“Oh Nadine,” he whispered. “You’ll be good to me, won’t you?”
???????
The scorpion had pulled the little frog down with him into the venomous deep, but somehow she had managed to endure his poison and drag the two of them to safer shores.
When she jolted awake with a harsh cry, he tightened his arms, sorrowful and possessive.
“Cal?” she spoke warily.
“Yes.” He ran his fingers down her arm. “I’m here.”
“I had a bad dream.”
“Did you dream of me?”
“It’s this house.” Raising her voice, she said, urgently, “I hate this house.”
“I know.”
She swallowed. “What happens now?”
“Well, I imagine the good sheriff will be working hard to smooth over the edges left by my father’s and brother’s absences. There probably won’t be any more hunting festivals. At least, not for a while.”Helena Peters, he thought sardonically,will be beside herself with joy.
“What about the money they bring in? Won’t that hurt the town?”
“Some things deserve to die.”
Cal slid out of bed, feeling the brush of air on his bare skin when she reached for him.I should go, he thought,leave this place, forever, but he remained where he was.
Some poisons were too strong to resist.
“What happens to me?” Nadine asked.
“You.” Cal breathed out harshly. “Well, I imagine you’ll leave, Nadine. Now that there’s nothing to hold you back, that would be the wise thing to do.”
“But I can’t go back!” she cried. “Not to how things were before! My aunt—she loves me, but she doesn’tneedme. And mysister’s . . . gone. I don’t have anything else. I don’t haveanyoneelse!”
His heart twisted at her impassioned words but he couldn’t bring himself to credit them. “And what do you want from me, sparrow? Would you prefer a cage to your loneliness? Would you like to be like my mother, quaking in fear of the man who haunts her nightmares—and her bed?”
His voice dropped. “When I came into your room that first time, I almost took you then. In your sleep. Defenseless. And I would have enjoyed it, Nadine. Just like I enjoyed hearing you scream when I bit your pretty neck. Tormenting you makes me hard—and so does the fear in your eyes when you run from me. Sometimes, I want you so much, I can’t fucking stand it.”
He had said too much. The air between them grew heavy, pregnant, suspended between the now and the future point of no return. Cal chuckled humorlessly.
“Is that the kind of man you want?”
“I want someone who wants me,” she said. “Whoneedsme.”
Jealousy clawed at his insides, hot and animal. “Good. Find him and fuck him, then.”
“I want you,” she said.
I want you.
He leaned over her, intentionally menacing. Planting his shaking hands on either side of her body, he prowled closer until he was suspended over her body like a predator over its prey, though no predator, he thought, had ever trembled so while meeting its quarry’s eyes. “And if I drag you into the woods?” he asked. “And if I hurt you? If I hunt you?”
“You saved me,” she insisted. “You care about me, in your strange, twisted way.”
It was true that even when reason dictated that he should not, he had sacrificed everything to be with her in every way that he could. And none of it had ever felt like enough. Even knowing what the consequences would be for his attempts at insubordination, he could not let her go, even to save himself. The fucking scorpion, prisoner to his own nature.
