Page 12 of Gilded Locks

Light filtered through the floor-to-ceiling windows, chasing away the night shadows and casting the men in the soft glow of dawn. Tall, broad, radiating danger. Every survival instinct she possessed shrieked warnings to run, but there was nowhere to go. No sanctuary left to claim.

Marigold scrambled backward like prey until her spine collided with the headboard. All three men watched her. One with amusement, another with something akin to concern, and the other like a predator eyeing its prey, as if he planned to eat her alive.

She tugged the oversized sweater down over her bare thighs with trembling fingers. The sable coat had fallen away while she slept, now trapped beneath her weight, and she must have kicked off the wool socks overnight. “There was a storm?—”

“Did we say you could speak?”

Her trembling lips pressed tight, and she trapped them between her front teeth.

The blond one snicked his tongue, and her wide-eyed gaze jumped to his face. “Submitting that easily? Where’s the fun in that? Go on, little lamb, keep bleating. Give us a chance to force your silence.”

Her heart hammered hard enough that she felt it against the headboard pressing into her back.

“You’re scaring her,” rumbled the man on the left, his voice rough and dangerous and completely uncompromising. “That’s my job.” Dark hair fell across features that belonged on wanted posters, and when he smiled, his full lips stretched with barely restrained violence.

The third man maintained perfect silence, but his black eyes tracked every tremor that rippled through her body with the focused intensity of a mercenary. There was something terrifying in his stillness, something that hinted he wanted to be entertained and liked an element of surprise, much like a cat waited for a mouse to flee.

The long-haired one stepped closer to the bed with fluid grace. “Tell us why you broke into our home.” His Russian accent was smooth as ice, and his eyes equally as sharp.

How far had she sailed once she got off that plane? Had she crossed into foreign territory?

He called it his home, but what if he meant more than the property? She thought about the dungeon downstairs. This wasn’t some empty vacation house waiting for distant owners to return. This was a place of secrets. These men led very private lives, and she’d trespassed on the personal property. Slept in one of their beds.

She needed to get out of there. Preferably alive and in one piece. “The storm,” she began, but the dark-haired giant severed her words with harsh laughter.

“The storm made you jimmy our lock?”

“It wasn’t locked,” she protested. “I swear.”

The blond glanced back at the long-haired one who casually lifted a shoulder. He appeared the most civilized, but she wasn’t fooled. She could see every muscle under his designer wool sweater. And his ice-blue eyes were unreadable as an Arctic sky.

“Ah.” The blond nodded. “So, because the door was open, you felt entitled to steal from us?”

“I’m not a thief!” The denial burst from her with more force than wisdom.

“No?” The quiet, threatening one finally spoke, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through her bones and settled in places she didn’t want to examine. With his fist still buried in the mattress, he could grab her leg in one quick lunge. “Then what would you call someone who enters a home uninvited, consumes the owners’ food, wears their clothes, and sleeps in their bed?”

Heat flooded her cheeks like spilled wine. When he catalogued her transgressions so clinically, they did sound like theft. But what choice did she have? The alternative was freezing to death.

“I was dying,” she confessed, lifting her chin with more defiance than she felt. “Would you have preferred to discover my corpse at your doorstep?”

The long-haired man’s grin widened with predatory appreciation. “That depends.”

“On?”

“How you’re willing to pay for our hospitality.”

Was this what they considered hospitable? It was difficult not to scoff, but she wanted to live. The tone of his statement made her skin crawl with dread and unwelcome heat.

“I don’t have any money. I lost everything?—”

“There are other ways.” The man with long dark hair dropped his gaze to her legs as the blonde circled to the side of the bed.

Marigold’s head snapped toward him like trapped prey tracking a hunter. His clean-shaven appearance did nothing to ease her tension. Every muscle in his body, all the way to his perfectly edged jawline, spoke of controlled discipline. Nothing about this man was unintentional, and something in his poised presence told her he’d witnessed horrible things in his life, things that would have made weaker men beg.

He stared down at her with cold-blooded detachment. “You’ve put us in quite the position, little thief.”

“Don’t call me that.”