Page 21 of Taken By the Kingpin
“Then I organised your annulment. Your education. Your protection. And every year I received an update on you. On your birthday.”
He has watched me since. All those days when I was sad and had no one, he was watching.
But he could have been in my life.
“Why didn’t you contact me? Every birthday? Could have sent a card,” I say with false lightness.
“Would you have welcomed that?”
I consider. A reminder of all that had been taken from me? “No. But still. Didn’t you want to?”
He hesitates.
“No lies,” I add.
“Yes and no.”
“I’m the Libra, weighing everything up constantly, not you.” I spread my hands as if to grip his neck in frustration. “I might yet throttle you.”
He smiles in recollection at our spat last night, but breathes in like the cares of the world are on his back.
“On your fourteenth birthday, I was sick to my stomach. You looked dead inside and out. I thought we’d screwed you up permanently. I didn’t want to contact you.” His words spill out, fast and unflinching and truthful as scalding water poured from a kettle. “Fifteen, you were a little better. I wanted to hug you and muzz your hair like you were my little sister.”
Like we were family. I wish I’d known. Those years… I’d left everything familiar behind and struggled to understand people. I thought I’d been totally deserted. But I hadn’t. He’d searched for clues in a report, while I’d been staring at the sky.
“Sixteen. You looked happy. I was delighted. I stared at that photo and told myself it was okay. You’d survived. I hadn’t failed you as badly as I thought. I kept it framed on my desk that whole year. You’d got the hang of dying your hair and it looked good. I saw that you were due to get straight As at school. You still wore that uniform but there was a confidence I hadn’t seen before. And I was proud as fuck of you for making it through.
“Then seventeen.” He swallows. “You were self-assured. The first photograph of you not in that school uniform. You wore a pale blue summer dress.”
I remember it. That was my favourite and I wore it constantly.
He shrugs. “It was a far cry from a blouse buttoned to your neck and a shapeless blazer. You were on the cusp of womanhood. And I… I responded with a man’s urges. I saw you and I burned. I wanted. I desired.
“And I knew, without a shadow of doubt, that I could never have you. That I would not drag you back to this life you’d escaped. I took down the sweet photo of you from the year before. I couldn’t trust myself to look at it and not imagine what you looked like now. And I couldn’t trust myself not to give in to the soul deep longing for you to be mine.”
There’s a silence.
I think of seeing newspaper columns about playboy bachelor Sebastian Laurent. I think of how I yearned for him to be my husband, my protector, my companion and my lover. How would I have felt, knowing it was mutual?
Excited. Hopeful. With a whole life to look forward to rather than an awkward feeling of needing to escape the inevitability of being trapped, desperate to know what the future had in store and willing to use anything—including balls of gas billions of light years away—to try to understand myself, my situation, and my fate.
“Do you still… Want that?” I ask cautiously. “Me?”
His eyes are harshly bright, like looking at the midday sun on an alpine glacier—all the heat and light reflected onto every inch of my body. I’ve never had anyone look at me the way Sebastian does. That intensity is both scary and thrilling.
“More.”
He’s like a crouched jaguar, ready to pounce, but somehow I know after his confession he’s not going to make the first move. I have to do that.
I screw up my courage. He says he wants this. I can tempt him into taking me, right? This should be simple; it should have been straightforward from the beginning, except we both naffed it up at almost every turn.
What would a sexy, experienced woman do?
Ugh. I don’t even know. And maybe that doesn’t matter. I crawl over the sofa until I’m on him. I’m a little awkward, unsure of our strange mess of limbs, and he hasn’t reached out to touch me.
Not bloody giving me any help at all. So typical of Sebastian. When it’s what he’s decided, there’s no stopping him, but until then, I’m on my own. And yet, I’m not. His looking out for me, his caring for me, everything he’s done to ensure my comfort and safety, it’s this massive net to catch me whenever I fall.
So I jump.
