Marked (Branded Book 3)

by Scarlett Finn

  Hurt warred with anger within her. She couldn’t believe the man she loved would do this to her best friend. There was no explanation, no reason, except that Archer didn’t like Tag, he was inconvenient, he’d interrupted their night and the punishment for that was being chained to Archer’s floor.

  “Nya! Get me the fuck out of here now!” Tag shouted.

  Archer’s eyes slid up. “You keep your fucking mouth shut, Taggert. I told you last night, no one gives a fuck how much noise you make. All you’re doing is pissing me off.”

  “So you put duct tape on my mouth? That shit hurts! Nya, you don’t know what he’s done to me! He’s a fucking animal! You don’t know what this is like!”

  Except she did because she’d been there. But she couldn’t get over that Archer was the one who’d done this. He’d tried to chain her to the pipe after they were together, but he’d done it to protect her and she’d convinced him to let her stay in his bed instead.

  But this wasn’t about protecting Tag. Archer couldn’t care less and if he was just trying to humiliate her friend, he was a far crueler man than she’d realized.

  “You have to let him go.”

  Archer didn’t equivocate. “No.”

  Moistening her lips, she touched his obliques. “Fella, I’m asking you to let him go.”

  Slowly curling one finger at a time around her chin until he clasped it, Archer tipped it up, lowered his face, and didn’t even blink when he said, “No.”

  Nya couldn’t fight with him, she would never win and he had more than one length of chain, more than one length of duct tape. If she got to be too troublesome, he could attach her to his bed, or worse, to hers, and leave her there for days.

  “Am I your prisoner too?” she asked because he was still in her way.

  He took a step backwards into the hallway giving her just enough room to squeeze past him. Nya glanced at him again, hoping he would change his mind, but he was fixated on Tag. Rushing down the hallway, she tried not to run, which was more difficult when Tag called after her again. Ester called too, but Nya went past her without looking up.

  Because if Archer wouldn’t listen to her and wouldn’t show her friend compassion then she didn’t belong in his apartment. They’d just got back together, but he was showing a cruelty Nya had never seen in him before.

  She didn’t understand why he’d shut her out or why he was so determined to keep Tag where he was. Nya couldn’t sit in the living room, drinking coffee, having frivolous conversations about sex while her best friend was being tortured in the next room.

  Nya thought she had influence with Archer, Tag had thought it too, so had Hexam. This morning had proved they were all wrong.

  twelve

  “I can go with him if you want,” Robbo said.

  Nya put a hand on her security guy’s arm and scanned the nightclub to check out the others scattered around Sizzle who didn’t appear to be doing much except moving chairs from one side of the room to the other in the closed club.

  “Thanks,” she said. “But I need you to keep on top of the other guys. The tables have to be ripped up and tossed in the dumpster out front.”

  “You look worried,” Robbo said.

  Nya had just finished meeting with the contractors and was watching them making their final assessments beside the DJ booth in the corner. “No, I met with them before today. I know what they’re doing, he’s just taking a last look and talking to his foreman about what needs to be done.”

  Looking at the security men who were roughhousing and jeering, she wished that they would get with it. “You know all my servers showed up? Double time was good enough for them. How come only half the security guys showed up? Don’t they have bills to pay? It’s not like you have a shift tonight, the club is closed until the work is finished, no more night shift for a while.”

  “I don’t know,” Robbo said. “Maybe they’re just not used to working days. I’ll call around and see what’s going on.”

  He’d turned out to be a lifesaver today because when she turned up at Sizzle, she hadn’t been in the mood to deal with builders and demo work. It needed to be done and in a way, Nya was glad to have something to do, but she wasn’t at her best.

  Even though she’d left two hours ago, her mind was still in Archer’s apartment. After storming out, she’d gone to her place to shower and change, and had come into Sizzle early to clear out some of the paperwork in the office. By the time her staff started showing up, Nya hadn’t even got around to making a proper list of tasks to delegate.

  They had the next few days to get the whole club stripped out before the real work would begin, and while she was paying her staff anyway, she figured it didn’t hurt to ask them to pitch in.

  “You’ve been frowning all day,” Robbo said. “You’re not worried about this, are you?”

  The guy topped out at five nine, but his arms had to be a full foot wide. Nya had never seen a man with so much bulk. He was absolutely solid; the female servers liked to taunt him into flexing those muscles. With narrow hips and shoulders as wide as a door, Nya could understand why the girls giggled and squealed as they fingered his tattoos.

  “No, I’m excited about this,” Nya said, trying her best to force a smile onto her lips.

  “It’s nothing to do with that guy, is it?”

  Her attention flashed from the construction guys in the corner to Robbo in front of her. But he was looking beyond her toward the door to his left, forcing Nya to spin around.

  Archer strode in like he owned the place and in an inadvertent way, he did. The security guys went over to greet him with secret handshakes and shoulder pats. While he received a hero’s welcome from them, she set her scowl, folded her arms, and began to tap a finger on her elbow.

  “Uh oh,” Robbo said. “If you guys are gonna go nuclear, give the rest of us a chance to take cover.”

  But she wasn’t in the mood for jokes. Archer already had her in his sight. One sure stride followed another until he got to them. “Alright, man?” Robbo asked. Archer nodded, but remained fixated on her. “I’ll get one of the guys to stay with the contractors.” Nya didn’t know if he was talking to her or Archer, it didn’t matter. “I’ll get our guys working.” Robbo hit Archer’s shoulder once. “Good luck, man, she’s been pissy all morning.”

  Robbo marched off and Nya waited for Archer to say something. “Can we go in back?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, satisfied that she could refuse him with good reason.

  “You won’t be pissed when you hear me out,” he said. “Come on.” Taking her elbow, Archer tried to pull her forward. His strength forced her to move a step, but she tore her arm away. “Come on, Ny, you’re not that pissed at me. You can’t stay mad at me, remember? This you taking your turn to dump me ‘cause I put my hands on your precious boy?”

  “Dump you?” she said, arching a brow and exhaling a snigger. “You wish, Fella. No way am I letting you off the hook that easy.” He smiled and leaned down to try and kiss her, but she slanted away from his mouth. “I can’t believe you did it, Arch. I can’t believe he’s there right now.”

  “We can’t talk about this here,” he said. “This is your dirty laundry and you don’t want it aired.”

  He tried to move her forward again, but she resisted. “The club is packed with staff, Arch. They’re clearing out the office too. It’s the middle of the day, didn’t you notice all the people around?”

  He scanned the space. She was sure he’d seen all the bodies, but they were irrelevant to him. Fixating on something above, he slid his fingers between hers. “Upstairs,” he said.

  Although the VIP floor was open to the rest of the room, it would afford them more privacy than standing here in the middle of the tables opposite the bar. Nya went upstairs with him and he pulled her towards the couch on the far wall, but didn’t sit down.

  “If you want to chain someone to your floor, use me,” she said, hoping there was still some shred of a connection tha
t might help her to breakthrough and change his mind. “If you’ve got withdrawal or you need a distraction after what happened to Jonno.” She frowned. “What did happen to Jonno?”

  “You mean, did I kill him?” he asked, touching her face. He shook his head once. “No. But only because he gave me the name of your seventh man.”

  “He did?” she asked, her hands leaping onto his chest.

  “Just a first name, but I’m working on it. I didn’t know how you felt. You kinda went off the idea after Vegas.”

  It wasn’t Vegas that put her off the idea, Nya had been preoccupied when he’d returned. “If your mom told you what I said about Damien, she must have told you what I said about you.” From his proceeding scowl, she assumed that she was wrong. “Oh.”

  “What the fuck did you say about me? I’ve told you, Ny, don’t talk to her about us.”

  “It wasn’t like that, I…” Nya didn’t want to remember that night or the feeling of grief that came before the hollow ache. “That was the night I realized I’d lost you,” she admitted. “All those other nights, all those times you slammed the door in my face, I never believed it was over. I told Tag we weren’t over. I missed you like crazy, but I was sure that we would get back together.”

  “You were right. Funny, you thought you’d lost me at the same time my head was fucked, wondering if we ever really broke up.”

  That didn’t make sense. “What do you mean?”

  Edging closer, he brought their lower bodies together. “All that thinking about you made me wonder if we’d broken up, or if you just let me think that to soothe my male ego. You know, the way that I think that I’m in control of this relationship and then you blink those big doe eyes at me and remind me you’ve got my balls in a vice. We might not have been screwing, Ny, but that power you have sure as fuck never went away.”

  She grinned and took great pleasure in stretching her arms up around his neck. “If I was in control, there would’ve been screwing.”

  “You know there was no one else, right? I didn’t even look at another girl.”

  “Even the redheads?” she asked.

  “That’s right, even the redheads.”

  Dipping to kiss her, she opened her lips to his. They had been broken up. He’d told her they were through and closed the door in her face several times. But he was right that they’d been in a kind of grey area because she hadn’t been with anyone else either.

  Archer had done work for her and she’d stuck close. He’d even gone to work for Hexam just to save her ass. Their love had never gone away.

  Breaking the kiss, she pushed away to put distance between their bodies, she’d always thought that when they were naked and talking they were too distracted by intimacy to ever come to any conclusions. But here they were standing upright, fully-clothed in a public place, and they were still being distracted by each other.

  “Wait, no, I’m pissed at you,” she said.

  “You can’t stay pissed at me.”

  He was right about that and part of her regretted ever admitting it to him out loud. But Archer was astute enough that he could’ve figured that out himself. “I am pissed and I’ll keep being pissed as long as you’ve got my oldest friend chained up like an animal. You only do that to people if you need something from them. They can free themselves at any time just by giving it to you. How can Tag free himself? What do you want from him? Do you want him to turn his back on me? Have you told him to cut me out?”

  “Squirm, if I thought it was that easy to get him out of your life I’d have done it the day after we first fucked,” he said and tried to touch her face again, but she couldn’t let him or they would end up being distracted. “You know, this is so dumb.”

  “You better not make this about him coming between us because you’re the one who did this, not him.”

  “No, it’s dumb that I’ve been in love with you for months now and you still don’t have a fucking clue who I am.”

  That hurt almost as much as a punch to the side of the head would. “What do you mean I don’t know you?” Worrying about what terrible secret he might be keeping made the hairs on her body stand on end. “What don’t I know, Fella?”

  Last night she’d worried that Tag was keeping a secret from her, one that Archer knew. Today, she found herself terrified that Archer was going to drop a bombshell about himself.

  “Think about it, Ny, I’ve wanted to hurt this guy since before you and me ever met. What stopped me from doing that?”

  “Me,” she said.

  “That’s right and you think that on the night I get you back I’m gonna think to myself, ‘Ah, fuck it, the bitch is in my bed again, so I’ll choose this night to screw with her boy’?” Nya had seen Tag attached to the floor and jumped to the conclusion that he was there for the same reason as every other person who got chained up. “I hate the guy, I can’t even stand looking at him. I sure wouldn’t ask him for favors. And I know damn well that any part of him I cut off is gonna cut a piece of you too. How likely am I to cut you, Squirm?”

  “You would never hurt me,” she murmured, trying to put the pieces together.

  “Another right answer,” he said and held up a hand to count off his fingers. “So we’ve got a guy I hate who I keep saving because of you.” He moved on a finger. “We’ve got a guy I wanna hurt, but I don’t lay my hands on him because I know it will upset you.” Archer moved onto a third finger. “I’d take pleasure in inflicting serious pain on the man who’s disregarded you since I’ve known you, but why don’t I do it?”

  She made eye contact. “Because you love me.”

  He lowered his chin. “Because I love you.”

  Nya’s lips curled and when she inhaled, cleansing air seeped through her. “Ok. Thank God,” she said, pouncing forward to throw her arms around him. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking about this place and I was so worried about you both. I should never jump to conclusions.”

  Using the couch beside them, she kicked off her shoes and side-stepped onto the seat so she could reach his mouth with ease. “You feel better now?” he asked, stroking his hands from her hips to her ass. They went up underneath her skirt and since the only thing behind her was the back wall of the club, he wouldn’t mind exposing her.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. You’re right. I do know you and I trust you. I didn’t mean to assume the worst.”

  “That’s your default when it comes to Taggert. You take protecting him seriously,” he said. Curling his thumbs around the waistband of her underwear, he pulled it down a couple of inches.

  She smiled and tightened her arms around his neck. “There are thirty people in the club,” she murmured on his mouth. “And in a few minutes, they’ll be coming up to take the furniture from here too.”

  “I never asked for nothing,” he said, rubbing his palms up and down her ass cheeks. “Just making up for lost time… You don’t want to know why I’ve got Taggert there?”

  She did want to know, but worried that if she asked too many questions, he might think she was doubting him again. “You can tell me whatever I need to know.”

  “Now she trusts the flow of information,” he said to himself. “I thought we were going back to the way things were. You never used to cut me any slack about sharing with you.”

  “You always found a way to tell me what I needed to know,” she said. “But you kept a lot to yourself.”

  “I did it to protect you. I can’t lie to you. I told you before, since we got together, I’ve never been able to do it.”

  “Then tell me why Tag is on your floor,” she said. “And if he’s there, what are you doing here?”

  “I’m here because you hustled your fine ass out of my place so fast, I put my fist through the wall.” Picking up his hand, she stroked a thumb over his rough knuckles. She was used to their scars and bumps, and it didn’t appear that he’d hurt himself too bad. “Just like that time you walked out of Taggert’s with those big eyes all wet… It’s the dis
appointment,” he said, gritting his teeth. “I’ve figured out that’s what it is. I don’t care when you’re pissed at me. I don’t even really care when you’re sniveling about something. I mean, I care, but I care in a, ‘I’m gonna go out and beat something until she smiles again’ kinda way. But when you wanna rip out my guts through my balls, baby, you look at me all disappointed and I can’t fucking fix that. I can’t make you proud of me.”

  “I’m proud,” she said.

  “You weren’t this morning. You weren’t that time in Tag’s before Bogota. All I want is to make you smile.”

  When she got excited, he got aroused. If he did something positive that made her happy, his male ego got stoked. Nya loved how his usually guarded emotions were so affected by her mood. She didn’t mean to manipulate his mood with hers; he’d given her into trouble for reacting on emotion and not being able to hide how she felt, so Archer was aware of what motivated her and it wasn’t any kind of malice.

  But when she got excited to the point that she laughed and rubbed herself all over him, somehow it made him feel like more of a man. And for a guy like Archer who exuded nothing but masculinity, that was an achievement she wished she could bottle.

  “How do you think I felt when you left my bed and told me we were through? What do you think it was like having your door closed in my face? And then in your apartment…”

  She almost couldn’t draw breath. Her guts got light and she experienced that hollowness again.

  “In my apartment, when?” he asked, concern creasing his brows.

  Coiling shivers vibrated against her diaphragm in sporadic little bursts. It was anxiety or terror, mixed with primal hormones. “When you kissed me…. After I told you I stabbed Jamie’s killer and you kissed me, Arch.”

  “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “I didn’t mean to fuck with your head.”

  “I liked kissing you, I always like it. You didn’t fuck with my head; you can kiss me any time you damn well please.”