Anything for Him: Dominated (#1) (5 page)

Gregory stood to one side of his parents;
the wide toothy smile that had gotten him through his life still in place but
Meghan knew just how often he had practiced that smile, and just how false it
was. He had loved to beat her when they were kids, kicking her and hitting her
with his fists when she was sick and he had to stay indoors rather than go out
on the sailboat with their parents. She had told him once that they had left
him, not because they were afraid he was sick too, but because they didn’t want
him around anymore than they wanted her. He had broken a rib that day and told
their parents that she had done it falling out of a tree. She had been grounded
for the entire school year.

She felt the same helpless fear she
always felt around the trio but Danny’s fingers stroked along her arm and he
whispered, “I love the way you look tonight. I might have to have someone paint
you,” and fear disappeared, replaced by a hot and unquenchable lust.

“Meghan?” Gloria Lowry’s face registered
the same displeasure at the sight of her daughter that it always had, “What are
you doing here?”

“Maybe she has come to rob us.” Gregory
joked.

All across the room heads turned and
voices were dropped to whispers. Meghan felt her face flaming red.

“Thieves do seem to be bred, don’t they?”
Danny asked casually. “Perhaps that would explain why it is that you,” he
addressed that to Tom, her father, “looted her inheritance and then claimed to
have used it to pay restitution.”

“I beg your pardon!” Gregory exclaimed.
“How dare you come in here and accuse my father of wrongdoing!”

“I have no issue accusing him of that
because it is true. I checked into it, not one cent has been paid in
restitution and yet her trust was broken nearly six months ago. I am sure that
some of these people here have been told that as soon as your lawyers manage to
open your wayward daughter’s trust they will be paid back for all of their
missing items. Which, by the way, were never sold by Meghan and I can prove
that as I bought some of the items and have the name of the man who sold them,
at your behest.”

Meghan stared up at him. She had kept
every single thing she had ever stolen, and had told her father where she had
hidden them. She had been confused by the legal jargon and terribly frightened.
She had honestly believed that once she had given everything back it was going
to be okay. She had had no idea that she had even had a trust fund, she could
not fathom what Danny was saying but the effect of his words was obvious on her
family.

Her father had gone pale and her mother
had stepped back, her eyes darting through the crowd that was gathered there in
her home. “Get out of my house!” she said in a hard whisper, ‘And take that
little tramp with you!”

“I am going,” Danny said softly, “But
know this; I am going to bring you down. I am going to make sure that you know
exactly what it is like to be out on the street and broke. I am going to make
sure it is your turn to suffer.”

“She is not worth it,” Gloria snarled,
her teeth rising up to reveal her beautiful little white teeth.

“Who says I am doing it for her?” Danny
asked cruelly. “I have all of your assets and shareholders in my pocket. I have
enough evidence to have you convicted on several crimes, not the least of which
is stealing your daughter’s money, money left to her by her grandmother. Trust
me, I am going to enjoy making you suffer.”

Meghan could not breathe. Tears stood out
in her eyes and she managed to whisper, “You took my money?” before she was
being propelled back down the hall and into the cool night air.

Danny put her in the limo and gave his
driver the order to drive away before he spoke to her.

“You belong to me. Do you understand? You
belong to me. That means you will be loyal, you will obey and you will serve.
In return I will protect you. I keep what is mine, and I keep it safe. You are
safe with me.”

Tears soaked her face and she looked out
the window at the shrubbery that marked the boundary of the property that she
had grown up on, for some reason those well clipped hedges made her think of
the fence that had surrounded the jail.

“I have something for you.”

Meghan blinked at the solid silver cuffs
that Danny dangled in front of her face, “Will you take these? Will you agree
to be mine?”

“Yes,” she whispered and held out her
slender arms.

The right cuff locked down, then the
left. There was no chain between the two; to a casual observer the twin cuffs
would have looked like a very lovely set of bracelets, but for the tiny little
locks that hung on the underside of her wrists.

It was strange but she had the
unassailable feeling that he had somehow managed to free her by taking her
prisoner.

~ * ~ * ~

Danny watched the night sliding past the
windows but his thoughts were far away. He had known that Meghan’s parents had
not cared about her, and that her burglaries had provided them with an easy way
to excise her from their lives so that they could legally take the trust set up
for her. The trust had been ironclad; it could only be opened if Meghan herself
caused a financial burden of catastrophic proportions. Her grandmother had
seemed determined to protect her, though why she had felt that need was still
something of a mystery to him.

He had studied the Lowry’s ever since he
had been a kid. He knew everything about them. Just reading through her files
had given him a strong sense of kinship with Meghan and knowing her personally
had made him feel that bond again. He had been unloved and disregarded as well,
and while he knew she had suffered in that manner he had not expected the
almost palpable amount of hatred her family held for her. He had not known that
their resentment towards her was so visible.

I should have known and I never should
have taken her there, he castigated himself as he stared at Meghan’s ashen
face. The silver tracks of her tears hurt his heart and he had to stop himself
from reaching out a hand to comfort her. He knew from hard experience that the
things that hurt people the most were the ones they were the least likely to
want to talk about, or to be comforted over.

He decided to speak. The silver cuffs on
her wrists had soothed her but she was withdrawing and he wanted to bring her
back.

“Your family, they dislike you because,
quite frankly, you control the sum total of their fortune. Or rather, you did.
When you reached twenty-one the trust was supposed to revert to you. The
business was also yours, and the truth is they stole it out from under you.”

“You must be mistaken.” Meghan whispered.
“My father owns the company; it was left to him by his mother.”

“Your father had a brother, you had an
uncle. No one ever discussed him, I take it? Regardless, he was the apple of
your grandmother’s eye. He was also a bit of a hell raiser and one hell of a
businessman. Before he was twenty-two he had made three million dollars for the
company. He opened up a whole new division; he brought jobs to this city, and
gave a lot of people hope. Then he died in a car crash and your father
inherited.”

“I heard stories of my uncle,” Meghan
said softly. “My grandmother used to come visit me and tell me stories about
him. I was only five or so when she died so I don’t remember much about her but
I remember that she always fed me ginger cookies and root beer and told me
stories about Uncle Michael. I thought she made him up, truly. She made him
sound like a superhero.”

“He was a good guy.”

“How do you know?”

“He gave me a glove at a company softball
game.”

“You knew my uncle?’

“Yes, my parents worked for the company
then.”

Meghan was not sure what to say to that.
“So what does my uncle have to do with my parents and me?”

“Your grandmother didn’t like your
father; she thought he was a fool and that he would run the family business
into the ground. Incidentally she was correct on both counts. Add to that the
fact that your mother was not her choice as a daughter-in-law and what you come
up with is a woman who decided to will everything to you.”

“But why me? Why not Gregory?”

That was a question he had asked himself
quite often, and to no avail. He had no idea why her grandmother had chosen her
over her grandson but she had. Before he could say that Meghan spoke again, “Do
you think Gregory knew about the money?”

“He was unkind to you, wasn’t he?”

She didn’t answer, she didn’t have to.
Danny read the answer in her downcast eyes and the teeth that bit down on her
bottom lip. She had pride, and that filled him with admiration and pleasure in
his choice, but he also wished she had trust enough to tell him.

Trust given too lightly or taken by force
was never really trust and she had come a long way, she wore his cuffs and if
he had his way she would wear an object that said, more than any other, that
she was his and that he owned her completely, that she trusted him with
everything. He decided to be content with knowing that Gregory had hurt her and
even as he patted her knee in a roughly affectionate gesture he added one more
reason to his long list of them to seek revenge on the Lowry family.

But she’s a Lowry, he told himself. That
halted his thoughts for a moment. He wondered just how far he could go in that
revenge before some vestige of loyalty to those who had raised her reared its
head, if it did at all.

Meghan was unaware of Danny’s line of
thinking. She was too exhausted to even attempt to comprehend it all, it was mind-boggling.
She was the person who held the purse strings of her family’s fortune? That
explained a lot of why they had treated her so horribly, they had to have resented
being cut out of the will. Another thought occurred to her, “What did you mean
when you said my father ran the company into the ground?”

“It’s almost bankrupt. Your parents, and
your brother, have lavish spending habits. While your father has good business
sense he also has a taste for the most extreme and the best of everything. When
the company ran into some financial difficulties instead of curbing the
personal spending he bought a new yacht and laid off three hundred employees,
he shut down an entire division.”

“How do you know that?”

“My family was among those laid off. The
official statement said that the division was being closed due to its not being
as profitable as it could be and the fact that labor was cheaper overseas. Two
days after that the newspaper’s society section showed a picture of your
parents christening the new yacht.”

“I’m sorry your parents lost their jobs.”

The sincerity in her voice did nothing to
quell the ever-present sting of their deaths. His father had killed himself in
utter despair after the mortgage company had finally repossessed their home and
his mother had turned to dancing in a tiny strip club on the seediest section
of town just to try to keep them in a place to live. One night she had decided
to go outside of the club for a private party, one of the other girls she had
hung out with had gone as well. They had both been killed. The police report
said that the two women had gotten caught in a dope deal gone wrong. His mother
had fought the attackers; she had been beaten severely but had managed to fight
them enough to run. She had almost made it out of the house too, but had been
caught in the blind alley and the five bullets in her back had ended her life.
The cops had found his photograph in her wallet alongside her driver’s license.
The men who killed her had taken her money.

Looking at Meghan he wondered if revenge
for what his parents had suffered was the only reason he was attracted to her
but it only took one look at her green eyes and curling red hair to know that
was not the case. She was not just beautiful; she was everything he had wanted.
He did not believe they had met by chance, he did not believe in chance, what
he believed in was making one’s own Fate. And she was just that, his destined
lover.

“We are not going to my apartment?”

“No, you don’t need to be alone tonight.”

What he didn’t say was that he wanted her
close to him - that he wanted her to sleep next to him. Her slim shoulders
drooped with exhaustion and there were dark circles under her eyes from stress.
That made him even angrier at her family but he pushed that anger aside.

“It’s too bad the past is never as simple
as you think,” Meghan said.

That startled Danny so much that all he
could do was agree.

~ * ~ * ~

The sun slipped its lemony yellow fingers
through the narrow opening between the expensive drapes and Meghan rolled over,
watching the pearly gray gloom of the room lift and turn rosy then golden. She
loved the peace of early mornings, loved the feeling of being alone in a waking
world.

Danny was still asleep and she rolled
over, her eyes examining the high planes of his cheekbones, the sharp line of
his jaw. In sleep his mouth lost the sensual sneer it typically wore and he
looked more innocent but just as handsome.