Wake to Dream(46)
“Eat.”
Every command he barked was as curt and emotionless as the one before it.
Picking up her fork, she ignored the whispers inside her head, the nagging reminders that she was giving in too easily. She was stronger than this, a fighter, a woman who’d endured her entire life despite the crushing blows and painful torment that had accompanied her from sleep into reality.
However, her body knew what to do despite her mind’s inability to conform. Her body was hungry. Her body was needy. Her body made her a slave to the demands of the man who now stood above her watching.
Slipping the tines of the fork into the scrambled eggs, she fed herself slowly, chewing thoughtfully on the food that would sustain her. Instead of the aversion she felt the previous night, she enjoyed the salty slide across her tongue, the warmth that traveled down her throat to land on an empty belly. Relief was found in the comfort of the nourishment he’d provided her.
“I have a surprise for you today. Something I know you’ll appreciate. It comes with a price, just like anything in life, but one that’s not too steep.”
Glancing up at him from beneath the thickness of her light colored lashes, she attempted a polite smile that was more strained than pleasant. “Will it hurt me? The surprise or the price?”
Unamused by the tone of her question, Max leaned back against the kitchen counter, a steaming cup of coffee held in his hands, his lips pursed to blow over the surface of the liquid. His face was clean shaven, the dust of shadow gone following the shower he’d taken that morning.
Alice watched him when he wasn’t looking, her eyes playing over the sharp lines of his cheekbones and the strong, square jaw that gave him a rugged, but cultured appearance. Despite the scar that marred the left side of his face, he was elegant in his features. With a straight nose that ran above full and sculpted lips, he had eyes that were pale and cold, a sparkling blue that were in stark contrast to obsidian hair and tan skin. An enigma wrapped in beauty, he was as alluring as he was fierce.
A question toyed over her thoughts. Afraid to ask, she worried her bottom lip between her teeth, her curiosity too much for her to keep her silence.
“What happened to you, Max?”
His eyes pinned her in their callous stare, studying her over the rim of the cup from which he sipped. His throat worked to swallow down the steaming liquid before he pulled the cup away to place it on the counter. “What do you mean?”
Clearing her throat of the fear she felt for bringing the subject up, she summoned everything brave within her to continue forward in the conversation she’d been dumb enough to start. “Your scars? How did you get them?”
His glacial stare was a wash of cold anger across her body, a shiver running down her spine to know she’d stepped in places not traveled by any person who valued their life. But wasn’t she already in danger just for being in the house with him? Hadn’t he already threatened everything she loved and admired for no other reason than because he could? What was one more thing that would draw his ire?
He wouldn’t kill her. That much she thought she knew. There was no reason to stifle the question that had traipsed quietly through her mind from the minute she’d met him.
Silently considering her question, his jaw ticked a slow beat. She wasn’t sure whether he’d answer her, and the tension that mounted her shoulders forced the fork from her hands, her pulse an annoying drumbeat that fluttered over the soft point of her neck.
Black lashes framed his hollow eyes, shadows creeping and swirling beneath the blue that didn’t give her any clue to the thoughts assaulting him inside.
“My father,” he finally said, his voice morose and vacant, “was an exceptionally driven man. I was an only child, his only offspring that survived the journey from my mother’s womb to the bedroom where she’d given birth to me. I was the seventh in a line of eight, and the only one who’d taken a breath once the umbilical cord was cut.”
Pushing up from the counter upon which he’d previously leaned, he took three steps to stand by the island where Alice sat listening. A sheet of paper sat to his side, a stack of mail neatly organized beside it. Slipping the top sheet from the stack, he slid it to lay between them, his hands working methodically over the blank surface, making folds with sharp creases, before opening it again. Spellbound by the precise motion of his fingers, Alice jumped when he spoke.
“So, because I was the only child they managed to successfully bring into this world, I carried the full weight of the family’s legacy on my shoulders.”
His eyes flicked up to catch hers, the fleeting contact sending a chill along Alice’s skin. Returning his attention to the sheet of paper he continued to fold and unfold for no obvious reason, he continued.
“Seven graves sat on the property where we lived. Six older than me, and one younger. I hadn’t been there for any of the burials because I was barely a year old when my sister, Greta, was stillborn. But every day, from the time I could walk and understand what was being shown to me, my father led me outside to look down at the markers that held the names of the seven children who’d failed him.”
A memory brushed across her mind, a nagging sense of something familiar and ominous skirting the edges to leave tattered ribbons of understanding blowing softly in an unwelcome wind. Like rain, the drops of memory fell over her shoulders, cold against her skin. Unsure about whether she wanted to hear the rest of his story, she drew her arms around herself, hating the shared emotions the dire tone of his story conjured within her battered heart.