Yet intoxicating, too.
Addicting.
Fascinating.
Problematic.
Dangerous.
Jakob is dangerous; that much is obvious.
To my heart, though? Or just my lady bits?
I suppose I’m bound to find out
11
THE DEVIL IN THE DETAILS
JAKOB
The house at the coordinates I was given—what feels like a lifetime ago, already—is an extremely ordinary colonial in an extremely ordinary suburb in the southwest section of Rochester. It's gray brick with dark blue siding on the upper story, and twin dormers with shutters painted a truly garish shade of purple. A colorful profusion of zinnias lines the walkway leading from the sidewalk to the front door; the lawn is in need of mowing, and the flower beds up against the house need weeding. There are no cars in the driveway or parked on the street, but that's no indication it's empty; the blinds are all drawn and the garage door shut. This is a quiet suburb, the purview of working families. It’s the perfect place for a safehouse.
I park on a corner a few hundred feet away and settle in to watch. Beside me, Brys has dozed off again—I'm rather jealous of that ability. Sleep has never been my friend. In fact, I'm shocked at how well I slept last night. I didn't expect to sleep more than a couple of hours, as usual, especially not with a woman I barely knew, even as exhausted as I was. I possess the fairly rare genetic mutation that allows me to function normallyon an average of four hours of sleep, and I can function on one or two, as someone else might on four.
Waking up with her nuzzled up against me, her soft thighs bare against mine, those strange, hypnotic blue-ringed eyes hazy and lazy and hot with arousal—frankly ravenous, they were…I don't know what came over me.
I could literally smell her arousal wafting up from beneath the blankets; that heady scent sent me into an aroused frenzy I could barely contain, even with my iron will.
What is it about her that makes me feel so…off-balance, out of control, and disoriented within myself? Physical attraction alone cannot account for my reaction to her. Granted, my attraction to her body is a raging inferno of an intensity I simply do not know how to explain or understand. It's not about body parts, no matter how magnificent hers are. It can't be about who she is as a person, either, because we don't know one another at all, and I don’t see myself being able to open up to her.
Isabel stole my soul nearly twenty years ago, and with it my heart. I may have died as far as the world is concerned, but my heart never fully caught on. Time has certainly played its part. The vicious agony of separation and loss has dulled. The feverish madness of obsession has dimmed and cooled, to a great degree, but she affects me still.
Seeing her yesterday was…brutal.
She never saw me, thank god. But I saw her. I saw her face. I saw her husband, her kids—my son.
Myson.
No.Herson,hisson. He may have my DNA, but he will never know I exist, and nor should he.
I have lived a decade without Isabel, yet that mad, turbulent time when she met Logan, discovered herself, and came to understand what I'd done to her is still ravaging my psyche.
I cannot forget; I cannot forgive myself.
I glance at Brys again. Thick, dense black lashes rest against her cheeks. Her hair is back in a thick braid, but a few tendrils have come loose to drift around her cheek and chin. At rest, she looks barely thirty, if that, although I know she has to be at least five years older based on her statement about the timing of my near-deal with her father.
She's a fascinating, complicated woman, resilient and brave. She's dealt with everything that has happened with remarkable adaptability, calm, and practicality, especially for a woman who, by all accounts, grew up wealthy and privileged. She hasn't complained; she has made it clear she's unhappy about the whole situation—understandably—but I think she also knows that I didn't want to and wasn't trying to pull her into my mess. She just gets on with the business of surviving, of doing what has to be done. She vomited at the sight of the dead man's brains on the wall, and then pulled herself together. I admire her resiliency, if nothing else. It's shocking to see such things in real life, right in front of you. Television doesn't prepare you for the scent of death, the stench of gore.
Inevitably, of course, my mind wanders to this morning—again, and again, and again.
So eager, so willing. Ravenous. Insatiable. Immediately willing to play along with my fucked-up mind games, my need to control…well, everything. God, she was fucking magnificent. Giving me what I demanded and somehow making it seductive, yet somehow…elegant.
Sex is not an elegant thing, usually. It's wet, messy, noisy, strange, intimate. Baring your body to another person, touching their most erogenous places, inciting such intense sensations…it's a highly personal thing, yet we engage in it with strangers. Perhaps we do so because of how vulnerable a thing it is—a stranger’s judgment and criticism of our bodies, of our sexual performance…in a way, it is less frightening a thing because theydo not know us, cannot, will not. After the heat has abated, we go our separate ways, feeling a little better for having gotten off, and for the most part, never think of that stranger again.
The same act with someone you know well, someone who knows your mind, your heart, your soul, someone who has seen you sick, clumsy, at your worst? That is frightening.
Brys made sex elegant. Graceful, beautiful. Her hunger was rapturous. She took my release with erotic delight, and if I had wanted her to, she would have kept going; kept giving; kept taking. When it was her turn, she gave me her body with utter trust. She let me take her past her threshold and into a release so intense she was left sobbing—that requires courage, especially with a man she scarcely knows.
