Footsteps crunched the dried grass behind him. A moment later, a slender shadow fell over him. He looked up into blue eyes. They weren’t exquisite or unforgettable. Just…blue.
“You have a beautiful voice.” She knelt before him. “In fact, you are an incredibly beautiful man. And I think you could use a little lift. Allow me.”
His cloud of grief labored his breath, squeezed his chest, and fogged his mind. He wasn’t alone in the fog. There was a spark. His beacon in the dark. “Charlee.”
She smiled. “You can call me Charlee.” She pulled on the chain around her neck and a small vial appeared from between her breasts with a tiny spoon attached. She dipped it in the vial and held up a scoop of powder.
Her plain features blurred, fading in and out and morphing into the visage of his dreams. His fantasy raised her little spoon to his nose and blinked huge inimitable blue eyes. “Sniff, baby.”
Charlee wouldn’t tell him to sniff. She would never be able to tell him anything. Looking into the face before him, she was all he could see. Christ, he needed to let her go. He needed to forget.
He sniffed. A zing pulsed through him. His senses opened. The sky deepened. The soil smelled richer. And the powder-coated finger sliding over his gums and the roof of his mouth trailed ice.
His mind fractured in memory. Don’t be so cold, little boy. The shed loomed against the night sky, waiting.
A tongue replaced the finger. It stabbed in his mouth and his own lay limp and numb. “Charlee?”
“Mmm.” She purred and rubbed her tits against him.
The numbness trickled down his throat and enveloped the chasm in his chest. The ache at the center melted away.
He fell upon his back, arms stretched out above him, and gave into the high. Gave into the hands in his pants. Gave into the mouth around his cock.
The loneliness lost its grip. Charlee was all around him. Her smile, her body, her mouth, her hands.
Hands. Petting his thigh. Squeezing his dick. Dragging him to the shed. Shoving him into the belly of hell. Oh God. He pushed her off him and jumped to his feet, swaying through a wave of dizziness. “Hands flat on the ground.”
Blue eyes stared up at him. Then she smiled and turned on her knees, bending at the waist and offering her ass.
Nausea turned his stomach. He pushed it away. “Move your hands from where they are and we’re done. Clear?”
She nodded.
The girl he’d spent one eternal hour with was gone. Yet she wasn’t just a girl, and she could never die. Submerged in the haze of hallucination, he visualized her skin beneath his palms, her * wrapped around his dick, and her strong-willed voice filling his ears. She was alive in him and always would be.
He dropped his head on his shoulders and shouted his release. “Charrrrleee.”
14
In the two weeks that followed, the penthouse had taken on a kind of tense stillness. Maybe because Charlee’s perception was limited to the confines of the stockroom, bedroom, and office, with Roy and Salvador as her only visitors.
She perched on the floor beneath Roy’s desk, her back pulled against his leg where he sat in the chair above her. She tried to tune out his conversation and focus on the drawing in her lap. If she could recall Jay’s scars better, she could perfect how the sketched flames should lick and curl around them.
What she did remember, however, had bound her to Jay those long painful months. Her mind remained whole, strengthening even, amidst the flames and steel of a man she hoped had gone on to fulfill his dreams. She clung to the vision of someday finishing his tattoo and seeing it displayed on stage for thousands of worshipping eyes. He deserved no less for saving her.
“I don’t care how long the company has been in your family.” Roy’s hand settled on her head and stroked her hair.
She leaned into the touch, craving the affection, despite the source.
“Sentimental shit is why you are drowning in debt.” Roy coiled a finger in her short strands and yanked, making her eyes water. “Take my offer, sell me the business, or I’ll make sure your competitors push you into bankruptcy.”
“I didn’t want to resort to this, Mr. Oxford.” The voice on the speaker shook, coughed. “Does the name Craig Grosky ring any bells? How about his daughter Charlee?”
The hand paused, stroked again. “I don’t hear any bells, Henry.”
“I hired an investigator. I know what that girl looks like, and I know what you did to her. I have proof.”
She stared at her sketchbook, hid behind her calmest expression, and tucked all her nerves deep inside.
“Are you attempting to blackmail me, Henry?”
“Yes.”
The stillness in the room convulsed. “Show me the evidence. This pointless conversation is nothing more than a poor attempt to weasel out of the hole you’ve dug for yourself. Until you have something useful to say or prove, we’re done here.” His fist hit the phone, and it flew off the desk.
She held herself immobile, invisible.
“How the fuck does he know anything about the Grosky’s? Charlee doesn’t even look the same.”