At dinner the next night, Leo grilled her on the questionnaire, surprised she’d studied so much.
“Tell me what you know about my work,” he said, as he sliced into his New York Strip.
She took a deep breath. “Y-you went to medical school and became a s-surgeon, but you felt the heart lung machines you needed c-could be improved upon-”
“Faith?”
She looked up like a rabbit caught in a trap-a mixture of pain and fear on her face. Or perhaps the anticipation of pain.
“No more stuttering. I mean it. It’s gotten tiresome. We have four days. You have to break out of this fear by then or I have to put you in the dungeon.”
Leo placed a hand over hers; she jumped and stared at her plate.
“Look at me.”
She looked up, her lip trembling.
“I don’t want to put you down there. If I did, I wouldn’t waste this time on you. But I care about my family. The women don’t need to know about this nasty business. Do you understand?” She nodded.
“Now try to speak naturally and tell me the rest.”
With great effort, she pushed the words out of her mouth, working to keep the stutter out. “Y-you designed an improvement on the m-machines and got a patent, and now you sell them to hospitals and surgeons all over the country, which is where your money came from.” She gathered steam as she spoke. “You still do surgeries two days a week, and with your money, you opened a private clinic here when you had this house built.”
“And? What about the blood?”
“Oh,” she blushed at her oversight. “You got involved with consulting on artificial blood, and you’ve been engaged to run clinical trials, which you’ll do in a lab you’ve set up next to your operating theater. They’ll start bringing you regular shipments of the blood late next spring.”
He didn’t expect all of this to come up, but if anyone started talking about his work, it was the type of thing they’d expect him to discuss with his fiancee, particularly since he wasn’t involved in the family’s business. It would be suspicious if she looked clueless. You couldn’t slide a lot past his family.
“Very good. What about the household staff?” Leo asked, going back to the questionnaire.
She was confused for a minute. “Oh. You sent some of them through school to be nurses and assist with surgeries and recovery, allowing them to take care of the house and help you with your business.”
“How many recovery rooms are there on-site?”
“Three.”
Her voice came out so small when she talked to him that he couldn’t decide which he wanted to do more: tie her down and whip her, or comfort her. As noble as he wanted to believe his gesture of letting her live in another wing was, he couldn’t be sure how long his self-control would hold.
When would he take what was his?
“Tell me how we met.”
“We met at a deli in the city. I had forgotten my wallet and you ooffered to pay.” She took a deep breath. “Then you asked me out. And I said y-yes.” She squeezed her eyes shut as if the lie were too painful to speak.
Leo stroked her arm. “I haven’t hurt you, Faith. Trust me. All I want is to protect those I love. I won’t allow Angelo to go to prison. And if you hurt the women-especially my mother-by letting them know the true nature of our arrangement, I will hurt you. That’s the only reason you’d have to fear me. It’s so simple here.”
As she gazed up at him from beneath thick lashes, he knew she wanted to believe that if she played her role right, she’d be safe.
“L-Leo?”
He forced himself to hold onto his temper. She wasn’t trying to annoy him with the stutter. “Yes, Faith?”
“What happens next Christmas? Am I still going to be alive?”
What kind of question was that? “Of course you’ll still be alive. If I wanted you dead, I would have left you with Angelo.”
There was a long pause while she gathered her courage. “What happens then? Or the next year? Will you lock me in the dungeon? We can’t pretend to be engaged forever.”
So that was where it was going. “I know,” he said. “We’ll have to get married. I was thinking next June. Everyone loves June weddings, and my mother will be in wedding-heaven. Shut your mouth when you chew your food, please,” he said in response to her gaping fish impression. “I can’t do this,” she whispered.
***
Faith raced down the hall to the entryway and flew up the stairs to her room. Once the door was locked, she pressed her back against the wood and slid to the carpet. Her sobs came out among strangled gasps for air.
What he demanded of her was too cruel. Pretend she loved him. Pretend they were a couple. Have a sham marriage. All the while she’d be a princess locked in a tower with no true love or life to call her own. She wanted to survive and stay safe, but what kind of life was this? What kind of safety?
The stupidest part of all of this was that she wouldn’t have told anyone. She would have been too scared. And calling the cops wouldn’t resurrect the guy Angelo had killed. But no matter what she said, there was no way they’d believe her and set her free. Especially now that she’d become their victim. They wouldn’t believe she’d let that go, too.
She’d let anything go if it meant safety.
“Faith, unlock this door, right now!” Leo’s voice boomed from the other side of the door, sending vibrations along her back as if his hands were on her.
She couldn’t breathe. If she opened the door, he might hurt her. If she didn’t open the door, he might break it down and hurt her. Her mind flashed to the night he’d spanked her for such a small infraction. Would he do it again? Or worse? Why did I lock the door? Why did I leave the table?
“A-are you going to h-hurt me?”
“I’ll hurt you if you don’t fucking stop stuttering!” he shouted.
She unlocked the door and rushed to shut herself in the closet, huddling in the corner. All she wanted was to get away from him. God, let her fall through some other magic dimension, away from this place. Why couldn’t he leave her alone?
She hugged herself as his footsteps approached her obvious hiding place.
“Come out. Now.” The anger was still there, but it was muted behind tenuous self-control.
“Please, Leo…”
His breath was harsh outside the closet as he got hold of himself. She prayed he could reign in his temper and that he wouldn’t take it out on her.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She’d gotten caught on a loop and couldn’t stop saying the words, hoping they would calm him.
His breath slowed back to normal, and then he seemed to move away.
It was enough to give her the courage to leave the closet.
Leo sat on the edge of the bed, watching her. “Come here.”
“Please…”
“Come. Here.”
She joined him, and he wrapped his arms around her and held her. An attempt at comfort? He had to know, his touch couldn’t comfort her. But somehow, it did. The more he touched her, the more she found herself desensitized to the fear of it.
“I’m sorry,” he said against her hair. “I don’t have any other choices.”
“You could let me go. I swear, I won’t say anything about what I saw, or about being kept here. I’ll go back to my life and be quiet. I’ll never speak of this. Please.” Then she said something she hoped was true but wasn’t sure. “I-I know you don’t want to do this. You can trust me. I promise I won’t talk.”
He stroked her hair. “Family comes first. I won’t take the risk. And you have no idea of the things I want to do where you’re concerned. Pray you never know.”
Despite the irrationality of the act, she found herself clinging to him, because he was the only thing to hold onto. He could protect her from Angelo. She had to get herself together if she wanted to keep his protection.
His voice was quiet when he spoke again. “Next summer you’ll become my wife in name only. I won’t force you. I won’t hurt you. Things will stay as they’ve been the past few days. I know you’re losing so much. I wish things could be different for you. Please believe that.”
He pulled away from her and helped her to stand. “Come finish your dinner. We still need to practice and finish going over our answers on the questionnaire.”
Faith placed a shaky hand in his and allowed him to take her back to the kitchen where their food had been left. He put her plate in the microwave and heated it for about a minute, then did the same with his.
While she ate, he stroked her arm and she tried not to jerk away from him. “Do you have any food allergies?”
The question caught her by surprise. “No, why?”
“It occurred to me that being Irish as well as not having big Christmases, you might not be familiar with our traditions. Our big meal is on Christmas Eve. We have mostly fish, including shellfish, and we tend to have a lot of cookies that have nuts in them on the Venetian table.”
Faith made a face. “Fish for Christmas?”
“It’s an Italian-Catholic thing. We call it The Feast of the Seven Fishes. Not all Italians do it, but it’s been a tradition with my family in Brooklyn since before I was born. We have seven different seafood dishes: calamari, scungilli-which is a conch delicacy-baccala, shrimp, clams with pasta, often lobster with pasta and a red sauce, and then something like salmon or trout. And of course we’ve got other stuff that has no seafood in it like spaghetti without the meat and antipasto.”
“What’s antipasto?”
“Are you kidding? Lettuce, roasted peppers, olives, anchovies, and cheese mainly. Then on the dessert table we have Baci DiDama, which are hazelnut meringue sandwiches filled with chocolate. We have cherryalmond star cookies, and pignoli-those are pine nut cookies. My aunt Lily makes a mean rainbow cookie with an almond filling, even though she’s not Italian. And of course you’ll find some cannoli and various fruits.”
Leo went into a sort of trance. No doubt he was lost inside holiday memories that Faith couldn’t pretend to understand.
After dinner they went through the rest of the questionnaire. She knew all the answers. She’d read them over and over, the threat of the dungeon hanging over her head. The hard part would be pretending she loved him. The easy part was facts and figures. She’d applied herself doggedly to learning everything he’d written down, hoping it would keep him from locking her up during Christmas.
When he was satisfied with her knowledge, he led her to a different room. This one had a large, flat screen against one wall. He put a disc in the player, turned out the lights, and joined her on the couch. It was a mockery of a date: a chick flick and his arm around her.
The movie was a typical romantic comedy with the typical formulaic plot line. If you’d seen one, you’d seen them all. It might be nice to get lost in it, but she couldn’t. She wondered if she might have watched this, or something similar if she’d stayed home with her cat that night instead of going out.
Midway through the film, Leo turned her face to him, and his lips met hers. She still froze when he did it, unable to bring herself to relax under his touch given the circumstances.
He pulled away. “Give in to me, Faith. All I’ll take from you are chaste kisses. You can give me that. You’ll be doing a lot of this when my family arrives. You’d better get used to it.”
He tried again, and this time she forced herself to relax and pretend it was a date with a guy she’d said yes to.
“Better. We’ll work on it.”
Leo pulled her into his arms to finish the movie. He held her as if he was her boyfriend, but even under cover of darkness, he never tried anything. When the credits rolled, he turned on the light. “We’ll try again tomorrow. Go to bed.”
He didn’t have to ask her twice. She couldn’t get back to her room fast enough, the one place where she was moderately safe.
That night, Leo starred in her dreams. Except instead of being a scary horror-movie monster, he was her boyfriend, and he was kind and funny. When he kissed her in the dream, she melted against him and moaned, opening her mouth to accept his probing tongue. Her arms gripped his shoulders, trying to pull him closer, wanting to be consumed by him. Between her legs, a throbbing ache started until his hand slid underneath her panties to soothe it away.
“See, Faith? This is nothing,” Dream-Leo said. “You can give me this.”
When she woke, her own hand was between her legs, and she was aroused. No! If some part of her actually fell for him, it would be more painful. She didn’t want to be like one of those kidnap victims who started sympathizing with her captor. She didn’t want to start believing his lies. And she definitely didn’t want to want him or like his hands or lips on her. She pressed her face against her pillow in an attempt to muffle her distress -though she knew Leo couldn’t hear her from the other end of the house. Then she pressed her face against the pillow to muffle the sound of her orgasm.