Savage Hearts (Club Volare)

by Cox, Chloe

  “Cate—” Soren began.

  “Oh crap, just pretend I didn’t say that,” Cate said quickly. “There are no strings. I meant it when I said there are no strings, not just for you, but for me, too, and—”

  Soren growled and turned her head to the side, kissing her roughly. His lips over hers, his tongue in her mouth, the scruff of his jaw scratching her chin—it was a guaranteed way to get her to stop digging herself in any deeper.

  When Soren finally pulled away, he took her nipples between his fingers and rolled them, sending sparks shooting straight to her core. The effect was dizzying.

  “Shut up,” he said, turning her head and giving her that Dom gaze. “I don’t want to hear about you and other men. Ever. You are no longer thinking about other men. You. Are. Mine. Am I clear?”

  Not that she needed to be told. She almost wanted to laugh. She hadn’t been able to think about anyone else since she’d seen Soren. And since he touched her, other men might as well not exist.

  “Very clear,” she said.

  “And I hadn’t been with anyone for over year before you. And then I saw you, and I knew I was going to have you. And it’s been you, and just you ever since.”

  Cate bit her lip and tried to pretend she didn’t feel tears gathering in her eyes. She hadn’t known that. Hadn’t expected it.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Cate whispered. “If you—”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” Soren said. “But other women aren’t you, and you’re the one that I want. And if I want strings, Cate, there are going to be strings, even if I have to truss you up.”

  Cate’s heart pounded a relentless rhythm in her ears. She couldn’t get enough air. Was he saying… What was he saying? Was he…?

  “I mean that in a non-creepy way, obviously,” Soren said.

  “I don’t know what that means!” she cried.

  Soren laughed slightly and pulled her into his chest, holding her tight against him.

  “It means that this is more than I thought it was,” he said. “And it means that in about two minutes I really am going to tie you down and fuck you so good I’ll have to cover your mouth to keep you quiet.”

  “Soren, I don’t—”

  “Shhh,” he said. “Do you know what it means? Do you know what you want? Tell me the truth, Cate.”

  She was shaking in his arms. Actual, physical shaking. And he was a rock behind her, this solid, calm, unmovable stone, and that both calmed her and terrified her. How could he be so relaxed? How could he be so certain in the face of this if he was feeling what she was feeling? If he really…

  Cate knew she loved him. Knew it, the way she’d only known a few things in her life. Knew it bone deep, knew he was right for her, knew she was better when she was with him. Knew she could love him better than anyone else.

  And she lied.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  Well, maybe it was a half-truth.

  Cate closed her eyes even though he couldn’t see her face. She just couldn’t do it. She couldn’t be brave like he was, she couldn’t risk losing him forever, and deep down, part of her believed that he would never love her back, not because he wasn’t able, but because she wasn’t good enough. She hated that that was still there, that little seed of evil, that thing that made her not trust her own heart.

  And then she tried to tell the truth, and remembered she’d been lying to Soren all along.

  “Jason did that,” she said. “Made me not trust my own judgment, or my own…I don’t even know what. I wasn’t really sure he was gone from my head until just the other day. I thought about you, actually, and then about Jason, and the way he treated me, and it just seemed so insane.”

  Tell the truth with lies, Cate.

  Jason wasn’t some abstract concept. He’d been in her office. He was still her husband. And Cate was in love with Soren Andersson.

  She curled in on herself.

  She just didn’t have the courage. Not at that moment. Not when she’d just alleJasoowed herself to see how much she had to lose, how much she loved this man, how important he had become to her. Cate told herself she would do it, she would tell him the truth, she would tell him she loved him, she would tell him she’d been hiding Jason from him, not because it was shameful, but just…Jesus.

  She would tell him, and she’d have to trust that he’d understand. She would. Just not right now.

  Cate didn’t have the strength to tell the truth yet. She didn’t have the strength to give up this one night of closeness, this first night where Soren was nearly hers, where she could believe everything would be perfect. Because it would be. She believed that. She hoped for that.

  But if she didn’t have the strength to speak the complicated truth, then she just wanted to feel it instead.

  So she turned in his arms, and let him kiss her. Let him pick her up and carry her back in through the skylight, arms around his neck. Let him set her down on his bed, eyes dark above her, mouth hungry, hands rough. Moaned when he lashed her limbs to the corners of the bed, cried out when he bit at her breasts, and screamed his name when he entered her, finally, obliterating everything else.

  chapter 18

  They were not careful at the airport. Soren took responsibility for that. He hadn’t been able to keep his hands off Cate since she’d shown up at his mother’s house, and he’d forgotten what it could be like at LAX, and he should have known better.

  So that was where they’d gotten the photographs.

  Cate in his arms. Cate’s face as he kissed her. Cate’s smile as he helped her off the plane.

  They were all very sweet pictures. But the headlines had been obscene. Cate was now his “lady lawyer lay.” It pissed him off that, if they were going for the alliteration anyway, they’d gone with “lay” over “love,” as though Cate were just another fuck. She was also the woman who was into whips and wins (not the best headline of the bunch), and they’d managed to talk about spankings a whole lot in the accompanying text, without ever once confirming whether Cate was in fact pro-spanking. Which was good for them, or Soren would have gone berserk.

  The general impression was that Soren had seduced another hapless victim into being his sex slave. And this time the woman in question was his famous, hot lawyer, the one who’d been arguing that Soren’s reputation had been unfairly maligned.

  The media reaction was to go batshit crazy.

  And it got even more insane when a man named Jason Whittier gave a very pissed-off interview.

  Soren felt his blood rise just thinking about it. He was waiting for Ford and Adra in one of the loun? sfont>The man who had hurt Cate. The man who was still hurting Cate.

  Her husband.

  Not her ex. Not some distant ghost from the past. Her lawful husband.

  Soren never should have let Cate drive off in that car without telling her. She’d said she had something big she was working on for his case, something that was going to end the madness, something she’d had waiting since before she followed him back home. And stupidly, arrogantly, so fucking stupidly, Soren had thought: That will give us both time. They both needed a breather. Let Cate be sure of what she wants. They had all the time in the world.

  They hadn’t talked. He hadn’t told her.

  And now he was staring incomprehensibly at the smarmy face of one Jason Whittier, the man who had hurt Cate, and the man that she had lied to him about. Soren needed to talk to Cate more than he needed food or water. He needed to tell her that he didn’t care. He needed to tell her that she was the only thing that mattered to him.

  He needed to tell her that he loved her.

  Why hadn’t he fucking told her?

  Because he was afraid it wasn’t true? No, he knew, he knew it with more certainty than he’d ever known anything else; he knew it like he knew his own goddamn name. The way he felt about her pumped in his blood, was his life-blood, she was his life now. He laughed now, because of her. She had switched
him fully on.

  She had taught him that he could love.

  Had he just been afraid of it? Of finally finding something stronger than he was? Did it matter? Whatever the reason, he should have told her. He needed to tell her.

  And she wasn’t taking his calls.

  Her secretary, Verna, assured him that Cate was fine. But that was all he’d gotten. He was losing his fucking mind.

  Cate was hiding again.

  Which meant the only thing Soren had left was how he was going to deal with Jason Whittier.

  “How you holding up?” Ford asked as he entered the room. The man was back to his blond James Bond-looking self, unbuttoning his suit coat as he sat across from Soren with that casual confidence that had women fawning over him.

  Soren just looked at him, and Ford’s face fell.

  “I see,” Ford said. “What can I do to help?”

  “We’re waiting on someone,” Soren said.

  “Who?”

  “Me,” Adra said. She was paused in the doorway, her hand on the knob. Her eyes locked on Ford.

  “Get over it,” Soren said roughly. “Both of you. Right now. I need you for this, so I need you to get over it.”

  Ford couldn’t tear his eyes away from Adra, either. The pain and lust on both their faces would have amused Soren in any other circumstance, but he didn’t have time for it now. He had to help Cate.

  “Of course,” Ford said, rising to his feet as Adra walked into the room. She paused and waited for him to pull a chair out for her, the two of them moving in this choreographed dance that neither was aware of.

  Soren hoped they worked that well together no matter what the project.

  “How can we help, Soren?” Adra asked.

  “Tell me everything about this guy,” Soren said. “I don’t care what the truth is, I just want to help her. I want to her to have whatever she wants. Whatever she needs.” He paused, his fists clenched tightly. “Even if that’s not me.”

  Ford and Adra looked at each other.

  “She needs to get away from Jason Whittier,” Adra said.

  ~ * ~ * ~

  Cate looked out the window of the bland hotel room she’d chosen for this meeting and told herself she would not cry.

  She would not.

  She had gotten off that plane and nearly run away from Soren, preferring to live in this fantasy dream world where he was always on the verge of telling her that he loved her, and where Cate hadn’t lied to him. Where she’d been strong enough to tell him the truth from the beginning, to own her past, to admit that she loved him and wanted him. She’d had the case to deal with, and she’d been happy about it—her investigator Rubin had come through, and Cate had everything she needed to nail Mark Cheedham and Daniella Collins to the wall.

  Cate couldn’t fix Soren, she couldn’t fix whatever their situation was, and she couldn’t fix the fact that she’d lied to him. But she could damn well fix this case, and that she was going to do.

  She’d relished it. She would come back to Soren with this case, and maybe…

  She couldn’t believe she’d actually thought that way. It hadn’t been conscious, but Cate knew the moment she saw those newspaper headlines that she’d been thinking that somehow she’d fix this one thing, and then all her other mistakes wouldn’t matter. That everything else would magically come togeallines ther.

  It was childish. It was inane.

  And now it didn’t matter anymore, because he knew she was a liar.

  She’d teased him about his honesty rule. She’d mocked it even, albeit gently. And she saw now that she had done that because she knew she was breaking it. It was a high, harsh standard, but Soren had serious reasons for it, and she’d failed it. Did it matter that she had good reasons for lying to him? Didn’t most people have good reasons for doing bad things? That’s what made them so easy to do. It was the rare, Cheedham-like person who sat there and tried to think up ways to screw another human being over. The rest was just people rationalizing because they were afraid, or hurt, or because they wanted something, until it seemed ok to do something that would hurt someone else.

  Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. But it had been weak, and selfish, and if she were in Soren’s place, she didn’t know what she would think. The thought that she might have hurt him had come too late, and now it was all she could think about.

  And what was worse, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to face him. Didn’t matter that she knew it was childish or inane, she wanted to be able to tell him that she’d at least done this for him. Soren had changed her life just by being Soren, by sheer force of will, by being the one to show her who she really was. And that she’d felt loved. Even if he never said it, even if he didn’t…

  He’d taught her it was at least possible. He’d taught her what being loved should feel like.

  She had to give him something back. She had to. And she was too much of a coward to face him empty handed.

  So, once again, Jason Whittier had found a way to hurt her. She almost had to hand it to him for this one. Points for style, at least. Jason probably thought that his blackmail leverage was all the more valuable now, but he wasn’t counting on one thing. She didn’t care if she never tried a case again. She didn’t have anything to prove anymore; now she just had the rest of her life to figure out. And the only thing she really cared about was making it up to Soren.

  Cate Kennedy was about to kick some ass.

  “Ms. Kennedy,” Mark Cheedham’s oily voice rang out from the doorway. “Very cloak and dagger.”

  The man was smiling. Cate had let him think she was about to make a settlement offer, on the condition that she arrange to transport Mark and his client to a secret meeting location. She had no doubt that otherwise the place would be awash with media, and Mark would have a field day.

  “Given the press attention, it seemed prudent,” Cate said.

  “For you, yes,” Mark said. His smile was actually lewd. Unbelievable. “Never become the story, Cate,” he admonished, shaking his head. Then he looked her up and down. “I never would have guessed.”

  Cate’s voice turned cold. She was very close to done with this dirtbag.

  “Where’s your client?”

  “I thought we could talk.”

  “Non-negotiable, Mark. I was very clear about that.”

  Cheedham looked at her with his dead eyes for a beat. Then he sighed and opened the door again, waving a woman inside.

  He’d made Daniella Collins wait in the hallway. Unbelievable redux.

  Daniella was a small woman, brown hair, blue eyes, tattoos down one of her arms. Head held high. Cate wasn’t sure what she should feel—this wasn’t a typical case, and she wasn’t a typical plaintiff. If it weren’t for Soren, Cate might have felt pity. But pity was too condescending for this woman. So Cate fought down the jealousy from knowing this woman had been with Soren and settled on empathy, instead.

  Cate wanted to help her, after all.

  “Daniella, this is Cate Kennedy,” Mark said. And then, as if he’d spent hours thinking it up and simply couldn’t help himself, he said, “She likes it rough, too.”

  Silence.

  Mark Cheedham chuckled slightly, as though this were a totally acceptable thing to say. Like it was fair game, just because it had been in the news. Like introducing them as though they both had a similar interest in tennis was a good joke.

  Unbelievable, the trilogy.

  Cate might have kept it professionally tactful, except she saw Daniella’s face. The woman looked hurt, and sorry, and sad, and full of loathing for this man who had put her in her current position and now made her the butt of sexual jokes.

  So she went with professionally blunt.

  “I wouldn’t make jokes of that nature if I were you, Mark,” Cate said. “You’ll be going to prison—soon—and unfortunately the threat of violence in our state facilities is still very real.”

  Mark looked up, stunned. She could see the pale circ
les around his eyes where he wore goggles in the tanning bed.

  “It’s tragic,” Cate said. She meant it. “But that doesn’t stop it from being true. Maybe you’ll be able to draw attention to the issue from the inside.”

  Cate sat at the small dining table in the corner of the suite, leaned back, and crossed her legs.

  “You might be able to bring those media manipulation skills to bear for a worthy cause,” she went on. “You could look at it as an opportunity.”ity>

  “What are you talking about?” Daniella said. “Mark, what is she talking about?”

  Cheedham had partially recovered. He was doing his best to look outraged now, rather than terrified, standing up as though he were about to storm out. “She’s talking out of her ass,” he said.

  “Sit down, Mark,” Cate said. “I have a hypothetical situation for you both to consider. In that hypothetical situation, I have evidence that you, Mark, coerced Daniella Collins into perjuring herself, making false claims, the whole deal, by first promising to pay for her nephew’s medical treatments, and then threatening to blackmail her.” Cate looked at Daniella, who was wide-eyed and open-mouthed. “Your sister is very worried about you, you know.”

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  Mark was silent.

  “In that scenario, I would be obligated to come forward. Perjury is a crime. So is fraud. I’m an officer of the court.” Cate sighed. The woman looked terrified. “Again, in that hypothetical scenario, I might also recommend that you, Ms. Collins, get yourself a criminal attorney. I think if you were to separate yourself from Mr. Cheedham here, make a full public admission absolving my client of everything you’ve accused him of, and cooperated with the district attorney, you’d probably be ok. My client isn’t the type to beat up on someone he cares about, and the district attorney is likely to be far more interested in Mr. Cheedham’s activities than your misdeeds.”

  More silence.

  Cheedham looked like he was about to throw up.