Page 32

I popped my head from underneath the covers, ears straining. There it was again. Three brisk raps on my front door.

“Who the fuck is knocking on my door? So help me, it had better not be another drunk partier from that damn bar, or I’ll call… what in the world?”

One glance at the security camera live feed had my brow furrowing in disbelief. Adrian Benedict was on my front porch and he looked like he really needed to get hold of me. His expression was mixed, as all of his expressions usually were when something concerned me. He looked annoyed and also slightly disoriented.

“You picked a hell of a night to come over,” I grumbled, quickly pulling on shorts to go with the oversized shirt I was wearing. Since Lug Nut wasn’t here, the man would be able to actually enter the house. Had the dog been here, he would have alerted me much sooner, and he would not let Adrian get close to me. We hadn’t parted on good terms, and Lug Nut had a very long memory.

The knocking continued to the point where I had to speak to the man through the camera app.

“Just a minute! I’m coming!” I replied in a heated whisper. The noise ceased for the moment and I undid the locks, yanking open the door to face the man who had caused me a lot of angst the last several weeks.

“It’s a bit late for a social call isn’t it?” I snarked.

Adrian stared at me, as if he wasn’t sure I was a real person.

“I need to see you,” he said, his tone oddly flat. He shifted on his feet, looking past me. I knew what he was looking for.

“My bodyguard is actually at the emergency vet.” It wouldn’t benefit me to lie. Obviously, the dog was not here or he would have already been growling and showing teeth. With a nod, his gaze swung back to me.

“I need to see you,” he repeated.

Feeling extra bitchy, I made a downward sweeping motion with my hand. “Here I am. You’ve seen me. Satisfied?”

Adrian shook his head. “No. You know what I mean.”

Did he actually think…?

“I’m not a booty call, Adrian. If that’s what you came for, you can go back to your impersonal penthouse.”

Again, he shook his head. “You’re missing the point, Brynn.” His tone sounded tight and his body language was agitated.

Not wanting to draw attention to a man standing on my porch, I stepped aside to allow him entry. High energy was rolling off of him and the longer he was around me, the more intense it seemed to get.

Something was weirder than usual. I wasn’t afraid of Adrian, but I was on high alert. Closing the door, I locked it, then turned to find him extremely close to me. Placing a hand on his chest, I gently pushed at him to make him take a step back. Feeling the muscles beneath his T-shirt was like a jolt to my libido. Dammit. I couldn’t think about any of that.

Skirting past him, I made my way into the kitchen with him close on my heels. I need water and I bet he could use some, too. Grabbing two glasses, I filled them both, sliding one closer to him while I drained the other. He just stood there, watching me but saying nothing.

“You’re going to have to explain a bit more about your reason for this visit. It’s three in the morning, and I’ve had a shit night. My dog is costing me a shit-ton of money because he decided to eat a toxic plant. A plant, I might add, that my neighbor had given me as a Christmas gift. You remember Kevin, my neighbor? The one who looks after my dog when I work late or go out of town? He thought he was doing a nice thing. And it was a nice thing, it just had something in it that apparently is a no-no for animals. I’m lucky Lug Nut weighs as much as he does or it might have ended up differently.”

I was babbling. I knew I was babbling, but it was unnerving to have this man in my house, standing mere feet from me, but not really participating in conversation, or even telling me more about why he had decided to cross town to come to my house.

Suddenly, his eyes darted to the bookshelf where the picture of me and my sister sat. He made a beeline for that bookshelf and picked up the photo. I had reframed it after he’d broken the other one. Thankfully, the picture itself had not been damaged.

“Blair was your sister,” he said matter of factly, running a finger over her face. His jaw tensed and released and I watched his grip tighten on the frame.

“Don’t you dare break that one, too,” I said. He set the photo down firmly, then looked at others. Some were photos of Lug Nut, some were of my dad. Some were recent shots of my dad and me. There was one picture of my dad, Blair, and me taken the Christmas before she had been killed. She hadn’t wanted to take that shot, but we had convinced her to pose. I was incredibly thankful that Blair had relented and posed with us.

“Blair was your sister,” he said again. What the hell was going on? Was Adrian on something? This whole interaction was beginning to creep me out.

“I already said yes. You can see for yourself in the pictures.”

“You didn’t tell me,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Why would I tell you? I had no idea the two of you ever met. I knew nothing about that part of her private life and I knew nothing about you.”

“You joined Olympus under false pretense.”

“Is that what this conversation is going to be, Adrian? You’re going to stand here and detail every one of my sins? If that’s the case, I’d prefer to have this discussion during regular business hours. This could have waited, you know. There was no need to interrupt my awful sleeping.”

He shook his head again. “I needed to see you.”

“For fuck’s sake. I’m here. You’re here. I see you. You see me. You’re not saying anything that really makes sense to me, nor are you truly helping me understand why you are here. If you can’t do that, then it’s probably a good idea to come back at another time.” I turned to walk toward the front door and I felt strong male fingers on my arm.

“You’d used Blair’s credentials to get in the server, then you created your own account,” he said hotly. “You lurked in that space. You were spying.”

“ No, I was not spying. ” I said indignantly. “That’s not why I joined. I was trying to understand my sister. I was trying to make sense of her death. Don’t you get it? Getting a feel for that server I thought would help me figure out why she died.” I continued. “She never told me anything about the lifestyle, or how she had discovered she was submissive. I thought she had shared everything with me, but I have since discovered that there is quite a lot she kept to herself. It’s been eye-opening and humbling to find out my sister had a whole different side to who she was.” I got a bit brave then. “She loved you.”

Adrian yanked me closer at those words until our bodies were almost touching. “That was her mistake,” he said, the words extremely tight and controlled. “She knew the rules.”

“Rules are made to be broken,” I replied.

“Not mine,” he said. His eyes were nearly black, the pupils huge. If I didn’t know better, it almost looked like he had been to an eye appointment and had them dilated. Again, I wondered if he was on something.

“Not true. I know for a fact that you have broken plenty of rules with me.” The man practically snarled in reply, pulling me even closer until we were indeed touching now.

“That was my mistake,” he growled, the self-loathing evident in his tone. “A mistake I am dearly paying for.”

My head snapped back at his words. Did that mean he had regrets about everything? I could most likely handle him not wanting to be around me anymore, but regretting ever being around me to begin with? That affected me deeply and I gasped.

The room began to feel like the walls were closing in and suddenly I experienced a tightness in my chest like I was being suffocated. I struggled against him until he loosened his grip, then I stepped back. Drawing slow, deep breaths into my lungs, I focused on the man before me. A quick glance at the clock showed he had been there for almost thirty minutes, yet I was no closer to having a clue why he had decided to do this.

“I think you need to go.” Once more, he shook his head.

“I needed to see you.”

“Oh my god, Adrian. You aren’t making sense. Quite frankly, you’re making me question why I even let you in. You should really go.”

Taking both of my shoulders in his hands, he shook me slightly as though he was trying to get my attention.

“Mistake. It’s all a mistake. Always a mistake.”

Before I could say anything else, he slammed his lips over mine.