What was more horrifying? The footsteps pounding down the stairs after her or all the creepy shit waiting on the other side of his bedroom door?

His body slammed against her back, his exhales hot on her neck, his erection stabbing her tail bone. He hadn’t bothered to put his pants back on.

She mustered a stoic tone. “Let’s get this over with.”

“Oh, the sweet seduction of your words.” He slapped her ass, lighting fire through her jeans, and swung open the door.

Chapter 9

Liv stumbled into Van’s bedroom, unable to look away from the antique gun cabinet on the back wall, with walnut crests carved around the double glass doors. One might’ve expected a dozen prized shotguns displayed on the racks within. Instead, the cabinet was crammed with a menagerie of dolls and mannequins piled atop one another. Arms and legs askew, some still attached to molded bodies. Most were not. All of them bald and nude.

She rubbed the chill prickling her arms. “Little girls everywhere want to know, ‘Where do all the broken dollies go?’”

“Shut up, Liv.” He sidled around her, and his foot sent a tiny headless torso careening under the bed, its jointed legs tumbling after.

Why wasn’t that one with all the hollow-eyed faces pressed against the glass of the cabinet? Some of the heads were upside down. Others leered to the side or stared out into the room from beneath hinged eyelids. Dust-laced cobwebs drooped between the dirt-smudged body parts. If she shook the case, how many eyes would wiggle and blink back? She shivered. “You need to—” She cleared her throat, tried to put oomf in her voice “—do some housecleaning.”

“Nah.” He threw himself on the bed, naked from the waist down. His erection hadn’t lost interest. It stood tall and unabashed between the flex of his thighs as he reclined on one elbow and watched her with his unnatural patience.

His interest in his collection, however, didn’t appear to be sexual. None of his plastic friends were anatomically correct nor did they look well-loved. Much the opposite, in fact. A hairless mannequin slumped in the corner of the room, grime coating its nippleless coned breasts from years of inattention. One arm lay beside it, unattached. Its face was punched away, exposing the dark cavern of its head.

Above him, another mannequin hung from something like a meat hook jutting out of the wall. Bent at the waist, its arms and head lolled forward as if reaching for the bed, the far-away gaze on its face frighteningly reminiscent of young Pat Benatar.

“Van…” She jerked her chin at the aberration above him. He’d never answered her years of questions about his fetishes, but he’d agreed to tuck away the ones that chilled her the most. He knew Plasti-Pat Benatar topped the list.

He rose, unhooked it from the wall, and tossed it under the bed to join who knew how many others. Then he turned to her, gripping the base of his cock, and pulled, one long lazy stroke. “Your turn, Liv. Show the pink.”

A shudder bunched her shoulders to her ears. God, she couldn’t do this. Her panties were bone-dry, and her throat felt like a fucking Texas drought. “I can’t do this.”

His expression hardened, his thoughts likely sifting through his arsenal of manipulations. Of course, he could punch her or choke her, but he never had to. She wagered he’d either return to the girl or call Mr. E.

She moved to the narrow bed and perched on the edge. “Not like this.”

The muscles in his jaw relaxed, and he sat beside her, dragging a blanket over his lap. He didn’t touch her. They both knew he would fuck her before she left that room, and his ability to endure her dawdling was something she always used to her advantage. Which was stupid. It never helped her in the end.

He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and stared at the dirt-matted carpet. A wrinkle creased his brow, his tone hesitant. “You want foreplay? Seduction?”

She wanted real. She wanted to feel an essential, basic emotion that wasn’t bound to the wounds he’d inflicted on her, the ones that wouldn’t heal. “What I want, you can’t give.”

He swung his head toward her, eyes alight with pain. “I dried your face when you cried. I held you when you screamed. I haven’t left your side once in all these years. You have me. All of me!”

She masked her flinch with the stillness she’d perfected. The absence of motion made her feel less visible under his constant attention. She didn’t want him ogling at her. She didn’t want him. How could she? His kisses haunted her, the grip of his voice too painfully familiar in the dark. He was the cause of those tears, those screams, her fears.

The cup of his palm on her cheek drew her eyes to his, and the tenderness in his tone snagged her breath. “Sing to me.”

His other hand caught her chin, preventing her from looking away. She shook her head in the cage of his fingers.

“If you need your distraction, your defense tonight, then by all means, sing.” His timbre dipped, a sultry intrusion in her ears. “Your voice makes me so fucking hard.” He shifted his hands to curl around her neck, thumbs caressing her cheeks, her scar. “Sing to me while I’m fucking you.”

She hated that he’d figured out her defense. There were two mournful truths about their intimacy. One, he understood why she didn’t want to fuck him. Two, he was able to convince her to do it anyway. He knew her feelings for him were as complicated as her situation. He also knew that if he led her to that dead place inside herself, she would hide there without struggling while he fucked her. It was a tactic she resented and appreciated. “Which song?”

A happy hum vibrated in his chest, his scar a macabre extension of his smile. “Bring Me To Life.”

His requests never strayed from Evanescence, the essence of grace in despair.

She let the trembling dread roll off her spine, drew in a long breath, and warbled through the first verse. Slipping into steady, lilting tones, her reluctance to fuck floated away with the notes. She held his eyes and sang the words he wanted to hear as he removed her sneakers, shirt, and jeans. When he traced her c-section scar, she kept her mind on the song, on its expression of the life she couldn’t have and the broken shell she’d become.

He touched her hip bones with reverence, kissed the lace that covered her most private parts, and stripped the material with a ragged groan.

“I can’t wake up…” she sang, the lyrics infused with a longing he couldn’t sate.

In the next heartbeat, she lay bare beneath him, her disloyal body lubricating his entry, programmed to respond. He fisted the sheets, panting and rocking his hips to the rhythm of her faltering vocals. Against her will, his thrusts woke her hunger, massaging sparks of pleasure along her inner walls. She lost her voice and burrowed into the remote pocket of her mind.

He raised up, shed his shirt, and lowered the sweat-damp heat of his chest to hers. Circling his pelvis, he dipped his dick in and out and dragged his teeth over her throat. “Your pussy’s so hot, clenching around me.” He nuzzled her neck, his arms stretched above them, fingers linked with hers, his biceps contracting beside her head. “Your voice makes me want to shoot my fucking load. I’m going to come so hard inside you.” He sank and withdrew, his girth a piston of stretching, hammering power. His exertion intensified, pounding her raw. “Keep singing.”

Beneath a different man, in another life, she might’ve sang with a passion to match the intimate connection. With Van, she was a cold voice in a warm embrace, her pussy an entity of its own. The needy slit existed objectively, disciplined to accept and serve. She sang from that carnal place of flesh and superficial appetite. The place where emotions didn’t dwell.

His grunts deepened, the roll of his body sliding and slapping against hers. “Come now. Come all over my dick.”