Cleave (Cutting Cords Series Book 3)

by Mickie B. Ashling

  “Are you that desperate for a cigarette?” Max asked, pulling his woolen scarf a little higher around his face. The wind was brutal today, and finding me outside battling the elements was atypical.

  “You have no idea.”

  “Are you okay, Sloan?”

  “Peachy.”

  “Oh dear,” Max clucked. “What’s wrong?”

  I groaned and laid my head against his shoulder. “Can we talk?”

  “Here?”

  “How about we go across the street and you can buy me a good, stiff drink?”

  “Darling, it’s not even noon.”

  “I could use some coffee and a lot of advice. Please?”

  “Come on,” he said, putting an arm around my shoulder. We crossed the street and found an empty booth in the small coffee shop. After peeling off all our layers and hanging everything on the coat rack, we sat and waited for the waitress. “What’s the problem?” Max asked once the coffee had been poured and menus laid on the table.

  “You won’t believe what I’ve just done.”

  “With you, I’ll believe anything.”

  I spilled my guts, and by the time I got to the part where I had Cole draped across the desk, Max looked at me in astonishment. “You didn’t?”

  I bobbed my head. “Sure did… a funeral fuck. It’s a first for me.”

  Max bit his lip to try to keep the laughter from erupting. However, his shoulders were shaking from the effort. He couldn’t keep the amusement off his face as he listened to my absurd confession.

  “This is not funny, Max. Trent will go ballistic.”

  “So don’t tell him.” Max guffawed, finally succumbing to the moment.

  “What’s up with you and Cole?” I screeched, appalled by his reaction. “I didn’t know the world was so fucking dishonest.”

  Max reached for a paper napkin and dabbed his eyes. When he’d regained his composure, he said, “Not everyone is as pure as driven snow, darling. You’re the only one who’s got the morals of a nun. Does fucking Cole mean you’re ready to give up Trent?”

  “Hell no!”

  “There you go. One random fuck does not constitute cheating.”

  “Huh?”

  “Did it mean anything? Does it make up for the hurt Cole inflicted? Are you going to go running back because now he needs you?”

  “Whoa. Who said anything about going back?”

  “You’re treating this like some earth-shattering event, when in reality this is a typical reaction to death. He needed to get his rocks off to feel alive, and you were handy. I’ve seen this happen time and time again.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Really?” Max sneered. “How would you like to label this?”

  “I really don’t know, but I don’t need your sarcasm.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Whatever. I guess I could keep this to myself. Trent and I never talked about being exclusive, although I know he isn’t seeing anyone else. Is he?”

  “Not at the club.”

  “See? He’s been faithful, and he’ll be pissed as hell when he finds out I’m a cheating asshole.”

  “Get a grip, Sloan.”

  “I feel sick. I think I might throw up, or worse.”

  “Stop it!”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Good, now eat,” Max ordered, picking up the club sandwich the waitress had placed in front of him. I looked at my patty melt and grimaced. Instead of taking a bite, I said, “Trent wants to collar me.”

  Max spat out half his sandwich and started to cough. I had to get up and thump him on the back, prepared to do the Heimlich if need be, but fortunately his coloring returned to normal.

  “Jesus Christ, Sloan.”

  “What?”

  “Do you have any idea what a big deal it is to be collared?”

  “I know,” I moaned. “He’ll probably withdraw the offer now that I’ve strayed.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to say anything.”

  “Max, I can’t lie to him, even by omission. It’s wrong.”

  “Then tell him and suffer the consequences.”

  “What do you think he’ll do?”

  Max pinned me down with a malevolent look. “God only knows.”

  “You think he’ll hit me?”

  “Has he ever?” Max frowned.

  “Relax, will you? He’s never done anything I didn’t ask for.”

  “What exactly does he do for you?”

  “I can’t discuss it with you.”

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “But hearing about you and Cole is?”

  “Who else can I tell?”

  “You always manage to give me the worst fucking headaches,” Max said, taking another bite of his sandwich.

  “I seem to have that power over everyone,” I remarked, thinking back on all the times Cole accused me of giving him a migraine. “I know I’m impulsive, Max, and my heart is too big for my brain, but he looked so sad.”

  “So sad,” Max mocked, rolling his eyes and pretending to swoon. Suddenly, he turned vicious. “Was he so goddamn pitiful you had to bone him in a flipping mortuary?”

  “It happened,” I yelled, finally losing my shit. “Screw this, Max. I’m going home to face the music.”

  “I’ll call the cops if I haven’t heard from you in forty-eight hours.”

  “You do that. I like pink carnations, by the way, none of those lily of the valleys for me.”

  “Drama queen,” Max grumbled, shoving the rest of his sandwich down his throat.

  I took a cab straightaway, not even bothering to go back into the funeral home to say I was leaving. Cole would have to figure it out on his own. On the way, I rehearsed my confession, fully prepared for a horrendous display of anger. The funny thing was I’d never once seen Trent lose his temper with me. I’d heard how tough he was, and I’d even witnessed him putting down a skinhead in London, but the man I knew was kind, intuitive, and amazingly tender, which would make this indiscretion so much harder to forgive. I was the first one to condemn it, and hell, if Trent needed to flog me to get over it, I’d let him. It was the least I could do. I decided to go home first and clean up. It wouldn’t be the best idea in the world to show up at Trent’s reeking of Cole.

  My boxers stuck to my skin, sticky with evidence. Setting the water temperature to a cleansing boil, I scrubbed like a maniac, hoping the coarse loofah would peel off at least one layer of guilt. However, there wasn’t enough soap in the world to absolve this. Replaying the scene with Cole and anticipating Trent’s punishment made me lightheaded with anxiety. I was vibrating by the time I stepped out of the shower stall and froze in place when I realized Trent was already in the apartment. He’d let himself in with the key I’d provided months ago.

  He smiled when he walked into the bathroom, but the playfully seductive look was quickly replaced with suspicion when he saw my face. He could tell something wasn’t right. I refused to look him in the eye and was doing everything to keep busy and stay out of reach. My intuitive master’s instincts went on high alert, and he reached for my hand and pulled me closer. He scrutinized me, trying to figure out what had happened while I was gone. “You’re back much sooner than I expected.”

  “There was no need to stick around,” I explained. “He’s got tons of support.”

  “I see.” Trent waited patiently for me to add more details. He could read me like a book, and I was unraveling in front of his eyes. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “We fucked,” I blurted out tactlessly. The enormity of my statement reflected in Trent’s eyes as they went from calmly inquisitive to dangerously frosty. The clear blue turned indigo with controlled fury, and he spat out the next word.

  “Where?”

  “Right there at the funeral parlor,” I confessed. “I feel sick about it.”

  “Didn’t you enjoy it?”

  “What does it matter?” />
  “If you had to fuck him, I hope it was worth it.”

  “I was trying to console him, sir. He was sobbing, and one thing led to another. Before I knew it, we were kissing.”

  “Shit happens,” Trent said coldly, “thus the expression. Death is a constant reminder of one’s mortality, and sex is often used as a coping mechanism. However,” he said, stepping away from me and releasing my hand, “what happened between you and Cole will have repercussions. Since this was spontaneous, I’m assuming you didn’t use a condom.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I, Sloan. This moves everything back several months.”

  “What?”

  “Obviously, you’re still conflicted about Cole, and I’m not prepared to collar anyone who’s not fully committed to me. Furthermore, if you had any illusions of fucking me raw, you can forget about it.”

  I knelt in front of Trent and leaned my head against his leg. “How can I make this up to you? Hit me, if you need to, but please don’t think for one minute that I have any intention of going back to Cole.”

  “Sloan, if I were to hit you in the mood I’m in right now, you’d never get up. I don’t do anything in anger, so I’m walking out of this apartment before this turns really ugly.”

  “Will you be back?”

  “I’ll have to think about it,” Trent said, picking up his keys. “Don’t try to contact me. I’ll call you when I’m ready to talk.”

  I reached out to try to stop him, but Trent whipped around and snarled. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Please….”

  He walked out and slammed the door behind him.

  Chapter 6

  The smell of leather and the large selection of whips and floggers had a calming effect when I walked through the doors of the gaming room at Wilde. I’d been trained to evaluate situations before reacting. Losing control and allowing emotion-based decisions accomplished nothing but failure and disappointment. I was infamous for keeping cool under fire, but Sloan had managed to trip my wires, and I’d been an ass hair away from slamming my fist into his face. My boy was more challenging than a trek through the Afghani mountains with full survival gear, but he was honest to a fault. Sloan could have lied, but he didn’t have a deceitful bone in his entire body. There were days when I wondered why I put up with half of his crap. He was nothing like the subs I’d known in the past. Sloan was a rule breaker from the word go, but when he did surrender, it was so heartfelt and moving it rang every one of my bells. There was nothing finer than hearing Sloan beg.

  The incident with Cole wasn’t altogether unexpected, but I had been bracing for it earlier in our budding relationship. I’d assumed the asshole would try to win him back, but when months went by with no incident, I’d gone complacent―big mistake. Knowing the enemy was one of the first things they’d drilled into me at West Point, and I’d fucked up by thinking Cole would surrender without a fight. The man had played Sloan and was intent on getting him back. I knew it as sure as I knew that I wasn’t about to give him up. Sloan was mine, and Cole was in for a rude awakening if he thought I was going to walk away from a very satisfying union over one infraction.

  If I had been the type of person who’d retreated at the first obstacle, I’d never have achieved most of my goals in such a short time. It had been years since I thought of home, back in Macon County, the heartland of Illinois, but I could still hear the words of my father telling me to get my head out of my books and go do my chores. The anger and frustration I’d felt then was pretty close to what I was feeling now.

  I’d had the disadvantage of being an only child in a farming family, where work was synonymous with breathing. Every waking hour was either spent in school or doing my chores on the farm. The days were the same, a mindless routine to make sure the animals were warm, reasonably clean, and fed. As soon as the hogs heard my footsteps, the grunting and squealing would start, and the noise would accelerate until each trough was filled. While they were busy eating, I’d hose down the concrete floors, gently sloped toward a drain on one side. Afterward, I’d clean out each stall and replace the soiled straw with fresh, shoveling the waste onto the manure pile outside. If it was any season but winter, the hogs were let out into the enclosed pasture to root around and wallow in the mud holes that were important for cooling off and keeping them free from parasites.

  The only time I could call my own was right after the dinner dishes had been washed and put away. I’d race to my room and bury my nose in the latest Tom Clancy novel. I was a huge fan of Jack Ryan, Clancy’s intrepid CIA hero, and I gobbled up the tales of espionage and covert operations as fast as I could procure the novels from the library. It led to a burning desire to join the military. My parents had assumed I would remain on the farm and live the kind of life they’d always known. When I first asked to join the army, their answer was a resounding no! They didn’t count on my single-mindedness and overachieving personality. With escape in mind, I put my efforts into academics and excelled in school, catching the eye of the recruiter who lurked around school property, hoping to lure innocent farm boys into the military life. He had no problem convincing me. The problem was getting my parents to agree. The offer of free education at West Point—and the honor and prestige—was pretty hard to pass up, and eventually they let me go. No one bothered to read the fine print except for me. I knew I’d be indebted to the army for a specific number of years to repay their investment, which suited me perfectly but came as a shock to my parents. They’d been sure I’d be back after four years to pick up the slack and take on the bulk of the work at the farm. Wrong.

  Other than a few cursory visits in between school terms, I never went back home. My meteoric rise at West Point left little time for farming. I was more concerned with learning how to rappel, jump out of planes, and shoot someone between the eyes from a hundred meters. Languages, complex mathematics, and deciphering codes became my obsession, and like my hero, Jack Ryan, I was determined to join an elite branch of the armed forces, where my special skills could be put to full use.

  Physical activity had always been my solution for working out intellectual knots. When I was younger and felt trapped between duty and personal ambition, I’d used the boars to help me get through the moment. Keeping the rutting, lustful males under control during mating season was a mental and physical challenge that couldn’t be equaled at the school gym. The upside was well-developed muscles and a better understanding of taming or bringing down an opponent who weighed at least 300 pounds more than I did.

  As I matured, and especially when I joined the armed forces, I discovered there was a need for men like me, the ones who weren’t sentimental and didn’t flinch when they walked the thin line between doing what was right and what had to be done. I’d risen up the ranks at a steady rate, and even though I loved my career in the military, hiding my orientation became a problem. I’d refused to put myself in a long-term situation where my choice of sexual partner could ruin my life. If the army believed that fucking a guy made me any less a man, they could take their DADT policy and shove it up their bigoted rear ends.

  What I took away from my structured life was the certainty that I was a control freak, and I associated power with sexual desire. Commanding a situation always intensified the pleasure. Inflicting pain on my sexual partners was only a means to an end and used if the intended desired it. I was proficient with most any tool in the BDSM world, but I wasn’t a sadist. What made my cock surge and heightened each experience was guiding my submissive somewhere he’d never been before. Having them surrender to my will, turning over their innermost desires and fantasies, was the reason I was a Dominant and loved the scene.

  I picked up a bullwhip and put all thoughts of my past back into the mental drawer where they’d lain dormant for a while. Compartmentalization was another skill I’d perfected throughout the years, enabling me to function under extreme duress. The instrument in my hand required the precision of a marksman, an area of expertise in my glory days
in the Special Forces. There wasn’t a target I couldn’t hit, moving or otherwise. The handle of this particular whip was covered in tooled leather, and I hefted it in my right hand, getting a feel for the weight and the size. I flicked my wrist and watched as the long tail whistled in the air, landing on the wooden dummy with a loud snap. Soon I got into a rhythm, striking with line after line of strategically placed grooves. A real submissive would have buckled under the heavy-handed lashing, but the wooden dummy could withstand anything, including my rage. The repetitive motion enabled me to get into my zone, exorcising my need to hurt someone before dealing with Sloan.

  I had no idea what I was going to do about him. Considering the amount of time and energy I’d invested in our relationship, and especially after asking for a more permanent arrangement, I was determined to find a solution. I had thought Sloan understood the magnitude of my request this morning, but apparently not. His momentary lapse meant he wasn’t indifferent to Cole, and it was up to me to convince him that I was the better man who could satisfy all his needs.

  I’d been going at the dummy for about fifteen minutes, and my arm was starting to get tired. Sweat ran down my back and I decided to sit in the sauna for a few minutes before my shower. Just as I was getting ready to leave the room, Max strolled in wearing a business suit.

  “Rather fancy attire for a dungeon, eh?”

  “I just came from the funeral home.”

  The bullwhip flew out of my hand and landed against the wall with a loud thud. Frowning, I stalked over to the other side of the room, picked it up, and wiped it down with a rag.

  Max quickly surmised I was in a bad place. “Is everything okay?”

  “Not really,” I said savagely, putting the bullwhip away. “My boy seems to have lost his way.”