowing of his eyes, the gleam of satisfaction in their depths that I both hunger for and reject.
“I’ll follow you to my place,” he informs me.
“I have no doubt you will.” I click the key clicker to unlock the car. I’m about to open the door when his hand comes down on it, and he leans close, so close his breath is warm on my neck and ear. That woodsy scent of him, which I could luxuriate in for a lifetime, permeates my senses, tearing down my already weak defenses.
His hip nudges mine. “Don’t think for a minute that when we pull up to my apartment, you’re going to ask for your car and leave.”
It is all I can do to fight him when he touches me. Purposely, I do not look at him, certain all my resolve to distance myself from him will crumble. “If I decide to leave, you can’t stop me.”
“Try me, baby. You’re coming up to my apartment.”
I whirl on him.“I don’t want—”
“I do,” he vows, and before I know his intent, his fingers twine into my hair and he pulls me into his arms, against his hard, warm body.
“Let go,” I hiss, my hand flattening on his chest. I intend to push him away, but the heat of his body seeps through my palm, radiating up my arm. My elbow softens, and I am instantly closer but not close enough.
“Not a chance,” he promises, his mouth closing on mine, firm with demand. His tongue licks into my mouth with one brutal, commanding swipe followed by another, and I have no resistance left. I’m weak, so very weak, for this man. As always with him, he demands my response and I helplessly respond. I am instantly wet and wanting, my nipples tight points of aching need.
I try to resist the lure that is this man, but th
e taste of him, familiar and almost brutally male, mixes with his anger and mine, and the effect is explosively passionate. I want to shout at him, push him away, pull him close, strip away his clothes, and punish him for what he is doing to me, what he takes from me. What he makes me need.
When his lips part from mine, too soon and not soon enough, I barely fight the urge to pull him back. “Was that for the cameras?” I pant at him, furious at myself for such weakness.
“That was because you scared the shit out of me when you didn’t answer your phone. I don’t give a damn about the cameras.” His mouth comes down on mine again, and his hand slides under my jacket, over my backside, pulling me flush against his thick erection.
I whimper, impossibly aroused, and my hands slip beneath the thick leather of his jacket, wrapping his waist. His hand caresses up my back, molding me tighter to him, branding me with heat and fire and sizzling passion that threaten to steal all the reason I possess. No man has ever made me forget where I am, forget why I should care.
“That,” he says roughly, when he pulls back again, “was for the past twelve hours that I should have been thinking about business. Instead, I was incessantly thinking about pink paddles, butterfly nipple clamps, and all the places I’m going to lick, kiss, and now, you can bet, punish you when we get home.”
I almost moan again from his words and have no idea how I manage enough coherent thought to issue a warning, but somehow I do. “If you think sex is going to make this argument go away, you’re wrong.”
“You couldn’t be more right, but it’s a good place to start and end the enlightening conversation you can bet your sweet little ass we’re going to have.” He sets me back from him and away from the door enough to open it. “Let’s go home where I can fuck what you’ve made me feel out of my system and you can do the same.”
Staring up at him, a million things I might say or do are wiped out by the word home replaying in my head. He keeps using that word, and it affects me when he does; it affects me in a deep, painfully real way that leaves me raw and vulnerable. He leaves me raw and vulnerable.
When I don’t move, he pulls me close again, caresses my hair,and gives me a quick kiss on the lips. “Get in the car, Sara,” he orders softly, and as always—though I’m fairly certain he’d disagree—I do as he tells me.
Also by Lisa Renee Jones
If I Were You
Rebecca’s Lost Journals, Volume 1: The Seduction
Rebecca’s Lost Journals, Volume 2: The Contract
Rebecca’s Lost Journals, Volume 3: His Submissive
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ISBN 978-1-4767-3850-5
Lisa Renee Jones, Rebecca's Lost Journals, Volume 4: My Master
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