by Wick,Christa
Numb, she settled into the visitor chair he had placed behind his desk now that his big leather chair was in the guest room. He gave her another kiss, tilting her chin up as his lips captured an errant tear on her cheek.
“You and Christine are safe here,” he promised.
Nodding, her brain unable to process Trent’s words, she watched him leave. Almost immediately, she wanted to call him back. He had said no one was hurt, but he didn’t say anything about arrests or witnesses or anything like that. Mr. Cobb had cameras on his property. That was how he had sent her the picture of the man she had shown Trent.
Pondering if she should go into the kitchen and ask him, her gaze landed on Trent’s laptop.
The screen was black.
She ran a fingertip across the touchpad.
A single icon appeared, the rest of the screen remaining black. Fortunately, the icon was for an internet browser. She clicked, then Googled her address. Zillow was the first result, a local news channel was the second.
She clicked the news link and started reading. The total annihilation of the house she had grown up in warranted four short paragraphs detailing when the fire was reported, what fire team showed up, how long the blaze lasted and that arson was suspected.
Ready to click back to Google, her finger froze as her gaze landed on one of those click bait type articles that populated the right menu on pretty much all commercial sites.
Kinky Billionaire Sex Ring Exposed
A few days ago, she would have rolled her eyes and continued on to real news. Hell, she would rather do her taxes than follow a click bait link. So, when she stabbed at the touchpad, it wasn’t the headline that made her do it.
It was the picture.
More accurately, it was the man in the picture—the same man who had cradled her in his arms the night before and was cooking her crepes at that very moment.
Daniella stared at the silver tray with its silver bowl of fresh fruit, the crystal glasses of orange juice, and the fine china plates with the fancy, dessert like breakfast. The man could cook and he could, and would, change diapers. His body, even with the scars, was carved perfection and he was smart, no doubt about that.
She didn’t want to think about how he was in bed. After reading the article on the anonymous sex club the press had nicknamed “Raleigh Rollers,” thinking about Kane in bed turned her stomach oily, the nauseating slickness quickly infecting her intestines.
Most of the article had been about a certain Marine Corps’ general who liked to make the trip inland while his wife stayed on the coast. But the write-up was quite clear on what all the males there did.
They paid for sex, usually sex that involved some sort of domination by one partner of the other.
Lynn’s battered face at the mortuary flashed inside Daniella’s head as she looked up at Kane.
“You never said why you were at the hotel the day Lynn died. Was it company business?”
He tried to wave it off as he leaned closer for what looked like an intended kiss.
“I’m just glad I was there.”
She pulled back and saw the subtle change in his expression as he sensed danger.
Reaching over to the sleeping computer, she hit the enter key. The screen filled with shots of the club’s exterior. A quick flick of her finger scrolled so that a virtual wall of shame came into view, Kane’s picture among a dozen prominent males photographed in the two weeks the reporter had staked out the location.
Next to each name was identifying information, where available. Names, businesses, cities of residence.
Kane’s said, “Unknown. Stark International, Raleigh.”
“So it didn’t have anything to do with this?”
Beneath the olive-gold skin, she saw a flush of red. His jaw tightened at the same time and his nostrils flattened. She guessed he was mad.
Pissed, really.
At being caught by the press and paraded about? At her daring to question him?
Another click and a picture of a woman who identified herself as Trinity appeared. She was training, the woman said, to be a UFC fighter. She identified Kane as one of her customers. She didn’t know his name. She had to call him “Sir.” She knew and catalogued in great detail the things he had done to her body in the course of their single session.
Daniella pushed away from the desk, Kane capturing her by the wrist before she could get out of the chair.
“You don’t understand—”
“What I didn’t understand was why I was getting all this help for free,” she started, cheeks heating as a bitchy mask slid into place to hide all the hurt raging inside her.
“Don’t make it out like that, Dani.”
“Mr. Kane,” she said, shaking her head then glaring at him. “I understand you like to restrain women, but you will release my arm immediately.”
He dropped her like a fresh lava rock.
She stood and he shot up.
She headed for his office door.
He reached the door first.
“You are staying, Dani. Think about it, you don’t have a house to sell.”
She offered a curt, seething smile. “No, I have an insurance policy to file on instead, much quicker. Now move.”
“Only if you promise to stay,” he answered.
Was that panic dancing in his eyes?
He had a whole lot more to worry about than some charity case he picked up off the street. The story focused on the Marine general, but the reporter had asked his invisible audience a number of tantalizing questions that had to do with the general, national security, favors, possible bribes and blackmail.
Once Kane was identified as Stark International’s Chief Operating Officer, the questions could lead to a Congressional subpoena—and worse.
“I will leave,” he coaxed as she studied him. “Reed will come and show you how to change the access code. But you have to understand, Dani, these are the kind of men you’ll always have to be looking over your shoulder for, not because they value what you’re denying them—but because you denied them.”
He reached slowly for her shoulder and she jerked it away.
“Baby, please. It was dangerous yesterday, it’s so much worse now.”
She swallowed, trying to erase the little term of endearment he had thrown out in what sounded like a heartfelt tone.
She didn’t know the truth of Merl’s associates, but she had to agree that the present was so much worse than the day before. She had woken up to so much joy and now it was all ashes. It coated her skin, clogged her nostrils, caked her tongue.
“Were you at the hotel with a woman you were paying to…”
Tie up, abuse, discard. She didn’t know which word to throw at him. She did know that Trinity had said her anonymous “Sir” had a reputation at the club of never using the same woman twice.
Kane’s jaw tightened. It was clear he had no intention of dignifying her question with a response.
“Answer me or I’m leaving.”
His lips drew inward. She could see that he gnawed at the inside for a few seconds, his gaze darting angrily around her face as he studied the minutia of her expression.
“Just what is it that’s worth risking Christine’s safety?” he countered, his tone turning cold and calculating. “Your pride? Your integrity?”
Her face crumbled at his question. He wouldn’t answer. And she realized she wouldn’t leave—at least not immediately.
“I need to check on Christine,” she said, weakly gesturing at him to move aside. “And you need to pack a bag.”
He let Daniella pass, her head filled with answers to his ruthless question. Staying meant she was losing her heart, her optimism, her faith. But he was right about one thing. None of her feelings, none of her hurt, was worth endangering the child who had been placed in her care.
Christine was everything to her, and, somehow, Daniella would have to figure out how to live the next eighteen years without that dedication becoming a visible b
urden as it had been with the Marquardts.
At least, she thought, coming to a stop in front of the crib, any sacrifice would be made out of love.
Managing a faint smile, she stroked the baby’s cheek.
Made out of love and repaid with love.
Chapter Nine
Bag packed for show, Kane waited for Reed to arrive. When the elevator doors opened, he let his subordinate step off, then he stepped on, not a word exchanged between them.
Everything the man needed to know, Kane had conveyed by text.
When the elevator doors closed, he pressed the button for the lobby and held it until the security panel reset. Finished punching in a sixteen-digit code, he felt the cage begin its long descent.
The upscale residential building nestled in Raleigh’s business district had been built the year after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Buried three levels below ground, the developer had put in a communal bunker. The attorneys, bankers, and dentists who once rented its office suites, had bought into the promise of safety at work, even if the Soviets launched their nukes.
Then came Nixon and detente followed by Carter and an economic slump. The professionals moved out and the building remained empty until Clinton’s presidency, when it was turned into an oasis for yuppies working in Raleigh’s tech corridor.
Now, the entire bunker level was his, it interior renovated with labyrinthine turns and dead ends.
If the decor upstairs seemed severe, downstairs was a shadowy mausoleum lit mostly by the small power lights on the electronics that permeated the bunker.
Entering the tactical area, he switched on a bank of monitors. The penthouse appeared across the many screens. Reed was in the kitchen with Dani, the two of them sitting on opposite sides of the island. Kane turned up the volume then walked over to the espresso machine.
The conversation sounded like Dani was once again leaning toward striking out on her own. Reed was trying to talk her down. As Kane had discovered after the scene in his office, Dani’s elderly neighbor had been severely beaten after the arsonists spotted his outdoor security cameras. The old man had given up his outdoor feed to their brutal interrogation techniques, but the long-retired veteran hadn’t revealed his separate indoor security feed.
When the cops showed up to ask about the cameras they had also spotted, they found him near death. He was in a coma now, but he had been conscious long enough to tell them about the second feed and how to access it.
Tears streamed down Dani’s face as she listened to Reed fill her in on the details.
“We’ve identified the men,” he told her. “They have rap sheets thicker than a bible. Sex and drug trafficking, extortion, battery, kidnapping—”
A sharp gasp from Dani cut Reed off before he could add the final polish to the men’s list of misdeeds.
Murder.
Not once or twice but over three dozen times between the two of them.
Kane listened with a voyeur’s mix of shame and victory. Certainly Dani wouldn’t be foolish enough to leave his net of protection after Reed’s report.
Famous last words, he realized as his attention glanced from the kitchen’s feed to that of the guest room.
Her bags were on the bed, ready to go.
He looked back to the kitchen and saw her shaking her head, her beautiful face filled with uncertainty and fear.
She must have been whispering because her lips were moving but Kane couldn’t hear what she was saying. He turned up the volume as Reed began to speak.
“You only know part of the story,” he assured Dani.
Another one of her stubborn head shakes had Kane’s hands curling around the armrests of his chair and squeezing.
“He could have told me the rest.”
No, Kane thought, she wasn’t going to listen. And he had tried to talk to her, just not on the information she was demanding.
On screen, Dani shrugged. “But it’s all one and done with him, isn’t it?.”
The hurt in her voice stabbed deep into his chest. She was wrong, so wrong. His intent hadn’t been to fuck and forget. He had only wanted to keep her safe while keeping his hands off her.
But there was something hypnotic about the woman, something he couldn’t explain.
“I’ve never heard of another woman being in here beyond Lindsey,” Reed gently argued. “But you’re going to believe what suits you. All I’m asking is that you don’t run off—for Christine’s sake.”
Dani threw her hands up. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“It could be a feint,” he answered. “We’ve had to guard a lot of unwilling charges. When they’re compliant, that’s when it’s time to start worrying.”
His finger tapped against the center of the island’s surface, his hand just a few inches from Dani’s.
“I will tell you before I pack our things and go,” she promised
First she’d have to unpack, Kane snorted from where he watched twenty-five stories below.
“You’ll have time to convince me that staying is the safest course of action for Christine,” she added.
Reed held out his hand, his posture suspicious.
Dani lifted a finger, hesitating. “Not so fast. You will work so that I have safe options beyond staying here.”
“Deal,” Reed agreed, his hand wrapping around hers for a brief shake. “But their network stretches halfway across the country, not to mention their East European contacts. Defeating them takes patience.”
Dani hugged herself, fear etching new lines across her face. “Poor Mr. Cobb. Do you think I—”
“No,” Reed answered at the same time Kane mirrored the denial. “No visits, no calls. But I’ll get a team out there to fix the damage to his place and, if he wants protection, he’ll get it.”
She managed a weak, but genuine smile. “Thank you.”
Reed sighed. “Don’t thank me, Dani girl. I’m following my boss’s orders. Kane isn’t going to let anything happen to you. He has a lot of resources to throw at this.”
Dani stared hard and deep at Reed. He looked away, his expression crumbling.
“Dani, you want Trent in your corner.” He shrugged after a few long seconds, his gaze landing on hers then darting away. “Me…I don’t have a very good record of keeping women I care about safe.”
“So you try not to care about them?” she asked, reaching across the island to place her hand on top of his.
Emotion burned in Kane’s chest at the contact between the two of them, but he didn’t dare name its source.
“Something like that,” Reed cleared his throat and slid his hand out from under Dani’s. “Let me show you how to reset the code.”
Turning the sound off, Kane tapped at the keyboard and a slideshow started on the monitors directly in front of him. The images fading in and out of view were ones he had rescued right after Reed had received his divorce decree.
His mouth shrugged in a fast ebbing smile as he remembered his first attempt to save the photos.
Reed had punched him.
It wasn’t the first, nor the last, not even the hardest punch the man would ever throw at Kane. But the force and Reed’s expression as Kane tried to dig the photo boxes out of the garbage on trash day had been enough for Kane to beat a temporary retreat, find the garbage truck and bribe the driver to stop at Reed’s house last and not run the compactor.
Their wedding photo appeared onscreen, Reed stiff in his tuxedo while Katherine was resplendent in the designer gown her parents had paid for. A bossy princess, Katherine was accustomed to getting what she wanted. Reed had somehow fallen madly in love with her despite the conflict between his working class roots and the woman’s overbearing sense of entitlement.
Kane’s finger hovered over the ESCAPE key, ready to exit out of the slideshow of another man’s memories—another man’s life.
He still had nightmares about the day that, ultimately, was the beginning of the end of Reed’s marriage.
The damage to her body, the w
ait for emergency medical care and the infection that had followed left Katherine infertile.
She placed the blame on Reed, not on herself for insisting on coming when he had told her over and over it wasn’t safe, not on her rich daddy for pressuring a friend who worked for a senator on the Armed Services Committee, not the friend who was willing to trade her safety and the life of her unborn child for the chance to keep a campaign donor happy.
No, she blamed her husband because he couldn’t bear the weight of a crumbling building on his back.
Even with the bitter accusations Katherine flung, Reed had loved her.
The idiot probably still loved her.
With a rough swallow, Kane hit the ESCAPE key.
The images disappeared from the monitor but lingered in his mind.
The experience had changed him, just as it had changed Stark and Reed. All three men came to view that moment as their biggest failure. As far as Kane knew, Reed hadn’t been with another woman since. Collin had turned toward bondage and domination. He might as well have had “you can’t protect what you can’t control” tattooed on his dick.
Kane, the youngest of the three, had twisted Stark’s mantra into “you can’t love what you can control.”
The women he had sex with weren’t allowed to touch him, weren’t allowed to gaze into his eyes. Their mouths might wrap around his cock, he might press his lips to their pussies, but he never kissed them. And he never, ever, ever, put his cock where it might make a baby.
Mouth?
Yes.
Ass?
Fuck yes!
But, even wrapped in a condom, he never so much as dipped into the hot, wet hole of a woman’s pussy.
Not until Dani.
Chapter Ten
Daniella and Christine remained in the penthouse. Reed brought the promised clone of her phone early Monday and stayed an hour asking her questions about Lynn and any of the dead girl’s acquaintances.
He nearly fell out of his chair when she told him she had all of her sister’s social media and email passwords. The Facebook profile was just a memorial now, but even that was enough to have Reed salivating because Daniella hadn’t deleted any of the private messages despite their disturbing nature. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to read more than a few of them, but she also hadn’t been able to force herself to delete them.