Taken By the Stranger by Jenna Rose
Phoenix
You stupid son of a bitch, you’re falling for her.
Sophie lies sleeping next to me, and I do again what I’ve been doing for the last fifteen minutes: I drag my eyes down the perfect line of her neck that leads from her ear to her shoulder to the curve of her back where the sheet has fallen away just right. I can see the side of her breast from this angle too, and while I may not be the most cultured man on the planet, I’m pretty sure she looks like one of those Greek statues you see in museums, like a goddess or something.
My goddess.
I tried. Fuck I tried to keep my distance, to keep my heart locked up and off-limits from her. But she was like Andy in the Shawshank Redemption with his little rock hammer, chipping away at me moment after moment, day after day, and after our little trip to Target, I finally cracked.
She showed true loyalty to me there when she didn’t have to. She could have called out to those cops. She could have run. Could have made a scene and fucked me up for life right there.
But she didn’t.
In fact, she made it clear that she wanted to stay with me. When I first saw that ad she posted on The Dungeon, I figured she was just having one of those rich girl moments – dipping her toes into the fantasy world of kink that she would never go through with. And I guess that’s what pissed me off on top of everything already. I’ve never been a major kinkster myself anyway, and never have even met anyone off the site in person, but when I saw her post, I was determined to bring the full reality of her actions crashing down on her.
And maybe she wasn’t fully aware of what she was doing when she made that post, and she damn sure lucked out getting me as the guy who responded to her, but she wasn’t wrong about not wanting to go home to her family. And knowing what I know about them, I can’t blame her. But the question is will she be able to live without the comforts and luxuries she’s grown accustomed to if she stays with me? Or will she grow tired of slumming it and want to go back? Because that would crush me, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
What I am ashamed to admit is that Sophie has thrown a monkey wrench into my plans, and the girl I’m in love with is a Madison, and the Madisons destroyed not only my family, but the families of everyone who lived in my old neighborhood. After we lost our house, after Mom left him, my dad developed a heart condition. Between the booze, the cigarettes, and the double shifts, he ended up in an early grave five years later. What would he say if he saw me with her, Howard Madison’s daughter?
“Fuck,” I mutter to myself as I slide quietly out of bed. I’ll leave her sleeping for now. I need to think and I know that if she’s by my side, the only thing I’ll be able to think about is how adorable she is. She’ll cloud my judgment worse than a case of beer. I skip the shower and just wash my face in the sink downstairs. My burner phone and its battery are lying on the kitchen table. All it would take is one call to get this over with.
By now, her dad and mom are getting frantic. They haven’t heard from me and may be assuming the worst. The chances they pull the same shit again with the cops is slim. I could probably even up my asking price by another million and they’d go for it. Hell, they pay more than that in taxes every quarter.
But as I picture the hand-off in my mind – me coming home with a boatload of money instead of Sophie, and falling asleep on the sheets she picked out for me, washing off in the bodywash she picked out and drying off on the towels we bought together, a pain shoots through my chest like a dagger being dragged across my ribcage.
Two or three million bucks could fix a lot of problems. I could look up all the folks from the old neighborhood and give every one of them a nice pay day. Who knows what they’d use it for? Medical bills, tuition for their kids, or maybe just rent or a down payment on a new place. Hell, I could get myself out of this dump and into a nice house too.
But not even Tony Stark’s smart-mansion on the coast in Malibu would be an adequate replacement for Sophie. Not even if it came with all his suits. This girl is one of a kind. The way she makes me feel…it’s something I never thought I could feel in my life. No amount of money could ever replace that.
But it’s not just me I have to think about here. It’s the lives of everyone else that bastard of a father of hers affected when he gobbled up my old neighborhood and drove them out of their homes like they weren’t even people.
To get my mind off things, I open the garage and wheel the Honda trail bike I’ve been working on out into the driveway. It’s been running hard, and I’m pretty sure there’s something wrong with the carburetor, so I get to work opening it up, but just as I’m getting started, I hear a voice behind me.
“That young Phoenix I see there?”
I turn and see a grizzled old man with a white beard standing at the foot of the driveway grinning at me. It takes me a minute to recognize him – he’s lost about sixty pounds at least – but there’s no mistaking that face.
“Bill?” I laugh. “Big Bill?”
“Not so big anymore,” he chuckles. I walk down to him, and he greets me with a dry, bear’s paw of a hand. “How the hell are ya, boy?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t even believe it if I told you, Bill. What about you? You starvin’ yourself? On the keto diet?”
Bill coughs out a laugh. “Oh, sure. Training for a decathlon!”
He’s kidding, but also holding back something. “No, really, Bill. What the hell’s going on with you?”
“Oh, just our wonderful health system, boyo. Ruptured a gut and insurance only covered a piece of it. Lost my coverage, had some complications, got sick again.”
“Jesus, Bill…”
“Yeah, I won’t bore ya, but this is the result. Lookin’ like a skeleton!”
Bill’s always been good at keeping his spirits high. He lived down the block from us when I was back in the old neighborhood and always used to help my friends and me with our bikes if they had a problem. He’s doing a good job keeping a straight face now, but I can see that he’s been through hell and back.
“Shit, Bill. I’m real sorry to hear that.”
Bill waves a dismissive hand. “Eh, life’s got its ups and downs. We can’t all be Howard Madison, can we?”
He laughs, and I do my best not to visibly cringe. “No.” I shake my head. “No, we can’t.”
“I tell you what, boy. I’d like to find that prick and show him this.” He lifts his shirt to reveal a long surgery scar on his stomach. “I’d like to ask him if he feels one single goddamn thing when he sees it. And you know what I think? I think he would turn his back on me.”
“Yeah. I think so too.” I glance down at the road where Bill’s truck is parked. “That’s not your same Ford, is it, Bill?”
The old man coughs up a laugh. “Good eye, boyo. I’ve done well at keeping her up over the years and will probably end up driving her ‘till the wheels fall off. Can’t be buying a Mercedes when the medical bills are weighing me down, can I?”
Jesus…
The old thing looks like it’s ready to collapse already, and Bill’s still driving it around? Hard to believe the cops haven’t pulled him over and told him to get it off the road.
“I wish I could help ya out, Bill—”
“Don’t you worry, Phoenix,” Bill laughs. “We’re all in the same boat thanks to those Richie Riches! And we won’t forget what they did to us, will we?!”
“No…” I mutter. “No, we won’t…”
Christ, I don’t know how Bill manages to keep his spirits up. Maybe he’s burnt out with all his anger over the years. But as he shakes my hand again and I watch him turn and limp back to his truck and pull away, I feel mine rise back up inside me again.
All those people…all those lives Howard Madison destroyed.
I kick a clump of loose dirt at the edge of the driveway.
But Sophie isn’t like that, right? She wants to get away from her family. She hates them. She hired me to kidnap her. We have a real connection.
But she’s only been gone for a few days. Staying with me in my tiny house and shopping at Target might be fun for now, but how’s she going to feel in a few months, or maybe even a few weeks, when she doesn’t have maids cleaning up for her or cooks making her meals? When she realizes she can’t just go to Daddy to buy her a car or a new wardrobe when she feels like switching up her style?
What would she feel like seeing me chatting with a guy like Billy?
“No, this is all kinds of fucked,” I say to myself, kicking the dirt again. We’re from two different worlds, Sophie and me. And so far, all this has been is one of those vacation romances. A very twisted, very kinky vacation romance. And what’s going to happen when it’s time to get back to reality?
When I go back inside, she’s still sleeping.
Good, that will make this easier.
She looks so peaceful lying there – so peaceful that for an instant, I almost convince myself that there’s still a chance that this could work. But I quickly harden myself, go back downstairs to the garage where I keep the med kit, then go to the kitchen and grab the burner phone. I slip the battery in the back and dial. Howard answers on the first ring.
“Yes?”
“No more fucking around, Howard. The price is now three-million.”
“My daughter.” His voice, for the first time, is on the verge of trembling. “She’s unharmed?”
For Billy’s sake, and the sake of all the others he did dirty, I want to toy with him, scare the shit out of him and tell him I carved his little precious princess up and left her close to death, but unlike him, I’m not a cruel man.
“She is,” I say through gritted teeth as my blood runs cold. “Three-million and you get her back. And Howard? No fucking around this time.”
I heard him swallow on the other end of the line. “Yes, I – I understand.”
“Oh, I bet you do.”
I hang up and head upstairs to go and do what will be the hardest thing I ever have to do.
But it’s for the best. She will hate me for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, but one day she’ll understand. And if not, fine. It’s better this way. This isn’t Twilight. I’m not Edward and she’s not Bella. We had our fun, but now it’s time to face facts. She doesn’t belong in my world, and nothing is going to change that.
