Deep (Chicago Underground #8)(9)

“Then why do I keep seeing you all over my house? First my office, now here. Are you a spy? Who sent you?”

“What? No!” Oh my God. Talk about paranoid. Then again, maybe it was warranted considering Shelly had been an informant for the police. “I was just…I was just curious.”

That wasn’t what I had meant to say. I couldn’t find Shelly. I was looking for the kitchen. I’m scared. There were a million things I would have said if I could have thought about it, but his presence, so close, so warm, so large, removed the ability to think. And once the words were out, I recognized the truth of them. I was curious about Philip Murphy—and that was a dangerous situation.

“Curious,” he said, sounding amused. It was too dark to see his face completely, and it gave him the impression of a god, watching me from above as I stumbled and fell far beneath him. “You know what they say about curiosity and the cat.”

Curiosity killed the cat—a dangerous situation for sure. “I’m not a cat,” I said hotly.

He ran a hand over my hair, a gentle caress. Petting me. “I don’t know,” he mused. “You have claws.”

“Trust me,” I said with as much confidence as I could muster. “If I had claws, you’d be bleeding by now.”

A silent laugh, more vibration than sound. “Maybe I am.”

“No.” I was the one bleeding. I was the broken one. “Don’t,” I said thickly.

“Don’t what?”

At least he didn’t say it with feigned innocence. He knew exactly what he was doing to me, but he wanted me to say it.

“Don’t act like you give a shit,” I said. No one gave a shit. Except for some reason Shelly did. My heart clenched.

“You’re in my house,” he countered. “That makes you my business. And I’ve been thinking about your…offer.”

My offer. Sex. That was what he meant. Suddenly my mouth went dry. His posture, blocking my exit, felt more sinister than before. He had refused me flatly, cruelly. And I’d been both hurt and relieved at the time, but I’d thought it was over. “You said you weren’t interested.”

“I thought about what you said. It’s only fair you pay your own debt. And I…” A hand cupped my waist and then slid down to my hip, burning a path—branding me. “I can’t deny I would enjoy it.”

My pulse raced, blood hot. “I doubt that. I don’t know anything.”

“I could teach you what you need to know.” A taut pause and then his voice was rougher. “I would love to teach you.”

Arousal bloomed between my legs, and I shuddered. “What about Shelly?” I whispered.

I felt his displeasure shimmer in the air around us. “She won’t like it.”

“Do you care?” I didn’t think he cared what anyone thought about him, didn’t think he would let anyone stop him.

“You’re too young,” he said instead of answering. Or maybe that was his answer. Shelly was protecting me because I was young—and somehow that had made me off limits even to a man like him.

Too young. I lifted my chin, defiant. “The men at the hotel didn’t think so.”

“And I’m just like them,” he said, half question.

He was nothing like them. They were small and mindless, rocks falling from a mountainside. Philip was his own freaking mountain. “You are,” I whispered because I wanted to hurt him, the same way he had hurt me when he rejected my naked, battered body.

It shouldn’t have bothered me when he did that. I should have only been glad.

And I shouldn’t have been able to move him at all, a small dandelion in his large shadow.

But he went stock-still, and somehow I knew I had gotten to him. A direct hit. He peeled his hands off the railing and walked away without another word. And I knew in that moment that I did have claws—I was glad of it. I needed some kind of defense against this dark world.

I had made him bleed. I’d won something tonight.

And lost something. I felt that too, just as sure.





Chapter Eight

I LAY IN my bed, the same bed where I had dreamed about cute boys at school and first learned to touch myself. I had been innocent then, but I felt different now. Changed in some fundamental way I couldn’t yet define. It wasn’t only about sex, knowing the mechanics of it. It wasn’t even about cruelty, the marks of which still lingered on my skin. Those things mattered, and I still woke up with nightmares, even now, having been back home for six months.

But there was something else, something elusive and strangely tantalizing. A secret beyond my reach. Something about Philip and the way he had looked at me, dismissed me, hurt me—but saved me too. I would always remember that, even though he was the one part of this experience I wanted to forget the most.

He had protected me, after all. And he hadn’t touched me again.

Some small, dark part of me wished that he had.

I stood up unsteadily and walked to the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror. I didn’t recognize the girl staring back at me, the one with shadows under her dark eyes and dull black hair—the one who looked nothing like the people around me.

For weeks, I had lived in a well-guarded house with Philip. And with Shelly.

A strange, protective little family.