Page 18 of Sweet Possession
I wanted to kiss her mouth and see how they felt pressed againstmine. I cleared my throat and gave her a nod in response, not trusting myself to open my mouth in case I begged her to let me taste her.
For a few minutes, we walked in a comfortable silence as Cora’s gazeroamed around the garden. Every so often, she’d take a deep breath and inhale the fresh air, and each time, more tension would leave her body.
I imagined there were times when she was locked up in the Dukescell that she thought she’d never get to experience the smell of freshly cut grass or hear the birds chirping in the trees again. A fear I’d experienced many times in my youth.
“Oh, you have a pool,”she said as we reached the edge of myproperty where the infinity pool was, her tone light.
“Yeah,”I replied, gazing at the enormous pool, and realizing I hadn’tthought about swimming since the minute I saw Cora’s picture a few days ago.
Strange. Swimming wasn’t just a hobby I enjoyed, it was the onlything that gave me a rare moment when my brain wasn’t thinking five steps ahead. But I also swam because there was a time when my inability to swim cost me dearly, and I never wanted to be in that position again.
Until the recent opening of Onyx, I swam daily, becoming agitated if Ididn’t. But with the casino opening, my mind had been elsewhere.
“You can use it whenever you want,”I said, waving to the pool.“Wecan get you a swimsuit if you want to take a dip.”
Bollocks. Don’t think about her in a swimsuit.
“Oh,”Cora said, her eyes dropping.“I can’t swim.”
At her words, the image of her in a bikini evaporated, and my heartplummeted to the soles of my shoes as an icy wave of panic descended through me, wrapping icy tendrils around my chest.
Images flashed to my mind of a young girl floating face down in thepool, her body still as the screams of a little boy echoed into the sky. The haunting image morphed into a vision of the girl being pulled out of the water, her eyes closed, and her lips blue.
Her body still.
Lifeless.
I shook my head, dispelling the memory before it could fully takehold, and taking a few seconds to compose myself.
It had been a long time since those images had haunted me.
“Baby girl, if you can’t swim, then you need to promise me you’ll stayaway from the pool unless I’m with you. Can you do that?”I said, my voice almost choking from the receding memory.
Cora gaped at me, her brows furrowed in worry.“Okay, I promise,”she whispered, before reaching out and taking my hand, giving it a small, comforting squeeze.
The actions of someone who had suffered their own trauma andrecognized the effect it had on a person.
Tension eased from my body in an instant at her promise. Wanting toget her as far away from the pool as possible, I led her back inside, our hands still clasped together.
When the tour came to an end and we were back in the kitchen, Corayawned and confessed that despite having slept soundly the night before, she was still exhausted.
Hardly surprising given what she’d been through in the last week.
Thanking me for showing her around, I watched her as she headedoff to her room. The worry that had plagued me the last few days had begun to ease, although I knew there was still a chance she’d tell me that she didn’t want to stay with me.
Truthfully, if she said she wanted to move to the other side of theworld to get away from Vegas, I’d be going with her, Nash and the business be damned.
Deciding to get some work done while she napped, I headed to myoffice, but of course, I couldn’t concentrate. The morning replayed over in my head, and I couldn’t help but smile at how different she seemed from the day we first met. I hoped that with time, life before her eighteenth birthday would become a distant memory.
At the reminder of her recent birthday, I sat up straight. Themoment Freddy told Diaz that Cora had only turned eighteen the week before he handed her over to the Dukes rang in my ears.
What was the betting Freddy had done the sum of fuck all tocelebrate her birthday?
Determined to give her a birthday she’d never forget, even if it was aweek late, I opened a new window on my laptop, work completely forgotten about, and my credit card at the ready.
Chapter 6
Cora
