“The senator is dead. He doesn’t decide what happens in this house anymore.”
Theo blinked like I’d said something he wasn’t expecting. Well, he’d better get used to it. I was just starting to be unexpected.
“I can teach you,” Theo said.
“Good.” I walked past him into my dark house.
I opened the front door and punched in the code to the alarm to make it stop beeping. In the dark, I walked down the hallway past the rooms I never used and was never going to, the sitting room and the study with the fireplace that had not seen a fire once in the two years I lived here. In the kitchen, I got a glass of water and drank it down.
Did Eden Morelli really hit on me? Did that actually happen?
Laughing, I filled up my empty glass and took it up the stairs to my bedroom. My bedroom was all white, as per the senator’s request. Floors, ceiling, linens. The furniture was mahogany and dark in the shadows.
I hated all white.
I should change it.
“I should move,” I said out loud.
“And go where, Princess?”
I screamed, dropped the glass and fumbled for the light, but he crept out of the shadows before I could turn it on.
“Leave it,” Ronan said. “This is a conversation better suited to the dark.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Heart pounding, thevodka in my stomach churning, I ran.
I made it down the hallway to the top of the stairs before he grabbed my hand, yanking me to a halt so fast it wrenched my shoulder.
“What the hell are you doing in my house?” I cried, trying to get my hand free, but his grip was iron. And I knew when I couldn’t win against a man’s strength. So I stopped fighting and waited for him to relax.
“I’m here to get some questions answered,” he said, turning back to the bedroom, pulling me behind him like a fish.
Yeah, I wasn’t going back into that bedroom with him. I started fighting again. If I could get downstairs to the alarm—
“Stop it, Poppy,” he growled and grabbed me by the waist and hauled me back into the bedroom. He threw me down on the bed, and I scrambled off, standing on the other side of it. In front of me was the king-size bed, Ronan, and a dozen yards between me and the door.
Behind me were French doors and a balcony. If I was careful and did everything just right when I jumped, I would land in the pool.
“Thinking of jumping out that window?” he asked. “I wouldn’t. It would be a shame to end this night scraping your broken body off the deck.”
“What do you want?” I asked, taking a step backwards towards the door.
“To talk some sense into you.”
“In my bedroom?”
“Calm down, Poppy. I’m not going to hurt you.”
I made some kind of scoffing whimpering noise in my throat and took another tiny step back.
“You don’t believe me?” He circled the bed, and there was no place for me to go but back against the wall. “You think I already hurt you?”
He made it sound like I was a child. Like I had no idea all the ways he could give me pain.
“Stop.” I put up my hand, as if I could fend him off.