Beastly Beautiful (6 page)

Chapter 8

When Teagan awoke she had no idea where she was. She was lying prone on her back and her head felt light, as if she were coming out of a long sleep. Opening her eyes, she expected to see the bright blue of a winter sky overhead with the towering shadows of city skyscrapers etched across its face. Instead, dim indoor lighting revealed unfamiliar surroundings. The walls above her were red brick and the ceiling high. A black wrought iron candelabra hung suspended over her head.

Slowly, cautiously, Teagan lifted herself enough to look around. The careful movement sent the world spinning dizzyingly before her eyes for a moment, and she had to concentrate on a single spot on the opposite side of the room until the feeling subsided. Her visual point was a square, black frame fixed onto the far wall. The frame held a large picture that looked something like a newspaper clipping, featuring two men in suits sharing a handshake. Even at this distance Teagan recognized the face of one of them. Sir…

That recognition sent her spiraling into a descent of panic as events came crashing back to mind. Her return to Sir’s apartment, the tense confrontation, his threats… She shot bolt upright, scanning the room for another presence. To her vast relief, she seemed to be alone. She had feared to find him hovering nearby, watching. The brief rush of relief she felt was short lived. Whether Sir was presently here or not, there seemed no question he must be somewhere close by. The luxuriousness of her surroundings told her she was still in the apartment.

She supposed that was something to be grateful for—that she had not as yet been deposited into the much feared dumpster or even dropped into the river. And yet there was nothing to say she was beyond the danger line. In fact, the position she now found herself in was almost as alarming as her last memories of Sir looming over her. She was sitting in a red-blanketed bed with a massive headboard and footboard towering at either end, its thick posts stretching almost to the ceiling. At one end of the large room stood an upright chest of drawers, and beside it, a tall armoire. There were heavy matching nightstands on both sides of the bed, and an oak bookshelf with glass panes lining an entire wall.

All of this Teagan took in with a hurried glance, the bulk of her attention being reserved for what she really sought: a way out. There were three wooden doors in the room: one in the far wall and the other two on either side of the armoire. Scrambling from beneath the soft comforter, Teagan slipped out of the massively carved bed with a feeling akin to that of a lobster escaping the pot. The floor beneath her still-in-place tennis shoes was gray-tiled with scarlet colored rugs scattered here and there. She half-tiptoed, half-ran to the door in the far wall, unable to make up her mind which was the more important just now, stealth or speed.

She gripped the thick steel handle, and turning it down, gave the door a tug. Nothing happened. She tried again, but still the door stayed stuck fast. With a sinking sensation, Teagan realized it was locked from the outside. Not prepared to give up yet, she next tried the other doors near the armoire. One turned out to be a deep walk-in closet with shelves and racks enough to hold an entire department store full of clothes. Most of them were stuffed too.

The other door let into the roomiest bathroom she had ever seen, featuring an immense tiled tub and a long granite topped counter with two clear glass sinks and dozens of drawers. The floor was tiled and the rugs, towels, and shower curtain continued the theme of scarlet and black. In the corner near the tub, a small stone fountain beside a potted plant provided a soft trickling noise. A long settee along another wall gave the room more the atmosphere of a place meant to lounge in than to carry out the bodily necessities.

An immense round metal-framed mirror hung over the bathroom countertop, looking as if its impressive weight should have dragged it right down from the wall. Teagan hardly recognized her own reflection gazing out of it. Her face was pale, her eyes wide, and she had a wary expression, as if expecting something horrible to leap out in front of her at any moment. She hesitated long enough to run her fingers through her dark hair in a useless attempt to tame the wild tresses. Something about her elegant surroundings made her do that.

She reentered the bedroom and told herself she had come to the end of her fruitless search. There was no other way in or out. This room lacked even a window, although it would have done her no good anyway this high above the ground. As she scanned the room with a sinking feeling of despair, her gaze returned to the framed picture she had first noticed on waking. It was a newspaper clipping. Curiosity made her move closer to study the two men photographed. The one was definitely Sir, but she didn’t recognize the second man. There was a small caption beneath the picture. It read:

J. Rotham of NationBank closes deal with board of directors
.

Suddenly, Teagan knew two things about Sir she hadn’t known before—his identity and his occupation. Unless the other man photographed was Mr. J. Rotham. Somehow she doubted it. Sir struck her as being too vain to display monuments to other people on his walls. Unfortunately, Teagan could see no way either bit of information would be of use to her until she got out of this place.

Nevertheless, appetite whetted by her first discovery, she looked around the room with a new eye. Hadn’t she been full of questions about Sir and his psycho behavior? It seemed she was in the right place to learn some answers if she could only set aside her fears long enough to do some exploration. She might even find something of use here—maybe a weapon she could use to defend herself if he returned. Didn’t all rich businessmen sleep with pistols under their beds so they could shoot themselves when their businesses went bankrupt? A quick peek under the ruffled bed skirt revealed that one, at least, did not.

Teagan moved on to the tall armoire. She felt a little uneasy opening its heavy doors, as if Sir might somehow sense his things being rifled through and come swooping out of nowhere to stop her. Nothing of the sort happened, of course, and the armoire held nothing but more clothing, neatly pressed suits in every variation of the colors black and gray. As if he didn’t have enough of those in the closet. There were even a couple of tuxes, complete with shiny black shoes to accompany them. And ties, dozens of those.

Teagan swung the armoire doors closed and went on to examine a neighboring set of shelves built into one corner of the room. She cast only a brief glance over the titles. Books on business, personal finance, self-help books… She would never have pegged Sir as a man who needed a book to teach him how to operate a computer but apparently he did. He also seemed to have a surprising interest in medicine and science. There were a lot of those books on his shelf too.

For fiction his tastes were less varied—and surprisingly nerdy. An entire half of the shelf was devoted to fantastic novels of vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and the undead. It seemed odd to think of a man like Sir sitting back in the evenings to crack open the covers of books with names like
Blood Dawn, Chill of Death
, and
Under the Full Moon
.

But his reading tastes didn’t tell her much about him. She moved on to a nearby chest of drawers. The first few drawers were nothing but socks and underwear. No interesting discoveries there.

It was in one of the bottom drawers that she stumbled across an unexpected discovery. This space was filled with odd articles of winter time clothing: gloves, scarves, and thick woolen socks. Teagan almost closed the drawer, but at the last moment she caught sight of something out of place. There nestled among the other things was a thin white envelope. Why would such a thing be kept with his winter accessories unless he had placed it there to hide it?

Snatching up the envelope, she studied the outside. It was addressed to Mr. J. Rotham of NationBank and had a return address in Vermont. The postmark told her it had been mailed three months ago. That was about all her amateur detective work could tell her without looking inside. Luckily the top had already been slit and she had only to tilt the envelope upside down for its contents to come sliding out. It held a folded letter on plain, cheap paper.

Unfolding the note, Teagan found the message inside was so messily scrawled it was hardly legible. With effort, she made out some of the lines. They all seemed to be angry rants and threats against Sir for foreclosing a loan on a failing business—Glintwood Options. There was no explanation of what sort of business this Glintwood Options was, but the letter’s writer made frequent references to groundbreaking discoveries and amazing advancements to benefit the human state, all of which would now be halted due to the actions of Mr. J. Rotham.

The letter closed with an ominous hint of revenge that would have left Teagan feeling deeply uneasy had she been the recipient of such threats. Had it made Sir uneasy? That would explain his hiding the letter away. Teagan privately thought in his place, she would have felt more comfortable tossing it into the fireplace than slipping it into a drawer only a few feet away from her bed. Who needed the constant reminder of an unnerving exchange with such an unpleasant man? Then again Sir’s own moods could be black enough, maybe he regarded the note as more of an amusing curiosity than an object of disturbance.

She flipped the envelope over and studied the return address again. There’d been no signature in the letter but there was a name here—Dr. Mortimer Green. “Sixteen hundred Old Pine Road, River Falls, Vermont,” she read aloud, committing the address to memory. One never knew when this sort of information could come in handy. A subtle idea was already nudging at the back of her mind about how she might turn this Dr. Green’s desire for vengeance against Sir to her advantage. If she got out of here alive, that was.

It was as she formed this very thought that she became aware of a soft rattling of the handle on the door leading out of the bedroom. There was a faint clinking noise, like that of a lock being turned, and then the door was creaking open. Teagan shoved the letter and its envelope back into the bottom dresser drawer and slammed the drawer closed not a second too soon.

Chapter 9

The door swung open and in stepped Sir. Expressionlessly, he took in her position. Teagan backed away from the dresser, trying to move casually but feeling as if all the focus of the room somehow pointed toward the hastily closed drawer. Why was he looking at it like that? Had she left it open a crack? Was a sock or something dangling out? It took an extraordinary effort not to cast a guilty glance that direction. She eyed the room’s single passage of escape, already vanishing behind Sir’s back as he swung the door shut behind him.

As he moved further into the room, Teagan took a step backward but he only walked around the space, inspecting its contents as if expecting to find something tampered with or missing. It seemed a colossally arrogant gesture for someone who had just acted as he had to now be concerned about her stealing his things… Teagan almost forgot she had in fact been guilty of both meddling and stealing in this place. Never mind, she told herself. She’d had her reasons.

The memory of that prompted her to exhibit a level of courage she didn’t truly feel. She broke the silence by saying, “I hope you won’t think I’m prying if I ask just what fate you have in mind for me and how long you plan on keeping me here.”

For the first time he switched his attention from their surroundings to look directly at her. Teagan was careful not to meet his eyes. In the past, that had proved a dangerous thing to do.

“Keeping you here?” he repeated. “I’m sure I hadn’t thought of doing anything of the kind. I don’t know whether or not you’ve noticed…” His tone was ironic. “But this place happens to be my bedroom. And while you’re fairly pretty and lively enough company, I think we’d be a bit crowded over time. Besides I’m not comfortable with strangers rifling through my belongings or helping themselves to any shiny little valuables they happen to pick up.”

Teagan was still too unnerved by the last scene between them to fall into the trap of his easy conversation now. “Don’t try to pretend I’m anything less than a prisoner here. Why else would you have brought me to this room and locked me in?”

“Locked?” He feigned confusion. “I don’t know what you mean. The door opened perfectly easily for me. But I apologize if you felt yourself for one moment—how did you put it—a prisoner?”

Teagan was finally working up enough nerve to insert her own note of sarcasm as she said, “If I was always free to go at any time then explain to me what I’m doing here.”

He shrugged. “You took some sudden spell as silly girls often do and fainted dead away in my living room floor. Would you have preferred I let you lie there?”

Teagan didn’t buy his explanation for a moment and kept a guarded watch on him as he circled around the room. He paused before the dresser and eyed the bottom drawer. Was it her imagination or was there a tiny scrap of white showing over its edge?

He continued with, “You know for a young woman who lives alone on the city streets you appear to have an unusually fanciful imagination. How old are you anyway? Eighteen? Nineteen?”

As he spoke he crouched on one knee before the drawer. Teagan’s attention was so wrapped up in what he was doing she forgot herself enough to give information she wouldn’t normally have shared with this man. “Twenty-two,” she admitted, nervously watching him slide the drawer open to free the white envelope that had been caught over its edge.

“Hmmm,” he said, handling the envelope. “I wouldn’t have thought it. Surely a woman of your age knows better than to pry into others’ things—or at least not to get caught if she does.”

He replaced the envelope over a pile of socks and slid the drawer shut again. Teagan thought he would say something more about her infraction or concerning the contents of the letter but he surprised her by changing the subject entirely. “I’ve been giving some thought to the proposition you made earlier,” he said, facing her suddenly.