Heart of Darkness - A Standalone Bad Boy Romance Novel Page 7
“I haven’t told her,” I said.
He turned and gave me a long, dry look.
“You uhhh…?”
Here he lifted his eyebrows again. Even with the pretense of fishing, Ben still didn’t exactly chat with me, but kind of just suggested things with his face and waited for me to catch his drift.
“Slept with her? Yeah.”
He flicked a stone he had been rolling between his fingertips into the water and it broke the still sheet into a few thin, circular ripples.
“Huh. Dude, you’d better tell her.”
“Well, she knows I was in prison” I said. “Just… she doesn’t know why. Yet.”
Again with the slow look.
“I met her on one of those… you know those dating sites for prisoners.”
He was going to needle it out of me anyway, so I may as well confess straight out. I sipped nervously. I’ve lived long enough to know not to truly compete with any man, but there are some races your older brother will just always beat you at. I waited to see what he’d say.
“Well shit.”
He crushed the can a little in his hand and tossed it over, landing it in an empty bucket.
“So what’s her deal then? Got a bunch of kids? Is she …you know…?” here he made some vague gestures with his hands and pulled a face, suggesting any number of possible ways a woman who would willingly date a prisoner might be, well, …you know.
“There’s nothing wrong with her. Christ. She’s nice. She’s a vet and she lives alone. No kids but she kind of fosters animals before they get rehomed and stuff. Really sweet woman. Long, long brown hair. Really pretty hair. Blue-ish eyes…”
He looked at me, waiting for the catch.
“Well shit,” he said, when he realized there was no ‘but’.
“Ben, I think… I think I really like her.”
“Buddy, you met her like a few weeks ago. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but she’s not the only woman in the world, you know.”
“She’s the only woman like that,” I said.
Here he smiled broadly at me and sat up in his seat.
“Hoo boy, you’re a goner,” he said, whistling low and shaking his head.
I punched his arm.
“Shut up. I mean it. She’s… different. She’s sweet and kind and really gentle.”
He stood up and went over to the cooler box, picking up a fresh beer and gesturing to ask if I wanted one.
“Nah, I’m still working on this one. She’s got a really good heart, you know?”
He sidled back over to the camping chairs.
“Kinda makes you wonder what she’s doing with a guy like you then, huh?” he laughed, and cracked the tab on the can.
“Kinda.”
“Don’t you think it’s weird she doesn’t want to know why you went to prison? Like, at all? You could find that all out in five minutes with Google.”
He had a point. It was weird. But she was just different. This was a woman who rescued an abandoned parrot and nursed it back to health, even though it had done nothing but bite her each and every day since. She had lost count of the unwanted animals she had patiently rescued and rehomes. She never cared how the animals that came into the clinic got that way. She just helped them, as they were.
“I’ll tell her soon. She’s a good woman. She deserves to know,” I said decisively. “And I’m looking for better jobs now, too. I’m getting back on track,” I added, as though the prettier I could make my life now, the easier it would be for her to accept how ugly it used to be. Ben settled down into his old spot on the horizon and said nothing more about the topic. I could tell what he was thinking, though. That I would share my deep dark secret with her, and she’d flip out and I’d never hear from her again, plain and simple. And to be honest, I was secretly thinking the same thing.
Chapter Eleven – Madeleine
The darkness was blanketed all around me. There is good in this world, and there is bad.
I huddled closer in to the small, wavering flicker of flame and held it in my hands, breathing in the hot stream of air that snaked off the top, staring deeply at the blue core of the fire. As long as I kept my focus on the light, it would all be OK. The darkness would be OK.
And it all depended on me being able to stand here still like this, in the dark. It didn’t matter that this was just a medicine cupboard and that it was 9am on a boring weekday in a boring suburban animal clinic. Darkness is still darkness …and it’s the same everywhere. I cradled the match flame in my hands and went as close as I could to it, breathing the warmth in.
Nobody knew that I did this. It was such a secret, I barely even remembered myself when I started doing it. Maybe after Alex left. Maybe before that even. Or maybe it was that time a hunter came in with his mangled dog, just after I had earned my license and started practicing alone.
He had been shooting rabbits and accidentally blasted a gaping wound in the leg of his own spaniel dog. He stood casual as can be, yammering away as I tried to stop the bleeding. He said that the dog would be fine, he was sure. Then he told me a story that I never forgot. A hunting story: that the predator can always tell when the prey has given up. Even before the prey itself knows, the predator can see something, see the way the skin ripples over the prey’s bones as it runs, a change in the eyes, a sort of attitude in the skin, in the smell of the body. It’s a small, almost invisible change, but it’s still a tacit agreement, a secret communication that the prey unofficially submits to being taken by the predator.
I curled my hand round the flame and let my mind go dark. Being a vet is ugly work. I don’t mind the blood and the bones and the torn skin. What sickens me most is the violence – the human violence. The people who would deliberately harm another creature, or the people who’d bring in their lifelong pet and put her down because they didn’t think she was worth the $400 to save. The animals are fine. It’s the humans that I couldn’t handle.
In any case, every morning here, right before I start work, I put on my name-embroidered overalls and I step into this quiet, dark cupboard, and I light a match, and I pray that I’m strong enough to deal with whatever lays ahead. By the time 5pm rolls around, I’m often broken. Fed up. Tired. But this little cupboard spell keeps me alive through it all. I can stare into the mangy, hollow eyes of an abused cat and remember that little flicker of flame in the darkness, and I can keep going. Whatever that little twitch in the prey animal’s skin is, that look in the eye, that smell, well, I refuse to do that. I’m not ready to be anyone’s prey yet.
I blew out the flame and threw open the door, the burnt match odor dissipating quickly. Almost instantly, one of the nurses blustered in and told me there was an emergency, a mix breed dog had been pulled from a fight and was now thrashing around in the waiting room, crushed, bloody leg dangling behind him.
All five of us in the surgery flew into the waiting room and tried to restrain a large brown lab mix, his hackles high and lips pulled back into a frothy snarl. The owner stood to the side, hysterical, unable to pull her eyes away from the lashings of fresh blood thrown all over the linoleum.
The receptionist had ushered everyone else out, and I raced back into the surgery and snatched a vial of alprazolam and a syringe. The assistants held back the snarling animal while I reached for his neck and jabbed the tranquilizer in as precisely as I could. Trails of blood following us, the dog still thrashing wildly, we managed to usher him into the surgery and hoist him up onto the table where I could examine his leg. He was a strong one. With a flash of irritation, I eyed the bulbous blue sack bobbing between his legs. People didn’t fix their dogs and then they were surprised when they became aggressive?
One of the assistants held the snapping dog firm round his neck and the rest of him wriggled and resisted, his claws scratching the metal table and leaving welts on the nurses’ arms.
“What about the other dog?” I asked, trying to get a clear look at the leg, bloody but still kicking back in anger.
I frowned. The leg was hideously damaged but until the dog stopped fighting me, I couldn’t get a clear look – it was all just blood-matted fur and gristle. Grasping at the knee, I pulled slightly to get a better look at the shinbone and before I knew it, the nails scratched one long line on the table and all at once the assistant lurched forward and screamed, “oh shit!”
I lifted my head to see the assistant lose his grip on the neck and immediately the pink, ribbed inside of the dog’s mouth came snapping towards me. I ducked out of the way but he quickly sunk wet, angry teeth right into the stretched sinew of my neck. I screamed out loud. The assistants yanked him off quickly and thunked him back down onto the table, where he whimpered and thrashed, the tranquilizer finally setting in.
My hand was on my neck now, and my head whirred with pain and shock. I looked to see the dog finally submitting, lying flat on the surgery table, panting hard under three sets of panicked hands pinning him down. Out the corner of his eye he watched me as I staggered back, my neck ringing with pain.
“He’s drawn blood, come over here quick,” said one of the nurses, and she was soon fussing with the slobbery patch on my neck, unwrapping swabs and furiously disinfecting the area.
But the pain felt strange on my skin. I felt …exuberant. I stared into that animal’s eyes and he stared straight back into mine. My head swum and swirled with panic, but somehow there was one bright, sharp spot in my awareness, just ahead of my eyes. I saw it clearly: I was alive. As alive and as much an animal as that slathering dog in front of me. And I wasn’t fucking scared.
In fact, as I stood there, heart banging like a drum, the memory of him came to me all at once.
Zack.
I saw his hard, angry fists raining down onto Alex’s body. I saw those same hands close around my own body. I saw the damp, black wires beneath his navel, and the veins in his immense cock, and felt the throb it had left deep inside my body, and all at once I laughed, from the sheer thrill of it, from the pain, from I don’t know what. But I laughed.
“It doesn’t hurt!” I told the fretting nurse, and kept staring into the dog’s eyes as the consciousness seeped out of them and he closed his lids. “I’m fine, I’m fine!”
And I was more than fine. I felt amazing. I could never have told the others in the room that morning, but something strange had happened to me. Something dark had come over me. Being bitten in the neck by an angry dog shouldn’t feel like this, should it? Why had I thought of Zack, all over me, and in me, and why had I felt hot and crazy and angry and more alive than I ever had? And what’s more, what was this delicious buzzing between my legs?
I tried to focus.
The dog. His eyes rolled back in his head and his tongue lolled out his mouth. Now, I could go in and do some damage control. Most of the assistants and nurses cleared out and I got to work on the brown lab. I told myself to pay attention. I would see Zack later on that evening. There’d be time enough to figure out what the hell was going on with me. But for now, the beast was sleeping and while he did, I’d need to mend his broken leg.
* * *
I poured out a stream of yellow liquid into his cup and set my teapot back on the table. I thought it was funny, that an ex-con’s favorite tea was chamomile, but I didn’t say so for fear of hurting his feelings.
As I lifted my own cup to my lips, I noticed that I was still shaking. Still trembling from the adrenaline put there this morning by the ferocious brown lab.
He sat opposite on me on the sofa. Yes, the sofa, and he watched me warmly, all easy smiles and lightly tanned skin that looked like burnished metal against his casual white shirt.
“You know, you sure are getting picked on a lot these days,” he laughed, and held the teacup in his wide hands, gesturing to my neck.
I laughed back.
It was true. With my still-bruised cheekbone and my newest addition of two vampire-like puncture wounds right on the jugular, I really was a sight to behold.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “you make looking beat up seem so pretty and glamorous.”
I giggled. He might be on to something. I had been on fire all day. Triumphant over my tussle with the beast, two fresh trophy wounds to show for my trouble and now, the thing I had been looking forward to all day: Zack. I wouldn’t be surprised if I was glowing.
Our recent tryst on this very sofa seemed like a dim memory. Something reset and I felt like I had to start all over, gathering up the nerve to touch him again, to kiss him again. We hadn’t spoken much about our last meeting, but my body remembered everything. Every last pulsing, sticky, delicious detail. I was still aching somewhere deep inside where he had been, and the thought both scared and thrilled me.
Just remembering his naughty smile and the force he used to pull apart my legs… something about finding little traces of him on me drove me wild at the most inappropriate times. I discovered a handprint on my ass while showering and was ten minutes late for work. I saw the letters “ZAK” on a license plate and instantly became wet. And when I sat a certain way, and squeezed my legs just so, and thought of just the right naughty thought, I could feel him. All I could think about all that day was his hard body, his sweet smile …and his fat, ruthless cock.
In fact, I was even having trouble just looking him in the eye at that moment.
“Glamorous? Well I wouldn’t call it glamorous,” I said, losing myself a little in his gaze and then tearing my eyes away again.
“Well, you’re beautiful, whatever happens,” he said, and I noticed his voice crack on the word ‘beautiful’.
We sat in silence drinking for a moment. The calm before a storm.
He flicked his eyes up to glance at me and then I knew all at once: it was going to happen.
Again.
I blushed and felt my pussy twitch deliciously. Half the fun now, I guess, was waiting it out. A game to see who could hold out the longest.
“More tea?” he asked, and I wanted to make a joke about how funny I thought it was for him to say that, but decided against it.
“No thanks, I’m good. There is something else I want though.” My heartbeat was like a wild animal caged in my ribs.
“Oh? What’s that?” He put his cup down.
“Could I possibly get another kiss?” I said, and tilted my head coyly to the side.
He inhaled deeply and looked me over with a pleased expression. God he was handsome. A good, strong face. A serious jaw. Full, firm lips and clear eyes. But dear Lord was there something unbearably naughty creeping all over that expression of his. He smiled and spoke in a low mumble.
“I’d be afraid to kiss you, quite frankly. I wouldn’t want to give you another injury…” he said, and lifted delicate fingertips to graze against my bruised skin.
The effect was electric. I exhaled and tried to keep eye contact.
“Oh, I’m not scared of you,” I said, a little smile fluttering on my lips.
“You’re not? Maybe you should be. I can be very rough, you know.”
The jolt of pleasure that zapped through me was so intense I felt like I would pass out. I would have done anything for him to just reach over and kiss me already.
“You? Rough?” I giggled.
He pretended to be insulted with a playful jump of his eyebrows.
“Ma’am, don’t I remember you saying what a dangerous convict I was? What a bad guy? In fact a man so dangerous that they…” here he leaned in so close I could almost taste the words from his lips, “…so dangerous that they had to lock him up away from society. Surely you must be just a little scared…” he said, putting on his best dramatic voice.
I was already soaking wet.
He wasn’t a bad man. But he was a man. The more I thought about this answer he had given, the more I understood it. I was scared. I was very scared. But I didn’t know how to explain all the other things I felt. The strange feeling that pulsed through me as I star
ed into the animal eyes of the rabid lab. The thrill I felt as his scratch marks stung on my arm. My heart beating when I thought certain unthinkable things about Zack… I didn’t know how to say: yes I’m scared. But I like it.
I smiled, my lips hovering just an inch from his.
“Well, when you put it that way, maybe I am just a little scared,” I said and leaned forward slightly to touch the tips of my lips to his. Not to kiss him, but just to touch.
Instantly, his strong hands folded round my neck and pulled me in deeper, and I surrendered into a deep, full, passionate kiss. It was an uncompromising, penetrating kiss, one that took all of me, and I so I gave myself up to it, all of myself, and opened my lips to his.
Soon his warm body was pressed close to mine, where I hadn’t even realized how much I had missed it. It was as though I had been holding on, holding my breath and waiting for him, and now that his strong arms were folding around me again, I could just exhale and let all of that go.
“I’ve wrestled one savage beast today, I think I can handle another,” I said teasingly, and with this came a low growl from deep inside his chest as he pounced on me. I squealed with delight as he jumped on top of me and pinned me down. I could already feel his solid cock jamming into my belly, even through his thick trousers.
Were we crazy? Was this all too fast? My heart was pumping at fever pitch. There is good in this world, and there is bad. But maybe there’s something else, too. A third thing: good-bad.
My throat went dry and I considered opening my mouth, coming up for air between each deep, animalistic kiss, and telling him I was scared, and saying please don’t hurt me. I thought about begging him to slow down. That the speed with which he was tearing my clothing off was scary, that it was too much, he was too much, too big, too rough for me, that I wasn’t ready yet. I thought of begging him to be gentle, to go slow. To be good. But then I realized that if I asked him to stop… he would.