Handcuffed by Her Hero (26 page)

An icy wind cut across the high
cliff. It was bitterly cold; the clouds would likely open up again soon.

Luna put an odds-on bet that
she’d get sick first.

She pushed the binoculars away with
a wince. “Enough,” she rasped. “I’ve seen enough.”

It had qualified as “enough” once
she watched Rayna and Z got out of the car. Could they have simply taken a walk
or gotten a friendly breath of fresh air? No way. He’d gotten her to dance with
him. Rayna had looked stunned, as if she couldn’t believe Z could move, let
alone dance. What, like it wasn’t common knowledge? Had the woman not done her
damn homework on the man?

But the dancing was easier to
take than the touching. Having to watch him stop and stroke her face so gently…then
give her that hot, heavy stare as she’d kissed the backs of all his fingers…

Shit, shit,
shit.

How was this possible? How had
this cup of vanilla frosting slathered herself in front of the Dom who was
supposed to be hers? Where had things gone so horridly wrong, especially after
their time in the dungeon had been so right?

It was supposed to be different
now. He was supposed to have seen, to have understood. Once he’d had her in his
hands, felt the potency of her submission and the strength of her devotion, he
was destined to forget all the rest and surrender to their connection…just as
she had.

Rayna Chestain had changed all
that.

A tortured cry sprang from her
throat.

Mua’s snicker felt like alcohol
on her open wound. He dumped salt on top of it with his musically-inflected,
“Are you all right, darling?”

She inched away from the edge of
the cliff. Though she mentally knew how essential she was to the man and his
“plan,” instinct screamed she shouldn’t trust him for a second.

“I think I’m going to throw up,”
she whispered.

“That’s unfortunate.” He stepped
away. “Please do it over there. I despise the stench.”

She stumbled back but her empty
stomach only cooperated with a painful retch. It was for the better. There
wasn’t time to waste. The next minute, she watched the distant silver speck of Max’s
Jag leave the parking lot of Annie’s Pizza and turn east on Cascades Highway.
Mua appeared next to her again, holding a smart pad that showed a GPS-style map
with a red dot traveling the same route.

The man emitted a low laugh and
called to the three men next to the SUV behind them, “Excellent work, Vadim.”
The middle thug, who had a face as round as a pie tin, accepted the praise with
a short nod. “It seems our target has acclimated well to the beacon.”

Luna scraped back her
wind-whipped hair to get a better look at the screen in Mua’s grip. A shiver
gripped her that had nothing to do with the day’s dropping temperature. “Th-that
dot is really being transmitted from inside Zeke?”

“Indeed.”

She shook her head, wondering if
her mind was going to implode. “I’m still having trouble comprehending how this
happened. And why.”

One side of Mua’s mouth tilted as
he brushed a stray pine needle off his wool blend overcoat. The move was as refined
as the Italian name which undoubtedly lined the garment—and gave her a
supersized version of the creeps. The man spoke and dressed better than his
brother but the wolf beneath the fleece was spawned from the same disgusting
gene pool. She almost hated herself for opening the door to him this morning.

Almost. 

Sometimes getting someone to see
the light meant you had to go to dark places for them. Really dark places.

Zeke was worth the dark places.

He was worth anything.

“It was quite a simple choice,”
Mua finally answered. “As you know, darling, time is a precious commodity to me
right now. Leaving the country is a paramount priority for me—though doing so
with Sergeant Chestain is equally significant. I’m sure that scenario fits into
your plans as well, hmmm?”

She wrapped her arms around
herself. “She’s not going to get killed or anything, right? I’m not a murderer.
I’m not going to be your little helping bitch for that.”

The man chuckled. It actually
made him look like a handsome magazine ad. She wanted to wretch again for even
considering the idea.

“I assure you, lovely Luna, her
well-being is of prime importance to me.” He handed the smart pad to one of his
men then turned fully back to her. “As a matter of fact, our original plan was
to simply slip her away in the middle of the night. We were but hours away from
mobilizing on that when Sergeant Hayes arrived at her home. After he departed
the next morning—”

“Wait.” She gulped against the lump
that dumped in the pit of her stomach. “He left…the next morning?”

Mua looked away, blatantly false
in his “sympathy” for her. “I could show you our surveillance shots of his departure,
though they are a little odd. He forgot his shirt. Seemed to barely have his
boots on—”

“I don’t want to see the damn
pictures.” She ignored Mua’s knowing leer. “Why didn’t you just take her then?”

“Her brother was still in the
house.” He sighed. “Seems she has one for every day of the week.”

She wheeled on him as irritation
joined her pain. “Right, right,” she snapped. “Got that picture, okay? Snow
White and her seven adoring mutants.” She glared in response to his amused
smirk. “So you followed her on Saturday night. She ended up at the Bastille,” –
and
I don’t want to know the reason why—
“and that’s when you moved in?”

Mua’s only confirmation of that
was a little arch of his brows. “It became apparent, rather quickly, that Rayna
wasn’t willing to depart peacefully with us. When Hayes appeared and
interceded, Vadim displayed brilliant thinking to move us forward with this test
of the tracking chips upon which we’d been working.”

She looked from him to pie tin
guy. “And you just had one conveniently laying around?”

His expression didn’t change. “I
brought one, yes. The intention was to use it on Rayna.” He flicked a glance at
the smart pad, seemingly satisfied with wherever Z was headed. “She would have
been our inaugural recipient. When Vadim inserted it into Hayes instead, he
saved us from risking a valuable commodity in the name of research.”

Luna shifted her gaze to the
ground. Rayna Chestain was really only a name to her but it was a better
designation than
commodity.
But caring for the woman, even by this
sliver, wasn’t part of the plan. Chestain was ruining everything again
.
The only person that mattered here was Zeke. She had to make him see the depth
of
her
devotion. When he realized she’d forged a deal with a demon for
him, had agreed to get this dirty for him…
This
would be the magic
formula at last. It had to be. He had to see everything she’d done for him.
After this, he just had to know how much she loved him, right?

She looked back up but directed
her gaze at the smart pad. “I still don’t understand where I come in,” she
said. “You said you needed me to help activate the chip.” She waved at the
screen. “But it’s clearly working. What is there left for me to do? Aren’t you
just going to follow them, go get Rayna and—”

When Mua clasped her arm to break
her off, she wondered if his perfect handsomeness was due to him being a robot.
His grip was crushing.

“Darling, if all I want now is to
‘get her,’ why would I have authorized Vadim to put the chip into Hayes?” His eyes
narrowed by dangerous fractions. “Procuring Rayna again is only going to be
half my pleasure. Watching her bow to my will and obey every word I say, down to
the moment I watch her crawl on her knees in the chains of another, shall be
the other. She’ll do all of it without ever spitting at me again, too.” He
gazed out over the Cascades peaks, many shrouded now in thick mist. “Hayes is
the key to her perfect compliance. Her weakness is now our strength.” A slow
smile spread across his smooth lips. “In the end, Rayna will be mine and Zeke
shall be yours.”

Hearing him say it aloud made her
heart squeeze with elation. She turned, unable to hold back her eager smile.
“So how do I help?”

Mua chuckled and returned her
look, flashing movie star perfect teeth. “Patience, lovely girl. For
seventy-two hours, we run on silent stealth. After that, Hayes’ system will
have assimilated the chip in its first phase of effectiveness.”

“You mean it does more than
that?” She nodded at the smart pad.

Mua cocked his head with unwavering
confidence. “We’ve only just began, darling.

Vadim pushed off the car and set
his stare on her, too. He waggled his brows. “A kiss for luck and we’re on our
way?”

Inwardly, she apologized to Karen
Carpenter. On the outside, she gave the asswad a look that told him his balls
were on the line if he took a step closer. 

“Oooo,” Mua interceded. “Touchy,
touchy, lovely Luna. Vadim only wants to help.”

The henchman lowered his eyelids
and leered. “I’m good at helping.”

“Tell him to help from over there,”
she retorted.

“That won’t make it terribly easy
for you to practice for your part,” Mua answered. “Since it’s going to involve
embracing Zeke, I assume you wish to get everything just right.”

Her guts did knot-tying practice
again. Her chest heaved with disgust. But she forced her feet to step closer to
Vadim. “If your hands go below my waist, your balls will be singing
Bohemian
Rhapsody.
”

“Mama mia,” the guy drawled.

“Shut up.”

I’m only doing
this for you, Zeke. You understand, don’t you? Of course you do. Sometimes we
do shitty things for the ones we love. Because in the end, it’s worth it. In
just a few days, we’ll have our happy end—and all this will be worth it.

Zeke was used to writing off a
lot of stupid hunches to the paranoia that was sewn into his DNA the second he
signed on for Special Forces. Not this time. No stupidity here. No paranoia,
either.

The air in the cabin had gone
from weird to outright uncomfortable. He was pretty certain it had started
before they even got back here—during their little dance in the pizza parlor
lot to be exact. The way Rayna had stared up at him, as if seeking something
but sensing she wouldn’t find it, had ripped through his gut like a shithook’s
rotor. Every muscle had jerked with the longing to flatten her to the car’s
hood and demand she give up every thought that darkened her eyes so much. Then
he would have kissed her in gratitude for the disclosure, promising her more rewards
once they got back here. Though there would be that matter of her flippant
language in the gift shop to address, preferably in the form of a few good
swats to her inner thighs…

One night of
indulging the dynamic doesn’t make her yours to do that with. To
think
of
doing that with.

So here they were at the
crossroads of Uneasy Avenue and Tension Boulevard. Rayna’s car was clearly
stalled at the light, stuffed with so many thoughts that the windows were
clogged with the mounting pile. In his car? An arsenal of rifles, primed and
waiting to blast those damn panes out.  

Dinner was simple, boxed macaroni
and cheese that she managed to inspire with spices and some packaged sundried
tomatoes, though they ate it in stilted silence. Z got himself a reprieve from
her taciturnity by asking about the kids with whom she volunteered once a week at
the base’s Child Development Center. With Halloween days away, the excitement
was high. They’d already made candy collection bags, as well as little ghosts
for the classroom. Audrey was going to be Strawberry Shortcake. Rajan was
pumped to dress up like Spiderman. Then there were her “creative” kids: Logan wanted
to be a walking cocoa machine complete with working spigot, and Veronica had her
heart set on being some creature called Derpy Hooves.

He thought he had her loosened a
little again, enough to try and get inside her head once more, when the
conversation fell upon the subject of the kids’ annual trip to the pumpkin
patch—which was happening tomorrow.

With a tight wince, Rayna had
excused herself.

With a tighter wince, Z relocated
himself to the couch.

Passing the next four hours with
a marathon of
Ice Road Truckers
didn’t ease the weight on his mind by
one ounce. Or the pressure in his body. Though the mental shit was a confusion
he didn’t want to untangle right now, he sure as hell knew what was going on in
his nerves and muscles—especially the one between his legs.

He was getting hooked on a drug
called Rayna Chestain. And damn it, he had no idea how to rehab himself out of
it.

He finally dragged his ass into the
downstairs bathroom for a shower. Making the temperature ice-cold helped him as
much as a cheap condom during wild animal sex.

“Nice, asshole,” he muttered
while tucking the towel around his waist, as well as the boner that shoved
against it. “Could you do any worse for mental metaphors?”

He opened the cabinet to grab a
fresh towel to hang on the rack. And groaned.

Laying on top of that towel was
the heart-shaped paddle Garrett had left up here. There was a smaller wood
spanker, a strict leather flogger, adjustable nipple clamps on a gold chain,
and a pair of soft leather handcuffs.

“Garrett Hawkins, you’re a dead
man.”

He grumbled it as he held the
clamps up. The chain that connected them glimmered in the light. His mind
instantly filled with the fantasy of putting them on Rayna.
Oh, yeah.
The matching gilt tints in her skin would glow as she endured the pain for him,
as her nipples went from copper to crimson for him…

He let the clamps drop into the
sink as he dipped his hand to his cock. If he didn’t get release from this
pressure now—

He’d gotten only halfway through
his first stroke when a crash from the kitchen filled the cabin.

“Fuck.”

A thousand images filled his
mind, none of them good. There was no damn way Mua could know they were here
unless the cockroach had gotten to Garrett or Franz, or had his minions hack
into the team’s personal records. Neither scenario had a bright side of any
kind. And if the din wasn’t Mua breaking in, then it had to be something like a
pissed-off raccoon, mountain lion, or bear.

“Fuck.” He repeated it as he
skidded around the corner to the kitchen.

There were no marauding forest
creatures. No armed and clumsy Mua henchmen, either. The wound in his upper
back, now throbbing due to Rayna’s debridement and butterfly bandage treatment
of this morning, thanked him for that.

But suddenly, ripping open those
dressings seemed a really good plan. He wondered if he could go back and pick
that box as the alternative to what he did encounter.

Rayna stood next to the sink where
the running water was fast filling one side with wash bubbles. She’d changed
back into his Henley, though he’d gotten her a set of pajamas in town. Next to
her bare feet were both their dinner plates, in pieces now, surrounded by squished
macaroni and spattered cheese. Her head was dipped but not so low that he
didn’t see the harsh wobble of her chin and the heaving breaths in her chest.

 “They just slipped,” she
stammered. “I’m so sorry.”

“They’re just dishes.” The angry
blades in his retort weren’t intentional. He didn’t care about the goddamn
dishes. It incensed him that she thought, even for a second, that he would. “Are
you
okay? Did you get hurt?”

She shook her head.

“Then what’s wrong?” He went to
her, skirting the shattered china. As soon as he touched her shoulder, dread
sliced his gut again. “Christ. You’re
not
okay. You’re shaking like a—” He
stopped himself. Awareness blared through his brain, hot and intense. “Shit.
You don’t have your medication, do you? You went to the club straight from
Sally’s. You thought you’d be going home.”

“I don’t need my medication.” She
squeaked the words before lifting her head a few inches. “Where are your
clothes?”

He reached around her and slammed
the faucet off. Since the suds were nearing the lip of the sink, a line of them
stuck to the underside of his arm. “I just got out of the shower.”

“And look.” A manic giggle
spurted off her lips. “Now you’re all soapy again.” Inside another second, the
laughter turned to a sad moan. She sucked in a choppy breath as she stared at
the bubbles dripping off his triceps. “Holy crap, Zeke. Your arms are really
nice.”

“Thanks. Are you sure—”

“I should get something to clean
that stuff up.” She turned away, sliding along the counter until she was clear
from him.

“Uh-uh.” By instinct or by
necessity, his Dom baritone broke free. He took one step to recover the three
she’d taken away from him. “You’re going to scoot your ass to the other room
and realign your chakras again, or whatever the hell you need to do, while I
figure out a way to contact Sally and have her call in a prescription for you.”

She shoved against his chest, making
his eyebrows jump. “I don’t need the damn medicine.”

He followed her stomping journey into
the living room. “Really? Because you’re weaving like a goose on acid, honey.”

“I
don’t
need the
medicine.”

He unfurled a threatening snarl.
“Rayna—”

“
I don’t need the medicine.
”

She whirled back toward him, now
raising her face fully. He stumbled back a step from the force of the sight.
Huge tears welled in her gaze. Her eyebrows bunched in torment. Her lips
battled each other as if disagreeing on how to hold back emotions that seemed a
living beast inside her. She tore him apart with that stare. Reduced him to the
same raw need with which she stared at him.

“I—don’t need—the medicine.” The
whispers came out between her quaking steps back toward him. When she came
close enough to touch him again, she bowed her head. “I need…”

She slid to her knees.

Then dropped her forehead against
his feet.

“I need this,” she rasped.
“Please, Zeke. I know you’re not signing on for forever…but as long as I can
have this from you, I need this.”

He was pretty damn sure he
stopped breathing. But as long as his eyes kept working, he’d be good to go. He
couldn’t get enough of this sight. He’d certainly commanded a few submissives
to honor him in this way before, but none had ever offered their surrender so
willingly, so openly, so perfectly.

The significance of her action
pierced him like a dagger in a bull’s-eye.

Rayna Chestain
was
a
submissive. And she was discovering it right in front of him. Discovering it,
welcoming it, and honoring it with every exquisite inch of her body and every
generous shred of her soul.

And then giving it.
To him.
A former street rat who used this dynamic as therapy for his fucked-up past and
a constructive purge for his current demons. A guy with an office that was
lined in jungle wallpaper and sported mud carpeting. A trained killer who could
wield an M4 as well as a flogger. A Dom would didn’t deserve her—

But sure as hell wasn’t going to turn
his back on her now. Just as he’d freed her from Kier all those years ago, he’d
release her from the assholes that violated her mind now. And dear fuck, he’d
love every minute of it.

He found his breath. Pulled it in
with steady intent. Only after that did he direct, “Rayna, lift your head.” He tugged
a finger under her chin. “All the way. Look at me.”

Tears tracked down her cheeks. He
traced one with the pad of a thumb and spoke directly from his heart. “You move
me, little bird…in so many ways. Do you know that?” When her face crumpled as
if she’d cry again, he pressed on, “Are you sure this is what you want? Rayna,
I’m not going to drench this in any sugar. Now that I’ve had your submission
once, I’ll want more.” To emphasize that, he tunneled his fingers into her hair
and pulled hard. Her head fell back, letting him see all the depths in the
magical lakes that lived in her eyes. “I’ll push limits. Are you ready to let
me do that?”

She swallowed. Then smiled. “If
you don’t, I already have a few bratty one-liners ready to zing free.”

He didn’t try to control his
responding grin. “Well, all right, honey. Let’s get started, then.”

“Thank you, Sir.
Oh
!”

Her exclamation coincided with
the brutal tug he gave on her head to pull her back to her feet. Once she was
balanced again, he let her go—and dropped his towel.

“Oh.” Her repetition carried half
the volume but twice the astonishment of the first. “Oh, my,” she murmured, her
lips parting as she took in his erection.

“Eyes up here, bird.” Z directed
it while pushing up the bottom of her chin. He gave the command out of
necessity as much as respect to the dynamic. Her spill had only diminished his
hardness by half, and she seemed damn determined to make up the gap with her
worshipful stare. At this rate, he’d barely have her tied down before needing
to give her a thorough dose of his hard, thrusting religion.

“That’s probably a good idea,
Sir. I don’t do well with being deprived of sweets I long to lick.”

“Fuck,” he muttered.

“Told you,” she quipped.

“For the record, that wasn’t
bratty. That was teasing.”

She gave an impish shrug. “What’s
the difference?”

“I punish teases worse than I
punish brats.”

Her lips pursed. “But why is it
teasing if follow-through is intended?”

His cock ached deeper, and visibly
jerked. Rayna curled a victorious smirk.

“
Now
you’re being a brat.”

He didn’t wait for her to form a
comeback. It was time to claim control and he did just that. With one yank, he
hauled her up against him. In the same motion, he crashed his lips over hers. He
wasn’t gentle about a second of it, making her accept the full assault of his tongue,
his teeth, his breath, his passion as he rammed his shaft against her warm,
soft stomach. She moaned from the contact, slipping her hands up to his neck. Z
didn’t let them stay there for long. He seized both her wrists and rammed them
behind her back, making her realize what kind of submission he expected from
her…craved from her.

Many minutes later, he pulled up
from her lips. She looked at him through half-lidded eyes, though her arousal
blazed from every emerald speck of them. Her mouth was red and luscious as a
pomegranate from his treatment, driving caveman-style triumph into every inch
of his dick.

“You intoxicate me, brat,” he
growled. “And I’m getting more drunk by the second.”

Rayna bit her bottom lip. “Then
maybe you’d better let me drive.”