All He Asks 4 Read online

I rest my hand on my upper arm, wishing that his fingers would be under mine.

  “What should I do?” I whisper to the memory of my father. My eyes sting with unshed tears. “If I don’t rewrite this book with him, we’ll might lose your publishing company forever. And he might hurt someone else.”

  But if I do rewrite that book with Erik, then I feel like I will lose my soul.

  Christine.

  I’m not certain, but I think that I really hear my name, this time.

  I turn to look over my back. The doors are open. The house is relatively dark inside, so I can’t see much.

  “Hello?” I ask.

  Christine…

  This time, I’m not imagining things. There is a sound inside of the house. Rationality tells me that it’s water running through the pipes, or the wind blowing another open window around, and my frightened mind is simply interpreting it as my name.

  It can’t be my father.

  Fletcher Durand has been dead for years.

  But when he lived, he told me that he’d someday send me an angel to look over me. He’d said this after the diagnosis. After he knew that he was dying. I think he’d said that so I wouldn’t feel so terribly alone, and to give me some small comfort once he was gone.

  Christine…

  My heart leaps.

  Someone is calling to me.

  It’s not the angel. It can’t be the angel.

  But I want to believe. Good God, do I want to believe.

  “Is someone there?” I move back into the hallway. My eyes adjust quickly, but the sound of the ocean is too loud. It drowns out much of the shifting elsewhere in the house.

  My fingers tremble as I shut the doors and put the latch back into place.

  Funny. Someone has replaced the latch recently. It’s not the old lock that used to blow open at the slightest gust.

  Christine…

  My head whips around.

  That voice sounded like it had been coming from right behind me.

  I try to speak, but I can’t get the words out. I swallow hard. Wet my lips with my tongue.

  “Father?”

  A shadow moves across the end of the hall, down where my old bedroom used to be.

  My heart leaps.

  It’s probably a curtain. There’s at least one other window open in the house. Even with these doors shut, anything could be blowing around.

  But I don’t feel like it’s a curtain.

  Maybe I’ve read too many Erik Duke horror novels, maybe I’ve spent too long writing romances, maybe I should get my brain away from fiction. But by the time I take the first step down the hallway, I have convinced myself that I’m not alone.

  There is someone in this graveyard of house other than me. Another soul.

  An angel.

  Christine…

  “Father, I’m coming,” I whisper. My voice is hoarse. The sound of it is lost underneath the groaning of wind through the attic.

  I slip my shoes off before continuing. Father never liked it when I wore shoes on his area rugs. They were antiques, with as much character as the rest of the house, fraying edges and discolored threads. He wanted to preserve them in their dying state as long as possible.

  The rugs are rough under my toes. The feeling of it is so vivid, evoking aching memory.

  Another shadow stirs within the bedroom at the end of the hall.

  Christine…

  Do I smell my father’s favorite tobacco?

  “I’m coming,” I say again.

  My body moves of its own volition. I am drawn to the spirals of smoke that drift through the open doorway.

  It’s not smoke. It’s just dust that’s been stirred up by my arrival.

  Surely it can’t be smoke.

  “Christine…”

  That’s not my voice. That’s not my imagination, either.

  Someone’s here.

  I push the door open the rest of the way.

  My bedroom hasn’t changed at all. It’s a little dustier, a little smaller than I remember, the bed sheets a little more dated. The twin bed is under the window so that I could watch the ocean as I fell asleep.

  And that window is closed.

  There’s no wind to create shadows or stir dust.

  “Father?” I ask.

  The door to the hallway slams shut behind me.

  I whirl.

  There is a man in the corner of my old bedroom, his hip leaning against my antique writing desk, silhouetted against the bookshelves that used to be filled with Nancy Drew and the Box Car Children.

  He is tall. He is strong. He is dirty from climbing the cliff to reach the property.

  Erik Duke has come for me.

  3

  It’s too late to run.

  I know that.

  But I attempt it anyway.

  I am a captive bird who has already had the door shut on her cage, but I have no choice to beat against the bars, flying to the window, slamming my hands on the glass in a vain attempt to open it.

  He grips the back of my shirt and wrenches me away.

  The room spins. I am flung into the bookshelf, and I realize he isn’t between me and the door.

  I grab the handle. Throw it open.

  His hand smashes into the door and shuts it again. My fingers are almost crushed.

  When he closes in from behind me, I elbow blindly, twist away. I don’t know where I could go. There’s so little room to run.

  Erik trips me.

  I fall to the floor in a boneless heap, shivering as I struggle for the window again.

  The bird who cannot believe that she’s been captured in her cage.

  I am that bird.

  He lifts me off the floor. Erik’s arms shackle my body.

  I would weep if I could find the strength for it, but I am paralyzed by terror, stunned to immobility by the memory of Mario Stone’s body underneath the dock. The wind weeps for me. It wheezes around the attic, whistles through the cracks in the wall, scratches branches against the window.

  He pushes me onto the wall. I am pinned.

  This is so much like when he tethered me in his basement--his body pressing hot against mine, his fingers digging into my arms, his breath on my hair.

  Erik smells of ink and old paper.

  I kick him. I drive my knee into his thigh. I try to rip my arms free.

  “Stop fighting,” he says.

  And I do.

  God help me, but I do.

  There is something in Erik Duke’s tone that prevents me from disobeying him, no matter how much I want to. His voice turns off the conscious parts of my brain and leaves room for nothing but his commands.

  Stop fighting, he says, and I do.

  I gaze up at him through my tangled curls, panting from the exertion of fighting him. He is breathing hard, too.

  We haven’t been alone since the night he slipped into my room.

  I haven’t seen his face this close since Sylvia Stone’s launch party, either.

  It takes several attempts for me to speak.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “It’s time to begin your lessons again,” he whispers.

  -

  My laptop is waiting for me in my father’s old office.

  Erik must have gotten into my home while I slept at Raoul’s house, stolen my laptop, and brought it here.

  It would have taken time for him to do that. He couldn’t have done it after I left Raoul’s house that morning--he had somehow known that I was going to run, known that I wouldn’t show up at the office, known that I would come here.

  He knows me better than I know myself.

  It shouldn’t be possible.

  Erik flings me into the wingback chair where my father wrote so many books, and I collapse against the desk with a sob, letting my head fall onto my arms.

  Sitting beside my laptop, there is a copy of my current manuscript. The one under contract with Durand-Price. He must have printed it out because it includes his revision
notes in the margins.

  He’s ready for us to rewrite together.

  The legs of the chair screech against the wooden floor as he turns the chair, and my father’s book shelves whirl around me. The heavy drapes should be dusty after so many years without an occupant in the house, but they are clean. The mold has been scrubbed from the ocean-damp windows.

  Erik came here early. He prepared it for me.

  For us.

  Over his shoulder, I catch sight of silk ropes--the same ones that he used to bind me to the hooks in his basement.

  “Look at me,” he says. “Stop crying.”

  And I do.

  Just as I cannot fight when he tells me not to fight, I cannot cry when he tells me not to cry.

  Erik is kneeling in front of me. His hands grip the chair on either side of my head. He has fixed me with a stern look, disapproving of my emotional display, and a little bit worried.

  I’m not hallucinating the caring in his eyes. I’m sure of it.

  “I’m only going to tell you this once. I won’t hurt you, Christine.”

  It shouldn’t reassure me. The man is deranged, likely a murderer--his words are meaningless.

  But that’s not true, either.

  We are writers. Nothing in our life has more meaning than words.

  And this is not fiction he is spinning between us, but brutal reality, a captivating fantasy.

  “You tried to kill Mario,” I say.

  “I don’t ‘try’ to kill anyone.”

  It’s not exactly a denial. He could just as easily be telling me that he didn’t kill Mario because he didn’t want him dead—but that he is still wholly responsible for the tenuous coma in which the agent rests.

  I’m too afraid to ask him which it is.

  “For a moment, I thought you were my father,” I say.

  He swipes a thumb over my cheek. I have been crying.

  “No,” he says.

  “How did you know I would be here?”

  “Because I did.” It’s so simple, but it seems so profound to me. It is plain truth. Because I did. Because I know everything.

  “You can’t know where this house is,” I tell him. “You can’t know what it all means to me.”

  He stands, pulls me out of the chair, bends me over the desk. “Write.”

  My laptop is already open to the document, first page ready. His notes are to the right. He shoves me until my nose is nearly planted in the monitor. I can see individual pixels.

  When my knees try to buckle, he yanks on my hips to keep me upright.

  I am bent at the waist in a most unflattering position. My elbows are on the desk.

  It is hardly an ergonomic way to try to type.

  If he hadn’t told me not to, surely I would be crying again.

  “I want to leave,” I say in a tiny whisper.

  “Write,” he says again in that tone of voice, and I know that refusing isn’t an option.

  “What do I write?” I ask, acutely aware of the weight of his hand on the small of my back, his other hand gripping the edge of the desk. My stomach is tight.

  “Once upon a time,” Erik says in a low, gravelly voice.

  I laugh because it’s so trite, such a cliche—exactly the kind of thing he hates.

  He is joking.

  Erik has trapped me at my dead father’s summer home, and now he’s trying to joke with me.

  “Raoul will find me,” I say.

  He slams his fist into the desk beside my head. I flinch away. He is only an inch from my cheek, and I can see the bloodless white of his knuckles, and the crust of something in his fingernails that might be mud or blood.

  “You are an artist,” Erik says. “He’s a businessman. He doesn’t understand you and me. He doesn’t understand the art. He doesn’t deserve you.”

  “He cares about me.”

  “He wants you because I made you a commodity,” he says. “If you think it’s about anything but the amount of money your art is worth…” He almost sounds sympathetic. Or pitying, perhaps. Erik thinks I am stupid and deluded, like a precious little child. “You’re better than that. He doesn’t deserve you.”

  “And you do?” I ask, knowing it’s a dangerous question.

  Erik’s hand presses harder on my back. My arms bow. My breasts press against the surface of the desk, so that when I look down all I can see is the smashed globes of my breasts.

  “No,” he utters. “Now write. I’ll give you the words.”

  I close my eyes, take a deep breath, swallow hard.

  It’s difficult to move my hands to the keyboard, but I do.

  Erik gives me the words.

  What I am rewriting is a Sylvia Stone book. The book that she wanted to be sexier than all her others. It begins with a woman, our heroine, rediscovering her passion after a divorce.

  It was originally written in Sylvia’s voice. The words are as trite as “once upon a time,” the kind of thing that Erik hates.

  The book is also chaste.

  Humorous, but not crass.

  Sweet, not sexy.

  From the beginning, I know he is changing everything.

  “I watched her through the window,” he says in a low voice. “From the moment she moved onto my street, I knew that she was dangerous to me. The woman with the blonde curls.”

  I type what he says, but must interrupt him.

  “This book is written in first person from the heroine’s perspective,” I say. “That sounds like it’s from the perspective of the guy she falls for.”

  “I said I’d give you the words, Christine.”

  My name is filthy on his lips, far dirtier than any four letter word.

  “It doesn’t suit the imprint,” I say.

  “You’re rewriting it to my demands.” His hand slides up my spine, stroking me the way he might rub a cat against the grain. “Your contract says you have to write it the way I want you to. I have creative control over the book. Are you trying to violate the contract?”

  On the word “violate,” he seizes my curls in his fist.

  I shut my eyes. Shake my head a fraction.

  “Type,” he says softly.

  So I type.

  He retains his grip on my hair as he tells me the story.

  The hero, Gerard, is immediately fascinated by the woman who moves onto his street. Her name is Sarah. The names are the only things that haven’t changed now.

  Sarah is not a post-menopausal woman on a journey of self-discovery.

  She is a beautiful thing, a Faberge egg, a treasure he covets.

  Gerard is not an earnest man who happens to stumble upon Sarah in his line of work.

  He is a covetous man. A stalker.

  Someone with deeply lustful thoughts.

  It is perverse, what Erik tells me to write while fisting my curls. More perverse still, I find myself reacting to it. Heat gathers between my legs. My knees begin to tremble.

  God help me, but I like the feeling of him tugging gently on my hair and pushing me into the desk.

  “Gerard knew immediately that he must possess Sarah,” Erik says. “He left his house on that blazing day with no intent to take her, but as good as his control may be over his body, his mind wanders. He can’t help but seeing Sarah working in her new garden and thinking of the way she’s bent over the flowers.”

  The way that Christine is bent over the desk.

  His hand strokes down my spine in the other direction now, curving over my posterior. He strokes the shape of my ass. There is a slight tremor in his hand as he does this, as though he’s not certain it’s something he should do, and the fact that he’s not certain makes me uncertain.

  I pause in typing.

  He notices.

  “Type,” he says, pulling harder.

  My heart flutters against the inside of my ribcage. “Erik…”

  His hand lifts from my backside.

  It comes back down with a hard swat, just hard enough for it to sting. I flinch.
<
br />   It hurts.

  But it doesn’t only hurt. It also feels…good.

  My cheeks flush with blood. A gasp escapes me.

  I type again.

  Erik continues to give me the words he wants. “Her body flexed as she pulled weeds from among the flowers. I watched the shape of her spine bowing under the thin veil of her shirt, dampened by sweat at the back of her neck and under her arms.

  “I imagined the smell of that sweat mingling with mine—a feminine and masculine odor combining to become something singular and yet more than they would be alone. I imagined feeling the vertebrae under my fingertips as she arched for me. Her hands weren’t curved around the stalks of dandelions, but around my body, yanking me from the soil, forcing me to come uprooted and shower over her.”

  As he speaks, I imagine what he says.

  I am Sarah.

  He is the weeds, and I am wrapped around him.

  I should be thinking of Raoul. I should be hoping that he will save me, but I’m not.

  In this moment, I am lost.

  We create together, Erik and I. He goes on to tell me about the man leaving the woman, but he returns later.

  My fingers fly frantically over the keyboard.

  His fingers remain tangled in my hair.

  The sun creeps past the window outside, the ocean roars, and I am growing stiff bent over the desk. My arms tremble from supporting my weight in such a strange position for so long.

  Time is meaningless.

  The words flow.

  One scene turns into another. Sarah and Gerard meet for the first time face to face on a rainy day. She can’t make her car start. She is flustered, confused, despairing. Her car was always maintained by her ex-husband. How fortunate that Gerard is there to help.

  “She leaned back against her car, hands behind the small of her back, thrusting her ribcage toward me. Her pert nipples strained against the thin material of her shirt. Sarah was unprepared for the rainy day, just as she was unprepared for me to see her like this. She doesn’t realize how appealing her hair is when it’s plastered against her neck, or how much I want to run my lips along the line it creates, lipping her collarbone and the hollow of her throat.”

  “I will make her mine. She didn’t know it yet, but I would. From the moment I saw the swell of her ass and the way her curls tickled her own breasts, I knew I would make her mine. It wouldn’t be long. Later that night, I knew I would be gripping her hips as they rolled on top of mine, mounding her feminine curves in my hands, devouring her groans and filling her with my seed.”