Willing Sacrifice (Knights of the Board Room) (26 page)

Now he went up the rest of the stairs, moved down the hall to the bedroom doorway. She’d moved. She was sitting in a chair by the window, her knees pulled up to her chest and feet curved over the seat edge. She’d donned a robe. Her head rested against the cushion, her fingertips tracing designs on the glass. The window overlooked the driveway and his truck, so she’d been waiting to watch him drive away. She hadn’t intended to come after him. He wasn’t sure how to react to that, but then she spoke.

“I’ve never been involved with anyone outside a club, Max. Not since my twenties.” When she turned her gaze to him, he realized she looked tired. She also didn’t look apologetic, but then he wouldn’t have expected that. She lifted her chin. “That’s all I can give you right now.”

There was a chair across from the one where she sat, and he took it, leaning forward and propping his elbows on his knees, making a steeple of his fingers as he studied her. She’d left her hair down, and it curved around her face, the dark, hard-to-read eyes.

“The picture in the hallway,” he said. “The girl you called Nelle. That girl is you.”

Whatever she’d been expecting, it hadn’t been that. He saw the flicker of shock in her gaze, quickly masked, telling him she’d learned to conceal any reactions related to that, but then anger replaced it.

“If you think to leverage my emotions by striking at a vulnerable spot, you can go to hell.”

“No. Damn it, no.”

She’d brought her legs down and stood, obviously intending to exit the chair and probably the room. He caught her wrist, holding her in place. “The only reason I brought it up, the
only
reason, is what you just said. I see things about you, Janet. I notice things. Things I have absolutely no right to know, so if you don’t want to share them, that’s fine. I just wanted to prove that you can trust me. That if this is all new to you, you don’t have to worry about that. We’ll stumble along together, but wherever I can, I’ll make sure the footing is sure for you.”

She gave his hand a pointed glance, telling him she wanted him to let go. Since she’d said he was her first relationship outside a club, he expected it wouldn’t surprise her that he wasn’t always going to be an obedient lapdog. He tugged her closer, putting his hands on her hips, looking up at her. “Let me do something?”

She gave him a wary look but nodded. He eased her on to his lap, cradling her in his arms as he settled back in the wing-backed chair. She allowed it, though she was stiff. “I wanted to know I was different,” he said. “That I wasn’t a series of snapshots you delete when you’re done looking at them. This feels different to me, and if it’s not different for you, I needed to know that sooner than later, to minimize the damage to us both.”

“Okay.” As she looked up at him, her hair brushed against his shirt front. “Your delivery and timing sucked though.”

“Yeah. No argument on that.”

They sat that way silently for a while. He didn’t feel like she needed him to say anything further, and he’d wait for her cues to see where she wanted to take this next. He hoped it was back to bed, but he accepted that ship may have sailed tonight. For his part, he could make do with this. Just having her willing to be in his arms. The tension in her body seemed to be growing though. He was thinking of a way to alleviate it when she spoke.

“How did you figure it out?”

He touched the ballerina charm where it rested on her sternum. “For one thing, you’re both wearing this.”

She put her fingers over it. “My mother gave it to me after my first recital. But that’s not how you guessed. I could have loaned out the necklace.”

He nodded, but with a gentle hand, he opened the robe, spreading it to expose her right breast. His target was beyond it, below her armpit. He touched the faint brown mark, a permanent imprint on her fair skin. “It would be unusual for you and a sibling to have the same birthmark, in the same location. But more than that, when your face softened, right before I was inside you the first time, you became her again.” Tracing the planes of her face, he caressed the sculpted lines. “I’ve been studying your face a lot.”

“Yes.” She moistened her lips. “I see that.” Her face did that softening thing then, but she looked away, out the window. Whatever thoughts she was thinking made it harden once again. He adjusted her robe so it was mostly closed, though the neckline framed the curves in an attractive way.

“Janelle. That was my name then. The last name’s not important, save that it’s no longer the one I have now. When I was twenty, I was good enough to be in a ballet company, but not good enough to ever break out and be the star. But I had an excellent grasp on technique, and I was good at helping the stronger dancers improve. However, at that point, I still had dreams of being center stage. Like so many women in so many different situations, I ignored the truth and instead believed a man who said he could make my dreams come true.”

There was no bitterness in her tone, just a matter-of-fact sympathy, as if she viewed herself at that time as a separate person. “His name was Jorge Mendes. He was in the audience when we performed in Mexico City. To my eyes, he seemed like an important man, with expensive cars and an aura of power an impressionable girl mistook for something real. He flattered me, told me I had an abundance of talent, and if I was willing to stay behind when the company traveled back to the States, he could get me a couple bookings where I would be the headline dancer. It was time for the company to take a summer hiatus, so it made sense, even though friends of mine told me not to do it. I thought they were jealous.”

Cold fingers touched his vitals. Her words could unlock a part of him that would take him to another memory, one that would pull his mind away when Janet obviously needed him a hundred percent present. So he steeled himself, resolved not to let that happen. This wasn’t Amanda in his arms, not his mother.

“The drug cartels run Mexico. I’m sure that’s not news to you.”

Though he shook his head, confirming it, she didn’t register his response. Her gaze was on that window, the raindrops slipping down it. “He was upper middle management in one of them, I guess. I never saw an organization chart.” Her lip curled. “The moment the company left Mexico, I became his possession. To his credit, I did dance in a few performances with a substandard company. My classical training made me shine, a swan among the ducks. At first I overlooked it, delighted to be the one soaring across the stage, hearing the crowds gasping at the more dramatic moments. I was at last the prima ballerina.

“It only took a few reviews from respected critics for me to realize I hadn’t achieved greatness. I’d simply denied the limits of my talent. When I accepted that, I knew my career would go further as part of my old company than as a prima ballerina in Mexico City. I told Jorge I wanted to leave. My fascination with him was dimming in the light of reality, and I was starting to notice things. I knew by then he wasn’t the kind of businessman he’d told me he was when we met. When I told him I was leaving, that was the first time he beat me.”

Max put his lips on her shoulder, brushed it with his jaw. Her skin was cool, and he adjusted the robe so she was more covered. She tilted her head to him, pressing her cheek to his temple. Closing his eyes, he held that connection, but the images she planted in his brain unfurled an old, deadly rage inside him.

“He didn’t do things in half measures. He beat me so severely that first time he broke ribs, but he limited it to what wouldn’t show. I was his little china doll, his ballerina on the music box, and he wanted to show me off. I escaped twice, and he caught me both times. He had people everywhere. The third time, he had to make an example of me, because his men knew I was running. This lowly
puta
had defied their boss. He used a baseball bat on my face and legs.”

Goddamn him to hell.
Max touched her face, brought her eyes back to him. “You don’t have to do this,” he said.

“I know. But you made a valid point. I can trust you.”

Because of the type of person she was, never saying what she didn’t mean, the impact of the simple statement on him was tremendous.

“Yes, you can.” He cupped her jaw, ran fingers over it. “With anything, Janet. Now, tomorrow, forever. No matter what happens with us.”

“I know. Matt seems to attract that type of man. Like Arthur and the knights who flocked to his table. Though I think Arthur might be too moderate for Matt.”

Max’s lips twisted. “Yeah. Matt’s more like a savage Celt king. I can see him drinking the blood of his enemies with no problem at all.”

He was rewarded with a faint smile, then she returned her attention to the window. “Jorge put me back together. Imported a European plastic surgeon, paid to have my face reconstructed. My legs were set and healed, but he left those scars untouched, because he wanted me to have a permanent reminder of who owned me. It ended my dance career, of course. There are rods in both my legs. No shock absorbers.”

He heard the quaver in her voice, even as she firmed her chin, lifted it. Her hands were gripped together in her lap now, her back rigid where it rested against his arm, as if she’d donned armor against what she was telling him.

“He’d touch my face and tell me that he’d re-created me, just like God teaching Lilith to be Eve, obedient to her Adam.” Her lip curled again. “I think it challenged and aroused him as much as it angered him, that he could never get me to submit to him without a fight. Except for the time he used the bat, he always had to tie me up when he beat me, because I fought him so hard.”

Which was why she didn’t tie her subs down, not so they couldn’t get away. He thought of the night he’d asked her about it, the shadows that rose in her eyes. Murder hazed his vision again.

“I would never cower from him like the house staff did, but I got smart. Except in private, I became the dutiful show pony, a credit to his household. And then one day I met Matt Kensington.”

* * * * *

She needed a break after that. She rose from his lap and they went downstairs. This time Max fixed them both a straight whisky in shot glasses from her wet bar. She tossed it back and her eyes didn’t even water, though he knew how the stuff burned a trail.

“Jorge and he didn’t do business together, of course. It was a chance meeting. Jorge was having dinner with his associates, and Matt was at a table nearby. He was so young then, in his twenties like me, but when I first met his eyes, I got caught by that still, raptor look he has. A man in control of things around him. Very different from the illusion of control Jorge had. His was based on a deceptive mix of charm, lies, fear. Matt’s was based on intelligence, a keen grasp of the details and his unfailing sense of right and wrong, moral versus immoral. Concepts he never confuses with legal or illegal.”

Max felt a vibration on that thread, another thing that connected him and Janet. Matt hadn’t had a hand in that “moral versus legal” part of Max’s life, but Max knew the K&A CEO was fully aware of it. It hadn’t stopped him from hiring Max as a driver. In fact, it was possible it might have influenced Matt’s hiring decision.

She pushed the glass toward him. “Another.”

He poured it, and she downed it the same way she’d done the first. “As long as I stayed in his line of sight, Jorge didn’t care if I sat at the table with him and his dealers while they talked business. I could feel Matt watching me when I moved to the bar, drank my cocktail, stared out into the night.

“After the baseball-bat incident, there were a lot of times I kept my mind blank, because to think was to go mad. I was always watching, though, waiting. Jorge thought my increased interest in his life and business was evidence that I’d accepted his ownership, but I knew my next escape attempt had to work. If it didn’t, he’d kill me for sure. At that point, I was ready for that. I would have preferred it to staying with him any longer, but I really didn’t want to give him that satisfaction.”

She lifted her head, stared at Max. “I never gave Jorge any real power over me. Even now, I think of him in a detached way, the way I’d think of a piece of furniture. To give him more than that would give him a piece of that power, and I refuse to do that. He beat me up because he was stronger than me physically, not emotionally. You understand?”

Max nodded. When she tapped the glass, he didn’t suggest she slow down. He’d seen things that a whole bottle of whisky wouldn’t even dent, and he had a feeling the worst part of her story was to come, if her desire for the liquid fortification was any indication. Even now, however, her back stayed straight, her hand steady and gaze direct. What would it be like, standing inside Janet’s mind and heart, seeing the tides of emotions she’d learned to mask and rein back to be the formidable woman she was? He’d caught glimpses of them, moments he knew were rare gifts. She had a softer side, but not what he’d call a vulnerable one. The Domme side of her was too overwhelming to permit that.

As she’d said, she hadn’t given Jorge power over her, a drug dealer who’d nearly beaten her to death. Her will was far beyond a mere physical thing.

She took a swallow of the whisky, put it down. “When Matt came up to the bar to refresh his drink order, he put his business card down in front of him. He was close enough I could see it, and he’d written his cell number on it in large print. He never looked at me, but he spoke. ‘Memorize it, and if you ever need a friend, call me’.”