Puppet Master

Chapter Three

"What the fuck am I doing?” he paced behind the couch, tearing at his hair, pulling those beautiful midnight blue strands from their pores, he screamed in frustration, doubling over like with an almost physical pain.

It was so completely out of character for Jayden: he was always in complete control, even at the pinnacle of fury, his muscles were always tensed, his eyes always focused, but never once had she seen him lash out as her brothers would have done, his anger was always cased up in his voice, set as it was at such a deep timbre that it would run down your spine in drips of molten lava.  His steps didn’t waver, and neither did the incessant muttering, but Tori hadn’t a clue what he was trying to say, she was simply bewildered, petrified in exactly the same pose as he’d left her. Arms and legs flayed, like a starfish, and an expression of shock, and daze warring across her face.

Feeling suddenly self-conscious, she reached for her blanket, and sat up against the back of the sofa, drawing her knees in close to her chest. “I’m sorry,” she whimpered, silent tears rolling down her cheeks, as she dealt with the rejection; the humiliation and shame of what had almost just happened in the wake of such a tragedy bearing down across her shoulders so that she slumped into her knees like a ragdoll.  How could she be thinking like this here? How could she be so selfish, so hedonistic?

Whatever self-annihilation was going on behind her was soon lost as he crouched before the petite figure on the sofa, whose eyes, a deep dark amethyst with the throes of her first tastes of arousal just minutes earlier, had now turned into a violent concoction of misery, despair, disgust and devastation.

Crushing her slender pale hands between both of his own, he urged her to look up at him, “Tori, no, honey, you didn’t do anything wrong, it was me, it was all me, I’m sorry. Honey, it wouldn’t be right.” He took a deep sigh, clearly, for once in his life, struggling to choose the right words to express himself and his feelings. He wouldn’t bother usually, she thought, baffled by the turn of events that the last fifteen minutes had taken.

Stunned, still sniffling away her tears, she looked up into his eyes. Although he was crouched before her, she was still only level with his chin, even from her elevated position on the couch, and didn’t that just make him feel even more of a bastard. She looked little more than a child, which she wasn’t.  At seventeen, she was just a baby, both her brothers and her parents having cosseted her, smothered her, her whole life. Both hands reached up to rub across his face desperately, oh what the fuck?

Everything about her was ethereal; her pale skin as smooth as silk, platinum hair that reached all the way to her waist like a gauze curtain across her body. She had a magic in her, because of her youth, every fairy tale wish a little girl could have spilled from her. And then there were the eyes, somewhere between gray, and blue, they emerged as a pale and dusky violet, and she had neither the will or the ability to hide any emotion from them, as they broadcast every single sensation that passed over her. He wasn’t a Prince Charming, he’d never pick up a girl in a glass coffin, or even go as far as crossing the river in search of a ... ahem, love, never mind fight through miles of thorn bushes. But she saw him that way, and it could be addictive for him, that kind of hero worship, he could feed off it, but it would destroy her.

“Then ... But ... Why? Surely you”, she gulped down the next words as a shadow passed across his face. She knew it was over then.” You wanted me.” Her voice was a pitiful mutter, almost a plea, and it just sent her shame spiralling down the rabbit hole after her. She wasn’t even looking at him, but she could hear his teeth grind together, envisaging that muscle that ticked in his jaw as he did it.

“You know I care for you Tor, but just, not like that.” She looked up in astonishment, because five minutes ago, he’d been grinding an erection into her that proved him a liar, beyond any reasonable doubt. She spluttered her disbelief, as the tears re-emerged to cement the humiliation. She refused to call him on it with words, instead lifting her head to look at his face, silently begging him to take it back.

He didn’t. Obviously. One look at his face told her he wouldn’t. He was cast back to that unemotional Adonis that he usually was. “When you look at a man like that, sweetheart, it’s hard for him to refuse, and I acted on an instinct that I should know better to turn down. But I’m just a man, honey, I’m not bloody Superman! I just , oh, I don’t know. It’s,” his eyes had glazed over, like he was not even in the room anymore, but somewhere else, searching inwards for the right words to say, taking a deep breath, weighing up his words, “You’re not what I want honey. I like my women with experience, so that they know what page I’m on, so that there’s no ... confusion.” He cleared his throat discreetly.

“Confusions?” Her question seemed to solidify his resolve, of course it did. For magical seconds, he looked her straight in the eye, a curious quiet blanketing across his face, as though he were laying a small child to sleep. With olive skin, and hair the colour of a twilight, when Jayden Caine looked you in the eye, you were drawn in like he was pulling on a string for you. The pale sapphire colour was such a gorgeous contrast, and the gaze behind them so intense, that she just couldn’t help herself as she leaned forward to put her lips to his at the exact second that he stood to his full height and towered over her, with a sigh, leaving her bereft, confused, as though she was waking up from a hypnotists trance after spending the last twenty minutes pretending to be a chicken.

“Confusion, Vittoria. You’re not, and never will be, what I want in my bed, and I should never have led us into the situation we just found ourselves in. It can never happen again.”

“But why? Because of what my brother would think? Other people? Why?  Tell me Jayden, please!” Her voice broke on her last words, and the tears threatened again, sounding no more grown up than Oliver Twist asking for an extra bowl of gruel, which was exactly how she felt ... like he was stealing her sustenance, which was bloody idiotic, she knew, but not something she could help while she was way too focused on her explicit heartbreak.  

He sighed resolutely, and looked intently into the mirror above the grand fireplace in her lounge, at his own granite reflection. “No Tor, because of what you might think.”

As he shook his head, she knew that that last sentence had been the only truth he’d spoken so far, and just as she opened her mouth to question his puzzling statement, he picked up his worn leather jacket from the hat stand in the corner of the spacious lounge, and slung it across his shoulder, “I’ll call Nate to come and stay with you, he was working late this evening on the paperwork, and I only went over to pick up the merger proposal for a meeting we’ve got tomorrow, when the police called. I need to get home, look over it.”

Without a backward glance, he was gone. End of conversation.

Tori’s chest heaved with a sigh and sob, as her heart splintered and fractured. Dazed and shaken, she realised for the first time that evening, just how lonely she would be. Curling into a foetal position within her baby blanket, she cursed the sense of abandonment that furrowed its way through to the bone.

As her darkest hour descended, she cursed whatever magic had led her to fall in love with Jayden, a man who looked at her with fury in his eyes, because that was all he had left to give anymore.

Always the same with Jayden Caine.

It was always his cue that you worked to.