She couldn’t say how late she had stayed up with Kabran, feeling the impossible weight of him on top of her while he ravaged her mouth, scraping his nails through her hair. Time had ceased to have any meaning. While they had torn at each other, their minds had drifted through the past. Lara relived the violence that she had once shared with him—pain and sadness and rage that should have died a lifetime ago, but somehow still stained both of their souls.
And now that she knew, how could she ever forget? The person she’d been and the person she’d become had collided. Lara didn’t know what that amounted to, but she felt a hell of a lot stronger than she ever had before. Her parents’ deaths hardly mattered any more. She was suddenly beyond that pain. Kabran was with her again—her mystery, her miracle—and the rest of the world could go to hell.
Lara went down the stairs loudly and burst into the kitchen on a wave of unstable energy. Reaching into the cupboard for a box of cereal, she heard Paige’s gasp from behind her.
“Oh my god,” she exclaimed. “What happened to your back?”
She turned to face her aunt like a model at the end of a catwalk. Her haughty smile didn’t falter, even as it split open a cut on her lip. The look of horror on Paige’s face was priceless and Lara had the satisfaction of hearing her gasp even louder.
“What happened to you?” she asked again. She gently held Lara’s chin to examine the marks that covered her face. “Who did this?”
Lara pulled away roughly, batting at Paige’s hands, and said nothing. After pouring herself a bowl of cereal, she sat down at the kitchen table.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” her aunt asked, leaning on the table. There were tears glistening in her eyes. “Please tell me what happened.”
Wordlessly, Lara stared past Paige and ate her breakfast. She wondered how much longer it would be before the woman cracked.
“Were you in a car accident last night? Did you get into a fight? Were you in some kind of…mosh pit?”
Hearing her aunt use the term ‘mosh pit’ made Lara break into raucous laughter. “Yeah, that’s it,” she said acidly. “I was moshing.”
In the silence that followed, Paige looked stricken. But then she seemed to find her anger and with it, her voice. “You cannot speak to me like this. I know that I’m not your mother—”
“That’s right,” Lara snapped. “My mother is dead!”
“—but you have to treat me with respect. I need to know what is going on in your life.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m your guardian. Your parents wanted Tim and me to take care of you.”
Lara sneered. “I can take care of myself.”
“It sure doesn’t look like it,” Paige replied, her eyes moving over Lara’s face.
“Oh, you haven’t even seen the half of it,” she said snidely. “Want me to lift up my shirt for you?”
She thought that she’d pushed her aunt to the edge of her patience. The woman’s face turned a bright shade of red. “God, what is wrong with you?” she cried.
“Nothing any more. And yet…more than you ever want to know. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to finish my breakfast in peace.”
Paige stared at her for a long moment. Then she clamped her hand over her mouth and hurried out of the kitchen, trying to stifle her sniveling.
Lara smiled as something that was like happiness bubbled up inside her stomach. That had been entirely too much fun. God, she’d had enough of being the lethargic, sad girl. It was refreshing to feel something good for a change.
When she was finished eating, she brought her dishes over to the kitchen sink to wash them. While she was squeezing detergent onto the sponge, she felt strong arms come around her waist from behind.
“Enjoying yourself, angel?” Kabran purred into her ear.
She relaxed in his embrace. “You know I am.”
He nibbled her earlobe. “You’re sexy when you’re cruel.”
Lara laughed shortly. “No one has ever said that I’m sexy before.”
“You never were until now,” the ghost told her.
She stiffened slightly and Kabran felt it. “You’re insulted,” he said. “But I’m not going to lie to you, angel. You were always beautiful, but there was something lacking. A certain depravity that you always tried to deny.”
The ghost’s lips fell to her throat and with a small sigh, Lara tipped her head to the side for him. She gazed absently through the window over the sink while Kabran kissed her neck. Her pulse raced as she felt his teeth rake across her sensitive skin and she had to brace herself against the counter to stay on her feet.
Outside the window, a flash of reflected sunlight roused her and Lara saw Marc’s truck pulling into the driveway. Her stomach clenched, remembering what she had said to him the night before. Like the idiot she was, Lara had blurted out that she had killed her parents. And knowing Marc, he was going to try to talk to her about it again.
Well, if he thought that giving her one night to cool off would be enough, he was sorely mistaken. In fact, she was going to demonstrate for him just how little he understood about her.
Lara smiled. “Depravity, huh?” she murmured to Kabran. “I’ll show you depraved.”
She left her dishes in the sink. The ghost’s hold on her disappeared as she stepped away from him. But she gave him a sly smile as she turned out of the kitchen and headed for the front door.
When Lara stepped out onto the porch, she leaned over to rest her elbows on the railing. Wearing a low-cut halter while standing in this pose would give Marc a good view of her cleavage when he came up the walkway.
She saw him before he noticed her because he was walking with his head down, as if he was sad or tired. He was dressed in his old work jeans and a tattered tee-shirt, which made the impression of exhaustion more vivid.
Seeing him, Lara suddenly felt profoundly guilty. After all, it was her fault that he looked like that. On the morning they first met, Marc had been happy and energetic. In a matter of days, she had destroyed that.
But her guilt vanished the moment he saw her. He froze in place as his eyes slid down her body and then back up, lingering on her breasts before settling on her face. Almost against her will, Lara threw herself into the role she’d planned to play.
“See something you like?” she asked Marc coyly. Her voice sounded strange to her. She’d never acted this way before in her life, though she was vaguely sure that she had in her past life. But hell, there was no time like the present…
A fleeting smile tugged at the corner of his mouth and was gone. Then he just looked at her.
That wasn’t the reaction she’d been aiming for. Kabran would have played along seamlessly. But it was all too apparent that Marc was different. Lara’s skin crawled with self-consciousness, but she would not back down. “It’s rude to stare, you know,” she said.
Marc sighed and looked back down. It seemed like he wanted to say something, but decided against it. He silently walked to the steps and came up on the porch.
Lara’s temper flared. She quickly got between Marc and the front door. Cocking her hip out, she crossed her arms and stood in his way. He tried to step to the side and she stepped too, refusing to let him by.
“You’re going to make me late,” he said.
“He speaks,” Lara said teasingly. She hoped that her voice didn’t give away any of the bitterness she felt.
Marc’s gaze darted to her face and away. “Please let me by.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then,” he said tiredly, “I’ll have to grab you to push you aside and you’ve already made it clear that you want me to keep my fucking hands off of you.”
He threw her own words at her so casually that it stung. The brief spark of pain gave her the courage to step closer to him, so that their bodies were almost touching. Marc’s chest was rising and falling too rapidly. Oh, he wasn’t as impervious to her as he wanted to seem. Lara smiled as she looked up at him.
“Maybe I was wrong about that,” she whispered. She stood up on her toes, letting her lips lightly brush against his as she spoke. “Maybe I want your hands all over me.”
His breath was warm on her mouth as she waited for a response. When he didn’t make a move, Lara took hold of his hands and placed them on her waist. As soon as he touched her, his grip tightened. It hurt as he pressed into her bruised body, but she couldn’t care.
“Ah, so you don’t find me repugnant after all.”
“I told you,” Marc replied in a husky voice, “I think you’re gorgeous. But this isn’t right.”
“You’re not pushing me away,” she said.
“That’s not fair.”
“I don’t care about what’s right or fair, Marc. I only care about this.” She tilted her head slightly as she leaned in to kiss him.
But then Lara felt something cold shove at her and she stumbled backwards in shock. Marc took hold of her arm to steady her and suddenly their eyes were locked on each other.
In that moment, she knew that he understood what had happened. He wasn’t stupid and he hadn’t forgotten or rationalized what he’d seen in the hallway the day before. Marc knew that the ghost had pushed her.
“Are you ready to talk about it yet?” he asked her.
“About what?” she asked shortly. “I just fell.”
“Yeah? And what did you fall into after I dropped you off last night? A wood chipper?”
Lara shook her battered arm free of his grasp. “According to Paige, it was a mosh pit.”
Marc didn’t seem amused. “I know what I saw yesterday.”
“Well, why are you asking me, then.”
“Because that…thing is hurting you.”
“Mmm. Actually, it felt good,” she purred.
“Could you please just drop the act, Lara?”
She recoiled from him. How did he always seem to say the exact thing that would humiliate her the most? “Don’t you get it yet?” she snapped. “It’s not an act. This is me.”
He gave her an appraising look. “Who are you trying to convince?”
“You are so damn arrogant. You think you know everything.”
“No,” he argued. “I don’t know anything. That’s why I want you to talk to me.”
“Why the hell do you even care?” Lara yelled. “Why don’t you just back off?”
“Because you’re throwing it in my face! You’re using me. One minute you like me, the next minute you hate me, and the next you’re throwing yourself at me. What exactly do you want from me?”
Lara drew herself up indignantly only to find that she had no answer for him.
Marc looked at her and smiled sadly. And his smile hurt as much as his words. She didn’t understand how he could perceive so much just by looking at her. Kabran was the only other person she’d ever known who could do that, and he’d known her a lot longer than Marc. It had been only two days and her soul was an open book to him.
“You don’t even know, do you?” he asked her.
When she couldn’t answer him again, Lara realized that he was right. She could barely even remember why she’d been trying to seduce Marc in the first place. She had no idea what she was doing with him or with Paige or with Kabran. She was lashing out blindly simply because she could.
Marc took a step towards her. “I know things have to be hard for you. But you’re not alone.”
“Don’t start that again,” she pleaded quietly. “Don’t start telling me that you understand because your dad left. That is not the same thing. You and your shiny happy friends could never understand.”
“How would you know? You don’t hold the sole patent on pain, Lara. Everyone goes through hell at some point.”
“Well, this is my hell. I earned it. He understands that,” she told Marc, not needing to explain who the he was. That strange bubbly energy was building inside of her again. “And you know what? I don’t even care about my parents any more. What happened is just so insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The world is bigger than that. Life is bigger than that. And so am I.”
Marc tipped his head to the side as he looked at her steadily. “If you really believe that, why don’t you tell me what happened?”
He’d gotten her again, but Lara couldn’t let him know that. She didn’t want to tell him, but she had to do it to keep the upper hand, to prove him wrong. “It was a car crash,” she said evenly. “We were fighting. I ran out of the house and took my dad’s car. They came after me in my mom’s car. I was driving too fast so that I could get away from them, but they stayed close behind me. There was a sharp bend in the road and I slammed on the breaks. But they didn’t react as quickly and they ran into me. They hadn’t put on their seatbelts because they were in such a rush to catch me, so they flew through the windshield on impact. When I got out to check on them, my father was already dead. My mother died a few minutes later, begging me not to let it happen. End of story.”
She had unconsciously turned away from Marc while she’d been talking so that he couldn’t see her face. But looking at him again, Lara wondered if maybe she’d turned away because she hadn’t wanted to see his face. He seemed to be feeling everything that she wanted to quash. Seeing the tears in his eyes, she panicked.
Lara started to hurry back into the house. God, she needed to be in her room. She needed Kabran. Everything would be okay then. She’d be able to swallow the lump in her throat as soon as she was with him.
But Marc took hold of her arm. Before she could wrench away, he pulled her against him and wrapped his arms tightly around her. For some reason that she could not explain, she didn’t fight him. Instead, she found herself relaxing a degree.
His body trembled and Lara realized that he was crying. Oh God, no. She couldn’t bare it. She hadn’t shed one tear for her parents. That would have been the ultimate blasphemy. But in the circle of Marc arms, it almost felt as if he was crying for the both of them.
An icy pressure tried to peel her off of him, but he held on tight. The muscles in his arms strained and Lara wanted to laugh. His killer biceps did come in handy after all.
“Let her go,” Marc whispered.
A cold wind blew her hair back and stung her skin.
And there it was. Marc had made his petition and Kabran had refuted it. Lara couldn’t help but think that the gauntlet had been thrown. And she had no idea on which side she stood.
Part 6
Part 8
Bound Main Page
Home