Devoured (11 page)

There’s a lump in my throat and I choke out a thank you. 

Then his mood changes and he raises an eyebrow almost mockingly, saying, “Now, no more interruption or I really will punish you.” I open my mouth, but he holds out a finger in front of him, stopping me from speaking. “God, when will you listen? No, I’m not going to physically punish you because that requires . . .”

When he nods his head, giving me permission to speak, I whisper, “Touch.”

“And the only way I’ll do that is if . . .”

“I beg.”

He grants me a smile and then continues giving me a play by play of the schedule for each day after Sunday. Day nine will be a recap of everything I’ve learned and on the final day, ten, he’ll conduct a small assessment. Of what, I’m not sure. “Nothing fucked up or”—he raises his eyebrow wickedly—“too strenuous.”

Yeah, right.

“Now, tell me what I’ve just told you,” he says.

I make it to day four, knowing that I’ve left out important details, and then I completely falter. “I-I don’t remember.”

“Verbal training,” he reminds me, and I flush. 

“Sorry, Lucas.”

I’ve not called him Mr. Wolfe or Sir like he’s asked me to, but instead of pointing this out or correcting me he seems to shrug the mistake off.  Maybe today counts as like an orientation. “Let’s try this again, this time”—he pulls a long strip of dark fabric from the same desk drawer he found the Best Buy bag in—“let’s try this.” He hands it to me, making sure our skin doesn’t touch.

“A blindfold?”

“Yes, a blindfold.”

“I won’t be able to see. And then—”

“You don’t have to see anything to listen. To speak. To learn.”

I feel like an idiot for even trying to protest because he has a point. I don’t need my eyes for any of those things. Sifting the cloth back and forth between my hands, I ask, “And you want me to put it on right now?”

 “Why else would I give it to you?” Lucas demands, in a husky voice, wiggling his index finger to let me know he’s ready for me to follow through with his request. Hesitantly, I press the fabric to my face, over my eyes, shivering at how soft it feels, how very dangerous.

As I sit in darkness, I listen carefully, intently, as he repeats our schedule to me. When he finishes, asking me what we’re doing on day seven, I don’t miss a beat. “Wednesday. A tour of your childhood neighborhood and an interview with your parents with the documentary crew in Atlanta.”

He quizzes me a little more, and I ace each question. The entire time he speaks to me, I feel hyperaware of everything around me. It gets to the point where I have to dig my fingernails into my knees because my nerve endings are prickling so fiercely. When I answer Lucas’s final question, my voice trembles. He’s quiet for a long time, but I feel how close his body is to mine as he paces the floor in front of me. Smell his mind-altering scent. My skin flushes.

“Take off the mask, Sienna,” Lucas orders in a strange voice. A moment later, after I’ve slid the blindfold down so that it hangs around my neck like a supple cloth necklace, I raise my blue eyes up. He’s touching the base of his neck and his eyebrows are drawn together. When I stare into his hazel eyes, there’s something there that makes my belly twist into an even tighter knot:

Hunger.

†

The entire mood of the conversation with Lucas seems to shift after I realize he wants me at this very moment. “Sienna?” he whispers. 

My eyes close and my back arches. “Yes . . . sir.”

“You have a license, right?”

“Why do you—”

“One word,” he says. “It’s a single word answer.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now you won’t have to spend the rest of your day at the DMV. They’re a pain in the ass.”

“Oh,” I say, opening my eyes. I push my hair back from my face with damp hands. I know there’s more that he wants to say to me. With my body still humming from the experience with the blindfold, now would probably be the best time for him to get it off his chest. 

Instead, a few seconds later, Lucas sends me away.

I’ve done a lot of work—all through high school and college and my job with Tomas—and this is the first time my boss has actually uttered the words “You’re dismissed.”

“Dismissed?” 

“Do I need to have you pull the blindfold back over your eyes? Leave.”

I’m shaken and suddenly a little lightheaded at the way his tone has hardened. Gone is the almost teasing voice he’d taken on while he was admonishing me over my lack of listening skills and drilling his schedule into my head. Now, he just sounds . . . like I’m the biggest nuisance he’s ever met.

“No sir, no blindfold,” I say, a sarcastic edge creeping its way into my voice as I stand up stiffly, and walk past him toward the French doors. When he shuffles his feet, clears his throat just slightly, I know he’s watching me leave.

He stops me before I step over the threshold, and into the sitting room outside the office. “Kylie’s left a list of her own for you in the smaller office on the bottom floor.”

I nod this time because there’s a massive lump in my throat and I don’t think I could possibly call him sir again without my voice breaking apart and giving away my disappointment. Gripping the Best Buy bag, I clench my teeth and do as he’s asked. I don’t even know why I’m upset to begin with.

Grabbing my laptop from my bedroom, I take it along with the new phone and tablet Lucas has given me. I find the stairs that lead to the lower section of the house in the kitchen and head down there. It’s cooler in this part of the house, like purposely colder, and my nipples harden under my thin cardigan. 

This whole floor was probably a basement at some point, but the contractor who did the conversion managed to make it look as elegant as the rest of the house. When I pass by a piano room, my letdown from the Lucas debacle momentarily disappears and I creep inside.

I was never the pianist my mom was—she had wanted to perform before she met and married my dad—but I had taken years of lessons. One of my few incredible memories of her was sitting at the Steinway my grandfather had bought for her when she was a kid. She had guided my fingers to the correct keys, teaching me to play some cheesy eighties song. Of course, twenty minutes later she was yelling at me for tapping a flat instead of a sharp, and my dad was forbidding she ever try to teach me anything ever again, but it was fun while it lasted.

I’m suddenly aware that I’m quietly playing that eighties song, and I drag my fingers from the keys. Rub my hands down the front of my black pants. 

Leaving the piano room behind, I find the office Kylie’s been using. She’s left me a long list of things I should be aware of such as the email address and password for answering Lucas’s fan mail along with a credit card paper-clipped to a note that reads:
Spend to your heart’s content! 

But after I’ve collected Kylie’s folder, I find myself standing in the doorway to the piano room, staring inside. That Steinway piano that had belonged to my mom—it was one of the many things Gram sold to help pay for her legal fees.

Usually, driving is a therapeutic experience for me. I’ve never taken the Metro in Los Angeles because despite how long my daily commute is, it gives me time to gather my thoughts, flush out any anger from the day. Sometimes, it’s the one chance I have where I feel like I’m in complete control of my life. 

Driving Lucas from point A to point B, though, is almost painful.

“Stop grinding your teeth, Sienna,” he says, his voice weaving from the third row—where he insisted on riding so that he could write music in “peace”—up to the driver’s seat to irritate me.

“It’s stop and go traffic. It’s nerve-wracking,” I hiss. Then, reluctantly, I add, “Mr. Wolfe.” I won’t mention that Kylie’s notes explicitly said that a car would be sent to take him to the photo shoot this afternoon. That I
heard
him cancelling said vehicle this morning while I was making myself a cup of coffee. Or that the only reason I personally think he’s having me escort him around is so that he can screw with my head.

Make me fail.

Tempt me.

I glance into the rearview mirror. My gaze locks with frustrated hazel eyes. “Just stop with the teeth,” he growls.

Before what? You discipline me?
I take a breath, ready to verbalize the taunts, but then I decide better on it. Lucas is holding something important over my head. Plus, despite his promise not to touch me unless I ask, I know he doesn’t have to lay a hand on my body to punish me. He’s proven that to me more times than I’d like to remember. Wetting my lips, I tighten my grip on the steering wheel to stop my hands from shaking.

For the rest of the ride, I slide my tongue back and forth between my teeth to keep from grinding them together.

When we reach the location for the shoot—a historic diner in the heart of downtown Nashville that’s been rented out for the entire day—Lucas stops me before I open my door. “Look, I don’t . . . do very well with this kind of thing with other people around.”

Shyness is not something I expect from Lucas, and I’m taken aback. “Meaning you want me to stay outside,” I say.

“Don’t sound so dejected. You’ve got the business credit card Kylie left, right?”

 “Yes,” I say. 

“There’s seven more days after this. You have a tendency to dress like a first grade teacher and since you’re a direct reflection of me—well, do something about it.”

“I’m a wardrobe girl.”

“Who dresses like a 23 year old teacher.”

“I am 23.” 

“And you’re my assistant who’s agreed to do as I say. Right now I’m telling you to buy clothes that fit the role. Don’t tell me you can’t because I know you’re fucking incredible at what you do,” he says. Then, lifting his eyebrows suggestively, he leans forward and places his elbows on his knees. “Because as it stands, the only thing I want to do when I look at you is take a ruler, bend you across a desk and—”

“I’ll do it!” I cry out, squeezing my eyes shut to flush out the imagery that’s just thrust itself into my brain. Every time I think I’m making a little progress of not thinking about sex and Lucas, he stomps all over it.

If he notices that I’ve not referred to him as Mr. Wolfe or Sir once during this exchange, he doesn’t say anything. He sits in the same position, staring at me expectantly until I realize at last that he’s waiting for me to let him out. 

Seven days.

He winks at me as he steps out of the Cadillac. As he slides past me, his body brushes mine. It’s just the tiniest of touches, the back of his wrist against my belly button, his shoulder skimming the top of my head so that strands of my red hair cling to his V-neck tee, but it’s enough to make us both pause.

Tentatively, I shift forward. The muscles jump under his cheeks, and he reaches up, past me, to close the car door. He keeps his eyes off of my face as he says, “When you’re shopping . . . remember you’re dressing a rocker’s personal assistant, remember we’ve got a semi-formal birthday party to go to while in Atlanta. And if I so much as see one lame ass cardigan, I swear I’ll burn it.”

He stalks past me and into the diner. Instead of following him with my gaze, I close my eyes.

Fantasize about what would’ve happened if our lips had touched.

Feel parts of me that I shut down two years ago wake up once again.

†

As I shop at the trendy boutiques and vintage stores downtown Nashville is popular for, my mind pings back and forth between Lucas, my duty to finish up my seven days and get the house back.

And my life in California. 

And I can’t resist wondering if I had given in to Lucas when we almost spent the night together, would things be different now? Would I be different? My attraction to him was immediate, one of those things that took my breath away, numbing my senses and making me ache all at once. I was drawn to his music, the way his voice had a way of tearing away my layers and digging to my very core, even when he was singing about strippers and partying.

Apparently, Lucas was drawn to me because . . . I had a hard time saying “no” on set.

Except to him, and he was too infatuated to realize that until it was too late.

The back of my neck tingles, and I tilt my head to each side to stretch it. I’ve got to quit letting the past mess with my head. I just need to forget Lucas Wolfe and all of this and move on. I just need—

“Sienna?” a female voice calls my name. 

I glance up from the black skinny jeans that I’m clutching to face a girl with short, spiky turquoise and pink hair and snake bite piercings. I squint for a second, trying to place her. As she comes closer, her face unblurs, and I mentally take away the facial piercings and picture her with blonde Jennifer Aniston-esque layers and a pink Polo shirt. I feel my lips automatically curl into a grin. Jessica rushes forward to hug me.

Drawing back, she squeals. “Dude, I haven’t seen you in—what?—four or five years? What are you now, a teac—?”

“Wardrobe assistant for Echo Falls,” I say before she has the chance to call me a teacher. Self-consciously, I tug at the hem of my flutter sleeve top. Guess it does its job of making me look professional. To the point that my boss wants to spank me with a ruler and an old friend assumes I spend my days drilling addition into first graders’ brains.

Nice.

“No shit,” she says. She drapes the armful of clothes she’s carrying across a mannequin’s arm, despite the nasty look the sales girl working the floor gives her. Jessica rolls her eyes. “I fucking hate that show.”

“Me too,” I say, and she grins.

“How long you here for?”

Glancing down at a rack, I shrug. “Just another couple weeks. I’m doing a favor for a . . . um . . . friend and helping my grandma with a few things.”

“How’s she doing?” When I tell her that Gram is well, she tilts her head to the side, nodding. “And your mama?”

That familiar buzz of humiliation makes me bow my head a little, but I fight back the urge to flinch. When my mom and her husband had gone down for selling and trafficking prescription drugs, they’d taken Jessica’s uncle with them. Jessica never seemed too hurt about it—and she’s not mentioning it right now—but I hate that she’s asked about my mother.