“Follow,” he ordered, “I’ll show you the private gardens.”

Around the house and down a wide stretch of open grass with a path built through the middle of it. I’d once seen pictures of the grounds of the estates of old monarchs in Europe, the sort of estates that they had while the peasants starved on scraps of bread and water. Big and wide and rectangular with gravel paths cutting through them, maybe a statue or a fountain in the middle of them breaking up the expanse and all of it to prove that they could afford to keep viable land for entertainment alone when crops were a necessity.

Understanding that objectively was one thing, but experiencing it here I understood it deep within myself. This was a neighborhood where lots were measured in acres while surrounded by a city where property was measured in feet. I had a lot of space in the land around my house, enough that it would take me a while to walk the length of it.

But Aiden had an estate. He had places to hide and places to keep things hidden. His luxury, it was on another level.

At the end of the gardens there was a small path into a dense wood and this was where he led me, walking through the twisting turns of it in silence because silence was all that was necessary.

There were no varieties of rare flowers for him to point out, no statues for him to provide the provenance of. It was just dense and old and knotted trees and a path that would have been overgrown save for the dragging of feet and the fact that the masters of this land seemed to will it to exist.

And Aiden didn’t need to tell me other things either. He didn’t need to tell me that there were servants on this property but none would dare to come here. That this forest was for the master of the land and him alone, and that Aiden, last heir of his legacy, was in absolute control here.

Nor did he need to tell me that no one knew we were here.

When we’d walked so long that I’d lost track of time the forest opened into a clearing that didn’t show the sky. The dense forest cover was overhead and all around us and the packed earth ground had given way to a cover of soft moss and clover on the ground, thick and pillowy.

If I closed my eyes I could hear nothing, for not even the rustling of wind dared to intrude on this place where he was in absolute control. Nothing would happen here that he didn’t want to have happen, and everything that he wanted would come to pass.

I heard giggling, nervous giggling, and it took me a long while to realize that it was coming from me. In shock, I clapped a hand over my mouth and my eyes went wide as I watched him slowly turn to look at me.

I realized dimly and too late that Aiden was standing between me and the path we’d come from, and realized that the dense trunks of the trees around us meant that was the only path in or out. If I wanted to leave I’d have to go through him.

But that presumed that I wanted to leave.

“I thought you brought me here for coffee,” I said softly, noting the contrast between the pounding beat of my heart and the volume of my voice.

“That is what I said,” he responded calm, even.

I smiled nervously, eyes darting around the clearing, “I don’t see a coffee pot out here or cups or any of those things.”

My eyes returned back to him and the hungry look in his eyes drained me of my humor. When he spoke again it was cold and piercing.

“Do you really want coffee?”

Aiden took a step closer and opened up space around him. I could step to one side and run and get away, hell I could walk away if I wanted to. Nothing was keeping me here but the magnitude of him and the draw that he had on me.

He was bad. He was damn near close to evil. He knew my situation and knew that I was married and he didn’t give a damn.

The lord of this land, he knew what he wanted and what he wanted was me.