“They could track your phone. Consider it gone for now.” He stood, touching her arm as she stalked by him. “Would you stop pacing? Calm down. Think of this as a retreat, a chance to rest and recharge.”
“I don’t want to rest. I don’t want to be here. I’m so angry!”
He walked after her, cornering her by the window. “Are you angry, or are you scared?”
She had too many emotions to cram into one word, but scared came pretty close now that he mentioned it. She burst into tears, feeling out of control for the first time in a long time. Ranting, snarking, and pacing felt normal to her, but weeping didn’t, especially when she couldn’t catch her breath.
He put an arm around her, and when she leaned into his chest, he embraced her fully as she cried against his shirt. It was a lot to take in, that someone wanted to kidnap you and ruin your life, and that they’d nearly accomplished it.
It was a lot to take in that a shadowy fleet of agents had been working every day to save her from that fate. She was scared and grateful, sad and confused, furious and aghast. So many emotions, and nothing to do with them except cry in the haven of her protector’s arms.
12am
Chad looked down at Rowan Park, wondering how many days they’d have together in this remote cabin. Once he’d calmed her down and gotten some food into her, the raving and tears had ebbed and a more composed woman had emerged, the woman he knew from Tech-C.
The woman he’d fantasized about in his weaker moments.
No. Jesus.
No matter how much her wide-set, flirtatious gaze enticed him, no matter how much her perky ass cried out to be spanked and otherwise molested, he wasn’t going to do it.
Instead, he prowled around the cabin as she slept, making sure the security alarms were armed, and that the clothes the DOD had provided were soft and warm enough for the Washington mountains in the early spring.
He hadn’t apologized for the spanking comment, although he probably should have. It had slipped out, a verbal manifestation of the fantasies he’d harbored ever since he noticed her browsing a popular spanking site he also frequented.
Even before that, he’d seen signs: the way she acted like a brat sometimes, the way she flirted, the way she sashayed when she walked, the way she fixated on his hands when he was in her space. He’d been drawn to her from the beginning, which wasn’t ideal when you had to keep your mind on your job.
Now he only had to worry about one thing—keeping her hidden within these four walls until the threat against her was neutralized.
It seemed she didn’t grasp how valuable she’d be to any of the dozens of unstable, thug-centered governments dotting the globe. Maybe she did understand, but chose to ignore the threat in her digital fight against the enemy. When he’d saluted her courage, he hadn’t been mocking. She was one of the elite few who worked in the nation’s shadowy hacking trenches—trusted, trustworthy, a homegrown computer genius who chose to use her gifts for good rather than evil.
And this was her reward. An unplanned, unwanted sojourn at a cramped cabin rented anonymously by the government for times when people needed to disappear.
He looked at his phone, thumbing through encrypted updates about her kidnapping situation. Not good, the amount of information the North Koreans had gathered. The Tech-C division would need to be relocated—again—before she returned to work.
But he wouldn’t tell her that now. What was the point? He wouldn’t tell her about the duct tape they’d found on her would-be assailants, the black sensory-deprivation hood meant to go over her pretty face and silken hair. He definitely wouldn’t tell her about the unregistered airplane seized at a private airfield not far from where she worked.
Maybe he’d play Monopoly with her tomorrow, or invite her to watch a movie with him. He’d do what he could to show her he wasn’t a bad guy.
He sat on his bed, mere feet from hers, and cringed when the mattress creaked, but she didn’t stir. She slept the same way she hacked, with utter concentration. Her emo, blue-streaked bangs fell along her gorgeous cheekbones, and her lips were pursed in a small, pink pout. She’d washed her face before bed, stripped it of eyeliner and makeup, but God, she was still beautiful.
He lay back with a groan, willing his inconvenient erection to go the fuck away.
11am
Rowan felt slightly more human after a long sleep, a shower, and some of her favorite cereal for breakfast. She didn’t want to know how they knew her favorite cereal, or what size clothes she wore, or that she liked wearing yoga pants and oversized hoodies on the weekends. She had so many questions, but the ones she was brave enough to ask Chad were mostly answered with, “I can’t tell you that,” or some variation thereof.
She paced the scuffed oak floor as Chad looked down at his phone, scrolling through messages he wouldn’t let her see. “No word yet on how long we’ll be here, Mr. Agent Man?”
He glanced over at her from his place on the two-seater couch. “Chad or Agent Collins, please. I asked you not to be rude.”
She was ruffled at his pedantic tone. “It just freaks me out that you’re not who you said you were.”
“I get that, but it wasn’t possible to be honest with you.”
“Why not?” She stopped next to the window, batted at the curtains he wouldn’t let her open. “You could have said, hey, someone’s trying to kidnap you. I’m just going to hang around in the evenings to be sure you get to your car all right.” She paused, thought a moment. “Wait. Were there people at my apartment too?”
His look told her yes. “They tried not to be obtrusive. If foreign agents know you’re under protection, they don’t come out of the woodwork, and we can’t put an end to their operation. See how that works?”
Oh yes, she got it. She had to be exposed to danger so they could find the bad guys more easily. Although when push came to shove, Chad had shielded her, even drugged her, to keep her out of the wrong hands. She started pacing again with a sigh. “I’m so bored.”
“I’m not good company? I offered to play Monopoly.”
That earned him a withering look. “I liked you more as a custodian.”
He rubbed his eyes but stayed silent. She could see their forced seclusion was getting to him too—and he had a cell phone to play with.
“Please let me have my phone,” she said, “just to goof around online. I won’t log in anywhere, I swear.”
Now he was the one who sighed, his broad chest rising and falling. “You can’t have your phone. Stop asking. I’m not going to change my mind. We can find something else to do if you’re bored. If you want, we can play cards. War, maybe?”
“I don’t want to play cards,” she whined. “I want my phone.” She knew she was acting like a baby, but she hadn’t gone this long without a digital device since second or third grade. “I have snap streaks going with my friends. If I don’t post a photo in the next hour, they’ll all be broken.”
“That’s ridiculous. How old are you?”
“Old enough to want my fucking phone. How old are you?” she demanded. “I don’t need some grouchy forty-year-old telling me I can’t check my phone for five fucking seconds—”
“Thirty-eight-year-old, thank you very much.”
“What if someone’s trying to reach me?”
He wasn’t bending, not one iota. “No phone,” he said in his firm, secret-agent voice. “I couldn’t give it to you even if I wanted to. I passed it off on the way here in case they needed it.”
“They?” Rowan turned to him with her fists clenched. “Who has my phone?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Fuck.”
“Language,” he reminded her as she flopped onto her bed. “It’s not that big a deal. The world’s not going to end because you don’t get online for a few days. Don’t you ever want to turn off the computer?”
“No.” She especially didn’t want some secret G-man going through her texts and porn files. “And I bet you don’t tu
rn yours off that much. You’re nonstop with your damn phone.”
“I have to be, because I’m working. I’m monitoring your situation because it’s my job. You think I want to be here?”
She lay back and pulled the covers up over her head. She couldn’t believe she’d ever had a crush on this guy. How long was she going to be stuck here with him? She kept thinking about his comment yesterday, the spanking thing. Had she dreamed that? Imagined it? Everything seemed like some weird dream—or nightmare—that she couldn’t wake up from.
Ugh.
She didn’t move for long minutes, trying to sleep. It turned out she was too overwrought to manage it. She’d never been much of a day napper. After a while, she heard his steps, heard him move closer and ease into the bed next to hers. She resisted the urge to watch him fold his large body into the tiny beds the cabin provided. A moment later, she heard soft, steady snoring that signaled he was napping. She wondered if he’d gotten any sleep last night. He’d been awake when she’d finally bedded down, and cooking eggs and bacon in the morning when she woke up.
Finally, curiosity got the better of her. She peeked out of the blankets and studied Agent Chadsworth Collins in sleep. For someone who could look so stern and dangerous, his slumber face was weirdly relaxed, smooth and peaceful. Without those piercing eyes boring into her, she could take in his other features: broad forehead, plentiful dirty-blond hair, prominent nose. His lips fascinated her most. They were wide and decidedly masculine, but softened by a dimple that sometimes appeared beneath his lower lip.
She squeezed her eyes shut. What the hell was she doing, perving on him now, in the middle of this crisis? Her last boyfriend had been the son of one of her mother’s friends, a dutiful Korean grad student who smoked pot and rode a moped on the weekends. She’d tired of him quickly, and dumped him despite her family’s protests. What would they think of Agent Collins?
She sat up in bed, but he didn’t stir. That was when she noticed the phone lying beside his hand on the other side of the bed.
Here’s the way she rationalized it—she worked with computers, and she knew what she could and couldn’t do when she was trying to stay off the grid. She also knew how to get past a lock screen. Logging into one mobile app for two minutes wasn’t going to bring the North Koreans down on them. She’d post a couple of snaps and replace his phone before he woke up.
She slid from beneath her sheets and tiptoed to his bed, lifted the phone with cautious delicacy, then ran into the bathroom and locked the door. She perched on the edge of the bathtub, measuring the kind of phone security he used against the operating-system hacks she knew. She’d been sure he hadn’t moved, that she hadn’t disturbed him, which was why it was so surprising when the doorjamb splintered a scant second later.
“Holy shit,” she yelled as the door fell inward.
He propped it against the sink, glowering at her. No, not glowering. Something meaner. The door hinges were history. For that matter, so was the door.
“What the hell!” She figured she’d better start off on the offensive. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You couldn’t ask me to open the door first?”
“Oh, should I have knocked?” He crossed the bathroom in one huge stride and snatched his phone from her fingers. “I know how fast you can hack into secure devices.”
Once he saw that she hadn’t opened his phone, the fury in his expression downgraded to irritation. Well, maybe a little more than irritation. She tried to move past him, to no avail.
“Oh no. You aren’t running away. We’re going to have a discussion.”
He took her arm and drew her protesting figure out of the bathroom and over to the bed where he’d been resting so peacefully a few moments before. She wished now that she hadn’t taken his phone. She wished it even more when he threw her over his lap.
“What are you doing?” she yelled.
“Teaching you the rule about not touching my phone.” He didn’t have to yell the way she did. His displeased secret-agent growl was enough to express that she’d fucked up, if she hadn’t already figured that out from the smashed door, and her current situation.
“I’m sorry.” She tried to turn around and plead her case, but he was bigger, much bigger. He pinned her over his lap with one arm, and smacked her ass with the other. Ow. Yoga pants didn’t offer much in the way of protection.
“You can’t do this,” she squealed as he delivered another stinging smack. “This is assault. This is harassment.”
“This is punishment,” he countered, “and if you don’t want to be spanked on your bare ass next, I suggest you lie still.”
The idea of him pulling down her yoga pants and panties… She couldn’t bear that exposure and humiliation. The spanking was bad enough. How many times had she fantasized about a man taking control of her, disciplining her with an over-the-knee spanking? Those had been horny dreams, bearing no resemblance to the actual experience of being punished. She’d even fantasized about this exact man punishing her.
She must have been crazy. This fucking hurt.
“Ow! I can’t… Ouch!” She squirmed, getting nowhere. “God, please! Stop!”
“I’ll stop when I think you’ve learned your lesson.” He held her down, walloping her throbbing ass cheeks. “When I said no phone, I meant no phone. Especially not my phone.”
“Okay.” Rowan kicked helplessly. Her ass was literally burning. “I’m sorry I took your phone.”
“It comes down to respect.” Spank! “I’m trying to protect you.” Spank! “All I ask is for your cooperation, and if I can’t have it…”
If he couldn’t have it, he was going to spank some cooperation into her. She understood that from the way he held her, from the sustained barrage of blows.
“Please, I can’t take anymore. Please, Agent Collins, I’m sorry, I won’t…”
He stopped, giving her a moment to breathe. “You won’t what?” he prompted.
“I won’t ever touch your phone again. I won’t even look at your phone. I won’t look at you.”
He released her and forced her to stand in front of him, eye to eye. Her face burned with emotion and embarrassment, and her fire-hot ass burned even worse. Tears filled her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But why did you have to do that?”
“I warned you.”
“I just didn’t think…”
“No, you didn’t think.” He took her hands, preventing her from reaching back to rub her sore butt. “I’m trying to keep you safe, not just because it’s my job, but because I like you. I think you’re a brave, intelligent woman.” His gaze hardened. “As well as a careless, stubborn woman. I told you when we got here that I was in charge. I make the rules, and they’re important rules. I’ll do whatever I need to do to preserve your safety and enforce my will. That includes doling out another spanking if you don’t cooperate with me. Understood?”
Rowan blinked back the tears that threatened to fall. She wasn’t going to cry for him, even though she felt choked up inside.
“Do you understand, Rowan?” He squeezed her hands when she didn’t answer.
Rowan, instead of Miss Park. God, he’d spanked her. She shook off his hands. “I understand,” she said with as much petulance as she dared. “But your supervisor’s going to hear about this.”
“I’m sure he will,” he said with feigned concern. “I’m sure I’ll be fired.”
“I can’t stand you.” She muttered it under her breath, looking around the cabin for a place to hide, to tend her emotional wounds. There was nowhere to go. Even the bathroom was door-less.
“Why don’t you sit on your bed for a while?” he said. “Think about what you’ll do differently while I make us some lunch. I’ll tell you when you can get up.”
Holy shit. Really? He was making her sit on her bed like a child in the Time-Out Corner? But she went there, afraid to oppose him. All the sass had been spanked out of her, at least for now.
Sitting on her bed had
the unwelcome effect of reminding her how sore her spanked cheeks were, but when she moved to lie down, he called from the kitchen for her to sit up straight.
Fuck. This was ridiculous.
But she sat up, shifting from cheek to cheek, imagining ways to get back at him for this, but all her imaginings led back to another spanking, perhaps a worse one on her bare ass.
As time passed, she replayed the spanking in her mind, especially the feeling of being trapped, and the stinging force of his smacks. The man who’d done that to her was in the kitchen making sandwiches. She didn’t know if she could ever eat again. She knew she couldn’t look him in the eyes again. She sat with her back to him, so when he came over to touch her shoulder, she almost jumped out of her skin.
“What the hell? How does someone as big as you walk without making noise?”
“Practice and skill. Come have some lunch.”
She wanted to refuse, but she couldn’t. Instead she sat across from him at the tiny table, trying to eat while her face burned in mortification. She prayed that one of the messages pinging on his phone was the message that busted her out of there so she could go back to her old life and never see him again.
Damn. Real spankings were nothing like the fun, porn-y ones. Real spankings hurt.
8pm
Poor Rowan. Chad figured she probably hadn’t enjoyed that spanking as much as her fantasy-porn videos.
But he’d enjoyed it. He shouldn’t have become aroused, but he had. It wasn’t just her body, her spectacular ass. It was also her energy, her anger, the defiant conflict in her gaze when the spanking was finished. Her courage was his favorite thing.
Now she was sulking. He didn’t want her to hate him, but he had no intention of going soft and letting her do whatever reckless thing she wished. She was under his protection, and damn it, he cared about her more than the average job.
Hero Undercover: 25 Breathtaking Bad Boys Page 31