In Love with My Kidnapper's Son

If you're having difficulty viewing chapter two, the link is: http://www.wattpad.com/1410285-in-love-with-my-kidnapper%27s-son-chapter-one-part .

                                                                                    Grey Silk

                                                                                Chapter One

Her eyelids closed. She concentrated on the soft brush of his breath against her neck and the insistent pounding his over-active heart created. She wanted to let the sensations lull her back into the kind of blissful state she usually experienced in his arms. But she was too anxious to revert back to that condition. Her father’s phone call had put her on edge, and she now wanted nothing but reassurance.

 “Do you think he really meant it?” The question lingered in the air, its worried tone mirroring the concern her down-turned lips expressed. She had just finished relating the abrupt ending of her father’s phone call to her boyfriend. Damien had listened intently, but she had found him gradually edging over the cushion of the couch they sat on until barely half a centimeter separated the two. As she talked about the ominous phone call, the thought had occurred to her that the weighty conversation would most likely fall short if she didn’t shove him away. But as she stared up at him, the adoration she found occupying his expression stopped her. She had given in and rested her head against his shoulder, closing her eyes to further soak in his presence.

 Damien made a low “hmmm” sound, but his concentration didn’t stop him from gently placing an arm around her shoulders. “I’m sure he meant nothing by it, Ava,” he finally said.

These words did nothing to calm Ava’s rapidly rising level of anxiety; they came out stilted, and Damien’s silken tones did little to mask the obvious lie. She swallowed, thinking back to the phone conversation. When she had first heard the deep baritone of her father’s voice, she had almost begun hyperventilating. Five years had passed since she had heard that voice. Five years since she had been kidnapped. Five years of peace.

She thought back to that night, the one that had so dramatically altered her life. She could still remember letting out a shriek before something hard crashed into her head and enveloped her in darkness. When she had awakened, she discovered the hard thing was an elbow, and that she had been transported far away from her childhood home. Northern Idaho, they told her. Such a distance from sunny Southern California.

And then there was the matter of finding the identity of “they”. There was James, a shifter and the head of the make-shift family. Then his three adopted sons of various ages and species: Damien, another shifter, Hayden, a werecat, and Logan, the sole werewolf of the family. And last was Maddy, James’s only daughter and a werecat.

James had expected nothing but fear from Ava when she first awoke, and this was exactly what he received from the twelve-year old. She had been taught by her father to fear Shadows, in all the shapes and sizes the monsters came in. The added fact that Ava knew James to be her father’s rival and enemy only increased her terror.

But eventually, as Ava found herself unharmed, she had slowly warmed up to the family of Shadows. Damien and Maddy became her friends, both being the same age as her. Hayden became a welcome, if allusive, older brother, and Logan obtained the position of the crazy uncle that occasionally came home to spread cheer and havoc to all.

In the months that followed her kidnapping, she had practically forgotten she was a “victim” of a crime. Naturally, James found this odd. He knew Ava was too old to just forget about her old life and father. That left only one explanation, the one Ava had been trying to hide from them: That she didn’t miss any of these things.

James, being the soothing person he was, soon managed to coax the truth out of her. Ava admitted to him that her father, when not leading his followers against Shadows, was nothing but an abusive drunk. The day Ava told James this was the day she felt his feelings toward her shift. He no longer looked at her like a queen in a game of chess, a special piece to reserve for just the right power-move. That day she turned into one of the family, just another adopted child for James to care for.

Since then, things had remained much the same. She was just a member of the family, not a kidnap victim or the daughter of an enemy. Really the only difference came from her relationship with Damien. He had bonded with her when they were sixteen, something everyone had been expecting. He had always been attached to Ava and protective of her. But his shifter instincts had taken over soon after his sixteenth birthday, and any love he had felt for her had been multiplied an infinite amount of times. Ava had become his “bond”, and he’d been madly in love ever since.

“What are you thinking about?”

Damien’s words broke into her thoughts, and she blinked to clear them away. “Nothing. Well, you, I guess. And our family.”

A chuckle rolled from Damien’s lean chest; the sound was like a stray strand of silk drifting through the wind, rich and smooth. Ava had learned to resist the urge to shiver at this sound, but its unnatural tones never failed to remind her of her boyfriend’s true nature. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

“I was just thinking about our ‘family’. James is slightly insane for keeping us all around, you know.”

Ava smirked, but didn’t try to disagree. A frown then overtook her face as she thought back to the phone conversation she had just completed.

Damien sighed, and he wrapped his arms tighter around Ava’s waist, pulling her closer to his chest. “What are you so worried about?” he asked softly. “You know your dad doesn’t mean a thing he says.”

Ava nodded. Her dad had done this before, three years earlier. He had called James, demanding to have his daughter back and saying nothing would stop him from getting her back “home”. Nothing had ever come from it. But now, Ava felt like that was about to change. Sometime about the way he had told her over the phone that he would be getting her back sent chills down her spine. She felt like he really meant it this time.

“Besides,” Damien continued, “even if your dad does really try to get you back, it’s not like James would ever let him take you.”

“You’re right,” Ava said. But her words came out forced, with no real assurance behind them.

Damien kissed her neck. “Butterfly?”

She tilted her head back in response to this nickname she both adored and abhorred at the same time. Her gaze was met with the same picture it always found; square jaw, tan skin, and two molten gold eyes that perfectly complimented his shaggy head of blonde hair. The picture of Damien. “Yeah, Dami?”

He smiled, tightening his arms around her even more. “I would never let him take you.”

Ava leaned closer into him, finding reassurance in both his presence and words. While her father had taught her to fear and despise all Shadows, she had grown to love Damien, regardless of his species. She truly didn’t care that he was a shifter; the fact that he had four retractable claws hiding in his forearms and stone-like flesh only made the golden hue of his eyes all the more mysterious and alluring to her.

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End of Part One of Chapter One. This Chapter will be completed in Part Two of Chapter One. Thanks for reading!