Page 50 of Edge of Darkness (Night Prowler 4)
“Jesus Christ, honey, what’s going on? Are you hurt? I’ve never heard you cry! And I’ve never heard anyone cry like that. It sounds like someone’s skinning a cat! Tell me what’s happening, I’m about to blow an O ring!”
Obscure car engine references from a hysterical gay man who’d broken into her house in the middle of the night after she’d discovered her sort-of boyfriend was something right out of a Steven King novel; the world had officially ended.
From under the covers Ember moaned, “Nothing’s wrong, Ash. Leave me alone.”
She heard his disbelieving “Puh!” just before she felt the bed wobble under his weight as he sat down on the edge of the mattress. A hand began to rub slow, relaxing circles on her back through the comforter. It reminded her of something her mother would do when she was sick as a little girl and brought on a fresh wave of tears.
“Please—you have to tell me you’re okay. You’ve refused to see me all week and I’ve been worried sick and now you come home like this. I haven’t talked to you since right before your date last Sunday—what the hell is going on?”
She blubbered, “It’s…it’s Christian. H-he—” She paused, then wailed, “Oh God!”
“That son of a bitch!” Asher shouted at the top of his lungs, scaring the wits out of her. “Did he touch you? Did he hurt you? I swear to God, Em, just say the word and I’ll get out my gun and go find that bastard and blow off his di—”
“No!” she groaned, cutting him off. “It’s not like that! He didn’t hurt me…” She trailed off, realizing she’d put just enough emphasis on that last word that Asher, if he was paying attention, would have picked up on it.
Fortunately, Asher was too busy having his own meltdown to notice.
He leapt from the bed and began stalking around the room, punctuating every third word with a foot stomp. “I should have known he was too good to be true! That face! That body! That wardrobe! That accent! I bet it’s all a ruse, isn’t it? He doesn’t really even have any money. He’s some kind of con artist, isn’t he? He’s a grifter! He lures innocent young women into his trap and then has his way with them—or their bank accounts!”
Ember thought it prudent not to mention she was neither innocent nor in possession of an enticing bank account.
Then Asher pulled up short and with a gasp said, “I bet he’s not even British…he’s probably from somewhere completely horrific…somewhere like…somewhere like Utah!”
Ember threw the covers from her head and shouted, “Asher, please! You’re only making me feel worse!”
“Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry.” He wrung his hands together, chagrined. Wearing fuchsia pajamas with a pattern of gold and scarlet peonies and a pair of mauve tufted slippers, he hurried to the side of the bed, sat down again, and took her hand. “But you have to tell me what happened or my imagination will get the better of me! What did he do? Or what didn’t he do? Tell me!”
Looking into his worried, beseeching eyes brought a fresh onslaught of tears. She hid her face into the covers again and blurted a muffled, “He’s not the person I thought he was.”
Her inner voice amended that to a derisive, He’s not a person at all.
Because life has a cruel and capricious sense of humor, her cell phone rang at exactly that moment. Before she could stop him, Asher had flung himself across the room, retrieved it from where she’d left it atop the dresser, picked it up, and shouted, “Hello?” He listened for approximately two seconds, then screeched into it, “What the hell did you do to her, you bastard?”
Ember moaned into the pillow and put her hands over her ears.
“No, you absolutely will not! I don’t know what you did but I’ve never seen her like this and so help me God if you come over here I’ll—” He cut off abruptly, listened for another moment, then with a muttered oath that included the words “roasted balls” he slammed the phone down.
Ember sat up in bed. “What? What did he say?”
Furious, Asher looked at her, his face a mottled shade of red. “He says he’s coming up.”
“What—now?” She looked wildly around the room as if he was lurking behind the curtains or beside the bookcase. “He’s here?”
In answer, there was a violent pounding on the apartment’s front door.
Seeing the look of pure panic on her face, Asher pronounced with venom, “I’ll take care of this jerkoff,” and marched out of the bedroom.
He slammed her bedroom door behind him so she couldn’t see what was going on in the living room, but within two seconds there was the muffled sound of shouting, another door being slammed, more shouting, this time louder, then a few unidentifiable thumps and bumps that had her cowering on the bed in terror, imagining the worst. Then her bedroom door burst wide open, disgorging an apoplectic Asher, wielding one of the set of carving knives from the block on the kitchen counter, and a snarling Christian, dressed only in the pair of linen trousers he’d been wearing when she saw him standing in front of the fireplace.
Ember shrieked, “Asher! Put the knife down!”
Then commenced the loudest, most convoluted shouting match Ember had ever heard. Asher screamed something, Christian shouted something back, the two of them volleyed threats and insults and ignored anything the other one was saying until Ember, exhausted and so strung out she thought her head might actually explode, yelled, “STOP!”
They froze. Both their heads whipped around in her direction.
Asher—athletic and muscular, but easily outsized by Christian—was in Badass mode. She?
??d seen this a few other times when he’d had occasion to divest some bigot of a misconception that gay men were nothing but effeminate, promiscuous, Streisand-loving sissies who’d been molested in childhood, triggering some kind of sexual Stockholm syndrome whereby the victim would forevermore “choose” to be attracted to other men in an effort to heal their painful past.
