Sheer Control (Sheer Submission, Part Six) Read online

  SHEER CONTROL

  (Sheer Submission, Part Six)

  Hannah Ford

  Contents

  WANT TO BE IN THE KNOW?

  SHEER CONTROL

  SHEER CONTROL

  Copyright © 2018 by Hannah Ford

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  SHEER CONTROL

  (SHEER SUBMISSION, PART SIX)

  SHEER CONTROL

  I’d always thought that if I’d ever said the words out loud, everything would change.

  So I waited.

  Waited for my throat to close up and my head to pound, for my knees to go weak, for my chest to seize, for something.

  But there was nothing.

  Everything felt exactly the same.

  Actually, that wasn’t true.

  The one thing I felt was a tiny little thrill. A tiny little thrill that I’d said it out loud, and that I’d said it to Landon of all people, Landon who’d kept this secret from me about my sister, who’d always seemed so control, who always had the upper hand.

  I watched as his eyes narrowed, his brow furrowing slightly.

  “What are you talking about?” If he was shocked by my revelation, he didn’t show it. In fact, his face was impassive, that same cold arrogance and I-don’t-give-a-fuck expression that seemed to come so easily to him. He was acting as if nothing I could say would shock him, but I knew it was just an act – how the hell could he not be shocked by me saying I killed my parents? It was infuriating.

  “Let me out of this room,” I demanded, raising my chin into the air defiantly. There was something sinister about being in here now, about being in this place that was filled with whips and chains and cuffs and things I didn’t understand, things I craved and despised at the same time.

  “I can’t do that.” His eyes raked over my body, and for a moment, I was afraid (hoping?) he was going to tie me up again, spank me and fuck me until I was raw. I could see it in his eyes, the desire there, the way any time I talked back or went against him, he wanted (needed?) to have me.

  “I’m not talking about anything in here.”

  Landon studied me for a long moment, as if weighing his options, then apparently decided I was serious. “I can let you out of this room. But you have to promise you won’t try to leave the house.”

  “You said I could leave whenever I wanted.”

  “I said you could leave with me whenever you wanted.”

  “Fine.” I crossed my arms over my chest, hating the way my body was responding to the stern tone in his voice, hating how my nipples had turned into two hard gumdrops at the sight of him standing there, tall and broad and strong, ordering me around. “I won’t try to leave. But you have to turn my phone back on.”

  He shook his head. “Your phone is done, Aven. It’s been deactivated.”

  “Well, reactivate it.”

  “The chip –”

  “I don’t care! Just get me a phone.”

  “I will get you a new one.”

  “Fine. Then I won’t try to leave.” Above us, on the domed ceiling, the snow was kicking up again, swirling and drifting, and the wind howled around the stone turret that made up the walls.

  I shivered, even thought it wasn’t cold in here.

  “Come,” he said, and took my hand.

  Back in the kitchen, he poured me a glass of water from a frosted crystal pitcher that sat in the refrigerator. Slices of lime and cucumber floated in the clear liquid, and when I took a drink it tasted pure and fresh.

  Landon leaned against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. He was still shirtless, wearing just the navy silk pajama pants, his feet bare, dark stubble dusting his cheeks. The muscles of his biceps flexed, and the cords in his shoulder muscles stood out as he moved. I felt that familiar warmth fill my core, and I took another sip of the cool water.

  “Talk.”

  I narrowed my eyes and slid my glass back and forth across the island. “What do you want to know?”

  Landon leveled me with his gaze, and I averted my own gaze. “I’m assuming that when you say you killed your parents, you’re not talking about the kind of killing that involves a knife or a gun.”

  “What, you don’t take me for a psycho?”

  “No,” he said softly. “I don’t.”

  “I was joking.”

  “Lame time for a joke, Ms. Courtland.”

  The way he was looking at me was disarming. I tried to remember the words he’d whispered to me back up in that room. What had they been, exactly? “I think I’m falling…”

  Had he about to say he was falling in love with me? That would have made no sense. He barely knew me. And I barely knew him. So then how I was I about to tell him my biggest secret, the one I’d never even spoken out loud to myself, much less told another person? And why did I secretly want it so badly to be true, that he loved me? Why did the words “Me too” want to form so badly on my lips?

  “You don’t know me,” I said, curling my hands around the coolness of the glass in front of me. “You have no idea if I’m a psycho or not.”

  “Aven.”

  I licked my lips. “I’ll tell you,” I said. “But you have to tell me something, too.”

  “This isn’t a negotiation.”

  “Do you want to know or not?” It had never occurred to me that he wouldn’t, that maybe he just didn’t care.

  He moved to where I was sitting, turning the stool I was sitting at around and pulling my torso flush against his.

  His eyes were hooded, his jaw tight.

  I reached up and ran my fingers over his face, feeling the contours, the lines of his cheekbones, the roughness of his stubble. His hands slid up my legs, his fingers kneading the soft flesh that padded my hips. I felt his cock twitch in his pants, and I let out a breath.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Why did you take the blame for Conner? Why would you do something like that?”

  “You first.”

  I swallowed, and Landon pressed his forehead against mine. I could feel his heart beating, or maybe it was mine -- I couldn’t tell where one of us ended and the other began.

  I licked my lip and took a breath. “We were at our lake house,” I said. “It was winter, well, spring, I guess.” I closed my eyes, and I could almost feel the way the air had been, that first hint of warmth, the sun slanting across the sky at a different angle, the first signs of longer days and warmer nights. “My dad wanted to take the boat out. Usually he went ice fishing, but he… he had a boat, a small one. A canoe, really. So he and my mom and my aunt, they went out.”

  My heart started beating faster, and I paused.

  Landon pulled me closer to him, and somehow, inexplicably, I was turned on, my core pulsing against his cock, the thin material of our pants the only thing that separated us.

  He tilted my chin up and brushed his lips over my closed eyes. “And then what?”

  “I stayed back at the cabin. I was reading a book, and I…I heard my aunt come runnin
g up the driveway. She was screaming for me to call 911. My dad’s boat had hit the edge of some ice that was still on the lake, and when it hit, my mom got thrown over. She hit her head on the ice, and she slipped into the water. My dad was trying to get to her, but… they both drowned.”

  Silence filled the kitchen. Landon had been rubbing circles on my back, and his hand went still.

  My core still pulsed, something about this moment making me want him. I wasn’t sure if it was because he’d primed my body so well, or if I was just that I was that fucked up, but suddenly, I craved him, wanted him to pull my pants down just enough so that he could slip inside of me, could make me forget the painful memories I’d done my best to bury.

  “So how is that your fault?”

  I’d told the story before – the story about what happened to my parents. Very rarely, but I’d told it. I’d never said the next part out loud, though, not to anyone, not even Violet.

  “The night before my parents died, I’d been out on the boat,” I said. “I wasn’t supposed to be. Violet and I weren’t allowed to take it out without an adult. But there were these girls from school I’d wanted to impress, girls I wanted to be friends with. So we waited until our parents were asleep, and we snuck out.” I swallowed. “We took the boat out to this island, you know, in the middle of the lake, and they called these boys over to meet us. They were older, richer.” I squeezed my eyes shut and my lungs seized. I could still remember the scent of the campfire, the way I sat huddled on a log, feeling out of place.

  The girls were from the other side of the lake, the rich side, the side where the houses rose far into the sky, not like the tiny shacks on my side, with their windblown shutters and crumbling steps.

  Landon’s hand moved up my back slowly, the pressure he was putting on my skin becoming harder.

  “They only invited me because I brought them beer.” I remembered that, too, the taste of the Miller Lite I’d swiped from the refrigerator, the sour taste that burned my throat after one sip.

  Landon’s hands pulled at me, his hands moving up the back of my neck and tangling in my hair.

  “We had a bonfire, and some of the guys, they were drunk, and they….” I closed my eyes. “They burned the life jackets that were stored in the boat.”

  Landon went still, his hands not moving anymore. His torso was still pressed against mine, the heat from his body radiating off of him and onto me.

  “So the next day, when my parents went out, when my mom fell overboard, when everything happened… “ I fumbled for the words, not wanting to say ‘drowned’ again. “The two of them, they didn’t have a chance. There weren’t any life jackets. And it was my fault.”

  Landon stayed still, quiet, and I closed my eyes, hot tears prickling at them, as I waited for the reaction I’d always imagined would come when I told someone my secret, waited for him to tell me I was fucked up, a bad daughter, a bad person.

  He held me close for a long moment, still not moving, and then finally, he pulled away.

  I searched his face carefully, watching him for any sign of what he was thinking. His eyes burned, and he took in a breath through his nose. He pulled me close to him again, pressing me against his expansive chest. I thought he murmured my name into my hair, but I wasn’t sure, and a second later, he released me.

  I looked at him again, still trying to glean a sense of what he was feeling. But his features, as was common, showed no sign of what he was thinking.

  There wasn’t anger, sadness, or compassion. There was nothing.

  “Your parents went on the boat with no life jackets.” If his face was devoid of emotion, his tone wasn’t. There was something there, something biting – spite? Blame?

  “Yes. There weren’t any life jackets, because I’d…. I’d let them burn.”

  “No.” He walked back around the island and opened what looked like a built-in cabinet, but what turned out to be a minibar, the kind of thing that you’d usually only find in a hotel. He pulled out a tiny bottle of something amber and poured it into a tumbler, then downed it in one swallow, no ice, nothing. “What I mean is that they went on the boat without putting life jackets on.”

  “Yes.”

  Landon shrugged, poured another shot, and downed it again. “So then it was their own fault.”

  His words were a dagger to my heart, and the tears that had been pricking the back of my eyes threatened to overflow. “It wasn’t their fault, Landon,” I said. “It was my fault.”

  “You were a child.”

  “A teenager. One who knew better.”

  He shrugged. “Sorry, but you go out on a boat without a life jacket...” He trailed off and poured himself another drink.

  “You go out on a boat without a life jacket and what?” I demanded.

  He stayed silent.

  “No, really, what were you going to say, Landon?” Anger burned in my veins. Of all the ways he could have responded, I’d never considered this one. I’d thought it would have gone one of two ways – either he would act like I was a bad person, or he would have comforted me and told me it wasn’t my fault.

  But now he was blaming my parents, acting almost like he thought they’d gotten what they deserved.

  “They should have been wearing life preservers.” His tone was matter-of-fact, like it was obvious, like we weren’t talking about a mistake that had killed the two people closest to me, but like something a lot less important, like forgetting a bag of apples at the grocery store.

  “They weren’t wearing life preservers because I took them out of the boat. And I took them out of the boat so I could impress some dumb kids.” Did he not get it? Had he not been listening?

  “No, Aven, they weren’t wearing life preservers because they were careless. They should have checked for them as soon as they got on the boat. They didn’t do their due diligence.” He poured himself another finger of bourbon, but kept it there on the counter.

  “They weren’t careless.” I bit the inside of my cheek hard, resisting the urge to scream out loud. “You know, I can’t believe this. I can’t believe I’m sitting here, arguing with you, trying to convince you that it was my fault.”

  “I can’t believe you’re sitting here trying to convince me it’s your fault either. Because it wasn’t your fault. You will never convince me of that. So if that’s your intention…” He trailed off again, as if the conversation was over, and downed the bourbon. He was in full business mode now, as if he were standing in a boardroom, going over financial figures or closing a deal.

  “My intention was to tell you something, something that I’d never --” I trailed off. He didn’t deserve to know, didn’t deserve to know that he was the only person I’d ever said this to.

  But by the look on his face, I could tell he already knew.

  “Aven.”

  I didn’t want his pity, didn’t want him to stand there and try to take back what he said just because he felt sorry for me.

  “Why are you so desperate to take the blame for this?” he asked, his tone making it clear that if I were afraid he was going to feel sorry for me, I’d been mistaken. There was no trace of pity or emotion in his voice. “Is that why you want me to punish you? So that you can feel as if you’re finally getting what you deserve?”

  “Fuck you,” I spit.

  “Because if that’s why, we can stop right now. It was your parents’ responsibility to –”

  “Stop saying that!” I got up from the stool and began to pace back and forth. I resisted the urge to put my hands to my ears, as if that would stop him from saying things I didn’t want to hear.

  “Stop saying what? The truth?” He came to me and grabbed my wrists, his thumbs putting pressure right on my pulse points, my body flushing. “That it was your parents fault for going out on a boat and not checking for life jackets? Any good fisherman knows that you always wear life jackets, Aven. Or at least check if they’re in the fucking boat. Your father should have known better.”

  �
�It wasn’t my dad’s fault,” I said bitterly. I yanked my wrists out of his hands.“ And honestly, I shouldn’t be taking ethics lessons from you, not after the secret you kept from me.”

  “The secret Violet kept from you.”

  “Semantics,” I said. “But that’s always what you do, isn’t it, Landon? Semantics and walls and when it gets too hard, you control me, you punish me. You can’t control everything, Landon. It’s impossible. And when you finally figure that out, I’m not going to feel sorry for you.”

  He looked at me, his eyes blazing at my disobedience, and he opened his mouth to say something, and then he changed his mind. He took a step toward me, but I moved back.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  A wounded look flashed across his face, but I didn’t care.

  “I want my phone back.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, and I let myself believe he was going to take me in his strong arms, that he was going to pull me against his chest, tell me everything was okay, that it was just an accident what happened to my parents, that it was no one’s fault.

  But this wasn’t a dream.

  This wasn’t a fairytale.

  This was real life.

  And in real life, things like that didn’t happen. At least, not to me.

  So in real life, Landon sighed, left the room and returned a few moments later with a phone. It was brand new, still in the box, and he slid it across the island to me. On top was the SIM card from my other phone. “You can call and text Violet and Emma.”

  “What are you talking about?” I unboxed the phone, a shiny brand new black smartphone. It was the kind of phone I would have coveted in the past, the latest version, the newest technology, the fastest specs and biggest memory. The kind of phone I wouldn’t have been able to afford, even if I’d been allowed to make monthly payments.

  “Your phone can only call or text Emma or Violet.”