“No—” I started to say, but another push from him sent my body into a hard shudder, his hand still kneading the spot where my ass met the back of my thighs. Oh, God, but it felt good! My protest trailed off into another whimper.
“You were so eager for another kiss,” he said. I bit my lip and shook my head, but in the darkness I knew he couldn’t see.
“So eager to give in again,” he said. His fingers slipped farther in and I tensed up, then relaxed as his knuckles dug deep into my muscle there, his fingertips almost touching me where I most wanted it.
“Already so wet. So wanting.”
I moaned as he pushed again, and then his lips found mine and I couldn’t help it, God, I couldn’t help it. I arched against him as he kissed me breathless, rocking, wanting the pressure, needing it—
Then it was gone. He broke the kiss and stepped away so abruptly that I would have fallen to the floor had he not held my up by my arms. My legs wobbled underneath me, my entire body melted with the desire for something that he’d taken away in an instant.
“No—” I croaked.
“No? You want more, kitten?”
A sob choked my throat. It was true, I wanted more. My body would not let me deny the sharp thrills of desire that he drew forward in me. And yet, my mind recoiled from the horror of this man, of everything he was. I shook my head and could not speak.
“I have to go now, little kitten,” he said. His hand caressed my cheek in the darkness and I flinched at his cool touch, the touch of a lover. “I’ll be back soon, and then maybe we can do another trade. Another bottle of water, another kiss. Maybe another question. Would you like that?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer. Instead, he let me go and I slumped to the ground on the dirty blanket. I drew the blanket around my shoulders and cried, not caring how many tears I wasted. I cried in self-pity. I cried for myself, for my mother who I had tried to forget and for all of the time I had wasted out in the world.
And I cried, too, because I wanted him and did not want to want him. The memory of his kiss played again and again in my mind and made me ache so badly. So badly that I touched myself and orgasmed immediately, coming hard against my hand in the dark dirty room. Stifling my moan against the blanket, I tried desperately to forget him, forget his touch, forget how much I had wanted him.
Who was worse? Was it him, the monster, the killer, the freak? Or me, who could not help but desire him despite all his darkness?
CHAPTER EIGHT
Gav
It started out as manipulation, kissing her. But her moan made something inside me shiver. It scared me, as much as anything could scare me. That she could have seen what she had seen... and still desire me.
It was the reaction I’d wanted, so why was I so disturbed by it?
Trying to get out of my own head, I went to the library to look up news about my kitten, to see how much information about her disappearance was floating around out in the world.
No, not her library, I wasn’t that stupid. A local branch, far away from the university.
Despite my otherwise opulent house, I kept all kinds of technology far away from me. No television. No computer, save for the security system. No phone. It made things simple. It kept me safe from being tracked in any way. And it made it easy for me to leave my victims in the house without worrying about them finding a way to contact anyone outside.
Now, I searched for my kitten’s real name and came up with a slew of news stories. To my surprise, only some of them were from the past week. I scanned the most recent ones and made sure that the police hadn’t gotten any new information from that friend of hers. Even as I went through the motions, a bubble of curiosity was floating up inside of my brain.
Nothing. There was nothing incriminating me. Nothing even to indicate that the police investigation was treating the case as an abduction. Missing girl. No further information. I licked my lips. The fear was already seeping out of my muscles.
Perfect. No push for a large investigation. I’d thought that a missing girl would be a thousand times more interesting than the missing businessmen and lawyers I normally killed. I suppose that my kitten was just lucky.
Or maybe there was more to it than that.
I went back to the older entries. The first headline sent an almost erotic thrill down my body:
Missing Teenage Girl Found
A local teenage girl thought to have been kidnapped was discovered last week…
No wonder no one actually cared.
She’d run away at fifteen years old, it seemed. I scanned through the rest of the article. No mention of her suicide attempt. Maybe it had been later, or maybe they’d managed to keep it out of the paper.
The other articles gave up some small pieces of information. Her parents’ names, their hometown. So much for her refusing to give me that information.
My kitten had managed to keep her parents from finding her for over three weeks. She’d apparently filed to claim independence from her parents once she’d been caught.