Chapter Three
I’m loath to welcome consciousness as it revisits. I can’t move. My legs and arms are lead. My eyes, as I blink them open, feel like bags of gravel.
A cautious squint reveals an unfamiliar room. A bedroom. Masculine, rustic, with exposed brick walls, dark furniture, and a wide dresser littered with a plethora of colognes.
I’m lying supine in a bed that is big and soft with lots of pillows. I want to roll over to enjoy this big, soft bed, spread my arms, and make pillow angels.
Unfortunately, my body feels like it’s weighing itself down. Just attempting the simple act of flicking my wrist feels the equivalent of deadlifting a trailer.
Where am I?
I hope it’s with— What is his name?
Right. Jaxon. With an x.
Anyway. I hope this is his bed, and that is his dresser, and those are his colognes. I hope he barges in and kisses me again. Touches his hand to my bare thigh. Makes me feel all those same weird and tingly things again.
I hope I’m still his hostage.
Stricken with inertia, I lie there for thirteen nauseating minutes—yes, I counted—before the room door finally swings open.
Had I the energy to sigh in disappointment, I would.
Not Jaxon.
Nonetheless, Collin, in all his heart-melting handsomeness, will suffice.
He wears a black wifebeater and red pajama bottoms that bears the Flash symbol on the right thigh. While the pajama bottoms hang low on his hips, the wifebeater, two sizes too tight, doesn’t hide much. He’s holding an enormous bowl of cereal in one hand while scooping spoonfuls into his mouth as he strolls toward the massive bed.
He doesn’t seem to notice I’m awake, probably because I’m stretched out as stiff as the dead.
As he climbs into bed, he takes a break from stuffing his face long enough to grab a remote from the nightstand and switch the telly on.
My head explodes. The noise from the telly is like an automatic weapon. Jarring enough to spur life into my fingers and curl them into fists. Eyes squeezed shut, I press the fists to my temples and croak out, “Lousy bastardous American bastards.”
The clinking of the stainless steel to porcelain pauses. The volume on the telly drops.
Much better.
I crack one eye open and find Collin smirking at me. “Welcome back to the rabbit hole, Nerd Girl.”
Both eyes open now, I correct my askew glasses. “You fricking drugged me. Again. Do you have any idea the dangers of drugging someone back to back? You idiots! What specific drug did you use? I need to know so I can take immediate precautions to prevent long-term side effects.”
Collin winces with contrition. “Dunno. You’ll have to ask Jaxon. But you’ll be okay. The drug is legal, safe. We’ve used it many times before.” He sets his bowl aside. “You feeling nauseous? Any memory problems? Confusion, delirium, hallucinations?”
I take a minute to assess. “Just nausea.”
“As I thought,” he says. “You’re okay. The heaviness will wear off soon.”
“I’m really thirsty.”
Without a word, he hops off the bed, leaves the room, and return minutes later with a tall glass of water. He sets the water down on the nightstand and helps me up so I’m seated with my back against the headboard.
As he picks up the glass and brings it to my lips, I think twice before drinking, as thirsty as I am. “Is the water drug-free this time?”
Remorse and apology fill his gray eyes. “Yes. It is. I am sorry for drugging you. Didn’t want to. But Jaxon wanted to shut you up. He’s not much of a talker…or listener—or anything else, for that matter. Just a big, vapid block of nothing, rather than a living being. So, to him, someone like you, well…”
He nudges my lips with the glass, and I open and begin gulping, reluctantly trusting him.
“But I like you,” he confesses. “You’re…entertaining. And cute, too.”
Huh, how about that? This heartthrob—one I’m positive has already broken a thousand pretty pink hearts—thinks I’m cute.
Melanie would snort at that through her snobby nose.
Speaking of which, I wonder how close she is to locating me…
“How long have I been out?” I ask.
“About seven hours.” He touches his finger to my nose, then climbs up on the bed, straddles me—Heart, please be still—and…reaches around to fluff the pillows at my back to make me more comfortable.
Well, that’s… I sigh. Unexpectedly considerate of him.
Once he’s satisfied, he crawls over me to his side of the bed, picks up his cereal, and resumes munching.
In all my twenty-two years of living, I’ve never had this much male action. Within twenty-four hours, I’ve experienced my first kiss, my first grope, my first hot-male-arm-around-my-waist, my first sleeping-in-a-hot-man’s-bed, and my first man-straddle…innocent as it all was.
For me, that’s a lot of male contact. And I’m unsure how to feel about it.
How it feels, however, is…nice.
Kind of.
Breath-catching with Collin. Heart-stopping with Jaxon.
Except, Collin likes me, and talks to me, and smiles and smirks at me, while Jaxon aims to shut me up—either with his mouth or with drugs.
Not that I mind him shutting me up with his mouth.
The drugs, though, not so much.
Ignoring the lingering warmth of Collin’s strong thighs straddling me, I clear my throat and ask, “What kind of cereal is that?”
“Honey Bunches of Oats.”
I love Honey Bunches of Oats. “Can I have some?”
This gets his attention. He all but hugs the bowl to his chest, and I think he’s about to growl a feral, “No!” but then he sighs, scoops three spoonfuls into his mouth, and begrudgingly passes me the bowl. “Don’t eat it all, all right?”
It’s not until eating the first spoonful of cereal that I realize how famished I am. The more I eat, the hungrier I feel, so the more I eat.
I’m down to the dregs when Collin glances over and possessively snatches the bowl from me. “I told you not to eat it all!”
Through a mouthful of flakes and granola, I grumble, “Boo-hoo, poo-woo. Why so aggressive? Can’t you just go get more?”
Almost angrily, he brings the bowl to his mouth and drains every last bit of what’s left, as if afraid I might ask for more.
Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he turns gray eyes to me, sculpted lips tipped in a half snarl. “I never share my Honey Bunches of Oats. With anyone. I trusted you with it, and you ate it all. For that, I’m never sharing my Honey Bunches of Oats with you ever again.”
The laugh that bubbles up from me cannot be helped. “You sound like a bloody ten-year-old. It’s just cereal.”
His expression is aghast, as if I’d just told him Santa Claus isn’t real. “Honey Bunches of Oats is not just cereal. It’s magic.”
My eyes circle wide. “Nuh-uh. That’s Lucky Charms.”
He takes a sharp breath. “Nope, you can’t be my roommate. One of the others has to take you.”
I’m even more confused. “Your roommate?”
“Despite our votes to let you go, Jaxon insists on keeping you here for a while. Unfortunately, there aren’t any spare rooms, and no one wants to room with the chatty nerd, so I volunteered—purely out of guilt for drugging you.”
I blink. “Meaning…you all live together?”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
A shrug. “Reasons.”
“Like what?”
He runs a hand over his jaggedly trimmed platinum mane and mutters something to himself before saying, “We work together, for one.”
“Is it mandatory in America for people who work together to live together?”
Collin expels an exhausted breath and slides down from the headboard to the mattress, staring up at the ceiling. “And so my watch begins.”
I laugh at the reference. I’m a fan, too. “If I’m to be your roommate, you should know I have sedatephobia.”
His eyebrows pinch together. “What’s that?”
“A fear of silence. Which means I’ll always be talking to fill it. And we’ll need to sleep with the TV on.”
“Wow,” he says with a resigned sigh. “I really screwed myself.”
“There’s traffic outside,” I say with sudden recognition. “And the kind of noises found only one place in the world. Are we in filthy New York City, perchance?”
“Correct.”
Okay. What are the odds I was kidnapped all the way over in Paris and brought right back home?
I looked around thoughtfully. “How am I a hostage if I’m not tied up and free to climb through those open, unbarred windows if I want?”
“Security’s pretty tight here, Nerd Girl,” he mumbles as he hops off the bed and heads for the bathroom. “Trust me, you won’t get far if you try to run.”
I could point out that there’s no security too tight for me to defeat, but I don’t. Mainly because I’ve no intention of escaping. I have a feeling Jaxon knows I won’t attempt to run. I’m too intrigued. And I do fancy the frequent hot-male contact.
A normal person with a normal life would be having a more dramatic, tonsil-vibrating reaction to my current situation. They’d be screaming bloody murder, and most definitely would not be reclining so causally in a complete stranger’s bed, no matter how obscenely handsome that stranger is. A normal person would be screaming bloody murder because they’d probably have a job, a doting boyfriend, an inseparable friend, and a family who values them, to go back home to.
I, on the other hand, am not screaming bloody murder because, one, I’m not normal, and, two, I don’t have a job or a doting boyfriend, and, three, my inseparable friend will be here soon enough.
As for family, a car accident in England took my negligent, alcoholic parents. I have an older sister and brother who are perfectly fine with my absence from their lives. They never could tolerate my eccentricities.
My brother is the oldest, but he’s somewhat mentally challenged, so when our parents perished, my sister took over. To chase her music career, she packed us up and moved us to the States—specifically, San Francisco. Through hard work, perseverance, and a Good Samaritan, she became famous and successful—the Saskia Day, world-class pop-rock superstar—and thus able to provide for us in ways we’d never dreamed of.
Growing up, I was always the straight-A student, the know-it-all smart-arse, the pesky, annoying critic and corrector. I started college at thirteen. Which is where I met Melanie, who’d started a year before me at just twelve. She, too, was a Brit relocated to the States.
Instant connection. Kindred spirits. She was everything I was. I was everything she was. We understood each other.
We got teased and pranked quite a bit throughout our adolescent college years. We were too smart and obnoxious for our ages, and the “normal” kids didn’t like that.
Our only other friend was our physics professor, Dr. Brookbanks, a fifty-two-year-old Star Wars fanatic. Eventually, he convinced us we were too cool for school, too advanced for nuance, and went about teaching us a whole new set of lessons, training us, exposing us to some of the most exciting yet unimaginable opportunities.
We became even bigger geniuses.
Intelligent criminals.
Soon, Mel and I were traveling the world on contracts and missions, all while balancing our college studies, acing our exams like they were nothing but minor inconveniences.
I was an engineer. I was a hacker. I was a part-time liar.
We were artists. Artists of every kind. Young, and overly capable.
About a year ago, we chose to settle in New York—much to my dismay, as I loathe this tightly packed city. But Melanie insists this is where we need to be to achieve all our dreams. And though I disagree—my suggestion was Silicon Valley—I let her win.
Ma—which is what I call my sister, since she’s more of a mother to me than our real mum ever was—and I keep in touch and see each other as often we can. But we both travel and move about a lot, so sometimes we can go months between visits. Therefore, I don’t have to worry about her panicking and sending out a search party if she doesn’t get a ring from me for a while.
“I need to shower,” I tell Collin as he returns from the bathroom. “I’m starting to smell like this city. And by the way, who’ll be feeding me?”
“Go on. There’s a pack of new toothbrushes in the cabinet. Jaxon will be feeding you. I’ll share my bed with you, but not my food.” He scowls.
I roll my eyes and climb off the bed. “Because I ate your cereal?”
“Because you dissed it.”
“Seriously, how old are you?”
Collin pulls on the strings of his pajama bottoms, peels back the waistband, and peeks down at his manhood before flicking a lascivious gaze back to me. “Sure you wanna know that, Nerd Girl?”
With a gulp, I turn and sprint for the bathroom.