by Sophia Reed
I spun, sighted where Samuels was, threw myself to one side as his gun exploded again.
This time it was held the right way but from his nondominant hand. He'd broken his wrist shooting at me.
That didn't make him any less deadly. He'd have been trained to use his gun with either hand. I ran for cover. At the same time I heard the most beautiful words I'd ever heard.
"FBI! Everyone freeze!"
47
Cole
They weren't FBI. But no one stops to check ID when the firing starts.
There were four of them inside the warehouse. Two guys caught on video at the courthouse, the ones who had done the transport.
And Samuels. Small world.
And Annie.
"Wait until we've got 'em nailed down, boss," Barry said.
Nobody told Annie that. She saw me and started to run.
I saw Samuels push himself off his one-knee crouch, let go of the wrist he was cradling, and train his gun on Annie.
Barry and his team raised their weapons.
"We need him," I said, very fast. "Need her more."
Barry took one step to the side so Annie wasn't in his line of sight.
Then he shot the gun out of Samuels hand. And shot a big hole in the hand. So we still had Samuels. Just now he was unarmed. Good deal.
Annie catapulted into me.
48
Annie
It had only been days since I saw him. But I was convinced I was never going to, ever again.
And then he was here. With the – "Those are not FBI," I said.
He wrapped his arms around me and buried his face in my hair. "You sure about that?"
Pause. "No."
He smiled into my hair.
49
Cole
There was a back room where she could change. I'd brought her sweats to bundle into. It was a warm day. Didn't matter. Annie would want warm and soft.
I guided her back there while Barry and his men called for the real police, handed her the clothes, let her go in alone. Went in after her when she took too long and I found her shaking and crying, sweating in the fleeces.
I scooped her up and sat down in the chair she'd been using and rocked her on my lap.
Somewhere someone was tearing up my imaginary Dom card.
50
Annie
Cole gave me three days. He contacted my school, told them he was a friend, gave them a story about my family going through some trauma or another I never bothered to learn. Just enough to know he'd gotten me a pass on some tests that couldn't be retaken and some time off. I could test out of the classes or retake them. I'd decide on a case by case basis.
Not that I wasn't busy being the best student I could be when I was on campus but I suspected part of this agreeableness from the University had more to do with a sizable donation from "my friend" who had contacted them, than with my wonderfulness as a student.
On the fourth day he came in where I was sleeping and stripped the covers off me. I'd been sleeping more and more, bundled into the sweats he'd brought me that now seemed safe. I didn't want to take them off.
Cole did. He pulled them off me while holding me with one hand and undressing me with the other. Then he placed me on my knees and, tired of posing me like a doll, said, "Lace your hands behind your head and keep your eyes down. Present your boobs. Spread your legs. Now listen."
And I did. But a growing pulse between my legs was making it difficult. Cole wore a button-down work shirt and jeans, boots and a thick belt I kept watching when he wasn't looking. My ass tingled like he'd already started in on it.
"It's time to make a decision, Annie. Are you going to stay or go? Because it's not going to work for you to live somewhere else. You know that, don't you?"
"I already made a decision, Sir," I said, which wasn't answering the question, but Cole stopped pacing so suddenly it seemed he really wanted to hear.
His voice when he turned back to me was softer than I expected. "What's your decision?"
I took a breath. "I want to stay with you."
He seemed to exhale a huge breath. He started to speak and I said, "Please? There's – more."
He closed his mouth and nodded. I could see the Master warring with whoever this man was.
"I've been running away from you every time because I didn't want to admit who I was to myself. While I was gone, before everything got so crazy all I could think was It's fucking Samuels doing this?"
He laughed at that. "Yeah. Me, too."
I blew out a sigh. "Sir? I want this. I want you to be my Master. I want you to push me in all the ways I think I can't handle. Insane long runs. Being spanked in the desert. I want you to discipline me because I need it and I want you to do it because you want to and I want all the things that scare me. I came back because of the rainforest cure at first. But that first time I ran?" I was ready for the big secret to be out but he already knew.
"I know you did some sessions in San Francisco."
I sighed. "And here I thought I had a secret."
He stopped pacing and looked down at me. "I touch you between your legs and you have no secrets."
My smile at that might have been.
"I want to give you what you need, too."
He sat down, facing me on a chair. "What's that?"
I swallowed hard. "I want to submit. I want to learn what I can endure. I want you to teach me, humiliate me, expose me, punish me, auction me off for charity."
He shuddered and I thought what he muttered was, "Never again."
"I want you to hurt me. But the pain I dream of isn't the same when I'm in the pain room."
He smiled brilliantly and laughed. "Of course it isn't! That's the point! Masochists dream of pain until it's happening. Sadists then give it to them even though they don't want it anymore." He leaned in close. "Want to know a secret? Pain hurts."
I pretended to be shocked.
He pretended to be imparting knowledge.
We smiled at each other.
"There are so many things you've done to me I never wanted and didn't think I could endure. Maybe some of them have made me stronger but that's not the point. I want to be pushed. But I want to do what you want, no matter how miserable or scared or in pain it makes me. Does that make sense?" I was really asking.
He was really laughing. "Masochist," he said.
It came back to that every time. So maybe I'd made my point.
He summed up everything I'd just said and then said, "That's everything we've been doing. What's different?"
I smiled. "I want to do it without a contract?"
He froze. "What's to stop you from running then, every time you get afraid?"
Like I had before.
"The fact that there's no contract. The fact that I can."
A slow smile spread across his face.
"I've never been more under your control, never more of a slave or sub, than when you've simply ordered me to remain still while you do something to me I don't want."
He nodded, accepting the point.
"It's not smart, Annie. You won't have your side of the contract." He stalked behind me and my flesh crawled with hope.
"I trust you, sir. I know that's foolish on its own. But what I ask from you is that you do what you want to me and force me to do what you want and that always the guiding principle is what it has been: Hurt, not harm. Humiliate, not degrade. Punish, not –" Damn.
He smiled. "We'll find a word that fits. How about punish, not play?"
I shook my head. "I like playing. I hate being punished!"
"Then we'll make punishments your new playtime. We can't have you thinking you're in control of everything. No topping from below."
Chloe had told me that. Hopefully he didn't know.
Though Cole tended to know everything.
"Are we agreed?" he asked. There was a Master's steel in his voice again.
"We are agreed."
He held out his hand to he
lp me to my feet. I stood in front of him, blushing at my own nakedness, proud of myself for what I'd just arranged. Surely things would be different now.
He gave me one long smile. Then said, "Turn around. Bend over. Hands on the desk. Present that ass. Higher. Higher, Annie."
And I heard him pull his belt free of its loops.
End of Book 5, Freefall from the Billionaire
Deep Cover: A dark billionaire series
Book 6
Exposed by the Billionaire
Synopsis
I used to be addicted to a drug.
But now… I’m addicted to him.
* * *
Cole.
The sadistic billionaire who has made it
his mission to save the world.
To fight human trafficking.
A mission that I’ve joined him on.
Cole has left his kinky lifestyle behind.
He’s obsessed with his fight.
Obsessed with me.
And I’m unofficially undercover.
Miserable without Cole.
Longing for his touch again.
He would do anything to bring me back.
If only he knew where I was.
Could it be too late for him to save me?
For us to find love
in the midst of hopelessness and misery?
1
Annie
Sometimes the Southern Nevada sunrise is subtle. Silvery clouds stretch over the sky looking like fish scales. The Spring Mountains turn from inky black silhouettes against the dawn sky into their rugged distant blues. Other times the sky explodes with vibrant oranges and reds, with purple and pink clouds, like some kind of science fiction planet, not anything that would be seen on Earth.
The desert outside Las Vegas is flat and rocky, studded with scrub from mesquite to sage. There's a surprising amount of land outside the city, even with all the warehouses being built as the state goes through another cyclical growth spurt.
Outside of billionaire and pharmaceutical CEO Cole St. Martin's rural desert compound, the flat desert made a terrific training ground for trail running. There were foothills Sir and I could reach if we worked on endurance, and there were paths we could take to sprint on. I was much better with endurance than I was with sprinting.
Which was why Sir had decided to train me with that today. Because "training" can denote having a coach who's invested in one's athletic performance. It can also mean one is the sexual submissive and newly discovered masochist in a relationship with a sexual sadist and Master.
That takes training to a whole different level.
I'd come back to Cole St. Martin after a brush with a trafficking ring. An ex-cop – or DEA cop in training, I wasn't sure who I was now – I'd gone after the ring operating out of Southern Nevada. I was partially responsible for partially breaking the ring.
Ever since I'd come back to Sir from that, I'd been restless and anxious. On my return, he'd wanted to sign a new Master/slave contract – my original contracts had been about keeping me safe from myself, because Sir had a variety of rainforest products that helped cure opiate addiction and I was strung out on fentanyl when a bad Seattle PD cop – and my handler for my deep cover narc work – "sold" me to Cole St. Martin.
Sir believed in that.
Me, I fought it until the truth took hold. Or a couple truths. First, that I really needed his cure because it really worked and if I wanted to stay a cop, I had to get off the drugs.
Second? I had a love/hate relationship with BDSM and sexual sadism and masochism. When Sir wasn't doing something to me, I was apt to fantasize about the St. Andrews cross, about caning and spanking and all the invasive, hard and painful things he loved to do to me.
When it was happening, I was convinced as soon as he untied me, I'd beat the shit out of him and run.
But a little self-inspection, at the cost of being trapped by the ring, led me to believe this was where I belonged. I kept coming back to him, after all, even after the addition was cured. There had to be something I was looking for.
This time we didn't sign a contract. This time the reason I didn't run from him was that I could.
Only right now? Right now I was definitely running from him, and I wasn't running fast enough.
"Faster, Annie!"
Pain exploded in my behind. I was running faster, damn it! But he was like ten feet taller than I was and he ran faster, even when I was already running far past my endurance and my comfortable pokey running speed that could take me miles and miles but not in any great hurry.
Cole St. Martin had decided to work on that. So today's training run was very long – more than our usual long ten miler – and I was dressed out here on the rural edges in a jog bra, my dark curls that were getting so long scooped into a ponytail. I wore top of the line trail running shoes.
I didn't wear anything else. Because as soon as we were out of sight of the compound, he’d made me strip off my shorts and panties and now he chased me. Every time my energy flagged or I started to slow, he lashed out with either the birching branches or with a riding crop.
Cole St. Martin is nicely over six feet tall. Those nine or ten inches he has on me he puts to good use and he's in amazing shape.
He had no problem with the speed and distance or with carrying the implements he was using to drive me forward. My ass already displayed a good two dozen switch marks and probably as many from the crop and once we got back to the compound, he'd for certain show me his displeasure at my slowness.
"Focus!"
The birch branches slashed across my ass again. I yelped and tried to pour on speed. It felt weird to be running half naked, shaved and oiled and on display, even if there was no one else anywhere around us.
The thing I found about being a sub was Sir constantly pushed me. The way it worked, at least for us, was he didn't chose the things I'd be willing to do. No outdoor sex in lush tree-filled grottos. No polite spanking with "Is this all right for you?" or holding me down with his hands on my wrists when he fucked me.
Cole St. Martin exhibited me, he stripped me naked in front of others, he spanked and caned and flogged and cropped me. He relied on his medical training before he went into pharmaceuticals and he made certain of my inner workings in ways I didn't even want to think about.
It was never what I wanted. And that in itself was gloriously freeing and horrifying and everything, all at the same time.
"Stop!"
I stopped on a dime. It could be because he wanted me to. Or there could be a rattlesnake up ahead, or a car I hadn't heard, in which case he'd block my body with his while I pulled on the shorts.
Or it could be this.
"Bend over and grab your ankles."
"I'm trying!" I protested.
Which never helped at all.
"Annie." He could imbue so much warning in just my name.
I didn't meet his eyes. For now, that wasn't allowed. Cole suspected me of topping from below. He was having none of it. And while he still liked that I wasn't submissive automatically, that I fought and argued and sometimes walked away, he liked the challenge.
Only right now his voice didn't sound that way.
But – "I'm trying my best!"
I heard his laugh from behind me. "I didn't ask if you were or weren’t. I told you to bend over and grab your ankles."
The laugh died out somewhere in that last sentence. I could do as he said or I could face a lot worse when we got back to the compound. With me fully naked, possibly.
I didn't turn to face him. I bent, my hands on my ankles, my eyes open and trained on the ground because if I tried to hide inside myself he'd order me not to.
"Count," he ordered, and he used the birch, giving me a full two dozen and ordering me to hold the position for several minutes after. My face flamed with humiliation and my ass flamed in agony. I hated the birch and whether he was playing or serious or punishing me, Cole had a very heavy hand.
"You may than
k me."
I let go of my ankles and turned gracefully, going down to my knees on the hard, rocky soil. Head up, gaze down, hands behind my back, I said, "Thank you, Sir, for caring enough to hurt me." It was the best I could do when I didn't know if I was being rewarded or punished, trained or prepared for whatever came next.
He moved behind me, his shadow long in the early morning desert. One hand snarled my ponytail and he yanked my head back. His other hand tightened on my throat, interrupting my breathing, stopping me from swallowing. He leaned close. "You're welcome." Then he kissed me, long, deep, his tongue in my mouth. When he released me he handed me my shorts. "Get dressed. Let's go back."
We walked back through the morning, this day's sunrise being wild fireworks of desert colors. The shorts brushed against the marks of his birching and cropping, hurting with every step. I didn't know if I was grateful for the distraction or not. Sir had his own concerns. He was deep in thought as we moved, sometimes muttering to himself, what sounded like alchemical formulas. He was the mad scientist, the wizard putting together spells. Or he was the pharmacist to started the company and had new ideas for cures.
I didn't mind so much. After the first mile I got used to the pain of the spanking and let my mind wander. It had been a month since the September raid by the Judge determined to "Clean up Sin City!" who had turned out to be a major player in the trafficking ring. Girls who fell afoul of the law for minor infractions found themselves not only fined and warned but actually going before the judge, who told them if they just behaved and played along, all charges would be dropped and wouldn't you like that, sweetheart? As if they had any choice in the matter. As if the hearing was real. As if it were normal to be dragged before the judge like that and to have him all avuncular and helpful about their futures.