My mind was still turning as I dressed and went to join Aaron who was working diligently on my extension.

A flash of guilt hit me as I watched the kid pounding away, humming softly to himself.

I had been having incredible sex with a virgin while he had been working on my home project.

“Sorry about that,” I told him. “Something came up.”

“I heard,” he replied cheekily and I grimaced.

“You didn’t have to come today, Aaron. I will get this done,” I told him but I was secretly pleased that he had made the effort.

I appreciated the help, even if I didn’t act like it.

“Meh, it gives me something to do,” he replied. “What else would I be doing? Watching football?”

I swallowed a smile, picking up a piece of drywall to place in the framework.

“So, Eloise,” Aaron drawled, eyeing me through his peripheral vision. “She seems nice.”

“She’s a little more than nice,” I replied sharply. “She’s incredible.”

Aaron snickered.

“I stand corrected but in my defense, I only had about two minutes to get to know her. What’s her story? Where did you two meet?”

I was silent for a minute, pressing the sheetrock into the frame.

There had to be another way into the compound but even if there is, what will we do when we’re in there? They can’t keep Jillian against her will and what about the others?

I was also plagued by the idea that my father had family living in the walls of the community under some cult-like rule.

“Harding?”

I looked back at Aaron.

Since joining the real world, Aaron was the only person who had treated me like a real person, not some redneck caveman.

Could I trust him to help me with something like this?

“Come on,” I said. “We’re going for a drive.”

He looked at me in surprise.

“We are? But what about this?”

I nodded quickly.

“We won’t be long but I need your advice.”

He grinned genuinely and I could see my words made him happy.

I had always shoved aside his attempts at friendship but suddenly I couldn’t imagine why I had been so standoffish with him.

Aaron wasn’t at all like the other assholes at work. He did his job with a smile and always had a friendly word.

If I was going to have a friend, I would want it to be someone like Aaron Jessup.

Even then, he took the change of plans in stride, dropping his hammer to the side and jumping to his feet, brushing off the debris from his jeans.

“Lead the way,” he replied with his characteristic beam.

I wondered if he would still be smiling after I took him where we were headed.

* * *

As I suspected, the beam faded from his face as I parked the F150 by the locked entrance of the compound.

“What are we doing here, Harding?” he asked in a tone which told me he knew exactly where we were.

“Do you know this place?” I asked, eyeing him and he nodded.

“Everyone knows the Community. Why are we here, Harding?”

“We’re going to break in. There’s at least one girl in here being held against her will,” I replied in a conversational tone.

Aaron’s face turned ashen.

“Woah!” he protested. “I don’t want any part of breaking into this place. These people are fucking nuts. Religious weirdoes who skew the Bible to practice incest and shit.”

“I know,” I replied shortly. “That’s why we’re going in.”

Aaron shook his head.

“Harding, it’s illegal to break into a – ”

“It’s also illegal to keep people here against their will,” I reminded him.

“Then we should go to the cops, man!”

I snorted.

I had come to realize that everyone knew about what was happening in the gated camp but no one seemed to care enough to do anything about it.

I was not going back to Eloise without a plan to get Jillian.

“If you don’t help me, Aaron, I am going to do it alone. I can’t force you to come with me but I could use your brain on this.”

I watched as his face transformed into a look of uncertainty.

He didn’t know what to make of my sudden offer of friendship when I had spent the better part of two years dismissing him.

He cocked his head to the side, biting his lower lip.

I stepped from the cab and left him inside to ponder his next move.

He followed me out as I knew he would and I felt a little bad knowing that he was a reluctant accomplice.

It was for the greater good. He would be proud of himself when we rescued Jillian and potentially others from the hell in which they were living.

“Come on,” I said, leading the way along the fence line toward the community at the back. “I want to see if there’s a tree back there we can climb.”

“How do you know about any of this?” Aaron asked me nervously as he followed. “And why do you care?”

I didn’t answer but it didn’t take him long to figure out my sudden interest in the commune.

“Eloise is from here, isn’t she?”

I gritted my teeth, wondering if I’d made a mistake allowing him into my plot but his next words put my mind at ease.

“Hey, Harding, I’m willing to help you, man, I am.”

I paused and looked at him over my shoulder.

“But?”

“But there’s a reason that law enforcement leaves these guys alone. They’re fucking unstable. No one knows what’s going on behind closed doors. We shouldn’t go in there blind.”

“We’re not going in there blind,” I assured him. “We’re going in there with a plan.”

I didn’t tell him I wasn’t sure what that plan was exactly.

We crossed over an acre of land, entering the ravine behind the camp and I touched Aaron’s hand, holding him back.

Several women were milling around in various stages of work.

We ducked back, studying them in their homemade, ankle-length dresses, hanging clothes from lines and washing over basins.

I felt like I was in a time warp, staring at a turn of the 20^th-century setting.

And then we saw her.

Her long blonde hair was twisted into a long braid, falling halfway down her slender waist and tucked beneath a bonnet.

Unlike the others, she sat completely idle, sitting on the stoop of the barracks, staring out into nothingness and even from the distance between us, I could read the expression of melancholy on her face.

“Is that Eloise’s sister?” Aaron asked and I knew I wasn’t alone in seeing the resemblance between them. “She’s beautiful.”

“It must be,” I muttered, the desire to scale the fence, barbed wire and all almost choking me.

Aaron seemed to sense my irrational thought and grabbed my arm.

“Even if we get in, we’ll never get out. What do you want to be they’re fucking armed to the tits?”

I wished I had thought to do the same.

“Come on,” I said, spinning to leave. “We’re going back to the cabin for guns.”

“Oh man…”

But he followed me, sneaking through the trees, our eyes still fixated on Jillian.

As if she could feel us staring at her, she suddenly raised her head and looked in our direction, causing us to freeze.

But it was too late.

She had seen us and her mouth parted in shock.

Oh shit! Don’t say anything, Jillian! Don’t blow our cover!

My message seemed to reach her and slowly, her mouth closed, her eyes reluctantly pulling away from mine.

“Come on, Harding. She’s going to get us caught,” Aaron mumbled but I didn’t need any more encouragement.

We were back to my truck in minutes, backing down Route 14 and heading back up toward Black Mountain.

“I’m thinking there’s only one way to do this,” I told Aaron after several minutes of silence.

He didn’t say anything but I knew he was waiting for me to elaborate.

“We have to storm the gates and let out anyone who wants to leave.”

“You make it sound so simple, Harding but you don’t realize that most of these people have never known another way of life. They are brainwashed into believing that Denton Crowe is some messenger of God or some shit.”

It was so strange. How could normal adults be so easily manipulated?

But it didn’t matter if the others didn’t want to go. Getting Jillian was the only important part.

The rest of them could stay and marry Crowe for all I cared.

“And we might be outnumbered,” Aaron reminded him. “Who knows how many people live in there?”

I was glad I had thought to bring him along for the ride.

He really was the voice of reason.

“Do you have any better ideas?” I asked and Aaron shook his head.

“No,” he replied, surprising me. “I think it’s the best one we’ve got but I think we should do it at night in the cloak of darkness. We don’t want them to see us coming and we don’t want them to be alert. With any luck, we can get in and out before they get their pants on.”

I agreed.

That’s what we would do.

We finished the rest of the trip to the cabin in silence and when we arrived, Aaron headed directly to his car.

“I’m going to go home and change into darker clothes,” he told me. “I’ll be back around midnight. That should give us plenty of darkness and they should be asleep by then.”

I looked at him, nodding slowly.

I was slightly surprised at his renewed desire to do this and I wondered where it had stemmed from.

“Thanks, Aaron,” I said sincerely as he unlocked his Dodge with a fob from his pocket. “I appreciate this and so does Eloise.”

“I’m doing it for Jillian,” he said and my eyebrows shot up.

“You don’t even know Jillian,” I replied, shaking my head but a strange smile touched his lips.

“I know but when she looked at us, Harding, I felt like I had known her before. Isn’t that weird?”

I shook my head.

“It’s not weird at all,” I replied quietly. “I know exactly what you mean.”

He waved toward the cabin and I saw Eloise watching us, an apprehensive expression on her face.

She was waiting for word on her sister.

Aaron pulled off and I hurried to join my lover inside the cabin where she threw herself into my arms suddenly.

“I got scared the minute you left,” she confessed and I could read the truth of her words in her face.

“Why?” I asked gently. “I told you, nothing is going to happen to you.”

“I was scared for you,” she replied, her chocolate eyes searching my face. “He has a violent temper. If he caught you there – ”

“We saw Jillian,” I cut her off, hoping to put her mind at ease.

“You did? Was she hurt? What did she say?”

“Shh,” I whispered, stroking her hair and kissing the top of her head. “We only saw her, we didn’t speak with her.”

Her frail body pushed into me was giving me a burst of heat in my groin.

She was so indefensible in my arms, a beautiful work of untainted art who I wanted to violate over and over.

The memory of her ecstatic squeals was fresh in my ears and suddenly I knew I needed to feel myself inside her once more.

Without warning, I grabbed her by the shoulders, shoving her back against the wall, my mouth crushing her surprised lips.

At first, she was too off-guard to react but when my arm snaked down against her ass, yanking her tiny waist toward me, she responded eagerly.

I rubbed my scruff against her cheek, inhaling the sweetness of her skin as my lips closed around her earlobe, nibbling deliciously as she panted softly.

My free hand slid across her front, slipping beneath the waistband of the too-big bottoms I had loaned her, fingertips meeting the cleft in her legs.

She was already fucking wet.

I wedged her deeper into the wall, one hand massaging her butt cheek, the other teasing the slippery button at her center.

Eloise gasped and moaned as I allowed one finger to “accidentally” slide inside her, the others still playing with the slickness.

“Fuck,” she mumbled and my head jerked back in shock, amusement lighting my eyes.

She was swearing already.

Corrupting her was going to be so much fun.

In and out, I fucked her with my index finger slowly and her knees buckled.

Instinctively, her arms reached out to hold my waist and I placed one palm on my growing rod, my hips thrusting toward her gently as I encouraged her to stroke me.

We fell into a slow, dizzying rhythm, my mouth finding the lines of her neck and shoulders, feeling the prickled flesh as my hands grew wetter with each jab of my finger.

Her hand tightened around my shaft, her free palms sliding my jeans lower so my entire package was exposed for her to explore.

I saw it in her eyes – she wanted to taste me but that was for another day.

We would have plenty of opportunities to learn from each other.

That day was for her alone and when I added my middle finger to the mounting thrusts, I was rewarded by a stream of heat against my hand.

“Take me,” she begged me, her eyes pleading with naked desire. “I need you inside me.”

I lifted my head and smiled at her, my digits still prodding at her soaked core.

“Of course,” I growled. “Your wish is my command.”