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By Root 718 0

me to obey Eli, but I did. “Don’t hurt him,” I stated, and stared hard at Eli. He didn’t agree or even acknowledge my request, but I knew by the way he looked at me that he’d not hurt my brother. I turned and headed for the door, and just that fast, a gust of briny air brushed the side of my face. When I looked over my shoulder, they were both gone. Uncertainty and an agonizing pain I couldn’t define washed over me and sucked every ounce of energy from my body, and my knees collapsed. I sat down right there on the floor. I wanted to run to the window, to see where Eli and Seth had gone, how they’d gone; I couldn’t. My insides were locked, and an inescapable feeling of helplessness overcame me. Then, the tears. The goddamn tears. I hated them, hated the weakness they represented, and hadn’t allowed myself the luxury of them since the day I found my mother dead in a bathtub. By the time we’d had her funeral, I was angry and the tears had dried, and I hadn’t shed one more tear until last night. Fuck it. Pulling my knees up to my chest, I locked my arms tightly around them, put my head down, and cried.

How much time lapsed, I couldn’t say; I must have seriously been in a haze, because when next I was conscious of my surroundings, I was in my bed. I could come up with no conclusion other than that Eli had put me there, because I didn’t remember crossing the floor and climbing beneath the covers myself. The lights were out, the room shadowy, and my mind was fuzzy with cobwebs. Pushing up on my elbows, I looked around, noted the familiar stream of light coming through the French doors, and remembered everything I wished to hell wasn’t really happening. I sat up and rubbed my swollen eyes.

“Go back to sleep, Riley.” Eli’s steady voice came from a dark corner of the room. “It’s early.”

“I think you’ve confused me with someone you can boss around,” I answered, just as steady. “Seth?”

There was a long pause, and my heart leapt. But then Eli answered. “Safe for now.”

My body eased at his words, and I shoved my fingers through my hair and searched the darkness. “Why are you hiding?” I asked.

In the time it took me to blink, he was standing over me. The light from the French doors morphed his figure into a silhouette, his face nothing more than a black cutout. “It’s called sentry, smart-ass. I’m watching over you.”

Carefully, I regarded his dark profile. “Thanks for not hurting my brother,” I said, and managed to say it with some sense of strength.

Again, another pause, this one longer than the last. “Had he hurt you, he wouldn’t have been so lucky.”

My insides shook at Eli’s words. I knew he was dead serious, and while it pissed me off, it intrigued me as well, and I couldn’t help asking, “Why?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said flatly, and I knew then he’d never tell me his reasons. “Now, go to sleep.” Still, he stood above me, next to the bed.

I sat there for a while, rebellious and determined that Eli Dupré’s self-prescribed supremacy over me would not get the better of me. Why the hell did he want me to go to sleep so badly? Apparently, I sat there too long. With my next breath he’d pushed me flat back onto my pillow, his arms braced on either side of my head. Although he wasn’t as hot-blooded as I was, the electricity remained, and my whole body tightened at his closeness and the tension it caused. You could feel it in what little air there was between us.

“Aren’t you afraid of me?” he asked with a steely, almost angry voice.

“No,” I said just as steely. “I’m not.”

He moved his mouth close to my ear, and the sensation of his breath brushing my neck made me shiver. “You really should be,” he said, and although he meant it as a warning, it turned me on instead. Releasing one of his hands, he moved it to my chest, and with a forefinger grazed the exposed flesh above my heart. “I can hear your heart beating a mile away,” he said, his voice raspy, thick. He laid his palm flat against my chest, his fingers brushing the swell of my breast. “When it pounds harder, or faster, I can feel it inside me. It’s like you’re fucking everywhere