“Permit me,” he begged.
I swallowed the knot in my throat. If I thought for a moment that letting him kiss me would secure my release, I might’ve considered it. But I knew it was merely the gateway to a larger problem. Damian was obviously infatuated with me and even the smallest concession would lead to other expectations that I could never, ever fulfill.
No matter how much I wanted to.
He stiffened, his gaze sliding toward the living room. The front door wasn’t visible from where we stood, and I hadn’t heard anything to indicate someone had arrived. But given Damian’s reaction, I knew someone had either awakened from the hallway scuffle (which meant they weren’t dead … yay!) or a secondary team had arrived. Relief tumbled through me for a nanosecond.
Damian yanked me fully into his embrace. He was all taut flesh and hard muscle (and did I mention his enormous penis, which was now pressed between the vee of my thighs?). My body and my brain argued over the appropriate response. My knees wobbled, and I felt all liquidy and faint. Then Damian leaned down and sank his sharp teeth deeply into the flesh between my neck and shoulder.
“Ow!” I cried. I smacked Damian on top of the head as if he were a pesky schoolboy taking liberties rather than a delusional schizophrenic. He straightened. And he was grinning with blood-flecked lips.
“I didn’t give you permission to do that!”
“I can mark you if I so choose,” he said imperiously. “I am the royal alpha.”
I gaped at him. The spot where he’d bitten me stung like crazy. I should’ve been asking him questions that helped me understand his delusion, but I was too pissed off. “You need permission to kiss me, but you can
bite
me?”
“No!” The angry shout came from Jarred. “Damn it! Sven!”
“Got him,” came Sven’s icy voice.
I heard a low, soft whine; then a circular silver object thudded into Damian’s shoulder. Oh. That explained the other wound. But why had they tried to tranq him earlier? What had triggered his delusion?
“You are protected now,” he said. His hands slipped off my arms as his eyes rolled back into his head. He crumpled to the floor.
“Christ Almighty,” muttered Jarred as he grasped my wrist and pulled me away from Damian’s prone form. I watched in a daze as Sven and his female partner shouldered past us and crouched down to check the unconscious man.
“It’s nice that you’re not dead,” I said to Sven.
He glanced up at me, his gaze widening as he noted what I was wearing. Then one corner of his mouth tugged up. “Back ’atcha.”
Sven didn’t completely hate me. Well, that was progress in one abysmal corner of my messed-up life. While Sven and his team dealt with Damian, Jarred led me into the kitchen. The whole area was open plan. The kitchen overlooked the living room and to the right was the formal dining room—complete with chandelier. Just ten feet away, I heard Sven on his walkie-talkie making arrangements to put Damian back into the induction room.
I wheeled around and leaned over the marble counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. “No! Don’t cage him!”
Sven’s gaze traveled past me, and I followed it to Jarred, who stood less than a foot behind me. He was as emotionally shuttered as usual, his expression stony. “He’s too dangerous to be allowed a suite.”
I had to agree with him, even though I didn’t want Damian tossed into the padded cell again. “Isn’t there a more secure location that’s not so … well, prisonlike?”
“No.” He nodded toward Sven. The big man picked up Damian and tossed him over his shoulder like an unwieldy sack of potatoes.
I turned away, unable to stomach the sight of yet another of my failures being carted away. At least Damian was alive. Robert had been dead, and deservedly so.
Jarred stepped closer, chopping in half the small distance between us. He looked as an ancient and stoic as an oak tree. His tense demeanor set me on edge. I couldn’t sense his emotions, but I got the impression something significant had changed—something that very much displeased him. His gaze slid over me, lingering on the gap created by the way the camisole’s fabric split. He had a decent view of my navel and the lacy edge of my panties. He might be able to block my empathic abilities, but I knew desire when I saw it—even in the tiny flicker Jarred allowed into those cold gray eyes.
“I’ll go put on a robe.”
“I would prefer that you didn’t,” he said.
I heard the command in his tone, and I didn’t like it. I had the childish urge to yell, “You’re not the boss of me!” Except that, you know, he actually was.
“I’m not particularly comfortable conversing with my employer while in my underwear.”
“You may as well know,” he said in thoughtful tone, “that I had fully expected to bed you by evening’s end.”
I swallowed the knot in my throat. I hadn’t been incorrect about his intentions at all. “I don’t care how desperate I am, Mr. Dante. I will not sleep with you to keep my job.”
He blinked down at me, the slight widening of his eyes the only indication of his surprise. “Our sexual relationship has nothing to do with your employment.” He frowned. “I find it disturbing that you believe I need to blackmail anyone into my bed.”
“I find it disturbing you think we’re going to have a sexual relationship.”
His lips thinned. “I hadn’t counted on the competition.”
Competition?
I looked at him blankly, and he sighed. He put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels, ever the casual man (only so not … everything about Jarred Dante was calculated).
His gaze meandered over me again, which I tolerated with some annoyance. Being wealthy and good-looking and autocratic had made Jarred somewhat a spoiled bully. I crossed my arms and glared at him, but he didn’t relent in his inventory of my assets. His mouth tightened almost imperceptibly.
“I’m surprised you championed Damian at all,” said Jarred. “He could’ve killed you.”
“If he wanted to kill me then I would be dead.”
The blame for Damian’s escape was mine. I hadn’t judged the situation appropriately. Worse, I allowed my attraction to him to cloud my judgment. I was entirely out of my league. I could no longer pretend that I was capable of running the facility when it was so obvious I couldn’t even run my own life. It appeared that I would never regain my confidence (or was that my own arrogance?). I would always second-guess myself—forget about regaining full trust in my own decision-making skills.
Why are you even a therapist, Kelsey?
The question was a blend of my mother’s voice and my own conscience. Pure stubbornness had propelled me forward. Despite losing civil lawsuits, and being convicted in the court of public opinion, I had received no reprimands from the state nor had the federal government sought charges against me. And I’d spent quite a few days in the company of FBI agents. So, with license (and the proverbial hat) in hand, I’d sought a therapy job. And I’d eventually gotten one—a very crappy, unrewarding one. Then Jarred found me and offered me redemption through his largesse.
But still I was plagued by the idea that I hadn’t found my place in the world. I always felt like I was going in the wrong direction.
I reached up and felt the wound on my neck. Even the light pressure sent a jolt of pain down my shoulder.
Ouch.
“The question is why Damian tried to find me at all. And how did he manage it?”
“He caught your scent.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Unless my theory that his delusion was so powerful, his body was actually accommodating it. “I can’t believe how embedded he is in the fiction he’s created. It’s amazing that it survived the amnesia, but not any of his other memories. He told me that he could mark me because he was the royal alpha.”
“Did he?” Jarred’s gaze flicked to my neck. “Let me see.”
He lifted my hair. He was such a large man that I couldn’t help but feel intimidated by his nearness. He was dressed in a gray suit with a striped tie, no doubt for our dinner date, and I had to admit, his spicy cologne was rather nice. He uttered, “Goddamnit.” Then he stepped back. “I’ll call Dr. Ruthers.”
I shook my head. “I’ll put on some antibiotic ointment and bandage it. I’ll be fine.”
Jarred quirked a brow. He removed his cell phone and pressed one button. “Dr. Ruthers, please come to Kelsey Morningstone’s suite. She’s been bitten by a werewolf.” He ended the call and stuck the phone back into his jacket pocket.
“Yeah. Funny,” I said. “It’s nice that you take Damian’s case so seriously.”
“Believe me, Kelsey, I take Damian’s case
very
seriously.” He reached into an upper cabinet and pulled down an elaborate bottle with a gold spiral around it. In another cabinet, he pulled down two snifters.
I looked at him, surprised. “I had no idea those were in there.”
“I stocked the kitchen for you. It doesn’t look like you use it much.”
“I don’t cook.”
“I’ll get you a chef,” he said as he handed me the glass. “Then you won’t have to.”
I didn’t particularly want alcohol to soothe my jangled nerves. I thought the whole gesture was rather cliché, but with Jarred staring at me expectantly, I took a small sip.
I grimaced. “Ew. That’s yucky!”
His eyes went wide, and he nearly choked on the drink he’d just taken.
I put the glass on the counter. “I don’t think I’m a brandy kind of girl.”
“If you can’t enjoy a one-hundred-twenty-year-old brandy with a seven-thousand-dollar price tag,” he managed hoarsely, “then no, you are not a brandy kind of girl.”
I studied the bottle, wondering why on earth he would spend so much money on such a silly thing. “Maybe you can get your money back.”
He shook his head. “On my soul, I will never tell the Frapin family that you called their Cuveé 1888 ‘yucky.’ ”
I shrugged. “It’s your liver.”
He put his glass next to the one I’d abandoned. Once again, he moved very close to me, leaning a hip against the counter. He reached out and curled a strand of my hair around his forefinger. “You are not impressed by the trappings of wealth.”
“I used to measure my success by the amount and quality of possessions I acquired.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m beholden to a man trapped in his wealth.”
He actually chuckled. His eyes crinkled in a way that made me think he had once been a man who laughed easily. I wondered what had happened to him to make him so closed off. He let my hair drop. Then he crossed his arms, his enigmatic gaze on mine. “I won’t allow you to quit.”
My mouth dropped open. He’d discerned my intent before the idea had fully formed. Hadn’t that really been what my mind had been circling around? My heart just hadn’t caught up. Once he said the words, however, I knew quitting this job, hell, quitting as a psychotherapist altogether, was exactly what I needed to do. I had never felt in charge of my own life. Part of it was because my mother was controlling—always pushing me toward the goals she thought I should accomplish. Still. I was twenty-eight years old. I could hardly keep blaming my mommy issues. Okay, I could, but I wouldn’t. The other part, of course, was my fear. What would I do if I wasn’t a therapist?
I couldn’t think of a thing.
It was scary to look at a road stretching out in front of me, endless and spiraling with no familiar landmarks.
After all I’d been through, I was still a coward.
“It’s not your choice,” I finally said. “You would think after I let a serial killer loose, I would’ve gotten the universal hint that I shouldn’t be a therapist.”
“What Robert Mallard did was not your fault.”
“It was, actually.”
He considered me for a long moment. I was feeling too tired to defend my position on anything else, and the pain of my injury had been worsening every second. It ached so badly now, I just wanted to pop some Advil and go to bed. I resisted the urge to touch the wounded flesh again. I had no idea what would soothe a bite, but suddenly I was glad Jarred had called Dr. Ruthers. Surely the physician had some magical ointment that would fix me.
“You will continue to work for me,” said Jarred. “Or you’ll have to deal with the legalities of walking away from your obligations.”
I felt the blood drain out of my face. I’d agreed to three years as administrator and head therapist in exchange for Jarred paying off my debts, a generous salary, and this luxury apartment. “You would sue me for breach of contract,” I said flatly.
“As a start.”
I tamped down my anger. Jarred was probably expecting me to get upset, so I tossed aside my impulse to tell him to take a flying leap, and tried to appeal to his sense of reason. “We both know I’m not cut out for this job. The staff doesn’t respect me. The patients don’t trust me. Sven thinks I’m an idiot. And you have the gall to believe that I’ll fall into bed with you because you’re rich and smart and handsome.”
“What’s wrong with those qualities?” he asked, ignoring everything else I’d said.
“When you can buy anything, or anyone, then nothing truly has worth. How can you cherish what you hold, Jarred, when you did nothing more than pay for it?”
He didn’t look away from me, but he didn’t respond right away, apparently mulling over my words. Then he shrugged. “It’s the way my world works. Everyone, and everything, has a price. One I can always pay.”
“I suppose that’s true. There’s no doubt you bought me,” I said. “But you don’t own me. Every female within a hundred miles would warm your bed tonight, but in the morning, what would you have left?”
“Some very good memories.”
“I don’t want to be someone’s very good memory,” I said softly. “Is that all you aspire to, Jarred?”
He didn’t answer, and though I still wasn’t getting any real vibes off him, I believed I glimpsed into his soul—maybe just a teeny-tiny bit. What Jarred was seeking, either through his work, this clinic, me, or that fancy brandy of his, he would not find. He wanted what we all wanted, what we all sought from each other on a daily basis. Connection. If we were lucky, we found our equal, the partner who balanced our weaknesses with their strengths, who offered us companionship and faith and security.