Against the Dark by Carolyn Crane Page B

pressing into you.”
    Her heart slammed against her chest. Keep going .
    “I touched you, invaded you, owned you with just the roughness you enjoy. You know what I’m saying, baby. And then you broke apart. You screamed. You were so gone that I had to hold you up. And all those flower magnets there on the refrigerator door? They all fell off as I let you slide to the floor.”
    “Oh,” she whispered.
    “It was at that point,” he said, “that the fucking began.”
    She shook her head, coming to her senses. This guy was threatening her, blackmailing her! “That’s enough.”
    “You don’t want me to remind you how—”
    “Enough.”
    “But certainly you’d agree that qualifies as more than a peck on the cheek. That’s my point here.”
    She stared at him. It was like she could feel him on her, touching her. He licked the knife. Slowly.
    “Stop it.”
    “Stop licking the knife?”
    “You know what you’re doing.”
    He smiled lazily. A potent pause grew between them. “Got any raisins?”
    “And FYI, that would never happen.” She took out her box of raisins and slammed it down on the counter. Hard.
    He pulled the rubber band off the box, smiling. “Nevertheless.”
    “Darling Cole, you’re not remembering what a prude I am. That entire scenario would never happen. Don’t you recall my religious upbringing?”
    She watched his face, saw when he got the idea she was saving herself for marriage. Then he laughed. “You’re also a jewel thief. You take what you want.” He began to embed raisins into the peanut butter at precise intervals.
    “Borgola isn’t going to need that level of detail for dinner conversation, right?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never had dinner with him.”
    “Never?”
    He crunched into his rice cake. “Mmm,” he said. “This is delicious, honey.”
    She sipped her coffee, trying to come down after the things he’d said. Now they were supposed to have a normal conversation? It was like they just had sex for the first time. No—it was more intimate.
    “Raised Catholic,” he said. “You’re telling me you’re into it?”
    “Yup. My whole family is.”
    “I won’t ask you to define into it .”
    “Good.”
    “So why did you leave? What went wrong? Why did you run away?”
    She snapped the rubber band around the raisins. How did this guy know so much about her past? “None of your business.”
    “Come on. What broke things for you and your family?”
    “Forget it.”
    “They look like good people on paper, though I understand that can be deceiving.”
    She gave him a hard look—she didn’t appreciate the grilling, but there was something else. A dark, driven quality to his questioning. This guy had issues. Demons. “They were good people,” she said simply. That was the shame of it. They’d given her everything and it hadn’t been enough.
    “You didn’t want others to define you,” he said finally. “You wanted to define yourself.”
    “That’s what you think, huh?” Not exactly right, though not so crazy.
    “You were in juvie with those girls, but it started before that,” he tried. “It’s something with your friends.”
    The intensity of his attention was unsettling—she was usually the one in the shadows, unlocking safes, unlocking clients. “The boyfriend doesn’t get that part until the third date.”
    He came around the counter, seeming energized. “You go back with them, probably to grade school. Nobody else saw what you could be except those girls. You believed in each other. You made girlish vows to fight back. And all the people who read you wrong, all the people who underestimated you, they could fuck themselves.”
    What the hell was this guy? “I’m not playing this with you.”
    “You would show everybody. You vowed to make them pay.”
    Her pulse raced. “Not even close. It was never about showing anybody or making them pay,” she whispered. “Ever.”
    He caged her against the refrigerator with his