Written on Your Skin by Meredith Duran Read Free Book Online

keep quiet.” The voice caught his attention. It floated to him through layers of darkness, pulling him from—memories, they were memories, they were not happening to him now, he was—in a bed. The darkness was beginning to fracture, bits splitting away, revealing a ceiling, blond hair, a woman’s eyes. Her lips, parted like petals, flowers, the smell of roses. No. Focus. She was speaking to him. “We are alone in this room,” she said. “I have covered the spyholes. But I cannot say who listens at the door.”
    Her statement implied something. His instincts recognized a cause for alarm, but his wits could not work out the reason for it.
    “You need more morphine.” She turned away, and her figure, the room around her, receded.

    His eyes opened. He was looking at a girl. He had done this before. She was speaking to him, but he could not hear her. His bones felt as if they were trying to break out of his skin. His tendons, his sinews, were stretching and vibrating with the effort to hold them in. Every cell in him sang with a sensation so extreme that he could not say whether it was agony or bliss.
    She slapped him across the face. He was staring now at a wall, wallpaper, patterned with flowers. This pain in his jaw was clearer, simpler; he focused on it, and her voice emerged over the babble in his brain. “Breathe,” she said, and something pressed against his nose, cold and metallic. A spoon. It felt vaguely familiar, as if she had done this before. He tried to avert his head. She covered his mouth with her palm, and when he moved to knock it away, he realized he was tied down. “Breathe,” she said, and he breathed.
    Fire raged up his nostril. Bitterness flowed down the back of his throat.
    “It may kill you,” she said. “I don’t know how it interacts with morphine, much less the nightshade.” Her laughter sounded ragged. “Well, at least you’ll feel very cheerful as you die. Collins’s way would not be so pleasant.”
    Collins.
    The word acted like a catalyst. He felt his thoughts reordering, forming straight lines. Collins. Right. He was in Collins’s house. Christ, this girl was Collins’s stepdaughter. The intemperate little flirt who conspired with his body to turn his brain to mud.
    He tried to speak, but his lips and tongue felt like cotton, too thick to shape the words. He throbbed. Everywhere. Looking at her, it was not an entirely unpleasant sensation. He watched through a dreamy haze as she leaned across him. The rope of ebony pearls at her neck fell over his chin, cool and smooth. They felt no smoother than her skin. Her shoulders were white and slim as a child’s, her breasts like the snow-covered slopes of mountains, a dark, scented valley between them. Think. He remembered that dress she was wearing. It matched her eyes, but did her no favors.
    She straightened, a cup in her hand. He could not feel it against his mouth, but liquid splashed onto his chin. The sharpness of alcohol stabbed his nostrils.
    “Swallow,” she said.
    The flirt looked very pale. Her hair was escaping her chignon, white-gold locks framing her face like parentheses. She moved to cover his nose, to force him to swallow, but he twisted away. What the hell was she about? His wrist was bound to the bedpost. That knot looked goddamned professional.
    “It’s only Vin Mariani,” she said. “They call it the French tonic sometimes.”
    He knew the wine. He’d told Collins he wanted to create a brand of it for American distribution. Its main ingredient was not alcohol, but syrup of—“coca.” The word was his, the voice unrecognizable. Hoarse, as though he’d been screaming.
    “Yes.” Laughter escaped her, a low string of it, obscenely musical. She had tied him to the bloody bed, and she was laughing. “And the powder you inhaled—also from coca.” Her lips quirked into a strange smile that made her appear much older. “Mr. Monroe, you will be so full of coca by the time you leave, you won’t even