by Angel Payne
“You know why,” she whispered. A weak laugh escaped after it. “I made you feel ‘real’? I ‘zapped your spirit’? We’ve been given a ‘treasure’? Qué no? What universe are you living in, Ethan?”
Whew. She’d said it. Now she just had to brace for his enraged male huff, followed by the wounded kiss-off and the flight to the next room, where he’d make that call for the cab before stomping out to the curb. Then she’d be able to curl into these pillows, bawl her eyes into puffy slits, and start the disgusting process of pulling up her heart’s drawbridge again.
A moment passed. Another.
He didn’t move. Even his damn fingers stayed put, catching the tears she couldn’t hold back anymore.
“What happened, Ava?”
Just three words. They said nothing. But they asked everything. “What the hell are you talking about?” she retorted.
His tone was like his touch, tender but unyielding. “I’m pretty sure your spirit didn’t always have such a huge wall around it. So what happened?”
She gulped again. The sting in her eyes was worse than a thousand bees. “Don’t.” The sound of her plea was mortifying. “Please don’t.”
His silence wasn’t reassuring. A moment later, as he curled his knuckles against her skin, he proved her instinct right. “Maybe the better question is…who happened?”
A crater opened in her chest. It got filled with memories that were dredged like slime from the bottom of a swamp, making her clutch his forearms for purchase. Stupid; so stupid. He’d caused this agony; how could he help drag her from it? But he did. His skin was warm, his grip didn’t waver, his muscles were filled with surety. Of course they were. They’d been trained to take down the baddest of the bad guys, to keep this entire country safe. They’d keep her safe, right? They’d take care of her, hold her, never leave her—
Never demand what he just had of her.
“No.” She shook her head desperately. “I—I can’t—” She stopped and blinked at him. “How the hell did you even know—”
“I didn’t.” He tilted her face up to scan every inch of it. “Not for certain. But I do now.”
She tried to jerk away. “Good for you, Nancy Drew. Proud of yourself?”
His lips pressed into each other. “Not particularly. Not yet.”
She squirmed again. And once more, didn’t get very far. “Let me up and go call your damn cab, Sergeant.”
His lips slanted in challenge. “Not until you answer my question.”
“Not happening.” She nodded toward the door. “If you’re really not leaving, then have fun sleeping on the couch.”
Without a word, he slipped his hands back to her knees—then pushed them apart. He kept them spread by shoving his own against them, then locked her down by twisting his ankles around hers. She grunted in astonishment. He’d kicked his flip-flops off at the door just as she had, freeing his toes to dig into her insteps with irrefutable force. Did Special Forces training now include toe calisthenics, too?
“Fun?” The word was a growl, his punctuation a dark chuckle. “I like playing, sunshine, but not like this.” He stretched his hands to brace her again, though this time he caught her by the wrists to lock her against the pillows. “And right now, playtime is officially over.”
The tears evaporated. In their place, she seethed at him with hard huffs. Several yanks of her arms and legs brought the realization that he was serious about keeping her here. Flat in her own bed. Trapped against her own pillows. By a soldier with muscles like boulders, a grip like steel, and even toes that were recruited for his cause.
Terror should have been declaring siege on her bloodstream, but she was too furious for that. Her rage grew to include even her own body, which acknowledged the intimate weight of his with a horrible betrayal. Her inner thighs ached and clenched. Her vagina started to pulse and drip. Even her nipples started to throb, awakening for him, stretching for him.
“Ethan, what the hell are you—”
“Don’t you mean ‘Sir’?” He charged it from lips that barely moved, again hovering inches above hers. “Two minutes ago, you were all about that, Ava. Eight hours ago, you freely tossed out the same words. And seven months ago, you begged me to trap you against a tree and control every move you made.” He dipped closer, so near that she could see the flecks of black smoke that fought with the cobalt fire in his eyes. His voice glided around her with the same sinuous intent. “Your need for submission is beautiful, breath-stealing. And goddamnit do I want to be the Dom that delivers for you, but…”
She wanted to scream when he cut himself off with a harsh growl. Her lungs sawed on air, caught in her body’s civil war: her soul and her sex against her head and her pride. He’d just given her the perfect opportunity to save the latter, too. She just had to stay silent, continuing the charade that what he’d just done hadn’t been the emotional equivalent of dangling solid gold Gucci heels in her face. No, worse. She’d longed for a Dom longer than the shoes. A man who took the word seriously, who would accept her submission with that same reverence, who would use their exchange to unlock a connection like no other…
That connection doesn’t exist, Ava. Not with a man like Ethan Archer. Not even with a Dom like him. He wears camouflage to work, remember? Delete him from the list. Delete him from your life.
“But what?”
The civil war had its winner. Her lips had fallen in with her lust. She heard a disgusted sigh echoing in her psyche as she urged Ethan on with the only method she had available: a pleading gaze. She watched him absorb it into the depths of his own before dipping his face toward her, wrapping her deeper in his power with every inch he closed in.
“You want to open the door, baby, but you’re missing the key.” His murmur was still molten, mesmerizing. “You want to call me ‘Sir’ and mean it and know the power that comes from it? Then you have to earn it…with your honesty. By talking to me. By letting me in.” He brushed his lips against her forehead. “I know you somehow think I can open this up and read it, but I can’t. Not what you lock away from me. Not what you won’t let me see.”
His feather-soft kisses loosened chunks of conflict through her mind. She shuddered as every piece fell. “I know,” she told him in a whisper. She’d never meant two words more. “I know. You can’t give me anything more than what I give you.”
His brows hunched. “So why do you say that like it’s a deployment to Siberia?”
She gave a dark laugh. “Good comparison. Damn accurate, actually.” As she finished, their gazes tangled again. Her heart slammed against her ribs. Looking at the man was like getting hit by a blue laser. “Ethan, I can’t lie and tell you that submission isn’t my dream…but I can’t go back there. I cannot dig all of it up again. I worked too damn hard to bury it, to leave it and make this life in its place. So unless you want to step up for a mission…to…Siberia…”
Her syllables slowed then stopped as the man pushed up, releasing his hold on her arms so he could yank off his T-shirt with a pair of hard tugs. He stripped off his dog tags, too, then wrapped the shirt around them and hurled the whole wad out into the dining room.
Ay dios mio. Every rippled inch of his torso was no less resplendent than this afternoon, when she’d had just the dim light of the wine room to help her gaze. The slice of light from her kitchen helped now, making it more impossible to reclaim her pulse from her bloodstream as he braced his hands to the tops of the dual ridges that dipped beneath his shorts.
“Let me make something clear.” His posture alone told her to interrupt him at her own peril. “Missions are what I do for a living—and that doesn’t define this.” He emphasized that by pinging a finger between his chest and hers. “It isn’t even in here anymore.” He swung the finger toward the door. “It’s out there, okay?”
Exasperation surged. She’d heard enough. She had enough. “Damn it, Ethan.” She tried getting away from him again but only got in a hard jab to his chest. “It’s not ‘out there’.” W
as he seriously living that high in the clouds? Or maybe he’d eaten some amoeba in the Mexican seafood that gave him crazy delusions. “It’s never ‘out there’ with you guys. Your survival depends on it being right here and here,” —she pointed at his sternum and forehead before sweeping her finger toward the room— “which turns this into a pretty convenient op target, right?” As the words spilled, so did her bitterness, stemming from the truth of every word she blurted. “I mean, why not?” Her breath wobbled. “Easy insertion point, yeah? Simple exfil, too. After you’re done, you can just compartmentalize it all to a back drawer in the brain, and soon, it’s easy to forget it ever happ—”
The torrent of his lips, wild and consuming, didn’t just drown her words. He drenched every thought in her head and sensation in her body. Surely the flood had been forged by a volcano, for his mouth was as scalding as a surge of magma from a burning core. He was everywhere, fusing his tongue and lips to hers with rolling waves of sensual invasion.
Ava mewled in protest. It didn’t stop him by a beat. She raised a hand to pummel his shoulder. He seized her fist and slammed it into the mattress. Her mind ignited in fury. Her blood detonated in white-hot arousal. Maybe that was why she tried the same move with the other hand. Maybe it was why her stomach flipped when he handled it in the same way, adding a harsh growl this time.
No more than a minute passed before he lifted his mouth from hers.
Sixty seconds in which everything had changed.
The man who’d joked with her during the drive from Bella’s? Gone. The Dom who’d silently brooded at her during the party? Disappeared. Even the half-panther lover from the wine room, who’d just popped in for a cameo in her own kitchen, had fled the building. This creature was someone new. Something new. Her breath snagged, caught on thorns of confusion and even fear as she struggled for a definition that fit him now. Impossible. Anger didn’t begin to describe the ferocity of his gaze. His focus had gotten reset to the power of a thousand, every degree zeroed in on her.
On a ruthless grunt, he shifted his body so her feet were freed from his—because he pinned her lower body with his crotch, instead.
“Ay, Dios!” She gasped in punctuation. Even through his shorts and her jeans, his cock pulsed with enough force to tease the swollen ridge of her clit. It was bliss and torture in a single second.
“My thoughts exactly.” Ferocity clawed every note of his voice. “But I’m not sure God can save either one of us right now.”
“Wh-what the hell are you—”
“I tried to do this the decent way, sunshine.” His jaw tightened in proportion to his grip. “I asked nice. One word, one name, was all I wanted. We were going to sit here and just talk about it. I stripped the tags off, threw them out the door. I wanted you to have nothing but me, committed to knowing more about you. But you wouldn’t let it go. Apparently, I wear those sergeant’s stripes on my fucking forehead, because that’s all you see. It’s all you want to see.”
She slammed her head to the side and gritted back more tears, accepting every word of the accusation. And why not? They were true. “Some things can’t be changed.” She prayed he heard the apology in her voice. “Some windows can’t be opened, damn it. They’re sealed shut, and that’s how people are doomed to see things.”
His angry breath seemed to fill the room. “Yeah? Well, that’s what hammers are for.”
Chapter Ten
Ethan watched Ava wrestle with that threat, licking her lips in hesitant curiosity but still not looking back to him. That was for the best right now. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d been in a woman’s bedroom, just a sun dress and a bikini away from having her naked and screaming nonstop Yes, Sirs but too enraged to make a single move, let alone a dominant action beyond his hold on her wrists.
Damn it, he hated mental smoke screens. In prisoners, the maneuver was maddening, but at least those poor shits had an excuse. From Ava, it was an insult. A bomb launched for maximum damage, intended to drive him back, generated from panic that rivaled any he’d felt from the poor morons they captured on missions. Fear that pushed at the realm of dread.
Of what?
Of him?
How? Why? Damn it, she’d been in that wine room this afternoon, too. She’d had the same hours as him to remember every one of those incredible minutes, every second of the connection they’d forged…to realize the enormity of the trust she’d given him, and the explosion they’d created together because of it. And now she was talking about super glue on her windows?
Well, there was more than one way to open a goddamn window.
He didn’t let her have any time to deliberate on his meaning. Or more importantly, to develop a defense against him. While she still blinked in analysis of the hammer reference, he reared up and planted on his haunches—and took the bodice panels of her sundress with him. The little buttons made like buckshot all over the room, backed by her high gasp.
“Caramba! Ethan! What the hell are you—”
She stopped herself with another choke as he continued ripping down the middle of her skirt. He was glad she kept sputtering for a couple of seconds, because the sight of her light bronze curves, tucked to perfection inside a halter bikini top and a string-tie bottom, had his tongue struggling for coordination, too. Thank fuck his brain wasn’t stopped at the same red light. It hit the gas pedal right toward Domination Highway, and he enjoyed every second of the ride.
“Ethan?” He looped a sarcastic edge on it. “Who’s that?” After pushing away the torn sides of the dress, he leaned and caught her dropped chin with a thumb, redirecting her eyes back at him. “You’re going to call me ‘Sir’ for a while.” He slid his other hand back to stroke the valley between her ear and her nape, a place he’d rapidly learned as one of her sensual hot buttons. “If you have a problem with that, tell me now.”
A ragged breath shuddered up her throat. “Bastard.”
He let his lips quirk up. “No. It’s ‘Sir,’ remember?”
“Sir bastard.”
He chuckled. The laugh came from relief as much as amusement. She wasn’t going to toss him out. Not yet. That gave him hope that this might work…that a taste of what they could physically be as Dom and sub would crack open her emotional ramparts, too.
“Hmm.” He drew back again, dragging his hands over her breasts, stomach, and thighs as he went, letting his fingers play at the ties of her swimsuit. “For that, sassy baby, you won’t get my help getting out of the rest of this.”
Her nipples turn to small stones through the bikini’s top, though stubborn fires still flared in her eyes. “You mean I may actually get to wear it again?”
His hands were positioned beneath her thighs. Perfect. Two sharp pinches to the flesh just beneath her ass elicited a lovely little yelp, as well as her renewed attention. “Take off your clothes, Ava,” he ordered evenly. “Now.”
He watched another skirmish cross her face. Part of her, that scared shitless girl who’d shed those tears on his fingers ten minutes ago, clearly clamored to give him the kiss-off to hell and beyond. But the other part, the woman who’d been longing for submission since well before their forest kiss, responded to the command like a kitten shown to a cream waterfall. She didn’t just want this. She needed it. The rapid rise and fall of her breasts, which she bared so beautifully for him by untying her bikini top, betrayed that. She was more demure about revealing the treasure beneath her bikini bottom, but he caught a long enough glance at the shimmering tissues to know cream wasn’t just flowing figuratively here.
The conclusion, beautiful as it was, laid down a conundrum. How did he give her what she needed without just handing over what she craved? How did he bash through her window without breaking her completely? And how did he do it all without giving in to the lust to simply spread her wide and fuck her so deep, she wouldn’t remember anyone’s name except his? But that was no different than feeding a buddy the answers to an exam. No lesson learned. No trust bonded. No connection forge
d.
Connection. He couldn’t believe the word now echoed in his mind. It had been a long damn time since he’d even hoped for such a thing. Years since he’d met a woman who seemed perfect for it on all the levels for which he longed. It seemed unreal that he took in the naked splendor of such a woman now.
Yeah. He needed to do this right. For both of them.
Which added another hurdle in the challenge course. Her bedroom wasn’t a dungeon with play toys on the walls.
Or was it?
Available resources. It was a key directive of any soldier’s training, especially once a guy was going for his beret. It came in handy now. Draped over the footboard of her bed were a dozen scarves in various colors and weights. He leaned back and scooped them all off, fast selecting the one he planned on using first. It was made of soft but strong fabric, meant to stay in place once tied. And it was all black.
“Perfect,” he murmured.
“For what?” she queried, though one glance into her eyes, brilliant with attention, proved she’d formulated some guesses. The look was pretty damn adorable, not that that he was going to let her know that right now.
“Tell you what,” he offered. “I’ll let you pick the start square.” He extended the scarf between his hands. “Wrist tie or blindfold?”
Her breath audibly snagged. “What if I say no and ask you to leave?”
“You can do that any time you want, sunshine. Call a red light and we’re done.” He leaned in to capture her gaze more securely in his. “But I don’t think you want to be done.”
The amethyst glints in her eyes got darker. She pulled in a long breath. “And what if, after everything, I still refuse to talk? What happens if you don’t get the information you want out of me?”