by Jane Henry
Her Hero
Boston Doms Book Six
Jane Henry
Maisy Archer
Blushing Books
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Epilogue
Jane Henry
Maisy Archer
EBook Offer
Blushing Books Newsletter
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©2017 by Blushing Books®, Jane Henry and Maisy Archer
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Jane Henry and Maisy Archer
Her Hero
EBook ISBN: 978-1-61258-245-0
Cover Art by ABCD Graphics & Design
This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as Blushing Books' or the author's advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.
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Chapter 1
Donnie eased his Valkyrie to a smooth stop at a red light on Harbor Road and shifted his head from side to side, trying to ease the tension that always gripped his shoulders after hours spent on his bike.
Christ, what a perfect day. Unseasonably mild for April in New England, it was all warm sunshine and cool breezes that could have tempted even the most devoted workaholic to play hooky. And as much as he loved his job managing The Club South and overseeing the ongoing transformation of the dilapidated old firehouse into the premiere BDSM playhouse south of Boston, Donnie had never claimed to be that dedicated. Instead, he’d done what his boss, Master Blake, was always encouraging him to do, and he’d delegated, leaving the deliveries, the contractors, and the paperwork in the capable hands of his team while he escaped for the day to clear his head.
Donnie had been up at dawn with his saddlebags packed and his playlist loaded, letting a flip of the coin determine that north would be his direction for the day. He’d been on the road early enough to avoid all the rush hour traffic as he’d cruised from Quincy through Boston, sticking to the highways as far as the Maine border and then detouring for a slow, scenic ride up and down Route 1. Just him, his trusty Valk, and the rocky Atlantic coastline stretching as far as the eye could see. He’d grabbed an early dinner at a seafood shack that was nearly empty of tourists this early in the season, before heading back south. And now, as the last streaks of orange twilight lit the sky, he found himself only two blocks from the place he called home—a room above The Club with a view of the water and the Boston skyline, where a scalding hot shower awaited him. Anticipation and pleasure curled in his gut.
In a life where not a lot had gone right, let alone perfectly, Donnie Nolan knew better than to take this stuff for granted.
As he straddled the vibrating machine, appreciating the salty tang in the air and the crash of the waves just beyond the sea wall, a flash of light in his side mirror caught his attention. He watched with detached amusement as a giant fucking behemoth of a bike pulled onto the shoulder of the road, passing half a dozen cars, and coming to a stop beside Donnie. It was the kind of illegal, douchebag move that gave bikers everywhere a bad rep. Not content with his Asshole status, the guy then edged his bike forward in impatient bursts that had a mom yanking her toddler back from the crosswalk. He then leveled up to Fucking Asshole by revving his engine loud enough for the people standing outside the ice cream shop across the street to crane their heads and look for the source of the noise.
Jesus, what a fuckwit.
Donnie wouldn’t turn his head or give the guy the attention he was clearly asking for, but from behind his own full-coverage helmet, he could see that the other man had swiveled to look at him. Dude had long white hair tied back in a long tail, no helmet on his head, and a taunting smile on his face that got Donnie’s back up.
And that was before he started mouthing obscenities.
The guy was looking for trouble. A race? A fight? Who the fuck knew? And he was trying to goad Donnie into joining him. And for the briefest of seconds, Donnie almost allowed himself to be persuaded. He could imagine swinging his leg over his bike, throwing his helmet off, and decking the asshole. Donnie knew exactly how it would feel when the flesh and bone of his knuckles made contact with the other guy’s face, how the shock of the blow would reverberate up his arm to his shoulder, how all the rational processes of his brain woul
d short-circuit, and a red haze would descend across his vision. He’d be a warrior once more, the tip of a spear, the chief leg-breaker in Mikey Nolan’s personal army, the instinct-driven animal he’d been trained to be. He almost craved the black-and-white simplicity of it. It’s him or me. Gotta fight, gotta win.
And then the light changed, sanity returned, and Donnie gestured the douchebag ahead with an ironic wave of his gloved hand. After you, motherfucker.
As the guy disappeared down the crowded street, weaving around stopped cars, Donnie slowly let out the clutch on his own bike, allowing himself to roll forward. He took a deep breath, forcing down the spike of adrenaline that made him want to chase after the other guy and teach him a lesson.
Not fucking worth it, he reminded himself. True strength lies in control.
He’d learned almost half a lifetime ago that when you let someone draw you into a fight, when you let them dictate the terms of a confrontation, you always lost, even when you won.
The Bluetooth speaker inside his helmet played out the first mournful notes of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Simple Man—the ringtone Donnie had assigned to his friend and mentor Blake Coleman. Donnie pushed away the last vestiges of his annoyance as he hit the button on his helmet to accept the call.
“Evening, boss,” he spoke into the mic as traffic crept along. He noticed with a smirk that his voice was raspy tonight, gravelly from disuse the way it always got when he’d spent the day alone on the road. Yeah, he’d paid a fair bit for a helmet that he could use to make and accept calls, but he could count on two hands the number of people who had his cell number, and even fewer he’d bother to talk to while he was riding. Blake was one of them.
“North or south?” Blake asked without preamble, amusement evident in his deep voice.
Donnie snorted. He hadn’t shared his plans with Blake this morning beyond a quick text to say that he’d be out-of-pocket for the day, but it didn’t surprise him that Blake already knew. Blake wouldn’t waste time asking stupid shit, like “What did you do today?” or “Did you have fun?” because the answers would be, “Riding,” and “Fuck, yeah.” Every single time.
“North,” Donnie replied, feeling a weird warmth in his chest that came from having someone know him that well and give a shit about his welfare. It was a feeling he wasn’t entirely used to, even after knowing Blake for more than a decade. The only other person who’d ever given him that feeling was Grace, and she was…
God. He hadn’t allowed himself to think of Grace in years, hadn’t allowed himself to fully conjure her face or imagine what her life might be like these days. But just when he thought he’d succeeded in scrubbing her from his thoughts, locking every cherished memory in a vault, her name would appear right in front of him, taunting him with what could never be.
He swallowed and forced himself to finish the thought. Grace was ancient history. A closed chapter. Another thing he’d been forced to leave behind.
“Knew it. Elena owes me,” Blake said, with a note of satisfaction in his voice that brought Donnie’s attention back to the present. “You headed west last time, and east the time before that. Figured it’d be north or south.”
Donnie snorted again. “Uh, boss, you know I toss a coin to decide this shit, right? Not exactly the kind of thing you wanna bet on?”
Blake’s chuckle was low and meaningful. “Only if I cared about losing this particular bet, Don.”
Jesus.
“Right,” Donnie said, rolling his eyes as he put on his blinker, pulled into the lot behind the three-story red brick building, and eased into his parking spot.
Given all the years he’d worked for Blake at The Club, first as a bouncer, then a Dungeon Master, and now as a Club manager, Donnie figured he’d seen and done pretty much everything. But somehow even the most vaguely suggestive reference to Blake’s much-younger wife Elena, a woman Donnie had come to think of as his adopted older sister, made him squirm and quickly switch the subject.
“So, are we still meeting tomorrow afternoon? Second floor construction is done, but I want to walk you through the third floor before I give the general contractor the final sign-off.”
Blake hummed a negative. “Tomorrow’s not good. Slay’s got shit to do, and I want him and Matt to be there for this meet. I was down there a couple weeks ago, but the other guys haven’t seen the place since we opened on New Year’s Eve.”
Alexander Slater and Matteo Angelico, both well-respected and experienced dominants who had worked with Blake for years, had bought into The Club a few years ago, just before the opening of the third location, The Club North. Though the transition from sole proprietor to partner had been a bit tricky for Blake in the beginning, Donnie personally felt that Blake was happier now that he could devote more time to Elena and their kids.
“I want them to see how much you’ve accomplished,” Blake continued. “You should be proud.”
Donnie cleared his throat. He wasn’t shy. He knew he’d worked his ass off, and he was confident he’d done a good job, but he had no idea how to handle Blake’s praise. He never had.
“No big, boss,” he muttered.
“No big?” Blake echoed. “That building was ready to be condemned six months ago, Donnie. And honest to God, for a second there, I wondered if we’d bitten off more than we could chew, but you turned it around. In two months, you had all construction on the first floor completed six weeks ahead of schedule, you had over a hundred members lined up before opening night, and now you have us open four nights a week, when we’d only planned to be open three until mid-summer.”
“I had help,” Donnie argued, feeling the tension in his neck ratchet up a notch.
“Yup. An almost-entirely new team that you hired, vetted, and trained. Your staff is pretty damn impressive too.”
Donnie wanted to dispute this, but he was too caught up on Blake’s last words.
His staff. God, wasn’t that a fucking kick? Donnie Nolan, the perpetual fuckup who would’ve won “Most Likely to Serve Hard Time” if he’d bothered sticking with high school long enough to see his senior year, had big responsibilities these days and a fucking staff of men and women who reported to him.
And it was all thanks to the guy on the other end of the phone, who’d somehow seen a spark of potential in a punk-assed, muscle-bound delinquent who was never supposed to amount to anything. Words, never Donnie’s strong suit, failed him just then, but he vowed to himself that he’d never give Blake a reason to regret taking a chance on him.
Blake smoothly covered Donnie’s lapse. “So, I’m thinking we’ll meet the day after tomorrow. Wednesday afternoon or evening. I’ll let you know once I confirm with Slay and Matt, yeah?”
“Yeah. Sounds good. See you then,” Donnie agreed, before disconnecting the call and finally shutting off his bike.
The sounds of traffic from Harbor Road seemed even louder after Donnie removed his helmet and tucked it under his arm. It was fully dark now, and as he crossed the parking lot and opened the back door, he made a note to himself that they needed to bump up the lighting in this lot ASAP. It was entirely too dark out here for his peace of mind.
He climbed the short flight of stairs to the main floor, where one of the bouncers would normally be stationed on an open night, unzipping his leather riding jacket as he went. Tonight, the lights were low and the rooms on this level—a large bar, a dance floor, and three demonstration rooms—were deserted. All the construction workers had gone home hours ago, and none of the staff were scheduled.
He debated a detour to the stockroom, to make sure Andy had received and organized the liquor delivery properly, but the lure of his own space, the third-floor suite Blake had insisted he remodel before any of the other rooms, was too strong. Shower, hydrate, bed, in that order.
He’d just put his foot on the first step to the second floor when a creak above alerted him that he wasn’t alone.
Instinctive caution, born of years spent under the thumbs of first his alcoholic asshole f
ather and then his psycho cousin Mikey, had him looking around for a weapon. He placed his helmet on the table near the main entrance and dipped his hand into his pocket, threading his keys through his fingers. He climbed the stairs quickly and quietly, keeping his feet on the thick carpet runner that ran down the middle of the treads. The Club hadn’t had any trouble with security at any of its locations in a long while; not since drug kingpin Chalo Salazar had been given a two-year prison stint and managed to win himself an extra year for bad behavior, and Donnie didn’t anticipate any trouble now, but it was always better to be prepared.
“Master Nolan? Sir? Is that you?”
The plaintive whine had him stopping in his tracks three steps from the top. Oh, Christ. Suddenly, he was almost wishing for one of Salazar’s goons to appear.
“Julie. You’re here late.” He made his voice as distant as possible as he shuffled up the last three steps, dropping his keys back in his pocket.
The petite brunette stood in the middle of the second-floor foyer, biting her bottom lip nervously, her eyes cast to the floor. She wore a short black dress that clung to her curves like a second skin and some strappy, death-defying heels—the kind of thing that the girls normally wore when they were off-duty, and at The Club to play or to participate in a demonstration.
“Yeah. I, um… I just finished up,” she said, waving behind her in the general direction of the office, which was located at the front of the building, directly above the main entrance.
Donnie pursed his lips at this outright lie. Julie was a waitress and bartender who worked (and played) almost exclusively downstairs. There was no reason for her to be hanging around the office at all. Still, he hesitated to call her out on it. He was pretty sure her real reason for being there had to do with seeing him, and the hopeful glances she was sneaking him from under her lashes only confirmed it.