by Anna del Mar
“Thanks.” I paused to collect my thoughts. “About what happened yesterday—”
“You had to take something,” she said. “To be able to leave the house and come to my aid. The unlabeled stuff in the green bottle on the kitchen counter. Do I have it right?”
She’d vaulted ahead of me and now I had to catch up. She’d looked around too. She’d always been razor sharp. IQ aside, I was going to need all my skills to get through this on top.
“Tit for tat,” I said. “Do you want to tell me what the hell you were doing with that creep?”
She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she climbed on the swiveling chair, reclined on the leather seat and crossed her long legs, unwittingly directing my attention to the smooth expanse of creamy thigh peeking from under the robe.
“It’s work.” She reached out for her wineglass and held it on her lap. “Research for an upcoming article.”
“An article?” I took the chair across from hers. “What kind of article?”
“A fresh perspective on sex, submission and domination for RelevantSex.com,” she said. “A ‘how I got started in BDSM’ kind of thing.”
“I’m really confused right now.” Did she realize the risks she was taking? How had she gone from her day job to this? “You write? About stuff like that?”
She inclined her head. “I write. About stuff like that.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Nope.” Amusement twinkled in her eyes. She was enjoying shocking me. “And the stuff in the green bottle?”
One had to give some to get some. “Liquid courage,” I said. “Don’t ask me what’s in it, because I don’t know, and yes, it’s probably illegal.”
“Why do you take it, then?”
“It helps me cope so I can get out for a bit, even though it eventually makes me sick. It’s the only thing that seems to work.”
“Why does it make your fingers turn white?”
“Side effect, vascular spasm.” I checked on my now normal-looking fingers. “Your turn. What happened to that psychology degree you wanted so badly?”
“I did business, marketing and public relations instead and after that, I got an MBA.”
“So your mother won after all.”
“She got her way, that’s true, but I got in some psychology classes and...”
“And what?”
Her smirk widened with mischief. “I...um...” She hesitated for a moment, as if judging whether she wanted to tell me or not. “I have my own blog.”
“A blog?” I began to make all kinds of connections. “Blog. Piece for RelevantSex.com. I get it now. And here the rest of the world and I were under the impression that you were the CEO of the Luz Foundation.”
“I am,” she said. “Why should one thing preclude the other?”
“Because you’re Senator Margaret Luz’s daughter,” I said, “and I don’t believe you can step outside your mother’s strict lines and survive unscathed.”
She stuck her stubborn little chin out. “Allow me to surprise you.”
“Ha.” I snickered. “You’ve already done that.”
“Sextattle.com,” she said. “Questions, answers, discussions and commentary.”
It was so damn unexpected. “You mean you run one of those advice sites that use anatomically correct names of body parts when talking about sex and shit like that?”
“People talk about what’s on their mind.”
I eyed her with a new measure of respect. “Mother Dragon knows?”
“No,” she said, “and she better not find out.”
“She won’t, not from me.” I zipped my fingers across my mouth. I had no love for Senator Luz and I didn’t even want to think about the bitch who’d kicked me off of Avalon all those years ago.
“Now, please, elaborate,” I said. “Your sudden interest in kink?”
“Tight deadline coming up.” She took a sip of her wine. “Do or die. Me? I prefer doing. What about you? When did you develop an interest in that stuff?”
I choked on my wine. “Excuse me?”
“Now, Noah.” She cocked her head and teased me with a telling glance. “My research hasn’t gone to waste. Safe, sane and consensual. You reminded Mark of the basics. Back at the old house? You knew the terminology. You knew the rules. Hell, you can really handle a pair of cuffs and you could run kinky circles around Mark creepy Walker.”
I kept my mouth shut and my jaw off my lap, but I had to give it to her. Her keen senses of observation hadn’t dulled over the years.
She flashed her irresistible smile, the one capable of extracting whatever classified information she wanted from my brain. “Want to share with my readers?”
“Hell, no.” I clung to my wits, but only barely. “Private is as private acts.”
“What about sharing with me?”
I scoured her face. “Why so interested?”
“Humor me, please?”
Hard to resist when she batted her long eyelashes like that.
Fuck it. I was so screwed. This was not the sort of stuff I shared. With anyone. But if I was going to dissuade Clara from her deranged plan, I needed to convince her that I knew what I was talking about. Better present my credentials and come clean up front.
“I had a playmate in the Navy with both brass and pull,” I said. “Every so often we ended up deployed in the same hemisphere. What can I say? It was war and we both needed something to get us through. She liked her games and I liked to play.”
No need to share that I’d gravitated that way because I’d failed to recreate the joys I’d discovered with Clara with other partners in vanilla settings. BDSM was about the only thing that had gotten me out of the rut. It channeled my high-strung erotic intensity and satisfied my appetites for sexual thrill and adventure.
It had also fit in with my lifestyle when I was in the Navy, as I went without it for periods between deployments, only to return to it without a hitch. In practice, it was a lot like riding a bicycle. It took time and practice to learn the basics, but once you had it down, you never forgot. I’d learned a lot about the practical aspects of sex, the experience of being human, and mostly, about myself.
I hadn’t forgotten a thing, but since I’d gotten shot, my sex life had taken a dive and erotic exploration was a thing of the past. I found it interesting that Clara was gravitating toward kink, even if her interest was purely academic so far. The mere memory of her in that cage got me hard all over again. No need to share that with her right now. No need to share the specifics of what I’d learned from Marine Brigadier General Selma Stephens, either.
“Sounds like a lot of common ground,” Clara said. “You two didn’t end up together?”
“Nah.” Why did I get the impression that she was on a fishing expedition? “We were just blowing off some serious steam. She was on her way up the chain of command, married to the Marine Corps and her career.”
“And you were busy working as an intelligence officer and, apparently, a highly decorated Navy SEAL with a gift for identifying, tracking and catching the bad guys.”
Sweet Jesus. Who the hell had she been talking to?
“Hello, NCIS.” I rallied. “Have you been doing some research while I napped?”
“Talked to a couple of people, including your friend Josh Lane.”
“How the hell did you do that?”
“Don’t worry, I didn’t crack your cell’s security code, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“You tried?”
She flashed her most mischievous smirk. “Called Martha. Got a name from her. Turns out Josh Lane is quite well-known among my people. Had no problem connecting. He’s the one who persuaded me not to take you to the hospital.”
“I see.” She was still an
unstoppable force and not even Josh Lane had had a chance.
“So you were saying...why didn’t it work with your high-ranking marine playmate?”
“Anybody in special ops would tell you that the last few years have been busy,” I said. “I was in the field a lot. If you must know, raw play is fun, but love and lust aren’t one and the same.”
“Wow.” Her eyebrows spiked. “That sounded deep, practical but deep.”
“I suppose I’m a pragmatic kind of guy.”
“So...” She bit down on her lip. “What do you call it? Agoraphobia? PTSD? What’s the diagnosis?”
The abrupt change of topic left me reeling. “Do you ever give up?”
“Just tell me the truth, Noah.” Her stare bored into my skull. “Are you going to die between these four walls?”
I looked down and rubbed my fingertips around the rim of the wineglass, playing a mournful note. “It’s a definite possibility.”
The air seemed to flow out of her. “Don’t you miss going out about the city? The outdoors? You loved the ocean. You’re part dolphin. Don’t you miss going out on the water?”
My heart shrank. I missed those things for sure, especially sailing. Hell, I missed my freedom the most. I missed all of that almost as much as I missed her. “I miss fresh sushi.”
“Sushi?”
“I’ve got everything else I need right here.”
Her eyes glimmered with disbelief.
It was my turn to change topics. “So, big wedding coming up.”
“Wedding?” She frowned. “You knew about my engagement?”
“Don’t look so shocked,” I said. “I can read, you know.”
“You kept track of me?”
“Only if reading the DC papers counts.” Never mind I’d flagged her name, so that any mention of her anytime, anywhere, would land the news straight in my inbox.
“I guess you don’t know then,” she said. “The engagement is off. I ended it with Matthew Morris a few months ago.”
“Sorry.” Good thing I wasn’t hooked to a lie detector.
“Yeah, stuff happens. I wanted to say sorry too, about Bess. I didn’t know she’d passed.”
Her kindness kicked me in the balls. “She’d been sick for a long while.”
She stared at the wine in her glass. “I also wanted to say thanks. For your help. Yesterday.”
“You’re welcome.”
“There’s something else.” Her throat rippled with a hard swallow. “I talked to Felix. He’s in rehab. He told me. About the letter? He gave your letter to Mother. And Noah?” she added. “So that we’re clear? Mother never gave me the letter.”
Chapter Six
Noah
The wineglass cracked in my hand. The bowl exploded between my fingers, the stem snapped and the wine spilled in the air before the remains of the glass crashed and shattered all over the floor. Clara had never seen my letter.
“Son of a bitch.” I leaped down from the chair.
Clara started to do the same. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, but don’t move.” I motioned for her to stay in place. “I don’t want your feet to get cut.”
I grabbed a rag, a roll of paper towels and a dustpan and, ignoring the pain shredding my guts, crouched on the floor and began to clean up the mess. Hundreds of tiny glass shards shimmered in the wine splatter. I forced myself to be careful as I brushed the shards onto the dustpan, but it was hard. My heart sat like a granite boulder in my chest and my jaw was about to break. Senator Luz. I should have known. One of these days, I was going to kill the bitch.
I felt as shattered and jagged as the shards collecting in the dustpan. I’d been so goddamn sure that Clara’s silence had been her reply. Leaving Clara behind in the clutches of her domineering mother had been one the hardest things I’d ever done, but I’d had to accept her decision, because I’d believed that it was Clara’s choice.
I mopped up the wine from the ground, gripping the rag like a weapon. For an instant, I imagined I was cleaning up a murder scene instead of a wine spill. My mind spun with all kinds of questions. Chief among them: What would Clara’s reply have been if she’d gotten my letter?
“Noah?” Clara’s gaze weighed a ton on my back. “What did the letter say?”
I balanced the dustpan in one hand. It took all I had to push myself to my feet and make it to the corner. I tipped the dustpan and watched the crystal shards cascade into the trash can. I was crippled, homebound and broken. “Nothing important.”
When I mustered the courage to look at her, pain clouded her eyes. It was as real as mine. Old pain? Lingering pain? New pain like the one stabbing at my heart?
“I called you a liar yesterday.” Her tone was sad and subdued and her long fingers caressed the stem of her glass as if she were consoling her wine. “But after I talked to Felix, I realized you told the truth. I know this all happened a long time ago, but I’m sorry we didn’t get to say our goodbyes.”
Yeah, me too. Our chances had died on that timeline. Or had they?
I couldn’t interpret the vibes coming from her. Sadness tempered her voice, but there was something else. Interest? Too much to hope for. Curiosity? I’d been out of circulation too long and my judgment was impaired by wishful thinking and my grossly underserved dick. After all these years, after thinking that I’d deserted her, after learning that I’d turned into a useless cripple, could she feel anything but contempt for me?
I returned to my chair and studied her out of the corner of my eye. Time had been kind to Clara. The changes on her face were subtle. The endearing parentheses that cased her lips when she smiled had deepened a little. The stubborn line between her eyes seemed a tad more pronounced. She wore her hair shoulder-length and lighter these days, almost blond with highlights, but she still swept her long bangs to one side over her right eye in a way I found incredibly seductive.
Hell, she was right. A long time had passed and yet, in my mind, she was still seventeen, I was twenty, and time had stopped. I was stuck in that moment, trapped like a needle on a scratch, replaying the same line of a soundtrack that hadn’t changed, would never change. I loved her. With all I had. She was that huge cliché I’d never believed in, that huge, rare, implausible phenomenon that people called “the love of my life” for lack of a better term. And she was still seducing me. She just didn’t know any of that.
I’d always known one day I’d go back for Clara. It had never been a question. I hadn’t had a clear idea of how I’d get her back, but I did have some ideas of when. When I was rich. When I was powerful. When I was her equal in every way.
I’d worked hard to achieve all of that. Those promotions and medals meant nothing to me, except a go at Clara. And then...clusterfuck. I’d gotten sick and my timetable had changed. So instead, I’d come to Avalon, where I could feel close to her even if she was way out of my reach. But I was determined. I’d go after her when I got better, when I reclaimed my health and when I had a life, a real future I could share with her.
But she was here, now. And I had nothing to offer but a life in a prison of my own choosing.
Her question startled me out of my thoughts.
“So what happened in Iraq?”
“Lots of things happened in Iraq,” I said. “I served four deployments out there.”
She pressed her lips together. “I guess you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Talk about what?”
“Your injuries.”
My stomach heaved. “I got shot, so what?”
“I saw the scar.” Her fingers brushed the spot below her ribs.
“I’m pretty healthy now.”
“Right.” She gave me a look that said I was full of shit and she didn’t like it, but thankfully she moved on. “There are a coupl
e of locked rooms downstairs.”
“Have you been snooping around my house?”
She lifted a shoulder. “A little. What’s in those rooms?”
“Garage?”
“Sure, yeah,” she said, in a tone that said that she didn’t believe me. “What about the other room, the one with the fancy security system?”
“Classified, remember?”
“Work or play?”
Her mind was a one-way street. “Not every BDSM aficionado has a dungeon in his basement. You can improvise a scene anytime, anywhere.”
“Now, see?” She teased me with a quick smile. “Fresh and raw for my readers. I feel as if I should be taking notes.”
“Clara?” I tried to hold back but I couldn’t. “Were you telling the truth when you said you weren’t going to let Mark Walker fuck you?”
She jerked. The words seemed to hit her like a fist to the gut. Brutal, I knew, but I was raw inside, not to mention extremely worried about her safety.
“You can’t write that goddamn article,” I said. “It’s too dangerous. For you, personally and professionally. Politics is a dirty business. Too many IEDs to navigate the terrain safely. Walk away, now.”
She set her wineglass on the table. “I can take care of myself.”
“You never could see people’s ugliness hiding behind fake smiles,” I said. “Hell, you can’t even differentiate when your mother is playing naughty or nice.”
Her eyes went liquid. “That’s not fair, Noah. I was seventeen.”
She was right and I was way out-of-bounds.
“You don’t understand.” She clasped her hands together on her lap. “If I write the piece and get the job, I can be free of the trust and do my own thing. It would be the first time I did something for myself, without Mother’s intervention.”
“Find some other way,” I said. “You aren’t built for this.”
Her eyes sparked with fury. “You don’t know me.”