Now it was Jake’s turn to be speechless. The only dom she’d ever had? He thought back to that first day, when he walked away thinking she was such a good actress he could have sworn she’d never been spanked and dominated that way before. Jake tightened his arms around her. “I love hearing that I’m your first dom. And from here on out, I will be your only dom. It’s a good thing Cabrera is long gone—because if he was here, I’d throw his sorry ass right off this roof.”
She stopped crying then and looked up at him. “I’ve always wanted to ask you… how did you create the illusion that there were other people in the room? I could swear sometimes that I felt more than two hands touching me at the same time.”
He looked down at her and smiled. “Sorry,” he said. “Trade secrets. And I’m afraid all of them have just gone up in smoke. Sounds like I may not need to recreate them. From now on, you’ll have to get used to having only two hands on you at a time.”
“Well, I’m no tech genius, but if I were designing the perfect virtual world, that’s exactly how I’d have it—as long as those two hands were yours.”
She was about to go on, but Jake stopped her. “It’s time for you to quit talking now.” His voice was stern but his eyes twinkled.
“Yes, sir,” she whispered, just before he captured her lips in a kiss.
Chapter Sixteen
Kyra strolled along the tiny stretch of sand, warm waves curling gently around her ankles. It was early, the sun’s warmth still welcome on her skin. The gash on her leg had taken twenty stitches to close but it was healing nicely and the rest of the cuts and scratches were barely noticeable. Later she’d go for a swim. For now, she was content to wander aimlessly, stopping now and then to pick up a tiny conch or a pretty bit of sea glass that had washed up on shore during the night.
She thought back to the night of the explosion, a little over two months ago. Sam had commandeered a helicopter from one of his faceless friends in Special Forces and landed on the roof before firemen could battle their way up. He jumped out and ran to them, leaving Slade at the controls, ready to lift off again as soon as they were on board.
“Where are Marcus and Riley?” Harmon shouted over the whirr of the blades.
“Hospital,” Sam replied shortly. “They’ll be okay. Marcus took the worst hit. He’s already in surgery. Riley has a broken arm but he still managed to hoist Marcus over his shoulder and carry him down ten flights of stairs before the medics arrived. Slade and I were in the lobby when the bombs went off, getting ready to go out on the town for the night. We took one look at the damage and decided our best bet would be to come down from the roof to get to you.”
He looked at Harmon’s burns, at Kyra’s roughly bandaged leg, still oozing blood. “I bet Slade twenty bucks that you’d be up here just lying in the pool while we were working our asses off—as usual.”
“Damn straight,” Harmon replied. “After all, I am the boss.” He pushed Sam away when he tried to take Kyra, insisting on carrying her to the helicopter himself.
They had both stayed overnight at the hospital, but Harmon had refused to let the doctors treat his burns until he checked on Marcus and Riley. A few hours later, he came by Kyra’s room to give her a report, his arms swathed in bandages.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he blurted out, when her eyes filled with tears. “This is just to keep that sticky ointment they covered me with from getting all over everything I touch… including you.”
He gathered her into his arms. “The doctors said you’re fine. Your leg will heal but all those cuts from the glass are going to hurt like hell for a while. And thanks to that new scanner I invented, they were able to tell within a few minutes that you didn’t have any permanent brain damage from the concussion.”
“How are the boys?”
“Marcus is going to be all right. They operated on him as soon as he got here. He’s out of surgery and doing well. He had a ruptured spleen and a collapsed lung from the force of the blast, along with a laundry list of smaller injuries. The doctors said he’d have been much worse off if Riley hadn’t dragged him out of the building right away. Riley was knocked into a concrete wall by the first explosion. He was lucky—walked away with only a broken arm. The doctors set it last night and put it in a cast. He’s upstairs right now ribbing Marcus about being a baby—says he’s been through much worse over the years without even asking for an aspirin. It will be a long time before Riley lets Marcus forget he carried him down ten flights of stairs with one arm hanging useless at his side.”
Sam arrived the next morning to drive them home from the hospital. He and Slade rode in the front seat of the limo and Riley climbed in back to sit on the bench seat across from Harmon and Kyra. This time the partition stayed down, so they could all talk.
“Where are we going?” Kyra asked, when the limo turned south.
“Ever since Sam first came to me with his concerns about the threats from those extremist nuts, I’ve been working on plans to find a safer place for our lab and offices,” Harmon replied. “When I was away on that business trip a few months ago, I visited sites all over the world that the boys here had picked out as possibilities. But I wanted to keep all of our staff and for many of them, moving to some faraway place would have meant leaving their families and friends. And I love being near the ocean. So—I bought an island in the Keys.”
“You what?”
“I bought an island. I named it DreamQuest Key. It’s big enough to house a new lab and all our key people. It’s only accessible by boat—or helicopter. But it’s close to Marathon, where our main offices will be located. I bought one of those big box stores that went out of business, too. It’s right on the Overseas Highway, not far from Seven Mile Bridge. We’ve been remodeling it to hold our main office. There’s room to expand and even set up production facilities nearby for that brain scan device we’re going to manufacture. Monroe County actually welcomed us. I guess they’re happy to have a business moving in that will provide decent wages for once, instead of just another condo hotel that will only employ maids and pool boys.”
“It’s nice to hang out with a billionaire,” Slade remarked from the front seat. “Wait till you see the place. It’s amazing what can be accomplished in a short time when money is no object.”
The limo sped along the 26-mile–long stretch of road that separated the Keys from the hustle and bustle of South Florida. Kyra stared out the window at the flat expanse of the Everglades stretching for miles in all directions. The Keys were like another world, a little like moving to a foreign country. Harmon seemed to take it for granted that she’d move there with him and for the first time in her life, she was content to take one day at a time. No five-year plan, not even a to-do list for tomorrow.
All she had were the clothes on her back and those weren’t even hers. Everything she’d brought from her condo had been destroyed in the fire, so Carmen had dashed out to buy her an outfit to wear home from the hospital. It wasn’t Kyra’s usual conservative style, but it wasn’t one of her naughty sub costumes either. This was a sleeveless knit dress that skimmed her curves, soft turquoise like the slivers of ocean she glimpsed from time to time outside the car windows. It had a V neck and a skirt that flared out from the waist to twirl around her calves. She had on a pair of low-heeled leather sandals and dark sunglasses big enough to make her feel like a movie star.
Despite her aches and pains, Kyra felt like she was going on vacation. She reached for Harmon’s hand and he brought it to his lips.
“I’ll send Esther to pack up whatever you want from your condo and have it brought down here,” he said, as though he’d been reading her mind. “When you’re feeling up to it, we’ll go on a shopping spree—down to Key West or up to Bloomingdales at The Falls, whatever you want. Everything is much more casual down here. I may even start wearing shorts to the office.”
She laughed. “And give up your formal attire of jeans and t-shirt? My goodness. Maybe the doctors should have checked y
our brain with that scanner.”
They took another helicopter for the short hop from the Marathon airport west to the island. It was a bright green crescent, one of a string of smaller islands lying on the gulf side of the Keys, not connected to the mainland by the Overseas Highway. Still, it was larger than Kyra had imagined. It even had a tiny stretch of sandy beach on either end. Kyra was surprised to see all the construction going on in the center of the island next to the helipad.
“We’d already started building a small lab here, just for me, right after I bought the place,” Harmon said. “I’m spoiled. I like being able to walk to work. On the south end, we’re renovating half a dozen old Conch houses. Carmen and Enrique will be in one. He’s over the top about being able to walk out his front door, get on a boat and fish every day. Each of the men will have their own place too, and Esther is moving into the last. By the time school is out for the semester, there’ll be a room for her daughter added on.”
Harmon took her hand and walked her down a little fern-lined pathway between the gumbo limbo trees to the northern tip of the island. The path ended at a clearing in front of a tiny shell-pink wooden house on stilts. It had a metal roof and freshly painted bright blue shutters at every window. Behind the house, she caught a glimpse of waves breaking on a small sandy beach dotted with coconut palms. She was charmed before she even set foot inside.
“I thought we’d take this place for now,” Harmon said. “It’s tiny, but private.”
She threw her arms around him. “I love it. I absolutely love it.”
* * *
Yesterday Marcus was finally well enough to be released from rehab. He joined them in the conference room at the new facility on Marathon and Slade sat everyone down to bring them up to speed on his investigations.
“The two guys from that extremist group are in custody. They haven’t admitted anything and they got one of those media-loving attorneys to defend them. I heard if they go to trial he’s planning to claim that they were led by the voice of God. But we have them dead to rights, caught on surveillance cameras buying the materials to build the three bombs they used.”
Slade went on. “I’m sorry, boss. We let you down. Turns out they had an insider plant the devices—Tony Reynolds from the marketing division. Despite all our security checks, we never picked up the fact that Tony’s mother lived with Brother Abraham, one of the leaders of their group, for a few years when he was just a kid. He married her in one of their private ceremonies so there was no legal record of it. She got tired of being in a cult, managed to get away a few years later. But Abraham had been a father figure to Tony as a child and when he found out Tony worked for you, he apparently still had enough influence over him to turn him.
“Your building sustained massive damage. It’s going to have to be torn down. Fortunately it was a Friday night so there were only about half a dozen techies in the office. They were injured, but they’re all okay. Engineers say it’s a miracle anyone survived.” He turned to Sam. “Tell ‘em the rest.”
“This concerns you, ma’am,” Sam said, turning to Kyra. “With the tapes from your meeting with Patterson, I got the D.A. to drop the idea of bringing any charges against you regarding the collapse of ITC. But that got me to thinking. Why was Patterson so desperate to pin the theft on Harmon that he’d try and get you to plant false evidence?
“We still have some friends here and there from the old days in agencies that only use initials.” Sam waved a hand at the other men around the table. “We got them to give us a hand tracing what were supposed to be untraceable transfers and recreating destroyed hard drives. Your buddy Special Agent in Charge D.L. Patterson’s name cropped up. I knew he’d been working behind the scenes, still trying to pin everything on Harmon. I guess he figured when he couldn’t get you to turn on the boss here, he’d use the explosion to claim that any records of Harmon’s involvement had been destroyed. Then he could mark the case as one where the bureau knew who’d done it but didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute. As it happens, he already put in his papers for early retirement. He was planning to join the millions he socked away in the Caymans right after the first of the year. I’m told he was arrested yesterday. Quietly. The bureau doesn’t like being made to look bad by one of their own.”
“He always bragged that he had several Federal prison wardens who owe him favors,” Kyra said. “Maybe he’ll get lucky and be assigned to one of their facilities.”
When they got back on the company’s new helicopter after the meeting yesterday and headed home, Kyra was happy. It was so peaceful on DreamQuest Key, so far removed from the world. To her surprise, Jake had settled comfortably into their little house. It wasn’t much more than a beach shack, but they loved it. She was surprised last night after dinner when she found him sketching the floor plan for a larger house.
“You know, you should be drawing up blueprints to renovate Slade’s cottage instead. He’ll need the extra room. He’s going to ask Natalie to move in with him before Christmas. Besides, I love this little place,” she told him, waving an arm around the cozy living room decorated with casual rattan furniture that could withstand sun and sand. “Can’t we just live here?”
“I love it too, babe. But we’ll want something bigger once the kids come along,” he said, sweeping her into his arms and giving her bottom a playful smack. “We need a private master suite… one that’s soundproof. After all, there’s nowhere in here where I can spank you any time I want and not have everyone in the house hear you screaming when you come in my arms afterwards. You get really loud, you know.”
She stared at him. “Kids?”
“I know we’ve never really talked about it. I’d love to have kids. Ideally three. But if you want more—or only two—that’s fine with me. I hate the idea of raising an only child here on the island. I want Jake Junior to have someone to swim and fish and play in the sand with. You know, I never had a brother or sister but I always wished I did.”
“Jake, having kids—that’s quite a commitment.”
He smiled. “Yeah, but so is this.” Jake Harmon did it right—he got down on one knee and brought out a little square box from the pocket of his jeans.
“Kyra Thornton, will you marry me? Will you promise to love and cherish me for the rest of our lives?” His eyes danced as he went on. “…and obey my every command when we’re alone in the bedroom? And in the kitchen. And maybe the laundry room. And definitely when we’re playing pirate out in the boat.”
“Yes.” She threw her arms around his neck then, punctuating her words with wild kisses. “And yes… and yes… and definitely yes.”
The End
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Bared by the Billionaire Page 16