Push

Briar

Days dragged on, yet blurred together. I wasn’t sure how long I had been here and wished I had a way of knowing. I had started counting the breakfasts, but eventually I couldn’t remember which day had been the day before. I’d spent days crying before my body stopped producing tears and a numbness settled over my heart and mind. As the numbness receded a few days later, the boredom settled in.

I spent whole days singing, others staring at the wall just wishing for a window so I could see the outdoors, and still others waiting in fear, wondering what the day would hold.

There hadn’t been another lesson, but there had been two more failed attempts of trying to push me into being comfortable with a man I hated with every fiber of my being.

He seemed frustrated by my lack of progress, but I didn’t know what more he could have expected. He was evil incarnate; he had paid for me after I’d been stolen from my life and the man I loved. He’d tried to teach me a lesson by making me think he was going to use my body . . . all because I’d refused to eat when I’d first arrived.

I knew I needed to gain his trust, and part of that was doing what needed to be done to get out of this room, but it wasn’t as easy as he thought it should be.

This wasn’t letting a man undress me as anticipation pounded through my veins and made me ache for him. This wasn’t letting the man I loved look at me, bare and vulnerable and ready for him. This was dancing with the devil and attempting to come out of it unscathed.

The door opened, but I didn’t look toward it as my throat closed up, effectively ending the song.

It took a few seconds, but I noticed there was a charge in the room that hadn’t been there yesterday or the day before, and it sent a chill through my spine.

He was staying . . .

I blew a steadying breath out before I found the courage to turn my head to look at him from where I was lying on the bed.

His power, darkness, and masculine beauty stunned me, as it had every time I looked at him, but I didn’t react to it. I watched him as he watched me, and I looked up at the ceiling when his eyes fell from my face to my body.

Sin. He was pure sin. I hated him.

“Blackbird,” he whispered in that voice of his. That invigorating, throaty mixture of warmth and softness that hinted at regret was just another part of his attraction . . . another part of his deceit . . . another part of him I hated.

“Devil.”

His face came into view then, his lips twitching into a brief, amused grin before falling, and then he was saying the words I didn’t want to hear . . .

“Show me that—”

“Is it the weekend?” I asked quickly, cutting him off.

His dark brows pulled low over his eyes as he studied me, and instead of repeating what I knew he’d been about to say, he asked, “Why?”

“Your shirt,” I responded automatically and hated that embarrassed heat filled my cheeks. “Um, you’re just normally in a button-down.”

He glanced at himself. “Do you prefer those?”

I looked at the black shirt that stretched over his tanned, muscled body and shook my head as I pushed myself up so I was sitting on the bed. “I don’t have a preference. I’ve just been trying to figure out how long it’s been since I was taken from home.”

He looked away, but not before I saw the way his face fell. He swallowed thickly and seemed to think about what to say for a while before he spoke. “Don’t think of it that way.” His voice was laced with some emotion I couldn’t place, but it shocked me all the same.

I had only ever seen him angry, annoyed, or menacing. To see any other kind of emotion that suggested this devil might have some humanity made him intriguing—no. He wasn’t. This is all a trick, all part of his darkness, I reminded myself, and forced the sound of his voice from my mind.

“How am I supposed to think of it?” I asked softly. My throat tightened and my eyes burned, but no tears came. I wasn’t sure I had any tears left in me. “I missed my wedding. I missed marrying the man I—”

“Enough,” he bit out, cutting me off. Dark, dark eyes met mine as his chest rose and fell with each rough breath that left him. After an eternity had passed in our agonizing silence, he spoke. Every word was automatic, detached. “You’re finally free here with me. You don’t need to count days.”

“Free? I was kidnapped. You bought me. I’ve been locked in this room for weeks. In what world could any of those things ever be considered free?” What had started out as whispers had turned into tortured yells, but he didn’t react to them.

He just watched me until I was finished, then calmly said, “In my world, Blackbird.”

“Your—” I began, somewhat taken aback. I hadn’t thought he would respond to those questions, and I certainly hadn’t expected that response. “What world is this? Where did they take me? Where are—what country are we in?” I demanded, my voice rising with each question.

The devil looked at me with forced amusement. “Where do you think you are?”

I didn’t even know where to begin with my thoughts on where they could have taken me. I’d been unconscious for the better part of two days while they’d brought me here. And I’d been so naïve to think that sex trafficking would never touch my world, that I didn’t know much about it. I thought it only happened in foreign countries, and I still had a feeling I was in one. “Not the United States,” I finally whispered.

He glanced down at himself for a split second, and when he looked up again, his eyes were cold. “I’m American, Blackbird. What would give you the impression that we aren’t in the U.S.?”

“Are we?”

“Why would I want you close to where they took you from?” he responded vaguely, trying to confuse me even more.

I shook my head slowly and pleaded, “Just tell me where we are.”

“In a room you should’ve been out of a while ago,” he said in a dark voice. “Show me you can handle this.”

“I can’t do this,” I whispered back immediately, and some distant part of me noted that I didn’t begin trembling as I had the other times.

“You can,” he argued gently, and he placed a hand to my chest to gently push me back so I was lying down again.

He put one knee and hand on the bed, and leaned over me as the hand on my chest ran up along the edge of the robe I was wearing. Our positions, his touch, and the way his eyes burned and betrayed his emotionless mask . . . it made this feel too real, too intimate. Made my mind confuse this for something it wasn’t.

Because he wasn’t a lover and his touch shouldn’t steal my breath.

But it did.

He was darkness, and I couldn’t allow myself to forget. No matter how he’d tried to backtrack with me ever since that first night. No matter how he’d stopped and covered me every time it had gotten to be too much and I’d started singing out of fear . . .

He was still pushing me for something that wasn’t natural. He was still keeping me here against my will and claiming to own me when all I wanted was to get back to Kyle.

Kyle . . .

A sob caught in my throat as Kyle’s face entered my mind while the devil above me pushed the satiny material off one shoulder in the beginnings of our slow, seductive dance—I began trembling as grief ate at me and fear consumed me.

His head shook subtly as he leaned down, and his lips brushed against my ear as he whispered in a tone that was at once pleading and soothing and longing. “Show me, Blackbird.”

But for the first time, my fear had nothing to do with what the man above me could do to me. And instead, was solely based on the devastating realization that I would never get out of here, would never go back home. Because I knew . . . I knew I couldn’t do what the devil was asking of me.

And like it was as natural as breathing, my mouth opened and the first words of a song tumbled from it.

The devil stilled above me just as he finished pushing the robe off my other shoulder, and I desperately tried to choke back the song and tame my shaking. Knowing if I could just get through this, I would be one step closer to seeing the man my heart was aching for.

When I felt the devil push away from me and start sliding my robe back into place, I panicked. “N-no, I ca—” But my words died when I looked at him to find his face twisted, as if he was being tortured . . .

But just as quickly it was gone, and that look of irritation and disappointment I’d come to know so well was all that lingered in his expression, and I knew I had to have imagined his pain, imagined that a devil could feel what I was enduring.

“Do you want to leave this room?” he asked as he sat back, his voice weighed down.

“Yes. Yes, you know I do.”

His head shook with a slowness that made me feel his disappointment in the pit of my stomach, made me want to apologize for not being able to do this, and I hated him for that too. “You know what you need to do to leave, and you aren’t trying.”

There was no point in arguing how wrong he was. A man like him would never understand. “I thought when I left this room I would get clothes,” I said quietly instead.

“You will.”

“Then why do I need to be comfortable naked? Will I have to be that way often?”

A grin pulled at the corner of his mouth that didn’t match the somber mood of the room or the coldness of his eyes. “Only if you want to be.”

“Then I don’t . . . I don’t understand why it matters if I—”

“What are you doing right now?” he asked in a rough voice as he reached out to touch the edge of the robe again, but he didn’t try to move it away. “You’re hiding from me by covering yourself. Why would I trust you to leave this room when you’re so afraid of me that you still feel like you need to hide?”

My mouth slowly opened as I wondered how he still didn’t get it. “I don’t understand how you can expect anything different from me.”

“I expect you to try for yourself so I won’t have to push you.” Even though his tone remained calm and even, it was dripping with venom and promised so many nights like that first one that my blood ran cold. “This room and the robes—this whole process—it isn’t for the sake of having sex or being naked. It’s about getting to the point where you trust me and feel comfortable being near me. When you get to that point, I’ll know you’re ready to leave the room. Completely covering yourself, flinching before I can even touch you, and trembling when I do, shows me that you aren’t.”

I nodded absentmindedly then shook my head. “But I won’t.” When there was no response, I risked looking at him again. His brow was furrowed, and he was staring at me intently. My voice shook through my next admission. “I don’t—I mean, I’m not that girl. I didn’t think any other man would ever see me without my clothes on. I’ll never leave this room because I’ll never be okay with some man looking at me or touching me.”

“Some man,” he said, and his dark eyes flashed with frustration. “I own you.”

“No, you don’t,” I reminded him.

His lip curled, but without saying a word, he got off the bed and began walking away from it.

“Another day, Blackbird?” I asked as I sat up on the bed, mocking his normal parting words, and immediately knew it was the wrong thing to do.

Even if it hadn’t been for the deadly calm that washed over him when he turned to face me, I would have known from the way his hands slid into the pockets of his jeans as he did.

For a man that exuded such evil—and could easily destroy my heart and my soul during a few minutes with my body—he had been patient with me during these progress days . . . all things considered.

As much as I hated him and hated what he was trying to make me do, I knew it could be so, so much worse . . . as he’d just reminded me.

I needed to be glad it wasn’t.

I needed to not provoke him.

“Watch yourself,” he growled in warning. He glanced at his expensive-looking watch, then said in a low tone, “There are people who should be here any minute for you.”

I froze as a dozen different thoughts, horrors and dreams alike, flew through my mind. “F-for me? Why? What’s happening?”

“They’re coming to change your hair color.”

I glanced down at where my hair was falling to my waist in waves. “It’s only ever been blonde.”

His eyebrows rose, as if I was missing something crucial. “And that needs to change.”

He looked away when the doorbell could be heard throughout the house and glanced to his watch again. “They’ll come in here. Don’t bother asking them to help you leave. You aren’t the first girl they’ve visited.”

I hated him.

The women who had come to dye my hair hadn’t said a word to me the entire time they were there. They had tilted my head down and up as needed and had disrobed me and shoved me into the shower to wash the dye out, but they hadn’t spoken. When I had exited the shower, they’d handed me a plush robe to dry off in and forced me into a chair as they began the process of drying my hair, but again, no words.

When they were done, they once again stripped me from their robe, dragged me in front of the mirror, and waited.

“It looks beautiful,” I said honestly.

Gone was the blonde and in its place was a warm brown. It transformed my face even . . . but the sight made my chest ache. The naked brunette in the mirror was not me. Briar Chapman was disappearing.

Both women had kissed my forehead before leaving, and I had turned around to grab one of my robes from the small closet in the bathroom.

Only the third robe was gone, as were all of my towels.

My brow furrowed as I walked out of the bathroom to my room, wondering if I had left the robes in there, and I stopped abruptly when my feet hit the carpet.

I hadn’t had to look around the room to see if the robes were there or not. The stripped-bare bed told me all I needed to know.

I hated the man in that house.

After searching every corner of the room and bathroom for anything I could have used to cover myself and coming up empty, I had curled into a ball between the bed and wall, and hadn’t moved since.

My legs had cramped up, but I knew the second I moved would be when the bedroom door opened, so I continued to sit through the pain as I waited.

And waited.

Dinner must have come and gone, judging from the way my stomach painfully growled before eventually stopping, and after nearly falling over too many times from drifting off to sleep, I finally stretched my legs out on the floor and rested my head against the wall. But he never came, and my eyes grew heavier and heavier until I couldn’t keep them open any longer.

I woke later to the feel of him lifting me off the floor.

I gasped and instinctively pushed against his chest, trying to get away from him when he began lowering me to the bed.

It didn’t matter that he’d done the same thing just that afternoon. That afternoon I’d been covered. That afternoon I could at least still hope for the kinder side of the devil as he tried to push me to progress. But he’d sent a blaring message by taking everything from me: Our “gentle” progress days were done.

“No, no!” I said desperately just before my back unexpectedly hit cool sheets.

“Stop,” he commanded gently. Grasping my wrists in his hands, he forced my hands to the bed with little effort, and captured my gaze with his.

“P-please, no.” My body trembled, and though I tried to close my legs, his still-clothed body kept them open.

“Stop moving, or the bedding is going to be taken away again, and your days in here will continue.”

I immediately stopped fighting him, but the trembling continued. I clenched my teeth together in a useless attempt to stop my shaking jaw, but it only made my body shake harder.

“Show me you can handle this.” It was a plea and a demand, every word coated with desire.

Despite everything—my hate, my revulsion, my fear—the sound sent a shiver down my spine. A rush of air blew past my lips at the pleasant feeling, and I looked up to find his dark, sinful eyes locked on mine.

“Show me, Blackbird.”

I hated him for taking away my choice. I hated his voice and those eyes. I hated that somehow, these days with him had caused me to not only want to succeed in this for me—but for him too.

I owed him nothing, and still . . .

No! He is darkness. He is the devil, I reminded myself as my breasts brushed against his broad chest. I want nothing from him, and I owe him nothing. I hate him . . .

“I can’t do—”

“Briar,” he whispered, his voice strained—the sound reminded me of his tortured expression earlier that afternoon. But other than letting his eyes shut then, his face remained blank. “I need you to do this. You need to do this. Don’t make me force you,” he pled so quietly that if he hadn’t been pressed to me, I wouldn’t have heard him. Then he dipped his head so close that he was my air, and I was his, and his dark eyes met mine again as he begged, “Show me.”

My breath caught in my throat at the haunted look that filled his eyes before he was able to force it away, and my fingers automatically curled around his hands.

I swallowed past the tightness in my throat, and after the briefest hesitation, I moved my head . . .

At first, shaking it subtly as some part of me tried to maintain that I couldn’t—wouldn’t—do this, before I quickly nodded.

I can do this.

“Briar.”

I owe him nothing.

“Don’t make me force you.”

To gain his trust and get out of here, I can do this.

“Show me.”

He held my stare for a few more seconds before releasing my hands and sitting back, and then his eyes dipped over my body in a way that felt violating and thrilling all at once. As his gaze moved leisurely back up, my breaths became rougher, harsher, but for once, it wasn’t out of fear or disgust . . .

And from the shift in the devil’s expression when he studied my eyes and took in my parted lips, he knew it too.

One of his large hands moved toward my face but paused in the air for a few seconds, as if he was debating whether or not he should do what he was about to. His dark brows drew together, and just when I thought he was going to drop his hand, he reached forward to curve it around my cheek, cradling my face gently.

My chest heaved with a trembling breath at the tenderness of his touch mixed with that same haunted look from earlier. And as I had before, I automatically reached down to grip his hand in one of mine.

Keeping my fingers locked in his, he slowly moved my hand back to where my other still rested on the bed above my head, and dipped his head until his lips were at my jaw.

My shiver was instant and not unwelcomed.

Heat moved through me, slow and intoxicating as his mouth moved down my throat in a series of sensual kisses.

Stop this. Stop him, I screamed at myself, but was only able to bite down on my bottom lip to stop a whimper from escaping me.

After releasing my hand, he placed one last kiss at the base of my neck before sitting back up, his dark eyes a mixture of need and indecision—and the need was winning . . .

In both of us.

He traced my cheek lightly, grabbed the length of my hair, and twisted until his hand was fisted at the base of my neck. A surprised huff blew past my lips when he pulled, forcing my head back on the bed, exposing more of my neck to him.

His free hand trailed down my throat lightly, the tips of his fingers leaving a tingling trail in their wake, and an erratically pounding heart in my chest. Wherever his fingers touched was no longer a cool burn, but an open flame.

Each breath and each second brought him closer and closer to my chest, where my bare breasts were on display for him despite my need to cover them. But then his fingers brushed over one of my nipples, and instead of trying to disappear into the bed, I arched against his touch.

The touches continued—light and demanding—until it felt like I would lose my mind. I needed them to stop and I needed them to continue. I twisted and bowed off the bed, trying to get away and get closer all at once, and inhaled sharply when I brushed where he was straining against his jeans.

Stop this, Briar, why aren’t you stopping him?

My hands flew to his chest to push him away, but one gripped at the material of his shirt in an attempt to keep him close—both hands at war with each other, just as the rest of my body was.

A whimper sounded low in my throat when his fingers trailed over my breast again on their way down, down, down . . . and he responded by wrenching my head back.

I cried out in pain, but the cry ended with a soft moan when his fingers trailed over a part of me I thought only one man would ever see again.

“No,” I said breathlessly, but my whimpers and moans and the way I pulled him closer begged for so many things that I hadn’t voiced, and not one of them was for him to stop.

Because there had been pain, and I had wanted to get away from him. But heat was pooling low in my belly, and some traitorous part of me wanted this feeling to continue more than I wanted my next breath.

I couldn’t make sense of what I was feeling.

“More.”

It took too long to realize that word had left my lips. I shook my head, trying to force that small piece from my mind, and I tried to twist away from him as his fingers began teasing me, but his body between my legs didn’t allow me to get far. “Please . . . please stop. St—” Another moan tumbled from my mouth and was followed by the slightest, most invigorating tug on my hair.

Shame filled me and my head shook as much as his tight hold would allow. My mind and my body were completely at war with each other. In my mind I was screaming at him to stop touching me, but the throaty sounds coming from me matched the way I was trying to get closer to his hand . . . not my thoughts.

My core tightened and another plea for more caught in my throat.

How can I want this so much?

Guilt tore through my chest.

Why am I not pushing him away?

I clutched his shirt tighter in my hand when he slid a finger inside me.

God, yes . . .

Then Kyle’s face slipped through everything going on inside my mind. Guilt and shame overwhelmed me, threatening to choke me.

Kyle. Oh my God, what am I doing?

I was letting another man touch me. A man who I wanted to continue touching me just as badly as I wanted him to rot in hell.

It felt like I was going insane.

I wrenched my eyes open to find the devil’s face just above mine. In movements too fast for him to stop, I shoved him back with one hand and slapped his face as hard as I could with the other while I screamed, “I said stop!”

He grabbed both hands before I could make another move and slammed them onto the bed as I continued to yell, “You have no right to touch me.”

“I own you, Briar!”

I gathered what little saliva was in my mouth and spit in his face, regretting it instantly when his dark eyes turned murderous. But he didn’t move, and he didn’t speak again.

“You don’t, and you won’t,” I gritted out when nearly a minute had passed.

Each ragged breath that we took forced our chests to brush against the other’s and reminded me that my body was still betraying me—that I still wanted his touch.

But with each brush of his chest, and with each craving for more that rushed through me, I told myself over and over again it was all a lie. That it was nothing more than what should have been an anticipated phase from being stuck in that house with the man who bought me after I’d been kidnapped.

“This is all a process to get me comfortable around you,” I mumbled, throwing his words back at him, and I hated how weak and defeated I sounded while doing it. “It isn’t about sex. And yet . . .”

His face went void of all emotion, even his dark eyes looked bored. After a minute of studying me and steadying his breaths, he said, “And yet, I still own you.”

A sharp pang hit my chest at his callousness after the chaos he’d just created inside me. “I hate you.” The words slid out easily, and I refused to regret them.

But seconds ticked by without a response from the devil, and eventually he released me and got off the bed. A moment later he laid the comforter over my body then walked from the room.