by Nicole York
He was quite literally nailed to the spot.
His ankles were bound to the front chair legs, his shins to the upper part beneath the seat, his thighs wrapped in what might have been duct tape over and over again.
He needed to open his fucking eyes.
Cole let out a frustrated growl as he forced his eyes open. Bright light blinded him and he wondered how long he’d been unconscious for. Hours? Days? Fuck. What was the last thing he remembered? Where had he been? Who had he been with?
Nothing came to him. His memory was nothing but a blank sheet of white.
When he finally managed to get his eyes open, he blinked rapidly, clearing blurriness away and trying to invite clarity in. The lights shining down on him made it damn near impossible to see anything for several minutes.
But finally and painfully, he began making sense of where he was.
He was in a small warehouse. The dripping water was coming from a support beam above his head and landing in a shallow pool of water about three feet in front of him. In that shallow pool of water lay the perfectly still form of a man.
Did Cole know this man?
His brain tried to process what he was seeing. The man was big. Really fucking big. His back was to Cole, so he couldn’t see his face, but he realized the pool of water was a deep burgundy color.
It wasn’t only water. It was blood, too.
The man’s blood.
Realization dawned on Cole as he looked the man over. He was bald, had broad shoulders, and a thick torso.
And he was dead.
“Marcus,” Cole breathed. His voice finally worked. His breath hitched and panic set in.
Where the fuck was he? Who had taken him? And who the hell had killed his boss in cold blood?
Cole tugged at the bonds. They held fast and cut deeper into him but he didn’t relent. He strained and pulled until the pain made him dizzy, and he let out a furious, desperate cry of fury that tore his lungs apart and made the taste of blood even stronger in his mouth. The cry took everything out of him and he slumped forward. Anguish coursed through him and he hung his head. None of this made any sense.
Someone started to chuckle.
They were close by, and the amused sound was painfully familiar. Masculine. Coy. Manipulative.
Cole lifted his head and listened as footsteps sounded behind him. The man drew closer and clapped his hands in succession.
Clap.
Clap.
Clap.
“It took you long enough to come to,” the man said.
As soon as the words dripped from the enemy’s lips, Cole knew who he was dealing with.
“Cooper,” Cole growled venomously.
“Are your spider-senses tingling, champ?”
Cole’s hands curled into fists and the rope cut right down to the bone. “What the fuck do you want?”
Cooper, who’d been approaching from behind, closed a hand on Cole’s shoulder. It suddenly smelled like cigar smoke and Cole knew the other man was puffing away. “Well,” Cooper said slowly, menacingly, “for starters I wanted to see your reaction when you woke to find your man dead.”
Cole’s gaze slid to Marcus’s corpse.
What had Cooper done to him? How much blood was the pool of water disguising? What did Marcus look like from the front?
Cole shuddered. Those were probably answers he would prefer not knowing.
“That cry of anguish,” Cooper said, full of unbridled joy, “so satisfying. Did Marcus know you cared that much about him? I doubt it. Last time I saw the pair of you, you shot him.”
“It was an accident,” Cole growled.
“Still. Bullet. Marcus. Blood. The works. I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed it.”
“Get fucked.”
“Soon, kid. Soon. I brought along another member for our party for just that reason.” Cooper snapped his fingers.
Cole’s stomach rolled over.
What the hell was Cooper talking about now? Who had he brought?
A side door with a burnt out emergency exit sign above it swung open on creaky hinges. The door slammed against the wall and a man dressed in black stepped through. He turned back to the door and reached through to the other side, where another man shoved someone toward him.
Someone with dangerously long legs, long black hair, and wide, terrified brown eyes.
Cole’s heart constricted in his chest.
Cameron.
“No,” he breathed. Frantically, he looked up at Cooper. “Let her go. She has nothing to do with this.”
Cooper chuckled and watched as Cameron was dragged into the warehouse. She looked frightened but not hurt. “She has everything to do with this, Cole. She’s your woman, isn’t she? By default, that means you invited her to play with the big boys. And she knows how to play, don’t you, kitten?” Cooper turned to Cameron.
One of the men dragged a chair over and slammed it down on the asphalt about twenty feet in front of Cole. They pushed Cameron down into the seat and one of them pulled her hair off her face and ran a hand along her jaw. She wrenched away from him, but his fingers tightened in her hair, and he held her in place. She gripped the armrests and Cole could see her knuckles turning white.
Cooper flashed a smile. “Yes, she does know how to play. Not much of a talker though. Surprising for a woman.”
“Let her go,” Cole said again. “Do you know who she is, Cooper? You’re playing with fire. Her father is a powerful man. A legitimate man. If he decided to come for you, he’d—”
“Get himself killed,” Cooper finished. “Plain and simple. I don’t give a damn if Wayne fucking White wants to come for me. I’ll blow his head off like I’m going to blow your head off. After, of course, I let him see what I’m going to make of his precious daughter.”
All of Cole’s worst fears were being realized.
How could he have done this to the first woman he loved after his wife left him? He never thought he’d be lucky enough to love again and there’d been a reason for that. This life of his was too dangerous for an innocent woman. And Cameron? Not only was he snuffing out the rest of her future just by being with her, but he was costing other good people so much. She was in this world to do good. Her purpose was to help people.
And Cole had compromised all of that with his own greed.
“I’ll do whatever you want if you just let her go,” Cole said desperately.
Cameron whimpered and shook her head.
He tried to ignore her. He couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t face what his actions had cost her.
Cooper moved around to stand in front of Cole. He crouched down and blew cigar smoke into Cole’s face. “All I want is to destroy you, kid. Plain and simple. And hurting her? Well, that seems like the most effective approach. Don’t lie to me. You know I’m right. And you know this is necessary.”
“No, please.”
“Silence,” Cooper hissed before rising to his feet and turning his back on Cole. He dropped the cigar and let it continue to burn on the asphalt. When he spoke next, it was to his men. “Kill her.”
Cole wasn’t sure whose scream rang louder in his ears, his own or Cameron’s.
25
Cameron
Cameron’s eyes fluttered open and she found herself blinking up at Cole’s bedroom ceiling. She noticed the water stain in the corner that she hadn’t spotted last night, and frowned. His place wasn’t terribly nice. She wondered if he’d ever let her spruce it up for him. She knew he wasn’t that kind of guy. All of the unpacked moving boxes in the place suggested that much. But even so, he deserved to come back to a place at the end of a long day that felt like home.
This certainly didn’t feel like a home to her. It felt like an in-between place where it would be easy for him to walk away.
Was he afraid of committing to something and not having it work out? Had his past tainted him and jaded him, making him always hold back from going all in?
Maybe, she thought to herself as she rolled o
ver to face him.
Cole was on his back, still sound asleep. The blankets were down around his waist, and his chiseled body was on display from the hips up. She cupped her cheek and admired all the lines of muscle, fixating on the way his pulse fluttered under his jaw.
She reached out and gently traced his collarbone and cheek before pulling back, not wanting to wake him. He looked so peaceful in sleep. None of the stresses of his job could find him there. She smiled and decided to let him sleep. She rolled back to the edge of the bed, pulled the covers down, and slowly stood up to stop the mattress from creaking.
She crept across the floor to his dresser to put on one of his shirts and slipped out of the bedroom, pulling the door closed softly behind her.
The apartment was bright and airy. Cole got good morning light through there and she thought it was a shame how hollow the place felt. So as she put on the coffee machine and started brewing a pot, she couldn’t help herself but to start tidying up a little. She doubted he would notice how she’d straightened the blinds or dusted them off or how she’d pulled the curtains open so everything was equally spaced.
She opened the patio doors and closed the screen to get some air flow, and she found an air freshener, which she spritzed on the sofa and in the air to get things smelling a little fresher and less like cardboard and sweaty leather from his punching bag.
That was all she managed to get done by the time the coffee was ready. She rummaged through his cabinets in search of his coffee mugs and found a grand total of three of them. None of them matched.
Our lives are so different.
Cameron couldn’t even remember the last time she’d made herself a cup of coffee. There was always someone there to make it for her, usually without her even having to ask. She went to his fridge to get milk and thanked her lucky stars it wasn’t expired. She didn’t know how he liked his coffee, so she filled the third empty mug with milk and put everything on a wood cutting board she found tucked inside one of the cabinets. She also found a plastic Tupperware container filled with sugar and brought that too.
Cameron made her way back to the bedroom where she found Cole still asleep.
Smiling to herself, she set the cutting board down on his nightstand and sat down beside him. He didn’t stir, so she reached out and ran her fingers lightly through his hair.
His eyes fluttered open.
Then with a sharp yell, he grabbed her wrist and sat up. Cameron yelped and tried to pull back, but Cole had a tight hold on her. His other hand gathered in the front of the T-shirt she’d put on from his dresser, and his eyes narrowed to slits before realization settled in.
Cole blinked as she tried to calm her panicked breathing.
“It’s just me,” she said. “It’s just me.”
He released her immediately.
Cameron pulled away and rubbed her aching wrist. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No,” he breathed, shaking his head. “No, I’m sorry.” He reached for her, gently this time, and she didn’t pull back. She let him take her hand and inspect the red marks forming around her wrist. Her brows drew together with anguish and guilt, and his blue eyes slid up to meet her gaze. “I’m so sorry, Cameron. I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to… fuck.”
She touched his cheek. “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know it was me. Were you having a bad dream?”
Cole got a far-off look in his eyes and nodded.
Cameron wondered what demons haunted a man like Cole in his sleeping hours. She had nightmares about spiders and her teeth falling out. But him? A man with so much darkness in his past and blood on his hands?
She could only imagine the kinds of things that would make him wake with such a start.
“It’s okay,” she told him, still sensing how tense he was. “It happens. Hey, I brought you coffee.”
His eyes slid to the cutting board with the mugs and Tupperware of sugar on his nightstand. He leaned back to slump heavily against the headboard and let out a weary sigh.
“I didn’t know how you liked it, so I brought the milk and sugar with me,” Cameron said.
“Black is fine.”
She picked up his mug and handed it to him. He didn’t sip right away.
Cameron chewed the inside of her cheek. “Do you want to talk about it? The dream, I mean?”
“Not really.”
She nodded.
It’s not a big deal. He doesn’t have to share it with you. He can keep some things to himself.
She tried to pretend that it didn’t hurt that he wouldn’t let her in the way she wanted him to.
The far-off look in Cole’s eyes began to melt away as he sipped his coffee. Cameron moved around to the other side of the bed so she could crawl back under the blankets with him. She snuggled in close and sipped her coffee too. It was bitter but not terrible.
“How did you sleep?” he asked.
She smiled. “After all those orgasms? Like a baby.”
He chuckled. “At least one of us did.”
“I have bad dreams sometimes, too. You’d think they’d go away as we get older but I swear they get worse. Kids dream about fictional monsters. Adults dream about real ones.”
Cole studied her. “What monsters do you dream about now?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “All kinds, I suppose. I dream about losing my parents when I’m stressed out. I dream about having fights with Pauline, and she abandons me, or she calls me all the terrible things I’m terrified of being, like a trust-fund daughter or a selfish person or a bad friend.”
“You’re none of those things.”
“I’m a little bit of the first one,” she admitted. “But I’m working on that. I dream about car accidents. I dream about being pregnant and losing a child I’ve never had. And recently, I dream about you.”
“Me?”
Cameron nodded with a small smile. “Yes, I dream of what I’m afraid of losing, Cole. I think we all do in some capacity.”
“Have I left you in any of your dreams?”
“Not yet,” she said. “You’ve been as steady and sure in my sleeping hours as my waking ones. Thankfully.”
Cameron had hoped her vulnerability might get him talking about his own dream, but Cole never opened up. Whatever it was, his lips were sealed on the matter. She tried to understand and told herself it wasn’t personal. Perhaps the dream was too real, too dark for him to relive.
She sighed and sank lower against the pillows. “I worry about you, Cole.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Why?”
“Because you’re trouble with a capital T.”
He chuckled. “Oh?”
Cameron nodded. “I mean it. You’re a bad influence.”
Cole smirked. “I think we both knew that from the get go.”
“Yes, but I didn’t quite expect things to go this way.”
“What way?”
She gazed up at him and bit her bottom lip. Why was she being so vulnerable? “I didn’t expect to be so afraid of losing you.”
Cole looked down.
She leaned over to peer up at him. “And I’m afraid of needing you too much,” she whispered.
Cole’s eyes danced back and forth between hers. “I need you, too.”
She might not have been able to get the details of his dream out of him, but she’d take those words as a win.
Cameron set her coffee down on the stack of boxes he was using as a nightstand and rolled back over to him. She lifted one leg over his hips to straddle him, took his coffee, and put it aside too. She leaned over and her hair fell over her shoulder and grazed his cheeks. He ran his fingers through it like he was playing a harp. Then he wrapped his other arm behind her back and pulled her down to him.
She kissed him gently at first, but as always, things heated up quickly. Words were one thing, but she wanted to show him with her body just how much she needed him. All of him. His heart, his mind, his body, his soul. He was what had been missing from her l
ife and she didn’t know it until just recently. How had she gone so long without having this in her life?
How had she felt fulfilled?
And how could she ever go back to being the girl she was before Cole made her feel like a woman?
He tried to roll her over, but she planted her knees and grinned into the kiss. She wasn’t going anywhere. For once, she was going to call the shots in the bedroom, and if he didn’t like it, that was just too bad.
She smiled against his lips as he tried again.
“Woman,” he grated. “You’re a tease.”
“You like it.”
Cameron loved the way his chuckle rumbled deep in his chest like the growl of a powerful predator. Her powerful predator.
26
Cole
Cole stared unseeing at the dance floor. It was Saturday night at Kadia and the place was busy as ever. Women in short dresses pressed their asses into the groins of men they knew and those they didn’t. Men squeezed handfuls of said asses, stole kisses, and whispered tantalizing words into the ears of the women. Some slipped away to make their way to the third floor, and others huddled close together to drop quarters of little blue pills onto each other’s tongues.
Cole saw it all and nothing at the same time.
He was distracted.
His mind had been replaying the dream he had the other night about Adam Cooper and Cameron on a sadistic loop. He hadn’t been able to shake the despair he’d felt in that moment when he truly believed he’d lost Cameron forever. Never in his life had he felt something so horrible—not even when his wife told him it was over and she was leaving him for someone else.
No, this dream had been far worse.
And it felt so real.
A man with a goatee and a gold chain around his neck bumped Cole’s shoulder as he made for the dance floor. A young woman was hot on his heels, her hand gripped in his, and she flashed Cole an apologetic smile. He tipped his head, not much caring about the clumsiness of the man, and heaved a tired sigh.