Take Me

by Anna Zaires, Pepper Winters, Skye Warren, Lynda Chance, Pam Godwin, Amber Lin

  I sensed movement, a drift of air and swoosh of clothing, and a dim light switched on. Several seconds passed as I blinked my surroundings into focus. I was sprawled on the ground of some sort of cage, my hands secured to the bars. I yanked on my bindings, and the bite of chains to metal made me shudder. My gaze shifted, taking in the space beyond my prison, which was cloaked in shadow, and I thought I spied rows of wine bottles. I returned my attention to him, mouth hanging open as I tried to comprehend that he had me bound and naked.

  Rafe stood on the other side and circled the bars with white-knuckled fingers as he glared down at me. “You can try to escape if you want, but I think you’re smart enough to know when you’re fucked.”

  On some level, I’d known this day would come. The day I’d have to face him. The day he’d demand an explanation for what I’d done. I’d imagined screaming and yelling on his part. Furious righteousness. Never this. As he withdrew a set of keys and moved to the door of the cage, any hope of forgiveness I’d clung to vanished. I couldn’t stop shaking as he stormed inside.

  “What do you want from me?” I asked, nervous about the answer, especially when I thought of how my nudity was on display.

  “Do you really want to know what I want?” The corner of his mouth turned up in the legendary Rafe Mason smirk I remembered.

  “Yes.”

  He bent and crawled over me, his knees settling at the apex of my thighs, and palmed the concrete on either side of my head. I licked my dry lips, acutely aware of how his clothing tickled my skin. That mere contact, the brush of denim on inner thigh, chased some of the chill away.

  “I want to fuck you,” he said, and the way those words played off his tongue, with a riff of sinister intent, made my heart jackhammer. His biceps flexed under the strain of supporting his weight, and my attention closed in on the tribal lines streaking out from underneath his sleeves. Breathtaking ink on hard man, winding down strong forearms to the back of his hands. He lowered his face, a tilt to his head, and commanded my gaze. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  I wasn’t sure what I expected him to say or do, and I couldn’t begin to measure how angry he was. “I don’t know what to say, Rafe.”

  “You don’t have to say anything. I want what’s mine, what I served time for.”

  I gulped. “You didn’t have to kidnap me.”

  “You’re right,” he said, his lips hovering, almost touching mine. “I didn’t have to kidnap you, but I wanted to, and I always get what I want. The last eight fucking years notwithstanding, of course. You made sure of that.”

  He shifted his weight to the side and brought a key to my wrists. The lock released, and I pulled free of the bars.

  “Get up,” he said, rising to his feet.

  The floor tilted in a dizzying whirl, but once I regained my bearings, I stood before him, face-to-face with the man I’d wronged. He was just as gorgeous as ever, though his green eyes told me things he didn’t voice. They hinted at how my actions had ruined a good person, because the one before me was anything but.

  My heart ached for the guy I remembered, with his deep laugh and teasing grin. The same mouth that sneered at me now used to curve into the sexiest smile when he caught me staring. I’d fallen hard, enticed by the irresistible contradiction that was Rafe Mason, a guy who displayed a quiet, gentle aura, yet used brute force on his opponents inside the cage. His only crime had been catching the eye of damaged goods.

  “Why’d you do it, Alex?” He moved, blocking the opening of the prison and hindering any chance I had to escape.

  I wrapped my arms around myself, feeling sick as I recalled the day they arrested him. The media had splashed footage all over the news, and I’d never forget the way his head hung in shame as they hauled him outside my father’s gym where he trained, hands cuffed at his back as if he were really guilty. Sometimes, merely being accused of something, even when innocent, could psyche a person into experiencing false guilt. Zach was an expert at that particular mental warfare.

  “I asked you a question,” he snapped.

  The moment had arrived, the one I’d dreaded for years, but my mind drew a blank. What could I tell him? There was no excuse or explanation that would make this right. Even the truth didn’t excuse sending an innocent man to prison. “I’m sorry,” I said, fighting tears. “You have every right to be angry.”

  “Are you refusing to give me an explanation? Don’t you think I deserve that much?”

  I dipped my head, thick hair falling forward and shadowing the shame warming my cheeks. What he deserved was nothing less than the truth, but it caught in my throat, perpetually trapped by my need for him to never find out about Zach and me. “I can’t give you one. It won’t change anything.”

  “I see.” He came closer, hands bunching at his sides, and ordered me to lower my arms.

  I backed up, hating how my body throbbed with indecent anticipation. My eyes burned, but I hadn’t cried in a long time, not since my mother died and Rafe had embraced me while I lost it. That seemed like a lifetime ago. I blinked several times, willing the tears to dry up, but the sight of him lowered the gates. Something fundamental in him had changed.

  My fault.

  My doing.

  A tear slipped free. With casual ease, he scooped it up and sucked the moisture off his finger. “Hands at your sides, now.”

  I shook my head, and the gesture probably came off as defiant, but really, I just wanted to crawl into myself and die. The thought of putting my body on display for him sent me into a panic. This body betrayed me, it attracted the wrong attention and glorified in it. All it would take was one touch of his hand for him to realize how I wanted him.

  “I-I don’t understand.”

  “What do you not understand, Alex? Sounds pretty clear to me.”

  “Don’t do this,” I pleaded, retreating until I bumped into the bars with nowhere to go. I hid myself as much as possible, thighs pressed together and palms covering my breasts.

  He unbuckled his belt and pulled it from his jeans.

  “Please—” I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t budge even as adrenaline coursed through me.

  “Do as you’re told, or I’ll make you wish you’d listened the first time.”

  My arms weren’t part of me. Somehow, all on their own, they dropped to my sides like two sticks of deadweight. His eyes traveled over me, starting at my feet and slowly lifting to my belly before roaming higher.

  “Look at the set of tits on you.”

  I stood on a precipice of indecision, and taking the plunge could bring about two different outcomes. Fear, the kind that made your heart beat so fast, your mind tricked you into believing you were seconds from death. Or, I could take a free-fall into insanity. Rafe Mason was, essentially, the love of my life. I could lie to everyone else, but not to myself. Nothing he did would change that.

  Even now, as his hand formed an angry fist around that belt, I came alive. Or maybe it was because he posed such a threat. God, I was fucked up. I knew what he was capable of. A memory of swollen and bloody flesh sprang to mind, so vividly I could describe it in Technicolor. That last cage fight before they’d arrested him, the one to trump all others, burned in my memory.

  His attention lingered on my breasts, and the mere heat of his stare branded me. Here was a man furious, a man few would blame for wanting to do horrible things to the person who’d wrecked his life.

  That person was me, and despite the threat in his expression, something about the way he caressed my body with a single glance reduced me to a puddle of need. It pooled between my legs until everything was tight and wet and hot.

  With careful patience, he feathered the back of his hand across my nipple, and I felt his touch everywhere, especially between my legs where I ached and burned from the inside out. Until now, I’d never known what it was like to be on the receiving end of Rafe’s attention. He was the only guy capable of making me feel this way.

  Hot.

  Alive.
r />   Needy.

  Our gazes entwined, and the feelings spearing through me were too intense to ignore. I’d lost count of the number of fantasies I’d had of this moment when he would touch me. Really touch me. Not as the kid he treated like a sister, not as the bothersome girl who mercilessly drove him to madness, but as a woman.

  A woman he wanted.

  His hand drifted lower, fingers skimming over quivering stomach muscles. Breath eluded me. The circumstances mattered no more. Fear evaporated into particles of mist that lingered but weren’t powerful enough to douse the feelings I thought I’d buried years ago. All that mattered was his hand, lowering…lowering still. I clenched my thighs to keep from spreading them and braced my back against the bars, hands balled at my sides.

  His body pressed into mine, and I closed my eyes, cataloging each sensation from the way his chest flattened my breasts to the heat of his thighs. He lifted my arms above my head and curled my fingers around the bars.

  “Don’t move,” he growled, hands squeezing one last time before falling away. “You are such a fucking tease.” His words drifted across my cheek. “I never touched you. No matter how much—” Abruptly, he sprang away as if I’d burned him. “I never touched you.” He reached for the belt that must have fallen to the concrete. “You destroyed my life,” he said, fingers playing with the buckle. “I was this close to making it to the UFC, and you snatched it from me.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that, you took my freedom, my reputation. You fucking took everything, Alex. I have to register as a sex offender now? Did you know that?”

  “I’m sorr—”

  The belt landed across my breasts hard, and I cried out as the breath stole from my lungs. My arms dropped, automatically moving to protect, but he struck again with a powerful crack. I gasped and clung to the bars as my nipples burned.

  “Don’t you dare tell me you’re sorry! You’ve had eight fucking years to be sorry, but you left me there to rot.” The belt slid to his feet, and he kicked my legs apart before shoving a finger inside me.

  My eyes grew wide as he probed me, though his jerky thrusts were far from gentle.

  “I rotted while you dated that jerk who probably doesn’t know the first thing about setting you off.” He added three more fingers, wrecking my concentration, his touch stretching and reaching higher. “Did he make you feel this good?”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and began counting. Five in, hold, five out. Repeat.

  “Answer me!”

  “He didn’t.” Lucas’ kisses and wandering hands had made me feel nothing, but Rafe…he made me feel everything. I swallowed past the self-loathing constricting my throat, tried to ignore the slippery plunder of his fingers, but a strangled moan escaped anyway.

  “Do you want me to stop?”

  Yes.

  “No.” I extended to my toes, fingers gripping the bars for support, and barely breathed as his thumb rubbed circles on my clit. “Rafe!” I pushed my pelvis against his hand even as tears leaked down my face. His mouth opened over my throat, and I inhaled sharply, my pulse throbbing an erratic beat underneath his tongue.

  This wasn’t happening. My body wasn’t betraying me again. No, no, no, no…

  “I still remember how to touch a woman,” he said. “I bet my fingers are the best fuck you’ve had. Can you imagine my tongue on your pussy?” He licked up my throat, and I whimpered, imagining it all too well. I saw myself on my back, legs spread wide and his dark head disappearing between quaking thighs. The visual was too much, and I hurtled into deep space. I saw the celestial heavens.

  “I’m coming,” I sobbed.

  “Yes, you are, sweetheart. Enjoy it because it won’t happen again.”

  I clawed at his dark T-shirt, my spine bowing and knees threatening to give. The orgasm came in waves around his fingers, each one more intense than the last, and each one filled my heart with so much shame my chest was heavy with it. Riding the waves, I howled his name, my cries resembling a cat in the throes. Afterward, as my heartbeat slowed, I collapsed to the floor.

  “You’re at my mercy,” he said, crouching to eye level. “You don’t eat unless I allow it, you don’t drink. You don’t get clothes or a shower or even a bed to sleep in unless I say so. I control every piece of you, including your fucking pussy.” I wrenched my head to the side, pained by the hardened features of his beautiful face, but he pressed his fingers into my jaw and forced me to meet his gaze. “You’re going to earn every damn privilege known to man. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes.” The force of his fury penetrated deep, and I would have agreed to anything in that moment.

  “You are nothing to me, Alex. You will never be more than a piece of ass.” My heart cracked as he let go, forming a jagged chasm I feared would forever remain. I watched him walk away, tears sliding down my cheeks, one after the other in an endless stream of regret. He exited the prison without looking back and the lock clicked into place with an unsettling echo. He bent to retrieve a pile of neatly folded clothing—my clothing, by the looks of it—and then climbed a staircase. An instant later, the light shut off.

  Total blackness.

  I couldn’t stop crying. Not because I was scared. Not because he’d just humiliated me. I muffled heaving sobs into my palms because his utter contempt sliced to my soul. And now I knew.

  He was going to break me.

  Chapter Four

  The Code

  Rafe

  I’d just lied through my fucking teeth. She did mean something, which was why she was down in that prison. If she meant nothing, I wouldn’t have wanted her in the first place. The musky scent of her sex lingered on my skin, and I sucked a finger into my mouth, unable to resist tasting her. I couldn’t wait to spread those thighs, thumbs biting into soft skin, and bury my tongue in her heat.

  Before she sent me away, I’d done my damnedest to do the honorable thing by keeping my distance, though there’d been times I’d slipped up. Like the time she baited me into a game of pool by implying she was unbeatable. We’d played a fiercely competitive game, all the while bantering about horror movies and alternative rock music. She loved the horror and loathed the rock. Not surprising, since she adored the piano.

  I’d smoked her the first game. During the second, she conceded and asked for my help in positioning her for the end shot. That was the first time I acknowledged the familiar tingle rushing through me as I bent over her, my hand sliding along hers and guiding her to set up the shot that would win her the game.

  I’d also realized, too late, how she’d used the game as a ploy to get close to me. We’d both jumped a foot apart when Zach’s boots thumped down the stairs, and our faces must have given us away because he was furious. The protective thumb he held over her wasn’t new. Guys couldn’t go near her without him losing it, but he should have known better when it came to me. Beyond helping her with a game of pool, I would have never crossed that line. Twenty-one and fifteen didn’t mix.

  I didn’t touch her again, until the day, a few weeks later, when she had a total meltdown after her mom’s funeral. I’d needed her in my arms, needed to absorb some of her pain.

  Leaning my head against the cellar door, I let my breath even out as a tremor seized my body, and the memory of our history together vanished. I fought the urge to go back down there and finish what I’d started. My dick throbbed with the need, though I held back. I was still too fucking raw, and I didn’t want to make the kind of mistake that proved fatal. With the visual I had going through my mind—hands wrapped around her delicate throat as I emptied eight years of pent-up rage and desire into her—I knew I couldn’t rush this. Control was imperative.

  But shit, I wanted to fuck her.

  I waited, listening for a while, but she didn’t make a sound, and I had to give her credit. I’d left her in total darkness, naked, and no doubt, freezing. These next few days were going to be hell compared to her pampered princess life.

  I’d scared the utter crap out of her, and some
sick part of me rejoiced in reducing her to nothing. She didn’t even have a bucket to piss in. Watching her cower had been the biggest rush of my life, and that was saying a lot, considering I used to live for pummeling bodies inside the cage.

  Maybe it was because I’d fixated on her in prison. At first, nothing but hatred consumed me, but then as my incarceration started playing with my mind, I’d let my imagination run wild. I’d fucked her every way possible, and in each scenario, she’d sobbed and pleaded for me to stop. I’d envisioned sexually torturing her in ways no sane, normal man should be able put into words.

  Those fantasies kept me on the brink of sanity, especially during the endless weeks I’d spent in the hole, bereft of interaction with humans and confined to a dark cell smaller than most bathrooms for twenty-three hours a day.

  When I looked in the mirror these days, I didn’t recognize the man staring back. The guy who’d wiped the sorrow from her face the day she buried her mother, absorbing liquid grief that dripped from her eyes in torrents of despair, was gone, replaced by a man who thrilled in eliciting her tears. Darkness turned at the core of my being, a turbulent need that had simmered for years.

  No one knew of my fucked up nature better than my old cellmate Jax. As I entered the kitchen, her clothes weighing heavily in my hands, he watched me carefully from the kitchen table as I disposed of them.

  “Did you fuck her yet?” That was the thing I liked most about him—he didn’t beat around the bush. He put everything out there without reservation.

  As I prepared dinner, I didn’t answer, and he didn’t speak at first. His silence wasn’t uncomfortable. We’d spent hours upon hours in the same cell with nothing but silence and each other.

  We’d forged an alliance after I’d beaten the shit out of his would-be killer in prison. He owed me, or so he insisted, and when they paroled him two years ago, he’d set out to repay the debt by keeping tabs on Alex. He’d also taken care of the island since the deed transferred to my name. In exchange, I gave him a place to live.