Page 39 of Triple Threat

3:07 am

I’d gone to bed around two. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but by four, I had to give up. I was too restless, and I was haunted by the ghosts of memories I would much rather forget… the what cameafterthe Daughton’s.

The dead-end jobs, the renting rooms, the fleeing in the middle of the night from one of those rooms when the house’s owner tried to get fresh with me in the middle of the night by coming into my room. God, the thing I’d managed to avoid in foster care, that led to my early exit, only to have to deal with itagainwhen I was nineteen and paying for my own space. I’d only gotten away because I’d smashed a water glass in his face.

I was lucky the police had believed me. I held up my hand in the sliver of moonlight coming in behind me through the bedroom window and traced the vertical scar in the middle of the heel of my palm with its slight curve at the bottom from that incident.

Once again, I’d found myself with my belongings in trash bags, and lucky enough that Michelle, one of my coworkers at the time, invited me to stay on her couch just until I could find something else… which I did, but it was just as sketchy. My lease hadn’t been renewed because the guy was pissed that I’d drilled holes in his door to put in a deadbolt on my bedroom. He was illegally subletting anyway and was like this forty-year-old guy renting to a nineteen-year-old. Fuck his security deposit.

The next place I’d moved into was with Nick, my boyfriend.

It went well until the honeymoon phase was over and I realized what a child he still was himself. Twenty-four, spending most of his time unemployed after rage quitting job after job and then finally deciding that I could just do all the work… and I do mean All. The. Work. From my regular waitressing gig, sometimes pulling double shifts, to every bit of housework in our little studio apartment while he played video games and watched movies all day.

I couldn’t do it on my own, and I packed up and left while he was passed out one night. Never looked back.

I sighed and sat up on the edge of the bed, mind racing. I didn’t want to go through the litany of bad decisions and sheer rotten luck that proceeded to follow in the years after that.

All of it leading to this grand gilded cage… coming full circle… right back to Kyle.

Kyle who had been my first love. Kyle who had promised he would find me and come back for me as soon as he was out of basic training. The first man to have lied to me on that score. Kyle who had changed his number or lost his phone or whatever and who I had never heard from again until now…

Kyle fucking Lachlan,I thought disparagingly.

KylefuckingLachlan who I had spent countless hours with in that final year of his foster care stint. KylefuckingLachlan who I had believed in, who I had promised he could beanything, who I tried so very hard to be kind to despite his sharp edges and who mademefeel things I had never felt before… or since, if I was being perfectly honest.

Kyle fucking Lachlan who had become a stone-cold killer…

I got out of bed, bare feet sinking into the plush, cream carpet, and I wriggled my toes down into the shag.

It’d been a few days since I’d seen him, down at the pool, and the mansion was big enough that I hadn’t encountered him again even though Conan assured me he was lurking and still here.

I hoped Iwouldn’tencounter him either. I didn’t know how to reconcile the Kyle of my youth to the man on those monitors, to the man he was now.

I sighed harshly into the dark and padded across the floor, the dusky light teal satin nightgown I wore fluttering against the tops of my thighs as I made my way across the dark room and peeked into the well-lit hallway outside my bedroom door.

My sleep schedule was all screwed up; though I didn’t suppose it really much mattered. I mean, what else was there for me to do? This place was already immaculate. I wasn’t really allowed in the kitchen without Conan’s supervision – that’s to say, he had taken to locking up the knives in one of the kitchen drawers after that first incident, and it wasn’t like I really knew how to cook beyond reading the directions on the box… and there certainly weren’t any box meals in Conan’s kitchen.

Still, I could at least heat up some milk or something and calm this gnawing in my gut which was akin to hunger, but certainly wasn’t me starving. No, Conan made certain I was well fed to the point I was starting to notice some changes in the mirror. For the first time in a long time, my ribs were no longer showing quite so prominently and my chest seemed to be filling out some.

I was grateful for that. Better than gaining it all in my ass and thighs.

I did warm a small glass of milk, drank it, and still felt restless, so I did what I always did when I was this sort of way – I slipped from the kitchen, ghosting up the hall, trailing fingertips along the expensive wallpaper and just wandered for lack of anything else to do.

I found myself on the single step to the sunken living room. The mansion, being so close to the Chesapeake, had certain built-in features, Conan had explained, in case of storm surge and flooding.

I stepped down off the hardwood and relished in the feel of my feet sinking into the rich carpet in here, too. Cream, like the rest of the mansion that I could tell. A red Persian area rug, bigger than I had ever seen, really tied the room together with its overstuffed couches and wildly oversized entertainment center.

It was the glittering moonlight over the Chesapeake that brought me down here, however, and up to the windows with their marble ledge about knee height. Another defense against the elements, should it come to it.

Cold radiated off the dark glass in front of me, and the marble before my feet, and I hugged myself tightly, letting my eyes wander over the freedom just beyond the thick, bulletproof glass, over the water, and along the rim of the bay with its glittering city lights.

I felt such a mixture, such a jumble of feelings about things. Like I should be grateful… and I mean, I guess I should be for some things. Roan had gentled and was kind enough to me and though Kyle was a stranger to me now, he still held such a familiarity – a tenuous link to my past for as awful as it was after my parents had died, leaving me with nothing and no one, no family to take me in.

A flicker of movement in the glass made me refocus, and I sucked in a sharp breath as Kyle’s reflection resolved in it. He was behind me by several paces, standing on the lip of the stair down into the living room – hands in the pockets of his black slacks, dressed identically to how he had been in the pool.

His eyes fixed on mine in the reflection of the window and slowly, almost predatorily, he stepped down in his socked feet into the living room. His eyes were sharp, cutting like chips of obsidian as he made his way to me, stopping just behind me. I touched a hand to my throat, my other arm around my waist, as I subconsciously tried to hide myself in the scant nightgown from his gaze, which was doing a slow sweep down the reflection of my front.

I felt my pussy clench and very nearly stopped breathing at the visceral reaction my body had to seeing him. He was still just as handsome, just as gorgeous as he had been to me when I was fifteen, only now, neither one of us were teenagers. Though Kyle Lachlan had been my first kiss, though my ribcage very nearly burned with the memory of his hand, slipped beneath the hem of my shirt, that was as far as it had ever really gotten between us.

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