Page 34 of A Dangerous Way to Love (Dangerous Bonds 3)

I stopped moving and stared into Alise’s frightened, light brown eyes. For the first time since I saw her, I saw her. She had distinct differences from Raven. Her skin tone was a shade browner, and her hair was curly at the nape where Raven’s was coarser. Alise’s dimples were more pronounced, and her eyes a little bigger. Yet, I wouldn’t allow myself to believe she wasn’t meant to be here with me. “You are my wife. I mean, you may not be her in the flesh, but her soul rests within you,” I explained.

“Van, I’m not your wife. I may resemble her, but I am not Raven.” Alise took that moment to look around the room again, this time studying Raven’s pictures hanging on each of the four walls. Her wonderment over their resemblance showed in her stunned eyes.

I was done talking. She now knew she was mine. At this point, I felt like we needed to connect on a much deeper level. I hoisted from the bed and walked over to the closet. I pulled out one of Raven’s silk nightgowns and handed it to Alise.

“Here…”

?

Alise

“Put this on,” was all he said before he turned and walked out of the room. I had been in this room for hours, waiting for him to come back. I checked the door and the windows and everything was locked. I was stuck here waiting on a madman’s next move.

He had snatched me from Tameka’s wedding as if I was his. Now, I really didn't know what he was gonna do with me. What I did know was that we had driven for miles to get to this isolated place, and I had no clue where we were. After he knocked me out, I lost my sense of direction. I assumed we were somewhere near Birmingham since that was the direction we were headed. All I knew for sure was that I was far away from home. Fear rushed all through me with the thought of what he was going to do to me when he returned back to this room.

What kind of man was this?

I felt like I was watching a movie as I looked around the bedroom of my confinement. There were pictures of a woman all over the walls, and the eerie part was that she looked just like me. I mean, really. They say everyone has a twin, and she was mine. I got up and went closer to the pictures to see if they were actually me, but there was one picture of the woman in her wedding dress. One of her standing by a beachfront. Then, I saw a picture of Van and her together on their wedding day. There was an inscription that read: “On this day we began our love journey, evermore.” It had their names Van and Raven Deveraux inscribed underneath. She was his wife.

My attention went back to the various framed pictures of her on the wall, and it clicked. He had called me Raven at the reception. The first time he saw me at the club, he said Rav— then caught himself and called me Alice, and I corrected him and told him my name was Alise. I wasn’t the person he was interested in having here. It was her. If that was the case, why wasn’t she here? What had happened to his wife? If the madman had kidnapped me from a wedding at gunpoint because I resembled his wife, what had he done to her?

Now, I was terrified. Just when I achieved success as a musician and found love, I had to die out in the middle of nowhere with a stranger. I had the worst luck in my love life.

The door handle started rattling, and Van reentered the room. He was wearing a smoking jacket and had a lit cigar in his mouth. In his hand, he had incense and a bottle of wine. “I know you like these, so I brought them for you. This is your favorite kind of red wine, and I brought a lavender incense.” He smiled, looking more relaxed than I had ever seen him look.

I, on the other hand, was slowly losing it. “How do you know my favorite wine and that I like incense?”

“I’ve been keeping an eye on you, my Alise.” He set the bottle of wine down on the bedtable and walked over and set the incense in a jar on the dresser. He lit it and inhaled the air. “Ah, I can see why you love it. I think I will fall in love with it too.”

Van looked at me with hungry-looking bedroom eyes and walked over to the corner of the bed. I was standing on the other side. He pointed to the bed since I wasn’t taking his cue to lie down on my side.

“Lay down, my Alise. It’s bedtime, my love.” Van slid into the bed on the side he was standing on. I kept standing. He reached around his waist and took out his gun, and I followed his order and laid down. “Oh, my love, I was not about to point this at you. I was only going to put it under my pillow to protect us against anyone who might come here to harm us. Come.”

He reached an arm out for me to move closer to him in the bed. I didn’t move. I was glued to that spot.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I asked, lying as far away from him in the bed as I could without falling off the other side.

“I thought you wanted this,” he replied in a low tone.

“Why would you think that?”

“You told me you loved me,” he said.

From the look in his bright gray eyes, he sincerely believed I had told him that.

“I’ve never said that to you,” I replied.

“Yes, you did. The night at the club when I yelled ‘I love you,’ you said—”

“And I love you back,” I said, remembering my famous line to say to fans when they told me they loved me. “Yes, I said that. But that’s something I say to all of my fans. I meant it in an ‘I love all of God’s children’ kind of way. I didn’t know you were taking that seriously.”

A scowl slowly grew in intensity on his face. “I did take it seriously. So, before you toss out words like that, make sure they mean something,” he said harshly.

“Okay, I will,” I said. The tense features of his face once again relaxed. Hoping that sparking a conversation about his wife would buy me some time, time from whatever he planned for us to do in this bed, I asked, “What happened to her?”

He shot me an icy glare as he pronounced, “I killed her.”

“You…killed her? Was it a mistake or something?” I could only hope he wasn’t a hardened murderer. At this point, I had to know. I was in the middle of nowhere, lying down in the bed with him. At least, I should know what happened to Raven in case he was planning to kill me next.

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