by Sophia Reed
Too far away. Too dependent.
He was too trusting now. He'd wanted a stronger Annie.
He had one.
For now.
And if he sent a message inviting me – or rather, "inviting me" – to his bed? I'd tell him I'd slept poorly and had night sweats and needed a shower first. He was squeamish over very few things, but that was one of them.
"It's beautiful out here, though, isn't it?" I asked as we stepped through the gates the guards opened automatically at the sight of us – or just me – in running gear.
"It's wet. It's cold." He sounded like a grumpy child. Why did he have to choose today of all days to make me smile?
"Come on. Be the big strong dom."
The look he gave me was part danger, part humor, part wet grumpy child. "Don't tempt me."
I laughed, threw out a Sir! for good measure, and set the pace, well under what I thought I could now maintain for several miles.
Cole fell in beside me and we ran. Away from the city.
But I knew right where that city was.
Morning again. I bit my lip. If he commanded me to stay in, I'd find some way past the guards. I didn't want to hurt them if didn’t have to and I didn't want to get caught, obviously, which I would if I had to fight to get out of the compound and failed. It was possible worrying about hurting Cole's giant guards was just my ego trying to convince me we could do this. If I'd thought I could overpower even one of them, I might not be here now.
I didn't let myself think of the idea that if I had been able to escape, I might have chosen not to.
Today was the day. I had my storms and no proof they'd go on happening daily for much longer. I couldn't hear any thunder, though. As I lay tense in bed, waiting for it, all I heard was the downpour.
The slicker he'd given me was a bright obnoxious spring green, but the flip side was gray. It would be wet and horrible but I'd turn it around once I was far enough away. I didn't think the guards watched my entire runs anyway and the rain-darkened gray would be harder to track.
It was a chance and I was taking it.
The text from him read Don't be absurd. I am a sadist, not a masochist. Go back to sleep.
It was more than fifteen minutes old. I was awake and dressed and ready to run. Cole would almost undoubtedly be asleep again.
I loaded my protein bars and water. The distance to the city looked to be maybe twenty or thirty miles. Marathon length. I could do it. I pulled my slicker on. I checked my shoes. I left the hobbled phone behind because though it only called out when he unlocked it for me, it undoubtedly had GPS. Therefore it wasn't an asset, it was actually a problem, but it was still damned hard to leave it behind.
The guard at the gate nodded. "Didn't think you'd get him out there today."
He was one of the guards who at least spoke to me. "He told me not to be absurd, but I can't sleep," I said.
The guard looked profoundly uninterested. "Your funeral," he said. He opened the door. He electronically opened the gate.
I stood outside the desert compound of the billionaire who owned me, my heart thumping with anxiety, and breathed in the wet of the desert in the rain.
Then I fixed my sights on the city lights and began to run.
43
Cole
She'd taken the bait.
She'd gone.
If she returned on her own, there would be no punishment. She was my property. I didn't mark my property for no reason.
If she had to be brought back, her life would change tremendously.
I stood in one of the upstairs rooms and watched her run. Even after she stopped and turned the lime green slicker inside out, I kept my eyes fixed on the moving figure, gray now against the grayish green sage, running toward the city.
44
Annie
Cole had kept my badge. At some point during the last confused months, he'd given it to me, absently-mindedly from all appearances, but I didn't think he did anything absent-mindedly. The badge was a reminder of what I had to lose, a tangible connection to the life I claimed I wanted to get back to.
I'd brought it with me. I didn't have any other identification, just the photo ID inside the badge case. If word of my disappearance was out, any police I contacted would probably know. If Seattle even knew I was missing and not on whatever extended leave Cole had arranged.
I paced myself, running a couple miles, then walking. Obviously if Cole sent his men after me on ATVs or in Range Rovers or Jeeps, they could move much faster than I could. I didn't think he would. I thought I'd be ten miles away by the time he woke, and approaching the city by the time he sent someone after me.
If I was wrong, I was wrong. I'd face the consequences. Not really much choice, was there?
But I made it to the city. I made it into Vegas and found a substation of Metro and gave them a story about being undercover and traveling with the gang I'd infiltrated. They didn't bother to point out I didn't have jurisdiction here. I didn't talk to anybody high up in chain of command or the outcome might have been different. Instead I talked to officers who patrol and told them a buy had gone bad. I needed to get back to Seattle and find my way back to the gang, with a plausible story of how I got there.
I referenced the deaths of the kids.
I referenced one of the busts made because of my work months ago.
Back before everything went crazy.
Three of them loaned me bus fare, which I would find a way to repay. I got a ticket for a bus going through in half an hour and drank acidic and scorched coffee until the bus rumbled out.
I didn't have a phone with which to research anything online. I didn't want to use the pay-for-time computers in the bus station, leaving a trail of my research into Cole. Or any trail of my research into my own disappearance if there was anything to be researched.
I didn't want to leave a trail into my research on anything.
I didn't have a book. I finally bought a copy of a domestic thriller from a Walmart down the street and tried to read it before the bus boarded. I might as well have held it upside down.
I wouldn't contact my parents or Mark until I was in Washington. I'd give Mark warning this time that I was coming home.
By the time the bus lumbered out of the station I was considering whether or not to come clean, at least to my family about the drugs. Mark already knew, and I thought that having a support system now that I was on my own, that couldn't hurt.
By Northern Nevada I was considering my father's acceptance and sorrow.
By the Oregon border I was considering trying to start up a normal life with Mark again.
By Portland, I was trading buses with Cole's warning in my ear that if I ran, I was on my own. He wouldn't bring me back.
I didn't believe it. But I didn't want to test it.
By dawn the next day, I was in Vegas again.
No one met me at the bus station. I didn't have a phone or a number to call. I was cold and tired and wanted a bath and a bed.
The rain had stopped. I wondered if I could find my own footprints out on the desert trails.
Ten miles from the city, the city itself looks like a mirage.
Fifteen miles from the city I was no longer running segments but walking. I had water and new protein bars and not much hope. My footprints had, of course, washed away in the rain. Even if I'd been able to find the exact place I entered the city.
At what I assumed was twenty miles away I was scared. I'd be out overnight if I didn't find the compound. Or if I found it and it didn't open to me. I didn't have the time or energy to get back to the city today.
At twenty miles and some change, the helicopter dipped low enough for me to see St. Martin Pharma emblazoned on the side.
I sat down in the cold December mud and cried.
45
Cole
She's back.
46
Annie
Cole carried me, exhausted, chilled and trembling, from the helicopter to the main
house in the compound. Resisting all offers from staff to help, he carried me up the stairs into his own room and stripped off my sodden, filthy clothes.
I waited, eyes almost closed, for the pain to start.
"Can you stand?" he asked.
I'd rather be tied. Standing on my own would be additional punishment. "Yes."
There was, to my surprise, laughter in his voice when he wiggled the fingers of the hand propped on my sternum, the one I was leaning hard against. "You're not," he pointed out.
"Oh." I couldn't think what else to say.
"Hmm," Cole said, and moved me to sit on the edge of the tub. "I meant to shower. This will have to do." He filled the tub with hot water and propped me against the wall and tub rim as it did so, giving himself time to strip out of his clothes.
Had I ever truly looked at him before? He was beautiful. His dark blond hair was sleep tousled. His eyes were sharp, the dark blue missing little, and narrowed as he considered me. He carried a lot of muscle, thicker than most tall men unless they worked out hard.
I knew that he did.
A thin line of blonder hair led down from his six pack abs and navel to his cock, stirring even now as my gaze landed on it.
He laughed. "Not now, I don't think. Come on, up and in, and lean forward. Make room."
I hissed as I lowered myself into the water, remembering my most recent caning and the beating in the hotel room that had turned out to be with a plastic coat hanger he'd had the foresight to bring from home.
Home.
This was not home.
But I was too tired to argue with myself. Instead I scrunched forward in the bath, making room for his long legs to fold down around me, his erection pressed against my spine, his balls up against my ass. His arms came around my torso, the water in the tub reaching nearly to my neck. I felt warm and somehow safe, even as I waited for whatever he had in mind. Clamps? Hairbrush? Paddle? Or would he simply use his hands again, fingers ramming too hard into me, pinching my nipples and tearing at them?
His hands smoothed water up over the parts not quite covered. He lathered shower gel that smelled of freesia between his palms and stroked it over my face, cupping water over and over to wash it. He gentled his hands over my neck, along my shoulders, down the slope of my chest and over and under my breasts. He washed my back, that most magical of sensations, and he kissed the nape under the fall of my hair, right where my spine starts all lumpy.
When we got out of the tub, he dried me with a soft bath sheet, then wrapped me in it and dried himself off, already starting to shiver. He scooped me into his arms and carried me into his bedroom and into his bed and I thought, Okay, now it starts.
But he slid in after me, moving gently so his weight was supported on his forearms as he slid his long, thick length into me and began to fuck me slowly, looking into my eyes as he did. His teeth nipped my bottom lip, my jaw, my shoulder. His hands found their way into my hair. His cock felt warm and familiar and somehow right.
When he came, when I came, he rolled off me and moved me to lie on my side, my back snuggled into him.
"I thought," I started and didn't finish.
"You thought that I was going to punish you."
"Yes."
There was a pause and he bit me somewhat harder on the shoulder. "Are you sorry I didn't?"
"No." I was in no condition to fight him, to keep myself sane and inside my own head. When he hurt me, it took every inch of my attention to keep myself whole.
Maybe I understood a little why he considered it part of recovery. If he truly did.
"No…?" he said slowly, more questioning than echoing me.
"No. Sir."
I felt his smile because he had pressed his face against my back. "There will be punishment. You'll understand the consequences of what you've done."
"But?" I asked, so close to sleep I probably wouldn't understand what he answered if he did answer.
"But it can wait for another day. Shhh, now. Sleep."
I almost said Yes, sir but I was gone before the sarcastic urge had faded into common sense.
I slept, and dreamed of the future.
Cole
She came back on her own. That had been the requirement. Though I probably would have dragged her back if she hadn't.
I could always tell myself it was only because of Theo Brad Prince. He had won the auction and I always pay my debts. She was my property. She would only be his for a two week period. But I was horrified to realize I now cared what would happen to her during that time. Prince was vicious and cruel. And he was vindictive and petty, and he was angry at me for having denied her to him initially.
And you care why?
I didn't care. Of course I didn't. I just don't like to lose and I don't like my property fucked with.
That was all.
And then I tightened my hold on the girl in my arms, closed my eyes and, listening to the rain drenching the desert, I fell asleep.
* * *
The End
Book 2
Addicted to the Billionaire
Synopsis
Annie Knox
She was Seattle PD, undercover narc, until the day she fell from fighting the war on drugs to becoming another casualty of it and became addicted to fentanyl. Faced with losing the job she loved and the respect of her policeman father, she accepted a radical treatment plan from a billionaire pharmaceuticals CEO that included untested rainforest cures – and equally radical BDSM. Determined to escape the compound where her possible savior is holding her, Annie learns that she can't always get what she wants – and what she wants isn't always anything like she expected.
* * *
Cole St. Martin
Billionaire philanthropist and sexual deviant Cole St. Martin believes he can cure Annie Knox's addiction and give her back not the life she left, but one that fits the new and improved version of herself she's in the process of creating under his care. But giving Annie up again might prove harder than he anticipated. Her body responds so beautifully to the pain he inflicts on it, her spirit fights so engagingly – and her submission and pleasure are so hard to imagine giving up.
* * *
But even billionaires can't always control everything, as Cole learns when the man who bought Annie from him in a kinky auction comes calling, demanding his right to his property. It might only be for a matter of weeks, but Cole's afraid of what Vincent might do to Annie.
* * *
And what Annie might do to Vincent.
* * *
Addicted to the Billionaire
is the second book in the 6-book Deep Cover series.
1
Cole
It was a Tuesday in early December and I was running my slave through the empty desert more than twenty miles outside Las Vegas, Nevada.
The desert in Southern Nevada doesn't actually get that cold, though you couldn't tell by the complaining that goes on in winter. Residents begin to whine when the temperatures drop to low fifties or high forties, and anything below that is considered an arctic blast. The millions of tourists who visit the city every year don't notice what the weather is doing because they're behind climate controlled walls inside casinos and convention centers.
Annie Knox was noticing. It was early enough on that December morning for the temperature to still be in the mid-forties and the sun was barely over the hill as we ran. For whatever reason, just after dawn, the temperature actually dips. So she was hot under her running fleece and lined running tights, and cold where her face and hands were exposed. Very uncomfortable.
She might have minded but Annie was used to being uncomfortable when she was with me. For the foreseeable future – still more than eleven months of our year and a day contract – she was mine to make uncomfortable and keeping her that way – uncomfortable, or actively in pain – that was my goal.
One of my goals. Another was to keep my billion dollar pharmaceutical company on track with rainforest cures that allowed for susta
inability and worked wonders on everything from cancer to addiction.
Annie was in my care for addiction.
Hers and mine.
Annie Knox was an undercover narc agent from Seattle whose life had gone south in a big way over the past summer. The leader of the gang she'd infiltrated was killed and she hadn't just been his old lady where her cover was concerned. She'd actually started to care for the son of a bitch. Then her father, the hero cop who inspired her to be a police officer when her three sisters were all pretty little wives and mothers, suffered a series of heart attacks and a series of heart surgeries. Add to that, Annie had a fiancé who was a doctor in the making and an intern with extremely limited free hours. Said fiancé also had limited love making skills, limited imagination in the bedroom, and a terrible bedside manner. Add all the stressors together and Annie was ripe to start using the fentanyl she found in her pockets after she left her deep cover with the motorcycle gang assignment.
It might have been understandable for anyone. With the right support from the people in her life, it might have been temporary. But Annie's support system was lousy to begin with and stressed with everything going on, and her addiction took hold. Desperate to keep it from her superiors, she allowed her handler on PD to suggest she come to me for treatment.