Raintree: Inferno (Raintree 1)

He gave it a brief thought, said, “Yeah,” and went out the door.

Lorna leaped and caught the door before it closed. “Don’t leave me here! Please.” She hated to beg, and she hated him for making her beg, but she was suddenly alarmed beyond reason by the thought of being stuck here for the rest of her life.

He got into the Jaguar, called, “You’ll be okay,” and then the clatter of the garage door rising drowned out anything else she might have said. Furious, she slammed the kitchen door and, in a fit of pique, turned both the lock on the handle and the dead bolt. Locking him out of his own house was useless, since he had his keys with him, but the annoyance value was worth it.

She heard the Jag backing out; then the garage door began coming down.

Damn him, damn him, damn him! He’d really gone off and left her stranded here. No, not stranded—chained.

Her clothes had been delivered earlier, and she’d changed out of the ruined pants—and out of his too-big silk shirt—so he wouldn’t have had to wait for her to get ready or anything. He had no reason for leaving her here, given that he could easily prevent her from escaping with one of his damnable mind commands.

Impotently, she glared around the kitchen. Being a drainer—king—whatever the hell he’d said—had made him too big for his britches. He pretty much did whatever he felt like doing, without worrying about what others wanted. It was obvious he’d never been married and likely never would be, because any woman worth her salt would—

Salt.

She looked around the kitchen and spotted the big stainless steel salt and pepper shakers sitting by the cooktop. She began opening doors until she found the pantry—and a very satisfying supply of salt.

She’d noticed he put a spoonful of sugar in his coffee. Now she very carefully poured the salt out of the salt shaker, replaced it with sugar from the sugar bowl, then put the salt in the sugar bowl. He wouldn’t much enjoy that first cup of coffee in the morning, and anything he salted would taste really off.

Then she got creative.

About an hour after he left, the phone rang. Lorna looked at the caller ID but didn’t bother answering; she wasn’t his secretary. Whoever was calling didn’t leave a message.

She explored the house—well, searched the house. It was a big house for just one person. She had no frame of reference for estimating the square footage, but she counted six bedrooms and seven and a half baths. His bedroom took up the entire top floor, a vast expanse that covered more floor space than most families of four lived in. It was very muc

h a man’s room, with steel blue and light olive-green tones dominating, but here and there—in the artwork, in an unexpected decorative bowl, in a cushion—were splashes of deep, rich red.

There was a separate sitting area, with a big-screen television that popped out of a cabinet when a button was pushed and sank back into hiding afterward. She knew, because she found the remote and punched all the buttons, just to see what they would do. There was a wet bar with a small refrigerator and a coffeemaker in case he didn’t want to bother going downstairs to make his coffee or get something to eat. She’d replaced the sugar with salt there, too—and mixed dirt from the potted plants in with his coffee.

Then she sat in the middle of his king-size bed, on a mattress that felt like a dream, and thought.

As big and comfortable as the house was, it wasn’t what she would call a mansion. It wasn’t ostentatious. He liked his creature comforts, but the house still looked like a place to be lived in, rather than a showcase.

She knew he had money, and a lot of it—enough to afford a house ten times the size of this one. Throw in the fact that he lived here alone, with no daily staff to take care of him and his home, and she had to draw the obvious conclusion that his privacy was more important to him than being pampered. So why was he forcing her to stay here?

He’d said he felt responsible for her, but he could feel that way wherever she stayed, and because of that damned newly discovered talent of his for making people do whatever he wanted, she couldn’t have left if he’d commanded her to stay. Maybe he was interested in her untrained “power” and wanted to see what he could make of it just to satisfy his curiosity. Again, she didn’t have to stay here for him to give her lessons or conduct a few experiments on her.

He wanted to have sex with her, so maybe that was what motivated him. He could compel her to come to him, to have sex, but he wasn’t a rapist. He was possibly a lunatic, definitely a bully, but he wasn’t a rapist. He wanted her to be willing, truly willing. So was he keeping her here in order to seduce her? He couldn’t do that if he went off somewhere and left her here, not to mention doing so made her mad at him.

Somehow the sex angle didn’t feel right, either. If he wanted to get her in bed, making her a prisoner wasn’t the right way to win her over. Not only that, she wasn’t a femme fatale; she simply couldn’t see anyone going to such extraordinary lengths to have sex with her.

He had to have another reason, but damned if she could figure out what it was. And until she knew…well, there wasn’t anything she could do, regardless. Unless she could somehow knock him out and escape, she was stuck here until he was ready to let her leave.

Last night, from the moment the gorilla had “escorted” her away from the blackjack table and manhandled her up to Raintree’s office, had been a pure nightmare. One shock had followed so closely on the heels of another—each somehow worse than the one before—that she felt as if she’d lost touch with reality somewhere along the way.

Yesterday at this time she had been anonymous, and she liked it that way. Oh, people would come up and talk to her, the way they did to winners, and she was okay with that, but being alone was okay, too. In fact, being alone was better than okay; it was safe.

Raintree didn’t know what he was asking of her, staying here, learning how to be “gifted.” Not that he was asking—he wasn’t giving her a choice.

He’d tricked her into admitting that she had a certain talent with numbers, but he didn’t know how nauseated she got at the thought of coming out of the paranormal closet. She would rather remain a metaphysical garment bag, hanging in the very back.

He had grown up in an underground culture where paranormal talents were the norm, where they were encouraged, celebrated, trained. He had grown up a prince, for God’s sake. A prince of weird, but a prince nonetheless. He had no idea what it had been like growing up in slums, skinny and unwanted and different. There hadn’t been a father in her picture, just an endless parade of her mother’s “boyfriends.” He’d never been slapped away from the table, literally slapped out of her chair, for saying anything her mother could construe as weird.

As a child, she hadn’t understood why what she said was weird. What was so wrong with saying the bus her mother took across town to her job in a bar would be six minutes and twenty-three seconds late? She had thought her mother would want to know. Instead she’d been backhanded out of her seat.

Numbers were her thing. If anything had a number in it, she knew what that number was. She remembered starting first grade—no kindergarten for her, her mother had said kindergarten was a stupid-ass waste of time—and the relief she’d felt when someone finally explained numbers to her, as if a huge part of herself had finally clicked into place. Now she had names for the shapes, meanings for the names. All her life she’d been fascinated with numbers, whether they were on a house, a billboard, a taxicab or anywhere else, but it was as if they were a foreign language she couldn’t grasp. Odd, to have such an affinity for them but no understanding. She had thought she was as stupid as her mother had told her she was, until she’d gone to school and found the key.

By the time she was ten, her mother had been deep into booze and drugs, and the slaps had progressed to almost daily beatings. If her mother staggered in at night and decided she didn’t like something Lorna had done that day or the day before—or the week before, it didn’t matter—she would grab whatever was handy and lay into Lorna wherever she was. A lot of times Lorna’s transition from sleep to wakefulness had been a blow—to her face, her head, wherever her mother could hit her. She had learned to sleep in a state of quiet terror.