Trueblood 01-The-Consolation-Prize (4 page)

Only she couldn’t. So why was she here?

She trembled as her gaze slid back to the wooden fire surround. Maybe the people who owned the hall didn’t know how bizarre it really was. Chloe had to admit she was curious to see if the passageway was still there, if the things she’d left as a kid were still around. Why else had she brought the flashlight?

She stood up and walked across the room.
Bad idea. Pack up and go
. That wasn’t her sixth-anda-half sense; that was her common sense. But when her hand opened the drawer she took out the flashlight, not her clothes. Chloe crouched at the base of the fireplace. It hadn’t been used when she lived there, but it was a period feature in a listed building and not to be touched, which was probably why Sunset Spa hadn’t ripped it out. She put her hand up the chimney and felt for the lever. Still there. As she pulled, part of the carved wooden surround slid out. Chloe looked at the wooden mouse standing proud of the other carvings and her heart beat faster.

Taking the mouse in her hand, she twisted left. The fireplace slid into the wall with a grinding crunch, leaving a gap at the side. Chloe switched on her flashlight and crawled into the darkness.

An old habit made her press the lever inside to return the fireplace to the correct position.

The musty smell of stale air and dust held a familiar comfort. It had been Chloe, not her sister, who’d found the passageway. Blabbermouth Lucy had told their mother and the sisters had been threatened progressively with a cold bath every night for a week, no chocolate for a month, and no TV for two months if they played in there. Chloe thought her mother showed a distinct lack of imagination because the bathwater rarely rose above lukewarm, they could buy their own chocolate, and their grandmother behaved like Gollum with the precious TV remote.

But then their grandmother had died. A few months later their grandfather had come home with a dazed look on his face and the elegant Selena on his arm. Chloe’s mother had stressed the girls were never to tell their new grandmother about the secret corridors. Nor were they to call her Grandma. Ever. That instruction came from Selena. Chloe didn’t blame her. Selena was younger than Chloe’s mother and was as far from a grandmother as it was possible to get. Short skirts, high heels, and perky breasts. Chloe wondered what she looked like now.

Despite dire warnings about getting trapped, falling through rotten timbers, encountering family ghosts or flesh-eating insects, the passageways were an irresistible lure to Chloe. She discovered that the narrow channels wove throughout the walls of the house and had found five ways to get into them. There were even hidden stairways between the attic and the basement so she could move around undetected and spy through peepholes. It was unlikely that was still the case. The alterations to the building had probably sealed up most of them. She thought back to the very last time she’d played there. She’d heard her grandfather and his new wife arguing and it was her grandfather who’d been crying. Something to do with sex and Chloe hadn’t listened to more.

What had been fun, suddenly wasn’t.

She’d never been able to figure out why the passageways existed. Lots of old houses in England had priest holes where members of the Roman Catholic clergy hid from soldiers, but why have secret walkways that roamed the whole house? Chloe wondered if the man who had it built wanted to spy on his wife. She had visions of craftsmen being put to death after its construction, like the workers who made the hidden chambers in the pyramids. She imagined skeletons hidden behind the wooden walls and when she told her sister, Lucy hadn’t wanted to play there again.

Chloe moved carefully down the dark corridor, shining the light ahead as well as down. The deeper she went, the more memories flooded back. She tried to look through the spyholes in a couple of places to find they’d been covered over on the other side. Maybe that was just as well.

She was a grown-up now with a more developed sense of guilt.

She descended two levels to the basement and smiled when she illuminated the wider section of passageway where she and Lucy had set up a den. Chloe shone the light around their secret play place and stopped on a shelf of toys. She bit back the gulp in her throat, picked up the dragon, and gave him a hug. A cloud of dust shot into her nose and she struggled to suppress a sneeze.

When she’d been carted off into care, she’d not been given the chance to retrieve the toys hidden here. Her favorite trio, and she’d missed them for a long time.

“Rufus, you need a bath,” she said in a quiet voice.

She put him back next to Angel, the horse that was sometimes a unicorn, and then moved Phoebe to another shelf.

“No fighting over the princess, guys,” she whispered.

There were more treasures in a shoebox: marbles, a compass, novelty erasers that crumbled when she touched them, and a bag of candy.

As Chloe’s watering mouth and growling stomach contemplated whether fifteen-year-old lemon sweets might still be edible, assuming she could break them apart, she heard a soft groan. Her hand froze around the bag. There was no further noise, and she’d begun to convince herself that the sound had been a creak -- timbers settling, maybe something she’d disturbed -- when the noise came again. A definite male groan. Tiptoeing the few steps to the spyhole to look into what had once been a storage area for garden junk, Chloe swung the hinged circle of wood to one side.

Darkness. She hesitated and then shone the flashlight through the hole and tried to peer in at the same time. The beam caught something that almost stopped Chloe’s heart. She sprang back. No way. That couldn’t be what she’d seen. Chloe leaned against the wall and rubbed the flashlight on her itching arm, knowing that she’d have to take another look.

She wasn’t wrong.

Hanging on the far wall was a naked man wrapped in chains.

“Phoebe, get back up here. Angel’s annoying me.”

“Can’t you two behave for a single moment?”

“Rufus’s dust is choking me.”

“And you’re not dusty, Angel?”

“Guys, give it up. We got her here. Now how’s she going to get him free?”

Chapter Four

Chloe jumped away from the spyhole, her heart clamoring to get out of her chest and run back upstairs to hide under her bed, with or without her. She took a deep breath. What was a naked man doing chained up in the basement of a health spa? Chloe chewed her lip and looked again.

His eyes were closed, his head pressed back against the wall, the pain on his face unmistakable.

He was in agony and she couldn’t bear to look at him. She swung the slip of wood into place.

Then her shoulders slumped. She couldn’t leave him like that. Even if she didn’t currently have the means to free him, she could at least reassure him that she’d try.

It took her a moment of shining her flashlight over the wooden panel before she found the lever.

Chloe exhaled shakily, then pulled and twisted in the unique movement that she hoped would slide the panel open. It scraped across the floor as it swung forward. Before the coward in her heart took hold and dragged her back upstairs, she dropped to her knees and crawled through.

“Hello?” she whispered.

No answer. Realizing rather late in the day that he might not be alone, Chloe swept the beam around the room. The light came back to rest on his body. She squeezed her eyes shut, sure she must be hallucinating, and then looked again. He still hung there, his tormented face framed by dark hair. The chains were wrapped tight around his legs, waist, arms, and chest, pinning him in place against the wall like some giant bug.

He didn’t have the body of a bug. Chloe got to her feet and moved the beam over him. Beneath the biting restraints he had a pale, broad chest. His rounded pecs were topped by tight copper nipples. Washboard abs tapered into a narrow waist and trim hips. She didn’t let her eyes drop lower. Well, not immediately. A two seconds pause, quite enough for her to feel virtuous, then she looked down. Wow. He was a big guy. His long, thick cock hung over a bed of dark curls.

Chloe knew she was staring but she couldn’t help it. What the hell was going on? Why was a naked man chained up in the basement of a health spa? She needed to ring the police.

“No police.”

“No police.”

“No police.”

The words flooded her brain. Those messages from her extra sense couldn’t be clearer. Chloe took a deep breath and one step nearer.
Shit
. His chest wasn’t moving. He looked dead. But he’d groaned. Chloe searched for the light switch and after a momentary hesitation, flicked it on.

Instead of the bare bulb that used to hang from the ceiling, the room was illuminated by four wall mounted glass cones. There were no windows. The piles of boxes and gardening equipment had gone and been replaced by things normally found in a bedroom: a wardrobe, a washbasin, a bed, and a rare occurrence in Chloe’s life, a good-looking naked man.

She took a few tentative steps in his direction. She was tall, five feet ten; he was taller. Maybe six feet three. He looked even better close up with his silky dark hair, square chin, angular cheekbones, and long black lashes over closed eyes, but his pale face was tight with pain and his body -- Chloe gulped. His poor body. Where the chain touched him, his skin was red, raw, and in places, bleeding. It looked almost as though the metal was eating into him.

“Er, excuse me?” she whispered.

No response. What could she say? Are you all right? Of course he wasn’t all right. She should call the police.

“No police.”

The voice blasted into her head and echoed around her brain like a ricocheting bullet. Okay, no police. She got it. Chloe tried not to look at the area below his waist, but her gaze slid down. He was beautiful. Every part of him. Chloe turned her head. Much safer to look at the washbasin.

She could give him water only there was no cup, no means to wet his lips. She opened the wardrobe and found a set of clothes. Dark chinos hung next to a creased pale blue shirt and at the bottom sat black lace-up shoes with crumpled socks stuffed inside next to a pair of black shorts.

Chloe checked the pockets of the chinos, found a few coins but no wallet. Ah, a business card.

Black with white writing.

Luka Varek

Rebellion

Tonight

All night

Every night

Odd name. Maybe he wasn’t English. Chloe stripped off her T-shirt, soaked a corner under the cold tap, and went back to him. He didn’t stir when she squeezed water onto his lips. Chloe soothed the material over his face and down his neck. She did the best she could with the rest of his body, trying to ease the areas of skin caught under the chains. There was no excuse to touch his wedding tackle. The chains left that area rather neatly exposed.

Chloe could see no way to free him without cutting the metal. There was no padlock, even if she had a key. In fact, she couldn’t see if there was any start or end to the chain unless it was hidden behind him. It was looped through several rings attached to the wall and wrapped all over him.

“Who’s done this?” she asked, then mentally asked the question she wouldn’t voice.
What did
you do to deserve it?

She didn’t want to believe such a dark, sexy angel had done anything really bad. Chloe wiped his forehead. Who was she kidding? Not angel but devil. This guy looked born for trouble. Her imagination slipped into overdrive and back to her childhood. He’d seduced the spa owner’s young daughter, Phoebe. He was Rufus, a fairy king/dragon who’d tried to drag a guest into his world through the therapeutic waterfall. Or he was into bondage and had asked to be chained up.

Chloe sighed. That was the most sensible thing she’d come up with. Maybe he liked pain.

“No.”

A spike of agony hit straight between her eyes. She clenched her teeth to keep from crying out, and for a few moments struggled to breathe until the pain faded. Her sixth-and-a-half sense getting vicious? Pain didn’t usually accompany the commands. Chloe thought back to the night her family died. Had the voice hurt her then? Had its insistence she leave, been an ache in her head?

“Yes.”

But not pain. Chloe shivered. She’d been drawn here for a reason and it seemed clear that reason hung in front of her. Chloe brushed her finger along his lips. “Wake up.”

Not a flicker.

“Luka? Is that your name? Luka Varek? I’ll come back, Luka. I promise. Just hang on.”

She winced. Under the circumstances, that was an unfortunate phrase.

* * * * *

Chloe drove to Harrogate and only after she parked did she realize that her inner voices had not tried to stop her this time. So this was something she was meant to do -- rescue the hunky naked man from the cellar. Chloe hoped he was grateful. Really grateful. It might seem the wrong place and time but the idea of climbing into bed with him seemed to be occupying rather a lot of her mind. Her mouth watered at the idea of giving him a blowjob. That soft satiny skin sliding over the solid core of his cock. He’d taste -- What the hell was the matter with her?

She jumped out of the car and strode towards the town center. She had to stop thinking about sex and start thinking about how to free him. Bolt cutters were at the top of her list, tricky to track down in a genteel spa town like Harrogate, dominated by up-market fashion boutiques and trendy restaurants. Chloe walked past Betty’s teashop, past all the clothes shops she’d normally have explored, and kept going until she found a hardware store.

The tool purchased -- and she winced at the cost -- gee, she could have bought a shoe to replace the one she’d lost -- she detoured to buy antiseptic cream, packets of sandwiches, cans of a sports drink, and a couple of chocolate bars. Okay, more than couple. If he didn’t want them, she did.

As she pulled into the parking area back at Washburn Hall, she spotted the guy from the garden striding towards her, a scowl on his face. Chloe stepped from the car and grabbed her bags.

“I thought you’d gone,” he said.

“I came back.”