Mind F*ck (25 page)

I don’t know her and her husband very well yet, but I can read people. And Mary seemed upset, even from a block away.

It ends up taking almost the whole drive home to lower my raised hackles over the whole half-ass encounter, truthfully.

Only for them to be raised instantly when I pull along the left side of the property. Pulling into the pool house garage, I see Drake, Liam’s right hand man, parked under some of the lower hanging trees off to the side of the driveway.

I slam my truck into park and tear my seat belt off before flying from the cab and slamming the door. “What’s up? What the hell are you doing here?” I cut straight to the point.

No need for pleasantries. We’re well past that.

“Liam asked that I come by and get a few of Lexy’s things. It seems you owe Mr. Dean a congratulations the next time you see him. As he and Mrs. Dean are expecting their first child, in December, I believe.” His smile is as wicked as his lies.

I counter, “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. It’s Dean who’ll be handing out congratulations. Not that I’ll be accepting
anything
from him. Why does he want Lexy’s shit? She’s been staying with me for the last few months, so there’s not much here.” I gesture towards the bigger house, “You’re more than welcome though.” I smirk towards the other man.

“I’ll take a look around. And her residence over the last few months is the last of Mr. Dean’s worries. He’s been busy in LA.” The pale blond man before me buttons his dark suit at the waist before tucking his hands in his pockets and turning towards his Jaguar. “Rebuilding what you tried to destroy. Not that any of that matters anymore though.” He looks over his shoulder before getting into his car. “Liam wanted me to let you know he’ll be calling soon. You’re going to need instructions in order to make it through the next few hours of your life. And he’s kind enough to provide them. He also wanted you to know, he’s willing to settle the score, if you’re willing to settle your loses.”

And unfortunately, at least for me, as soon as his words were finished being said, the door of the Jaguar was closing, shutting off any retort I had on the tip of my tongue.

I’m not losing Lexy, though. So I don’t have any loses to cut.

I glance at the blue picnic basket in the backseat of my truck.

I’m not losing Lexy.

Then I glance at my phone and check the time.

As a matter of fact, I’m about to have my first date with the girl.

And it’s odd, but right now in this moment, the words of the song ‘
My Little Girl’
by Tim McGraw are what I hear as I head into the pool house to get ready for our first date.

I hear his words before I feel them being whispered across my skin between his kisses. Rhett’s father is supposed to land tomorrow night sometime, but he shouldn’t be actually getting here in Andes until the day after. Which is good, I briefly muse. Because it’ll give me a little more time to decide when to tell him.

Before
or
after
I know who the father of this child is…more specifically.

I stretch and smile when I feel the ache in my tender muscles left over from last night.

And it may be his tender kisses, or it may be when they turn from nibbles to bites, but at some point while my fuzzy brain transitions from sleep to fully awake, I do feel a sort of impending doom lurking around the edges of my consciousness.

I feel it, but I don’t acknowledge it. Not yet.

I’m still stuck in time, with Rhett—what, was it three or four days ago, now?

His hands slid up the back of my thighs between them and the mattress, gripping when he reaches my bottom. His hair falls around us like a curtain as he braces himself over me with his arms hugged tightly around my waist. “Does some of the shit I say to you ever freak you out?” He chuckles as his laughing brown eyes look into mine with a note of seriousness.

“No. It doesn’t freak me out. It’s kinda romantic. Why? Are you about to say something that’s going to freak me out?” I laugh around my words and link my arms around his bare neck, combing his hair with my fingertips. “You can’t freak me out or scare me off, Rhett. You’re stuck with me. Stuck, buddy.”

He tucks his head in the crook of my neck and whispers, “I just want to see all your scars, Lex. As crazy as that sounds, and I wanna see where you keep them hidden. When I know how you tick—then I think I’ll know how to take care of you. The way you deserve to be taken care of.”

I feel his warm lips on my shoulder briefly before I feel them creeping up my neck. “That’s all I ever wanted. You know that? Just to take care of you.” A moan crawls from my throat when his tongue flicks out and licks at my pulse. His hands tighten around my waist, gripping the flesh, hard.

Too hard.

Then they tighten around my wrists and ankles, too.

What the fuck?

My fuzzy brain tries to count the places I feel his hands tightening around me. 1…2…3…4…

That can’t be right.

“Stop.” I turn my face, trying to look at Rhett and make eye contact. But the irises reflecting back at mine aren’t Rhett’s. They aren’t muddy brown.

“Rhett?” I question Liam like a fucking pathetic
idiot.

“No. No fucking Rhett,” he growls. “How does me taking care of what is mine equate to Rhett fucking Bennett? Or did I just interrupt a little wet dream of yours about our boy in question?”

I decide when I hear it echo from the dingy hotel walls, that I can die a happy woman if I never hear that fucking maniacal laughter of his again.

Then and only then, did the recent twenty-four hours of complete and utter hell I’d just lived through, slams into me like a Mack truck coming in off a motherfucking hurricane.

Oh my GOD.  Every muscle wrapped around every bone in my body aches under the skin that’s stretched and wrapped too tight across it.

“What have you done?” I spit my words at him. Reveling in the fact that they sound as if they’re dripping with distaste. “If you kill this child, you may as well fucking kill me, Liam.” I cut my swollen eyes at him over my shoulder through the sun barely filtering in through the curtains. Then I lick my cracked, dry lips and spit out the rest before conveniently losing my consciousness, yet again. “It may not look like it right now, but I promise—I’m going to fucking kill you. So if you hurt this baby, you better hurry up and beat me to the punch. Do you understand me you crazy fucking bastard?”

But I don’t get to hear him answer.

Because just before his forehead connects with the back of my head at the base of my neck, suddenly he’s gone and Rhett is back.

Bracing himself over me. Rhett’s dark brown irises, looking into my green ones.

I’m not shoved face first against a mattress under Liam in some Holiday Inn with my wrists and ankles shackled to a bedframe.

I’m in Andes. I’m in our room at the cabin.  I’m lying in bed with Rhett, and we’re discussing which ingredients are our favorite and the differences in spaghetti and lasagna sauce.

He tickles, I laugh. Then he kisses and I twist his hair around my fingers while we whisper a silly conversation.

It’s just us, being us—like any other morning.

It’s just Rhett being his same, funny, irritating as hell, but charming self and me getting all awkward because I can’t find the right damn words.

He used to tell me I get too caught up in my own head all the time. But all that did was make me get caught up in my head about that, too.

When he figured that out, he stopped.

I smile looking up at him.

I wish I would have told him that morning that I loved him.

I wish I would have told him to his face that he was the baby’s father and that I loved him, but I never got the damn fucking chance.

As if I’m watching myself from the corner of the room, Rhett fades out and Liam hovering over my prone, beaten and limp frame draped across the hotel mattress at the Holiday Inn fades in.

I know I won’t withstand much of this
. I think, shuddering as I watch his hands slide up the back of my battered and bruised thighs.

What is he doing? And why?

Then I see it.

Then I fucking see it.

It’s surveillance monitor, one from the pool house—one Rhett obviously hasn’t found. And Rhett is drawing up his night time dose of insulin.

It took Liam Dean one glance once when I was fourteen to invade my heart and possess my soul. It took him thirteen years to create my dreams, let me get a fingerbreadth away from them, before decimating them right in front of my eyes. But it only took him one torturous week, keeping me holed up in a guest room of some penthouse in LA before he finally got tired of teasing me.

Taunting me.

And torturing me.

It’s as weightless as it is effortless when your mind finally fractures and you can hand over the control to insanity.

I can’t say much for certain, so take this how you will, but I can’t remember how many times my sanity fractured during those seven days.

I remember there being pain.

And I remember praying.

But aside from that, aside from those two things—other than the lucid dreams I had of memories with Rhett, that’s all I really recall.

Thankfully.

The packaging change in Rhett’s usual brand of insulin was pure coincidence, but I really think it helped things along in the long run. It didn’t take the two doses of insulin I assumed it would to throw the bastard into diabetic ketoacidosis. The idiot just drew up the assumed amount of units, without even looking at the doctored labels, and he injected himself.

The goddamn moron killed himself!

I just made sure Drake was there to inhibit him from getting the help he sought and medically needed, that’s all. He could have fought harder. But he didn’t.

The ball was in his court.

And it wasn’t my fault he had the seizure.

I could tell early on in the video that he was losing his consciousness. His concentration kept waning. It was like no matter how hard he tried, his eyes kept going blank—mid- sentence. Almost as if he kept losing his train of thought.

I had Drake set up a camera in the pool house very early on the morning of Rhett’s incident to catch what the surveillance wouldn’t.

Obviously, you know how much I like to document things.

Planning and documentation. Documentation and planning. The best strategies, by far. Trends aren’t only important in the stock and business world.

I’m surprised you haven’t learned this yet.

Then, as instructed, and out of the cameras range of audio, Drake read to Rhett, whom is the focus of the camera, the words I’d written before I boarded a plane bound for Lexy in Andes, NY.

I never heard Drake read the words, I only ever saw the video of Rhett hearing them.

The emotions that flashed across his face as he reacted, were priceless. Each and every one.

It was like watching the phases of accepting death, cross the face of death, as death dawns. Epically incomparable to any other experience, I’m certain.

Well, aside from witnessing Lexy watch the video in its entirety of course.

Which has yet to happen.

I said, ‘Yet.’

I’m surprised it only takes me a week to bore with her, in all honesty. She showed such promise and fight in the beginning.

But she just kept fucking passing out.

I had it in my mind in Buffalo and the first few days after we got back home to LA, that maybe…if I filled her with enough of my cum, maybe somehow it would leave some sort of impression. That it would make a difference on a cellular level, somehow.

So that after this kid of hers is born, and even if it doesn’t look like me, when the bastard does something intelligent or worthy of my pride, then I can say he at least got something from me.

I sigh, frustrated as hell at my current situation.

I need to make another coke run. I need some more damn Vicodin and Xanax too, but I can’t be too picky right now either.

Travis called and said the police are watching my building. And Old man Jackson’s been asking questions about my recreational drug use—again.

Two problems I certainly can’t afford at this juncture in my life. I need more time with Lexy. I need time to convince her that I can make her happy. That I
can
take care of her. If she’ll let me.

Apparently Gigi and Mary have finally met the required stipulations before filing a missing person’s report on Lexy after she missed her lunch with Mary and then a following date at Dean’s Estates with Rhett Bennett after. Even though she’s
my wife,
and I say she’s okay.

I threw out every speed bump I possibly
and legally
could to set that report back a few days.

Trying to buy myself more damn time with my wife.

But all Lexy did was pass out.

Again and again.

And it’s gotten tiring, quick. Real quick.

I stalk into the door leading to the lower level of the penthouse floor and ride the elevator in silence as a rush of blood surges to my head along with the rails of coke I just inhaled in the master bathroom after my shower.

I hear the whoosh just behind my ear drums.

Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.

She’s going to fucking stay alert. Somehow, someway, come Hell or high water, she is going to learn to stay awake tonight.

She will submit.

She’s trying to give up on us.
Or she already has…

No. No, I can’t think that. Not yet.

Not yet, dammit.

I clench my fists and grit my teeth at the same time I breathe in slowly through my nose, then exhale from my mouth. As I grip the bars and slide the lock away from the door, I try to calm myself before walking through it.

When my eyes are used to the dim light and I can see though the darker room, it doesn’t take me long to spot her.

She’s pale. And tucked around herself, huddled in a corner of the room sitting on top of an old mattress.

Don’t blame me. What? I’m not the one responsible!

She chose these living conditions. I tried to offer her my room. My bed.

And she won’t fucking eat what I feed her. That isn’t my fault.

Which is cum, by the way. And yes, cum alone. It has protein, doesn’t it? If she wants to nourish herself, I’m supplying her with the nutrients. All she has to do is swallow. Cold, or lukewarm—it can’t be that bad.

It’ll keep the kid in her stomach alive, won’t it?

I don’t know if it will or not, actually.

Which is the reason I did start feeding her saltine crackers and chicken broth on Friday.

She has a figure to maintain. Least she forget. And this pregnancy can be damned until it can’t be helped or hidden any longer—when, and I do mean when, because it is happening, when she accepts her place at my side, she’s going to need to still be able to wear a damn cocktail dress and turn heads.

Facts are facts.

I’m just stating them.

It isn’t my fault she didn’t heed my rules and instructions when I spelled them out for her in my room at Dean Estate the night of Rhett’s birthday celebration.

I fucking spelled them out. I told her, word for word:

“I don’t know what’s going on, but I will. Soon enough. And when I do, I’m coming back for what’s rightfully mine. It’s going to be hard to follow my lead, I know. And I’ll grant you that when you fuck up. And you will fuck up at some point before this is all over. But I can promise you this. If you play by the rules. By my rules. And you make it out of this without making a complete fool, or foolish whore, out of yourself, you’ll get another chance. You will live to see another tomorrow, and so will our new friend Mr. Bennett. Am I making myself perfectly clear, Lexy?”

And I kept my promises. Well, one of them.

Did I not?

As far as I’m concerned, I can’t see where I’m at fault. With any of this.

Her increasingly saddening future or his already quite dismal one.

And then I ponder which is worse.

Death or the knowledge of its upcoming arrival.

I guess it’s all in the eye of the beholder, though.

In hindsight.