His mouth remained hard, his posture stiff. She waited. Apparently, he didn’t want to say anything. He just didn’t like it when people walked away from him. Undoubtedly he was the one used to doing the walking.
“Never mind. Just take me back,” she said, straining to keep her tone even. He didn’t deserve to see how upset he was making her. She was dizzy with confusion. The only thing she knew for sure was that this had been a mistake. “Please.
Now
,” she grated out before she turned and around and took the steps to the lower deck two at a time.
Keep reading for a preview from Beth Kery’s suspenseful and sensual novel, GLOW. Available now from Berkley.
It was the second time in a week that Dylan awoke in the dark room to find his arms empty. Instinct told him that it was still too early for him to escort Alice to the camp, a clandestine ritual they went through every morning before dawn. Neither of them wanted the Durand managers to know that Alice, who was a candidate to become a Durand executive, had taken up with the CEO of the company. What was between Alice and him was complicated, and it was their business alone.
At least for now it was. Dylan wasn’t sure how long he could keep Alice and Durand Enterprises in separate spheres. For all intents and purposes, Alice
was
Durand Enterprises. She just didn’t want to—or couldn’t—accept that reality as of yet.
He reached blindly, finding his cell phone on the bedside table. He squinted at the time. No, he’d been correct. It was only a few minutes past two in the morning, way too early for Alice to be up and preparing to return to the camp.
He rose from the bed with just as much haste and alarm as that first time, but on this occasion with more certainty that he knew where to find her. The knowledge didn’t quiet his worry any. He flipped on a bedside lamp and hauled on some jeans.
On that other night, he’d found a half-wild, disoriented Alice blindly seeking in the pitch darkness of the west hallway. When he’d flipped on the hall light, he’d cringed at the vision of her searching hands, pale face, and huge haunted eyes. The ghosts of the past could come so close to her at times—even leap from the deepest recesses of her unconscious mind until they seemingly took form in front of her. Alice had said she’d seen a woman in that hallway on that night, a woman that Dylan knew for a fact had died nearly two decades before.
The human mind was as mysterious and vast as the night sky.
That night, Alice had seen her biological mother. It was as if her long-buried, resurging memories were too foreign to process in her everyday consciousness. Instead, those memories had been projected into her nightmares and even into the solid reality of her surroundings, like a weird unconscious hologram effect or a ghost taking shape. Or at least that’s how psychiatrist Sidney Gates had tried to explain it Dylan.
Presently, he found Alice standing square in the middle of the large empty bedroom suite in the west hall. Her long, toned legs were naked. They looked especially vulnerable in the bright glow of the overhead chandelier.
Tension coiled tight in his muscles. It was so hard at times, not knowing what to expect from her from one moment to the next. Sometimes he felt like he could only be certain of her when he was making love to her, and he felt her to be entirely present in the moment with him, abandoning herself wholesale to pleasure.
To him.
“Do you remember to whom this room belonged now?” he asked from behind her, his voice echoing off the bare walls in the mostly empty room. She’d accused him of manipulation and lying when she’d realized he’d purposefully kept her from entering this room. That was before he’d told her the truth of her identity.
He was glad when she started slightly and turned her head, meeting his stare. Since Alice had come to Durand Castle, there were a few times when she’d go utterly still in his presence, and he’d seen the ghosts of her past flicker eerily in the depths of her eyes.
Is that what
he
was to her? A ghost?
“Was it Addie Durand’s room?” she asked slowly, her low, hoarse voice causing his skin to roughen.
His heart knocked uncomfortably against his sternum, even though he knew his appearance remained calm. No matter how hard he was trying—no matter how much he understood—he couldn’t entirely adjust to Alice’s distant, disconnected attitude about what he’d told her about Adelaide Durand.
He nodded and stepped toward her. “It was originally Addie’s nursery, and it had just been remodeled for her before she was taken. Are you remembering?” he asked her again cautiously.
She shook her head adamantly. Her short, dark hair was growing some. Her spiky bangs fell into her eyes. She stuck out her bottom lip and blew up on them to clear her vision. The uncontrived, potently sexy gesture distracted him.
Just like almost everything about Alice did.
“I don’t remember anything,” she said
Despite her quick, firm denial, he wasn’t entirely sure he believed her. “Then why did you come here?”
“I was curious,” she replied, her eyebrows arched in response to his quiet challenge.
“And how did you guess this was Addie’s room?”
She shrugged. “You tried to keep me from it. And it’s the most ideally situated in the house, so large and airy . . .” She faded off, glancing around at the ornate crown molding, the bluish-silver silk wallpaper and the enormous bay window with a built-in, curving cushioned bench that looked down on the gardens, and the sharp drop-off the dune to Lake Michigan. Because it was night, only their reflections and that of the chandelier’s glowed in the black glass. The room was nearly empty, only a few of his personal items remaining from his recent occupancy. He saw Alice’s neck convulse as she swallowed. “You and Sidney had suggested how the Durands prized Addie so much, always giving her the best. I just guessed it’d belonged to her. And to you. Alan Durand prized you, as well,” she added, once again meeting his stare.
Slowly, she spun to face him. She wore only the fitted T-shirt she’d had on last night during the storm and a semi-transparent pair of white cotton panties. Instinctively, his gaze dropped over her, trailing along her elegantly sloping shoulders, the full, thrusting breasts that stood in such erotic contrast to her slender limbs and narrow waist and hips. His gaze lingered between her thighs. Alice dyed the hair on her head to an obscuring, near-black color, but her true shade was a dark red-gold, a combination of her father’s blond and her mother’s auburn. He was reminded of that yet again as he spied the triangle of light brownish-red pubic hair visible beneath her thin panties. Despite the tension of the moment, he felt his sex flicker in arousal. There was something about the contrast of Alice’s tough-girl strength and her potent vulnerability that lit a fire in him, something elemental and strong. The paradox was singularly powerful.
He dragged his gaze to her face.
“It must be strange for you, thinking of me living in Addie’s room. Here. In the Durand’s house,” he added, taking another step toward her. It struck him that he was often approaching Alice like he might a half-wild animal forced into some domestic confine, highly aware that she might bolt at any moment.
He was determined to catch her, no matter what move she made.
She shook her head. She wore not a trace of makeup. Without the heavy eyeliner and mascara she often wore to obfuscate or intimidate—or both—her dark blue eyes looked enormous in her delicate face. Jesus, what he’d experienced when she’d walked into that office last May, so awkward and yet so defiant in her inexpensive new interview suit. The truth had slammed home, jarring him, rattling him to the center of his bones, even though he’d taken great pains to hide it. He had seen those eyes before.
But even if it
had
been the first time Dylan had ever seen her, he suspected he might have been nearly as shaken. No wonder she’d been drawn to the eye-goop. Her eyes would draw men with the noblest intentions.
And the foulest.
“No, it doesn’t seem strange to me at all. I can see you in this room.” Her chin tilted and her eyes sparked in that familiar defiant gesture. “You moved out of it because of me, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know what to expect. Sidney thought we should cautiously expose you to the surroundings,” he admitted. Sidney was familiar with Adelaide Durand’s history and had been friends with Alan and Lynn. He’d brought his psychological expertise to bear on Alice’s unique situation, once Dylan had finally tracked her down after nearly two decades of searching. It was Sidney who had suggested bringing her to the estate under the pretense of hiring her as a Durand Camp counselor. In that scenario, Dylan could keep an eye on what she recalled and how she would react, monitor her for signs of trauma. If not him personally, then the two Durand security employees Dylan had hired to watch her could do the job.
“I was familiar with Addie Durand’s habits,” he began slowly. “There are a few rooms that I worried might be more likely to trigger something . . . undesirable. This one. Alan and Lynn’s suite. The den, the original living room . . . and the dining room. With few exceptions, the entry hall, the kitchen, the terrace gardens, and the media room have been extensively renovated, so I didn’t worry as much about that. Most of the other rooms here weren’t used much—either by the Durands or by me, so they weren’t of any concern.” He hesitated.
“I never imagined you’d inadvertently find your way into the dining room that first night you arrived here at the castle. Or the woods and stables the next day,” Dylan told her, choosing his words carefully. Alice had made it very clear to him that while she would discuss the details of Addie Durand, her kidnapping, and Dylan’s part in the tragedy, she wouldn’t talk about Addie and herself as if they were the same person. The recent revelation still seemed too overwhelming for her to assimilate. Currently, they were treading on dangerous ground.
Her eyelids narrowed slightly, and he knew he’d made some kind of misstep, despite his caution. “You suspected I was going to be in your bedroom, even before I came here? And so you moved suites, in order not to trigger any . . .” She faded off uncertainly, aware she was skimming close to the fire. Her defiant expression made a quick resurgence. “I thought you said that you hadn’t planned for anything sexual between us . . . that it just
happened
that morning in the stables?”
“That’s true. And since you seem to need a reminder,
you’re
the one who seduced
me
, Alice,” he said with a hard, pointed glance meant to quash her suspicion immediately. It didn’t work. He mentally damned her defensive posture and angry expression and closed the space between them. Satisfaction went through him when he took her into his arms, and she pressed her front against him.
“If that’s what you want to call the first three seconds of our being together. It was all you after that, baby,” she grumbled under her breath.
“I didn’t hear you complaining.”
Her eyes flashed up at him defiantly.
“I’m telling you the truth, Alice. I didn’t plan for us to be together in the stables that morning. How could I have? I didn’t know you’d show up there. I
didn’t
plan for us to get involved that way when you came here.”
“Then why would you worry about me being
here
. . . in this room? Why did you pack up most of your things and decorate a whole new suite if you didn’t
plan
on us sleeping together from the first? Why else would I be in Dylan Fall’s bedroom if not for sex?” she demanded.
Dylan suppressed a sigh. Despite the fact that she grasped his waist and lightly pressed her breasts and belly against him in a tempting gesture, her trademark wary expression remained as she stared up at him.
“I didn’t move out because I had plans to seduce you,” he told her with an air of finality, mapping her elegant, supple spine and the tight curve of her hips with his hands. He felt his need for her mount. How would all of this have played out if this powerful attraction hadn’t been there? It was so hard to say, but he would have contrived something to bring her closer to him.
“
Why
, then?” she insisted, undaunted by a tone that Dylan used regularly to subdue some of the most tried and hard-boiled executives in the world. Of course it didn’t faze Alice. He closed his eyes briefly. Dammit, she could be impossible.
“Dylan?”
“I felt like an interloper, being in here . . . knowing you were about to come to the Durand Estate.”
“You felt like an
interloper
?” she asked slowly, looking slightly dazed by his reluctant confession. “Because this was Alan Durand’s house? Because of your history with him?”
“Because it was no longer my room. No longer my home. Not since you came. Period.” Regret sliced through him at his harsh tone when he saw her lush lower lip quiver.
“I’m sorry,” he said, frustrated. “It’s just that sometimes you keep pressing. And it’s hard to know when you want the truth and when you don’t.”
“I know,” she said quickly. She, too, looked regretful. “And it’s not true, what you said. Of course Castle Durand is your home. You own it, don’t you? You bought it?”
“Yes, but only because Alan Durand offered the house to me as part of the special contract he created to make it possible for me to purchase Durand shares when he made me CEO. I wouldn’t have been able to afford it at that time in my life if he hadn’t offered me certain concessions.” He exhaled as the memory of their negotiations for his taking over Durand entered his brain. Alan had been so stubborn. So insistent. So
generous
in contriving a way to set terms which would allow Dylan to smoothly and completely take the helm of Durand Enterprises. “In the olden days, a lord’s title was tied to the land. That’s what Alan explained to me once,” he recalled with fond, wry amusement. “Alan loved his European history. He insisted that I’d be taken more seriously as the head of Durand Enterprises if I was master of the company’s symbolic domain.”
“The castle,” Alice said, a small smile flickering across her lips. She sobered. “And you
are
the master, Dylan.”
“No. Not entirely.”
He cupped her jaw, trying to ease her sudden troubled expression . . . her abrupt fragility. She looked up at him through her spiky bangs, her glance reminding him again of that of a cautious, wild thing.
“It’s just so impossible to believe, Dylan,” she said in a rush, and he knew instinctively she meant his revelation that she was the true daughter of Alan and Lynn Durand. “I mean, it’s not that I think you’re lying. Why
would
you? It’s just . . .” Her expression grew a little desperate as she seemingly searched for words to explain. “You can’t just start thinking of the world as round in a second when you’ve thought it was flat for your whole life.” She gave a sharp bark of laughter, as if she’d just absorbed the meaning of her words only upon hearing them. “It’s not a bad analogy, really,” she mumbled to herself. “I sort of feel like I might fall straight off the earth into nothingness every time I think about what you told me.” She looked up at him entreatingly. “Please understand.”