Dammit. Goddamn it all to hell.
He gulped in air and stumbled back to lean against the hot tile wall. The adrenaline flowed from him like the water, and he dropped his head, exhaustion overwhelming him. Only then did he see the threads of red curling toward the drain.
Blood?
Confused, he looked up, and realized that the shower door was shattered. That his hand was bleeding.
Fuck.
He let himself slide to the floor. Let the water continue to run, to dilute the blood. He closed his eyes and sat in the steam, and wished that he could wash away his self-loathing as easily as the water washed away his blood.
--
"You didn't return my call."
Dallas paused in front of the cot where he'd been pacing in his room, a bath towel wrapped around his hips, and allowed himself a single moment to regret the decision to answer the phone.
"Hello to you, too, Adele."
"What's the matter, pet?" He could hear the pout in her voice, accentuated by the lingering French accent that she hadn't lost even though she'd moved to the States forty years ago when she was thirteen. "You don't sound happy to hear from me at all."
"It's not you," he lied. They'd broken up four months ago. And although it had been surprisingly hard to break away, cutting himself free from their screwed up relationship--if you could even call it a relationship--had been one of the best decisions of his life.
At least that's what he thought most days. Other days, it was hard. Because Adele had been the only woman he'd ever had in his bed who knew some of his secrets. Who'd go with him into the dark.
Sure, he could blindfold the models and actresses and socialites who sucked his cock. He could tie their wrists together, spread their legs wide and fuck each one hard with a dildo while he sucked her off. He could spank the redhead. He could make the blonde crawl. He could jerk himself off until he came all over the new one's tits--the one he imagined stroking her own pussy as she videotaped her two friends.
But there were limits on what he could do with a woman he would only invite to his bed once or twice, three times at the max. And while a little kink only increased the titillating buzz that he'd worked so hard to foster, what really got him hard wasn't the kind of thing that socialites whispered about to each other over their Cosmos.
He'd told the redhead that he liked his sex fucked up, and that was true. She just didn't have any idea of how fucked up he was talking.
Adele had known. Hell, Adele had liked it.
"My ego is very happy to know it's not me," she said lightly. "But what's on your mind?"
He sighed, knowing she would press. She was trained as a therapist, so being nosy was part of her makeup.
He put the phone down on the cot after turning on the speaker. He'd bandaged his hand, and it ached from holding the damn thing. "It's nothing, really. I've just got a crisis at work I'm dealing with."
She chuckled softly. "Darling, your father would be so proud. I think he believes you run from anything related to your job that doesn't require you to wine and dine an investor's daughter or squeeze some B-actress's ass at a ribbon cutting for a new Sykes department store."
"You've never even met my father."
"Touchy." He could hear her adjust the phone. "I'm sorry. That was uncalled for. But Colin knew Eli well, and still talks about him often."
The mention of Colin, Jane's birth father, was like a sharp poke between the eyes, and he winced, everything that was wrong about his time with Adele coming
back to him like a flood.
They'd met in the years following the kidnapping, when Dallas was grappling with the loss of Jane--both her friendship, and the sudden cessation of everything forbidden that had happened between them.
Dallas had gone one day to Colin, whom he'd once thought of as an uncle, and Colin's new wife, Adele, had joined them for lunch. She was in her early forties, twenty years older than Dallas, and gloriously confident and sexy. There'd been an undeniable awareness between them. Not heat so much as attraction, as if they were succumbing to some sort of magnetic power.
They'd danced around it for years, never doing more than flirting. But as her marriage to Colin deteriorated, Adele had become more and more suggestive and aggressive. So that when she and Colin finally divorced, it was almost a foregone conclusion that Dallas would have her in his bed. Or--he still wasn't entirely sure--she would have him in hers.
She was the only woman with whom he ceded some control, and though he didn't understand why, he knew that something about her compelled him. Got him hard, even when he didn't want to be. It was more than her looks. She was beautiful, true, but with her thin, angular face, she really wasn't his type.
Hell, other than Jane he had no type.