“Tell me what you want.” His mouth whispered it, those lips close to hers. Her own parted, letting out a breath that was a near sob.

“I want to be whole. Feel it just once more.” She raised her palms before her face. “I remember lying there with David beneath me, feeling his heart stop beating. I tried to cup his head in my hands and it was wet…so soft. Softer than a baby’s skull.

“And there were these people around. Staring at us. But I felt so alone, because David was gone. His heart was no longer my heart, his voice in my head was gone. And they didn’t know me, didn’t know us. And I wondered, ‘Will anyone ever share my soul again? Get inside me and know my thoughts?’ No. Surely not. And yet, I didn’t die. That’s the most intolerable cruelty, that you can realize that truth and not die. It seems a revelation like that should simply pluck your soul right out of you, cast it into the earth. And I think it did. I am a vampire. Sitting in the shadows, sucking in everyone else’s light and life to feed my own, but it’s false, because there’s only darkness within me.”

When Tyler took her hands from her face, he was alarmed to feel her cold skin had gotten even colder.

“I don’t believe that. Sshhh…” He soothed her, touching his lips to the juncture of her neck with her shoulder.

His hair brushed her jawline and she tilted her head despite the scream of resistance in her head. Easing one arm around her back, he brought her a step closer.

Turned her to face him. “Let me in,” he said softly. “And I’ll light a candle.” He didn’t threaten a roaring blaze, as if he knew a being that had lived in darkness as long as her soul would be agonized by bright light. She raised her hands to touch his back, closed her fingers into handfuls of his shirt.

Keeping his eyes on hers the whole time, Tyler leaned in and pressed his mouth over hers. Over her bottom lip only. A brush of that fullness, tasting the flavor of a moist lip gloss, finding the source of the scent of raspberry he’d occasionally caught when she spoke tonight at dinner.

He moved his kiss to the upper lip, nibbled there, nuzzled her cheek with his nose.

Sliding both arms around her shoulders, he wrapped them across her back so she was folded in toward him, her elbows bending to maintain her grip on his back. He took her into a deeper kiss, one where both of her soft lips were covered by his mouth.

Caressed her tongue with his own. When she made a curious noise, somewhere beyond a whimper into the realm of a sigh, he kept exploring her mouth with his own, cognizant that her body was rigid against his, but he realized it wasn’t conscious resistance. She had a death grip on his shirt. She was simply, totally petrified, rendered to catatonia by something as simple as a kiss.

Following instincts that had been honed from nearly twenty years of enjoying, mentoring and training submissives and Dominants alike, awakening them to their natures and how to accept and exercise their desires to bring them and their partners pleasure, Tyler increased the power of the kiss, the demand level to it. Gave her heat.

“Do whatever you want, dear heart,” he murmured. “But I won’t go away. I’m all yours. I’ll be your Master, if you surrender to me.”

He didn’t know if the compulsion was intuition or the poor judgment of a man too much in love to exercise good timing or sense but he shifted one hand from her, dipped in his pocket to retrieve the object he’d been carrying most of the night and drew her left hand from around his waist.

Marguerite’s eyes flitted down and shock captured her features as he slid a ring over her finger, fitting it snugly past the knuckle. “And I’ll be your husband. I’ll do my best to keep you whole. To catch you when you fall. You’re the only woman I want.

And I knew it the first time I saw you.”

The ring was a platinum band with a marquise diamond framed by metal work.

There were Japanese characters etched in the band on either side of the gem. They looked like elegant decorative scroll, if the person wearing the ring hadn’t known what the characters meant.

“Trust. Faith.” She murmured the words.

“On the inside of the band right beneath the diamond is one more. Love.” Simple concepts and the most precious in life. Marguerite closed her fingers over the metal.

“You’ve lost your mind.”

“I’ll say. Do you know there’s at least three ways to write Japanese and some words have ten different characters, depending on how you mean to say them?”

“No, that’s not what I… Tyler, I can’t…”

“You can think about it. That’s all I want you to do for now, angel. Wear it and think about it.” He brought her around the bench, turned her so she was watching Mac and Violet again. “Put your hands on the bench. Obey me.” She did, her emotions scrambled. Her already stimulated body was suddenly more so as it became obvious what he was intending to do. He did it without ceremony.

Caressing her cunt beneath the skirt to confirm she was wet, he unfastened his jeans and eased his thick cock into her, filling that aching void that was threatening to close in on her mind, as if he knew exactly what she needed at this moment. The ring pressed into her skin as she gripped the top of the bench. Her eyes clung to the band the same way, to the promise of it, as immediate and verifiable as the man’s body covering her now, driving into her.

“Tyler…” she gasped his name, her fingers clutching the bench edge as he pushed down the strapless top, freeing her breasts to grip them in his hands, kneading as he stroked her inside.

“Watch Mac and Violet,” he ordered in a firm tone that had a ragged edge, betraying his own desire at this moment. “And believe in fairy tales. In happy ever afters. In the fact that I will never stop loving you, no matter how often you pull away.

No matter how many times you get lost in the shadows, I’ll find you. Because you’re my light and salvation, angel. I have to have you to have light in my life.”

He put his teeth to her shoulder then, his cock working her, bending her further over the bench. When he took command of her pussy with his fingers on her clit, he shoved her over the edge of the climax, leaving her writhing and crying out. The two figures stilled on the opposite end of the small pond and she knew they were listening to her pleasure, her pain, her fear, her fulfillment. It seemed all the different reactions were inseparable.

“Tyler, I can’t…”

“Come for me, angel. That’s all you have to do right now. Come for me.”

Chapter Fifteen

But demons preyed on happiness, she knew that. She lay in her bed and heard him coming, knew that it was one more night to get through. She’d stopped wondering how long it would last. Just like an abused dog, she simply had to endure this moment and then there would be a void of nothingness. Nothingness was good, undemanding.

“Time for your punishment.”

After he raped her, he turned her over. This hurt even more than the other way, but she’d learned not to resist. She smelled the cigarette, felt his organ penetrate her backside, heard his guttural command to her to stay still as he pressed the tip of the cigarette to her skin. Her flesh burned, but she didn’t move. She’d learned never to move.

“This is all there is. All there will ever be. This is your hell and mine.” She hoped it would not be one of those odd nights when he turned her over, held her and cried. Called her “Mother” while her insides burned with agonizing pain and blood stained her thighs, her small buttocks.

When she fell from great heights the sky became white feathers. There was the sense of tearing as well as floating, as if there were two parts of her, her soul fighting to get loose of her body.

It’s because the soul is weightless, little sister. David’s voice seemed to whisper to her in her dreams. You just have to let go…

Only the voice wasn’t David’s. It was her father’s. His hands bruised, took, demanded, invaded.

She jerked out of the dream, her body tense, motionless, afraid to move. Blinking several times, Marguerite told herself it was a dream, that the nightmare was no longer a reality. She used a simple one-syllable Kundalini chant to balance herself, the one she usually did to make the lie a workable rationalization so she could get up and face the day. But her reality had changed. The bed she was in was Tyler’s. There was a rose on the pillow next to her, a note from him to come join them for breakfast. When she reached for the note, she saw the ring on her finger. She looked at it for a while, her gaze shifting between it and his bold script on the note. As she touched the stem of the rose his fingers had touched, it occurred to her she was using the things he had left for her in the same way she had used the chant.

At length she rose, washed, put on her slacks and blouse, fixed her hair. It was when she was packing her bag she realized she had made a decision to leave. Suddenly needed to leave desperately. Shouldering her overnight bag, she walked down to the main floor to the foyer and heard them in the kitchen area. Mac and Violet. Joseph and Leila. Tyler. Talking, laughing, the relaxed atmosphere that friends could enjoy. That she’d enjoyed last night. Why couldn’t she hold on to it? Why did the darkness always come?

Because you’re always running from it. The answer is to stop running, to simply let the darkness have you. She shuddered at the insidious whisper which always sounded so simple, so truthful.

Hands coming at her out of the dark.

She yelped, spun, striking out at the touch. When everything came back into focus, Tyler had her hand, his brow furrowed in concern, his stance non-threatening and reassuring.

“Angel? Where are you going?”

“Home. I have to go home.”

“Come have some breakfast.” His eyes got that firm look, the determined set of his mouth that said he understood what was going on with her and he would help bring her out of it.

Only it wouldn’t matter. It always came back.

“Marguerite.” He took her other hand, caressed her palms with his fingers. “It’s all right.” His gaze took in the shadows under her eyes and he cursed himself for leaving her alone. “You had a bad dream. It was just a dream.”