She's
known it her whole life. She knows it every time she spreads her legs. Every
time she begs for the pain, the pleasure, the heat of a hard man driving deep
inside. She's a slave to her own twisted lusts--and it's eating her alive. She
loves it. She craves it. Sex is her drug, and she's always chasing her next
fix. But nothing can satisfy her addiction, not even the nameless men she uses
and tosses aside. No one's ever given her what she truly needs.
Until
Gabriel Hart.
Cold.
Controlled. Impenetrable. Ex-Marine Gabriel Hart isn't the kind of man to come
running when Leigh crooks her pretty little finger. She loathes him. She
hungers for him. He's the only one who understands how broken she is, and just
what it takes to satisfy the emptiness inside. But Gabriel won't settle for
just one night. He wants to claim her, keep her, make her forever his. Together
they are the lost, the ruined, the darkness at the heart of Crow City.
But
Leigh has a darkness of her own. A predator stalking through her past--one
she'll do anything to escape.
Even
if it means running from the one man who could love her...and leaving behind
something more precious to her than life itself.
Note: This book contains material that may be triggering for some
readers
PROLOGUE
“State your name.”
Cold, clipped words, blending into the noise of the police station.
Leigh lifted her head from a fixed study of her clenched fingers. Colors
whirled around her in a lurid carnival nightmare, too bright, too blurry. On a
bench on the far side of the room, a wasted and broken scarecrow woman picked
at a scab on her wrist with a certain habitual listlessness, oozing diseased
red-brown blood over liver spots. Her tendons were rails under her skin, and
the dull gleam of cuffs chained her to the bench. She raised her head and
stared at Leigh with yellowed eyes that captured her with a sort of empty,
terrifying promise.
Across the desk a policewoman waited, with that compassionate
impatience only a half-step from pity and shoulder-to-shoulder with disgust.
Her flat blue eyes said she’d been trained to care, but couldn’t be bothered
anymore. Leigh swallowed and tugged her hoodie close against the tinny
air-conditioned chill. Her mouth had dried to a tacky, sticky mess, gummy pills
of lipstick beading on her lips, and her tongue was a bloated and useless
organ, this swollen pink thing pushing pointlessly against her teeth.
“Leigh,” she ground out. “Clarissa Leigh…” Her married name scratched
sandpaper syllables against her throat. “…van Zandt.”
“And Miss van Zandt, do you know why you’re here?”
She nodded, her neck a creaking wooden puppet-hinge. “I do.”
“Your family’s been worried about you.”
“I know.”
She knew what she should do here. Bow her head in shame and
contrition, maybe even sniffle. But she looked for the emotions and they
weren’t there; just scraps and tatters, clinging to the empty place where they
belonged. She had no feeling left, hollowed out and lost and wondering how
she’d ended up here. This didn’t feel real. Instead it was a dream where
everyone leered in fisheye close-up, their smiles all teeth and stretched red
lips and manic glee. She wanted to run, but somehow she’d gone too numb to do
anything but sit here surrounded by the stink of fear-sweat, stale beer, and
that particular police-station smell of urine soaked into concrete for decades
on end.
“What happened to you?” the officer asked. Leigh didn’t answer, and
the officer’s pen tapped against the forms on her desk, rat-tat-tat,
rat-tat-tat, Morse code for I’d rather be anywhere but here with this spoiled
little runaway princess. “It’s been four years. You were declared legally
dead.”
“That’s all right.” She closed her eyes with a laugh that ripped her
guts up into her mouth, and buried her face in her hands. Dead. Dead.
Yeah, that was about right.
“Miss van Zandt?”
Stop calling me that.
“Miss van Zandt. I need you to focus on my voice.”
Stop calling me that!
Leigh took a measured breath and opened her eyes. Her shoulders
squared. The bolts on the back of the hard, ass-biting chair dug into her
shoulder blades. “I am focused. I can hear you just fine.”
“Eyes are dilated.” The officer—her nametag read Maroni, could there
be a more clichéd name for a Crow City cop—leaned across the desk, peering at
her face. Then she beckoned to the aide hovering over them like a mannequin.
“I’ve seen this too many times. Drugs and prostitution.” She talked about Leigh
like she wasn’t even there. “We’ll have to clean her up before her husband gets
here.”
“I’m not on drugs. I’ve never been on drugs.”
Maroni’s pen-clicking stopped. Her disbelief was a heavy thing,
push-push-pushing until Leigh nearly laughed.
“You’re not on drugs.”
“No.”
“Then what happened?”
There it was. The first hint of exasperation. Of frustration, stitched
into knitted brows and the purse of lips in just the right shade of I can’t be
a woman, I’m a cop mauve. Because like anyone normal, anyone who wasn’t fucking
broken to pieces and liked being that way, Maroni needed to make sense of this.
Needed to quantify it in a world where the rules worked as normal and everyone
wanted to chase that dream of happiness that wasn’t anything but desperation
painted over of a frantic tally of things. Things of plastic, things with value
created by people whose upper lips curled when they looked down at little girls
like Leigh, and demanded she account for herself in sane, rational ways that made
proper sense.
Sorry, Officer Maroni.
I’m not the kind of thing that makes much sense.
Maroni pushed a harsh sound through her teeth. “You had a job, a
husband, a newborn son. You had a life other people would kill for, and we find
you here on the streets. Were you pressured? Kidnapped?”
“No. None of that.” Leigh shook her head.
“You’ll have to explain, then.”
“I left.” She trailed off, lips parted; no words came for long
seconds, until she managed, “I…I was afraid.”
“Of what?” Maroni tried to catch her eye, but Leigh looked down at her
hands, at her chipped pink fingernails dipped in the sparkles of shooting
stars. “Miss van Zandt. If someone was hurting you, you need to tell us now so
we can take appropriate steps to protect you.”
“No. No one hurt me. Not like that.”
“I’m afraid you’ll need to be more clear. What were you afraid of?”
“Of…”
She struggled for an answer. Struggled for something this woman would
accept, something that would make her sigh with sympathy and pity and relieved
disdain that said there, but for the Grace of God…
But again, she found nothing. Nothing but the truth, and Leigh
shrugged as she looked up at the policewoman and wondered if she had daughters
who might one day be like Leigh, daughters who would cut stark red lines of
fingernails in the walls of flesh that caged her in the shape of pop culture’s
perfect woman.
“Of the inevitable monotony of it all,” she said.
And smiled.
Corporate consultant by day, contemporary
romance author by night.
Mid-thirties. Coffee addict. Cat lover.
Bibliophile. Technophile. Definite sapiophile. Native Southerner. Runner.
Country boy turned city suit. Shameless collector of guitar picks, vinyl
records, and incense holders. Aficionado of late-night conversations over live
music in seedy bars. Browncoat with a secret crush on Kaylee Frye.
Fascinated by human sociology, and
particularly by the psychology of sex and gender – and their effect on
relationship expectations, the culture of dating, and what it means to fall in
love.
Non-smoker. The picture's just a stock photo. A rather broody, dark one
for someone who isn't all that broody or dark, but sometimes forgets to smile
even when he means to.
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