Breathe (31 page)

He wanted to be left alone. But he didn’t want to
be
alone, which was why he couldn’t handle the idea of drinking by himself at home right now.

Alcohol consumption was closely monitored in Veritas, because drunkenness and BDSM play were a dangerous combination. But with Samantha gone he wasn’t planning on doing another scene again tonight.

Forcing himself to lift his wineglass, he sipped at the ruby liquid inside the expensive glass. It tasted sour on his tongue, a reflection of his mood, he knew, and not the wine.

“Two fingers of Jameson’s, water back,” a rough and familiar voice said to the bartender, and Elijah felt a thread of anger slide through him as Robert, an older Dom who had been one of the first members of Veritas, took the barstool beside him.

Elijah forcibly swallowed his irritation. As one of the owners, it was his job to be polite, even when he didn’t necessarily want to be. And Robert was a good friend—he didn’t deserve to get pissed on just because Elijah was in a shitty mood.

“Saw you with your sub earlier,” Robert said. Elijah tamped back a glower as he turned to look at him. The other Dom was in his seventies, but age hadn’t diminished his stature. He was large, though not as big as Luca, and had a way of filling the space around him.

He just wanted to drink in peace and wallow in his anger at Samantha. Couldn’t he do that in his own damn bar?

Humming out a noncommittal noise, Elijah stared into the depths of his glass as Luca delivered a glass of whiskey to the newcomer. Elijah watched from the corner of his eye as Robert sniffed the potent fumes, took a long swallow, and sighed with apparent satisfaction.

“Yep, saw you with your sub. Was a mite jealous, truth be told.”

“Bit young for you, isn’t she?” White-hot possession flooded Elijah, and his fingers tightened on the stem of his wineglass as he turned to glare at the other man.

“You wound me, Master E. I’ve still got some swagger.” The man held up his arms, signaling that he came in peace, though Elijah saw the spark at being challenged by another Dom.

“I’m not trying to move in on your lady. She reminded me of Gladys.”

Even at his age, Robert was a powerful enough Dom that he drew the attention of subs twenty years his junior. He hadn’t touched any of them since his wife and longtime submissive, Gladys, had passed away the year before.

Though he no longer participated, he still came to the club. It felt like home, he said.

Elijah was inclined to agree—even with the emptiness he was feeling at Samantha’s departure.

“The way your sub responded to you was what put me in mind of Gladys. A connection like that is rare.”

This time the older Dom caught Elijah’s full attention. He turned, his eyes homing in on his target. “What do you mean?” he asked, trying to tamp down the terrible hope. He had no business thinking the way he was. Samantha had made her choice, and any Dom worth his salt abided by those hard limits set by their other halves.

“She was so entirely focused on you. It was gorgeous to see. So submissive to you, even when Big Guy here was in the scene.” Robert gestured to Luca, then rubbed a hand over his forehead. “Made me miss Gladys right hard, it did.”

It took an extreme effort for Elijah to keep his emotions from running riot over his face. There were hundreds of Doms and Dommes who carried memberships to Veritas. Out of that number, only a handful were experienced enough, comfortable enough in the lifestyle to turn dominance into an art form.

Robert was one of them. He was dominant to his core—had been, to Elijah’s understanding, for his entire adult life. A lifetime of experience had given the man unrivaled skills of observation.

And Robert had seen complete submission from Samantha in their scene?

What was he seeing that Elijah wasn’t?

Sipping at the wine without tasting it, Elijah regarded the other man thoughtfully, noted that, true to form, Robert was looking around the play area, taking in everything that happened around him.

“I think that sub and I might have parted ways.” Elijah chose his words carefully, not liking how they sounded. “I don’t think she has what it takes to be fully submissive to me.”

Beside him the former soldier snorted inelegantly, finishing his whiskey and sliding the empty glass across the counter. He turned to look Elijah in the eye, and Elijah felt a hint of kinship, Dom recognizing Dom.

“I’ve been in the lifestyle for fifty-two years.” Though Robert’s eyes followed the path of a pretty sub with long gray hair as she walked by, he didn’t look further, reminding Elijah that that connection between himself and Samantha, between Robert and Gladys, wasn’t something that could be found with just anyone. “And I topped a lot of subs before I met my wife. Some are a hell of a lot more work than others, but in my experience those are the ones whose submission is the sweetest. Hell, I scooped up the most ornery one I ever came across quick as I could. And I’m telling you, that pretty redhead of yours was giving in to you in a way that makes me think she would only ever submit to you. No one else.”

Robert slid off his barstool, then nodded to Elijah. “Of course, if you own a place like this, you’ve probably never had to work too hard with a sub. They probably throw themselves at you. And I hate to offer advice when it hasn’t been asked for, but you looked like you could use some.”

And with that the man was gone, muttering something that sounded like “stubborn young pup” as he stalked away.

Elijah stared after the older man, turning the abrupt, unexpected conversation over in his head.

Robert had had some hard truths for him. And despite himself, Elijah could feel himself heeding his advice. Since Tara, since he and his friends had opened Veritas, he hadn’t had to work for a sub at all. Hadn’t wanted to, preferring to keep it casual.

Samantha . . . She’d crept up on him because she was different.

And he liked it.

Carelessly shoving the glass of wine aside, Elijah stood from his own barstool and walked to the exit, his stride suddenly full of purpose.

They had problems to deal with—that was for sure. And he was still pissed as hell at her—damn it, her words had sliced right through him.

But he was damned if he was going to let her slip away without a fight. It was time to push a bit more.

It seemed that he was about to take a trip to Colorado.

•   •   •

S
amantha looked down at the two sleeping women in the small hospital room. One was in a hospital bed that had the rails up, an IV pumping clear liquid into her hand. Her skin was so pale that Samantha could see the bluish veins running just beneath its surface.

The other woman curled in fetal position on a small, lumpy cot. Though her pallor was better than that of the older woman, she still had amethyst smudges beneath her eyes.

It was impossible to miss the resemblance between the two—and between them and herself, she realized. The same large eyes, the same straight nose. Though Beth’s hair was pale strawberry to Samantha’s red fire, and Gemma’s was bleached bottle blond, the three women were still clearly related.

Resentment surged as Samantha looked down at the woman who had given her life. She tried to feel sympathy, love—
something
.

Instead there was only bitterness, bitterness tainted with the bloodred hue of rage. And layered underneath was panic, the clawing need to flee back to what she’d left behind in Vegas.

“Sam?” Beth’s voice was hoarse as she sat up slowly and looked around owlishly. “How did you get here so fast?”

“I wasn’t in Mexico.” Samantha kept her voice deliberately light and her eyes trained on the only person in the room that she cared about.

Beth frowned but didn’t press, seeming too sleep muddled to push further.

“Thanks for coming.” Rubbing her eyes, Beth lay back down on the tiny cot. To Samantha, Beth seemed to shrink back into the teenager who had needed Samantha’s support.

“How are you feeling?” Samantha whispered.

“I’m doing better.”

Samantha repressed the urge to throttle her mother. Without the extra stress from her mother’s incident, Beth would have been feeling just fine.

Smoothing her messy strands of her hair away from her face, Samantha perched herself on the edge of her sister’s cot. They both stared at their mother for a long time, and Samantha wondered if there was something missing inside her, some emotional capacity that would have allowed her to care about her mother.

Gemma had wronged her in so many ways, the biggest of which was something that had radically altered the way she saw the world. But surely she should have still felt
something
for the woman in whose womb she had lived for nine months.

“I wish you’d come with me,” Samantha said, staring down at her hands. They were pale, the skin crisscrossed with thin burns from her hot glass.

“I wish you’d come home,” Beth replied, and Samantha bit back a sigh. It wasn’t a new conversation, but it was one they still had from time to time.

She couldn’t move back without facing the trauma of her past. And she couldn’t exorcise it without telling Beth what had happened.

“My girls.”

Samantha lurched as the cigarette-ravaged voice rasped over from the hospital bed.

“Both of you here to see me. It’s about time.” Gemma gestured feebly with her left hand, found it connected to an IV, and scowled. She turned the disapproving stare onto Samantha, eyeing her up and down before saying, “You certainly don’t look like you’ve been in Mexico. You spreading lies again?”

Samantha’s nails dug into her palms and she narrowly avoided shouting. An extreme reaction like that was what her mother wanted—she
wanted
to play the martyr, the saint whose elder daughter had run away for no good reason.

The woman thrived on drama. Because of that, both of her daughters hated it.

“I’m not here to see you, and I don’t care what you believe or not.” The latter was a lie. Samantha had once cared very much about whether her mother believed her, and at the time when she’d most needed her to, she hadn’t.

“Let’s not argue,” Beth pleaded, wringing her own pale hands together. Samantha swallowed back the nasty retort that was on the tip of her tongue, ready to fling it in her mother’s direction, but she swallowed it down instead, knowing that Beth hated any conflict.

Samantha sat, frozen, her fingers clutching the blanket on the cot as Gemma and Beth chatted, mostly about the things that Gemma perceived as having gone wrong since she’d been admitted—the food, the attitude of the nurses, what the stay was going to cost. Samantha wanted to strangle the woman—if she hadn’t tried to drink herself to death, none of them would have been at the hospital in the first place.

She tried to tune the words out, the strange, tense ebb and flow an angry song to her ears.

“—still don’t understand what all that nonsense is about,” Gemma was saying, scowling at Beth, who looked pleadingly at their mother. “Surely you can just control it with diet. You must not be eating well, if your whatchamacallem levels are too high.”

Samantha watched as Beth’s mouth fell open for a long moment. Something more potent than irritation lashed through her as she saw her sister open her mouth to respond, then close it again with a shake of her head.

It was unbelievable. After so many years, that Gemma had no idea of anything about her own daughter’s chronic illness was unthinkable.

Standing, her muscles stiff with tension, Samantha stalked to her mother’s bed, waving her finger in the air.

“Beth is a diabetic, you coldhearted bitch.”

Gemma sucked in a wounded breath. She looked hurt.

If the shoe fits, and all that.

“I don’t know what that means.” Raising her nose in the air, Gemma sniffed, rather like a dog that had examined its breakfast and found it lacking.

“It means that you should have learned all of this years ago, when Beth first got sick. You should have been the one taking her to the emergency room, figuring out what the hell was wrong with her. You should have been the one up with her in the night, checking to make sure her blood sugar levels stayed steady.” Samantha fisted suddenly sweaty fingers in the loose cotton of her T-shirt. When she realized that she’d actually said the words instead of just thinking them, she began to tremble.

But it felt
good
, getting it out. Better than she could ever have imagined.

Samantha watched as something uneasy seemed to flicker through Gemma’s eyes, so similar to her own. It was quickly covered with the cool composure that Samantha had seen on the older woman throughout her whole life.

“If you’ve got something to say, then say it, girl.” Gemma regarded her coolly.

Samantha looked back, not daring to turn away, and noticed anew that her eyes were the exact same shape and color as her mother’s.

No matter what she’d done, she hadn’t been able to forget where she’d come from. So maybe it was time to start confronting instead of running.

A trickle of excitement worked its way through her rage. If she could do it, if she could face this, then maybe it wouldn’t be too late to make things right with Elijah.

With an uneasy look at Beth—the younger sister she’d tried so hard to protect—Samantha turned back and faced her mother.

“How could you do it?” she asked quietly. Bitterness coated her tongue as the rage and disappointment of years past tried to flood through the small door she’d opened inside herself.

On the bed, the sickly woman shifted fretfully, her eyes darting away from her daughter.

“Don’t you dare say you don’t know what I’m talking about,” Samantha said, cutting her mother off when the woman opened her mouth, not giving her a chance to deny it. From the corner of her eye she saw Beth shift uneasily, and Samantha cringed as she understood she couldn’t protect her kid sister anymore.

“I told you what he did,” Samantha continued quietly. Though she wanted nothing more than to look away—to run away—she forced herself to study her mother. The years hadn’t been kind to Gemma Collins, a woman once so beautiful that she’d attracted scores of wealthy men.