Breakwater by Errin Stevens

Author:Errin Stevens [Plantz, Eden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IngramSpark via Indie Author Project
Published: 2017-07-06T14:12:48+00:00

TWENTY-FOUR

Duncan’s company exhausted and depressed her. And at any given hour, Isabel had to

steel herself against leaving for that reason alone. She stayed not for further proof

Duncan was up to no good—she knew with certainty he was—but because she felt

obligated to do what she could to contain the threat he posed to family and friends. She

wanted to remain in Raleigh until she could discover the details of whatever madness

he plotted so she would have this information to take back to Carmen.

In what she considered the biggest paradox of her marriage, her complicity in this

situation would allow her to undo whatever wrong Duncan would attempt, just as her

complicity at Shaddox had supported his slide into selfishness. She hadn’t quite

understood what he was doing when they first talked after her arrival, but she soon

figured it out. Duncan’s reliance on primitive human hypnosis worked on her because

at first she’d badly wanted for them to negotiate their relationship amiably, so she’d

been open to him.

She felt so foolish over her initial naiveté back at Shaddox. Starting from the time

she’d departed the palace, she’d continued to misunderstand both the depth of

Duncan’s depravity and her own ability to cope with it. Sometime during her first week

in Raleigh, she found a registration form in Duncan’s apartment for the hypnosis course

he’d taken, which she immediately connected to their conversations. And that

ridiculous cigarette he waved around.

Unfortunately, by giving him an initial entree into her psyche she’d allowed him to

build a pathway of influence, which made her susceptible to his efforts thereafter,

although she wanted to believe her own desire to act with integrity was at least as

important as Duncan’s facility. The problem, in her opinion, was her respect for siren

society’s principles of good behavior, which worked great if you could trust those you

interacted with to conduct themselves likewise. She’d played fair, worked to diffuse

potential conflict, and by now had lost any ability she’d ever had to engage in sustained

acrimony.

Her long association with Duncan also sealed her fate concerning his manipulative

forays into her subconscious, since she was literally unable to resist these requests from

her one-time mate.

To her chagrin, he now accessed a conduit into her head whether she wanted him to

or not, which he did often and without compunction. It wasn’t a carte blanche ability to

overtake her—she was too strong for such tactics to completely work—but she

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