Quantum Boxed Set: The Complete Series

by Force, Marie

  I want to beg him to come back.

  “I can’t be your rebound, Marlowe, as much as I’d love to act on what I feel when I’m with you.”

  Ignoring the rebound part of the equation for right now, I force myself to look at him. “What do you feel when you’re with me?”

  “Things.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “Nope.” He taps his finger to my forehead. “You need to get yourself sorted and healed before you do anything else.”

  I know he’s right, but sitting here next to him, discovering he feels “things” for me, I find that I’m as sorted as I’ve been in a long time.

  Sebastian wants me. What else do I need to know?

  “What’re you grinning like a loon about?” he asks, his tone gruff.

  “You like me.”

  He rolls his eyes. “This isn’t middle school, Mo.”

  “Believe me, I know.”

  “How about we put some of that medicine on your back and get you tucked in for the night?”

  I’m oddly disappointed, even though I have no right to be. “Are you letting me down easy?”

  His eyes flash with something dangerous and wild, and I feel like I’ve touched lightning or something equally powerful. “I’m putting you on ice.” He bounces his index finger off my nose. “For now. Talk to me on the other side of this crap with the piece of shit, and we’ll see what’s what. But until you give yourself some time to deal with what happened, you shouldn’t be having this conversation with me or anyone else.”

  Even though he’s right, I don’t appreciate being told what to do.

  “Hey.”

  “What?”

  “Look at me.”

  I force my gaze to meet his.

  “If this hadn’t happened with him, I’d be all over it—and you—in a fucking heartbeat. I’d have you in my bed so fast, your gorgeous head would spin. This is not a rejection. It’s a time-out.”

  As I look into eyes darker than midnight, I can see the fierce internal battle he’s fighting to do the right thing, to be my friend and not take advantage of my fragile emotional state. Except, I’m not feeling particularly fragile. I’m feeling something else, something I can’t put into words. Whatever it is, it’s powerful and determined and the absolute opposite of fragile.

  “We should put some medicine on your back. Dr. Breslow said we need to stay on it to avoid infection.”

  I don’t want anyone touching or even seeing the wounds on my back, but I can’t do it myself and he’s been nothing but gentle with me since he found me the other morning. “Okay.”

  He stands and offers a hand to help me up.

  I curl my fingers around his large hand and wince when my ribs and abdomen fight back against the movement. A memory of Rafe, out of control and enraged, raining blows down on my body, has me shuddering in revulsion.

  “Easy.” Sebastian puts his arms around me and holds me until the trembling subsides.

  “I’m okay.”

  “No, you’re not, but you will be.” When I’m steadier, he leads me into the guest room. “Get comfortable.”

  I stretch out on the bed, facedown, arms wrapped around a pillow. My entire body is tense in anticipation of pain. Flashes of memory bring back the excruciating lash of the whip, and the harsh words.

  “Is this what you like to do to other people? How do you like it? Is this what gets you off, you sick fuck?”

  The whip broke my skin, but his words broke something much deeper. In all my years as a practicing Domme, I’ve never once broken the skin of one of my subs. I’m not about injuring people. No, my kink is all about pleasure and satisfaction, especially that of my partner. But Rafe hadn’t given me a chance to explain. No, he’d taken one look at the dungeon and had lost his shit.

  The bed dips when Seb sits next to me. “Ready, sweetheart?”

  I bite my bottom lip—hard—and nod, hoping I can get through this without falling apart.

  It hurts me to hurt her. I can’t bear it, but her wounds must be cared for, so I force myself to press on. I raise her T-shirt and carefully remove the gauze that covers the worst of the lash marks. The sight of those angry red cuts on her back makes me want to howl with outrage.

  “Here we go.” The hands that I’ve washed thoroughly are shaking from the effort to be gentle, to not cause her any more pain than she’s already experienced. “Nice and easy.”

  She gasps at the first touch of my finger.

  I move quickly but carefully, wanting this done so she can relax. I venture a glance at her face, see tears rolling down her cheeks and I’m gutted. Her tears are like a knife to my heart. “Almost done. You’re doing great, sweetheart.”

  “Hurts.”

  “I know.” I want to cry myself, but I need to stay strong for her. When I’ve covered every inch of the four wounded strips of skin with the antibiotic ointment, I cover the areas with new gauze and tape it back into place. “All done.” I draw her T-shirt back down over her back.

  She exhales and closes her eyes, breathing through the pain.

  I grab a tissue from the box on the bedside table and wipe up the remaining tears on her face, wishing there was more I could do to comfort her. I lean in and kiss her temple. “Get some rest.”

  “Seb.”

  “What, honey?”

  “Don’t go.”

  Christ have mercy. I’m powerless against those two little words coming from this particular woman. I stand, turn off the light, walk around to the other side of the bed and lie down next to her. “I’m here.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Tell me things I don’t know about you.”

  I grunt out a laugh. “That’s stuff you don’t need to know.”

  She turns her head so she can see me in the faint light filtering in from outside. “I want to hear it anyway. Tell me the bad stuff.”

  “Marlowe…”

  Her hand grasps mine, sending a sharp bolt of sensation up my arm that reminds me of the danger she represents. Hayden and Flynn would kill me if they ever knew that Marlowe touching me in the most innocent way possible makes me harder than I’ve ever been for anyone else. I try to figure out what’s different about her touch, but all I know is that when she touches me, I feel it everywhere.

  “Why do you want to talk about that?”

  “I want to know you.”

  “You do know me.”

  “I know what you want me to.”

  She’s incredibly insightful. I’ve always known that, but she proves it again with that telling statement. “You won’t like me anymore if I tell you the bad stuff.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I promise I will.”

  She links her fingers with mine and holds on tighter to my hand.

  Desire is like a live wire, crackling and sizzling between us, as if I’ve opened a door that can never be closed again.

  “You know most of it.”

  “Tell me the rest.”

  This is the last thing I want to talk about with anyone, let alone her. If I tell her my truth, she’ll never look at me the same way again. Ah, who am I kidding anyway? Me with Marlowe Sloane is the biggest pipe dream anyone has ever had. She’s a certifiable goddess among women. And me?

  You’re in a bed with her, holding hands, the hopeful part of me thinks.

  The realistic part of me scoffs at that. You’re a reformed thug not worthy of breathing the same air as her.

  That may be true, but I am breathing the same air, and she wants to know me. The part of me that’s burned for her for as long as I’ve known her can refuse her nothing. “You know my mom.”

  “I love your mom.”

  Everyone does. She’s the best. “You know she worked for Hayden’s dad when we were kids, that we grew up together.”

  “Right. Brothers from another mother.”

  “Yeah.” Hayden, who grew up
as the son of a wealthy, if often self-destructive and ultimately unsuccessful, actor, has never treated me like he thought I was less than him. None of the Quantum principals have ever treated me as anything other than a trusted friend and colleague. But I am less. They’re wildly talented and successful, each of them Oscar winners in their own right and as a group. I’m a hanger-on compared to the rest of them, a lackey. “My dad took off when I was six, and that was when my mom had to go to work for Hayden’s family. We were lucky she landed such a great job, even if his dad could be a bastard a lot of the time.”

  “Still can be, from what I hear.”

  “Yeah, he’s a tiger who’ll never change his stripes.” I haven’t thought about this shit in a long time, and if I had my druthers, I’d leave it in the past where it belongs. But Marlowe wants to know me, so I press on, despite significant reservations. “I was really messed up after my dad left. I couldn’t understand where he’d gone or what I’d done to make him want to leave. My mom was equally heartbroken, so she wasn’t much help to me. By the time I hit high school, I was getting into trouble in school. I got suspended for two weeks for fighting.”

  “What grade were you in?”

  “Eleventh.” I place my free hand over our joined hands and stroke her soft skin. Now that I’ve been given permission to touch her, to share secrets in the dark, I can’t help but want more. “I was so angry. That suspension was actually the start of much bigger trouble. Here I was, pissed off with nowhere to go all day for two whole weeks. My mom was at work, and even though she told me not to leave the house, I did anyway. I went looking for trouble, and I found it. I met an older kid at an arcade who saw the same anger in me that was in him. He introduced me to others, and it sort of took off from there. Before I knew it, I was into all sorts of illegal shit—stealing cars, breaking and entering, assault, arson. You name it, I’ve done it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but they were testing me, making sure I was loyal and trustworthy before they ‘promoted’ me to bigger and better things.”

  “I’m almost afraid to ask what bigger and better might entail.”

  “You really don’t want to know, but suffice to say they would’ve been looking for me to prove that there was literally nothing I wouldn’t do to demonstrate my loyalty. Hayden intervened two years later. I was an adult by then and in danger of doing serious time if I got caught.”

  “What did Hayden do?”

  “He called and told me he was in trouble and needed my help. Because it was him, I dropped what I was doing and went running. Apparently, that’s what they’d counted on with this plan.”

  “They?”

  “He and my mom were in cahoots. He’d had me followed, realized how bad it was, went to her and ratted me out.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “He had me meet him at his place, where he took me by surprise, overpowered me and handcuffed me to a chair.”

  Marlowe’s low, sexy laugh makes me smile, even though there’s nothing funny about this, even all these years later. “What’s so funny?”

  “I’m trying to picture Hayden overpowering you.”

  “I wasn’t the beast then that I am now. I’d break his neck now. Back then, we were more evenly matched, and he got the better of me.”

  “What happened after he handcuffed you to the chair?”

  “I told him I was going to fucking kill him if he didn’t let me go. He sat across from me and said I could rage all I wanted, but neither of us was going anywhere until I agreed to his terms.”

  “Which were?”

  “Join him on a shoot in West Virginia for the summer, or he would call the cops and tell them he had the guy who burned a shop owner in Compton out of his store.”

  “Did you do that?”

  The shame has never really gone away, even if time has tempered it somewhat. “Yeah.”

  “How’d he know?”

  “He’d been having me followed for months and had the footage to prove it.”

  “Wow. What did you do?”

  “I fought with him for twelve hours, during which he wouldn’t let me eat or drink or take a leak or do anything but sit in that fucking chair with my arms shackled behind my back while he threatened me with almost certain death if he called the cops. Or, he said, I could get on a plane with him to West Virginia in the morning and start a whole new life. The choice was mine.”

  “Holy crap. That sounds intense.”

  “It was. The whole time, I just kept thinking about how I was going to kill the motherfucker the second he let me out of those cuffs. I was going to wrap my hands around his neck and squeeze the life out of him.”

  “He must’ve known you’d come at him if he let you go.”

  “He did, and that’s when he brought in the big gun.”

  “What was the big gun?”

  “My mother.”

  “Ohhhh.” Marlowe props her head on an upturned hand and hangs on my every word.

  “Mama cried and begged and told me that I’d broken her heart, shattered it into a million pieces that could never be put back together again. She said…” Some things could never be forgotten.

  “What?”

  Sighing, I tell her the rest. “She said she was disappointed with me, devastated that the child she’d raised had become a lawless, heartless thug. If I didn’t go to West Virginia with Hayden, she said I would no longer be welcome in her home, where I still lived.” My gut twists with the pain of that memory. “Hayden said he would let me go, but if I walked out the door, I was dead to him, too. ‘It’s us or them,’ he said.”

  Marlowe sniffles and dabs at her eyes.

  “I was infuriated that they’d do this to me, that they’d force me to choose between the two people who’d always been there for me and the people who’d given me a purpose and an outlet for my rage.” I can still remember the fury and the fear of that day so clearly, as if it had happened yesterday rather than twenty years ago. “Hayden unlocked the cuffs, and God, my arms hurt like a motherfucker. First thing I did was take the most satisfying piss of my life, and the metaphor of that wasn’t lost on me. I wasn’t so far gone that I couldn’t see that I was pissing my life away and looking at hard time if Hayden made good on his threats to turn the video over to the cops.”

  “Do you think he really would’ve done it?”

  “I’ve thought about that a lot, and I’ve decided that he probably would’ve, because if he had a choice between me being in jail or dead, he would’ve picked jail.”

  “So you went to West Virginia.”

  “I went to West Virginia and hated every fucking minute of it. I made sure that Hayden regretted bringing me by being a complete pain in the ass for the entire summer.”

  She lets loose with that legendary laugh of hers. “I would’ve liked to have seen that.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t. I was such a dick back then. I can’t stand to think about the way I behaved toward the man who saved my life.” I glance over at her. “That kid I met when I was suspended?”

  “What about him?”

  “I stayed close to him, and he taught me everything I needed to know about how to get away with just about anything. When I came home from West Virginia, I found out he’d been killed in a shootout with cops. I would’ve been with him when it went down and probably would’ve been killed, too.”

  She squeezes my hand. “I’m so glad you went to West Virginia.”

  “So am I. Three months away, learning something about making movies—even if I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever been part of at the time—and coming home to that news as well as the hopeful look on my mother’s face… When Hayden offered me a permanent job, I took it, even though I knew I wasn’t qualified to get him coffee, let alone work as an assistant to him after what I’d seen him do in West Virginia. I didn’t want my mom to be disappointed in me anymore, and even though I tried to convince myself that I hated Hayden’s guts, I didn’t. Not really.”

  “This is why you vol
unteer at the community center, isn’t it?”

  I’m shocked that she knows about that. “How do you know that?”

  “I hear things. You’re there to try to keep other kids from making the same mistakes you did, aren’t you?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I want you to know that I admire the way you turned your life around.”

  I bark out a laugh. “Don’t. I never would’ve done it on my own. I had people who cared and intervened. Otherwise, I’d be either dead or doing life in prison.”

  “I don’t think you give yourself enough credit for getting on that plane when it would’ve been much easier to stay and keep doing what was familiar by then.”

  “All the credit goes to Hayden and my mom. They turned things around for me.”

  “Sebastian.” She tugs her hand free of mine and places it on my chest, the heat of her palm working its way through my T-shirt. I break out in goose bumps in reaction to her touch. “They couldn’t have done it unless you allowed them to. They might’ve given you the ultimatum, but you made the choice. You did that.”

  “You’re giving me way too much credit.”

  “You don’t give yourself enough.”

  Her hand moves from my chest to my face, her thumb caressing my cheek. “I want to kiss you.”

  “Marlowe…”

  “Sebastian.” She sounds amused, and damn if that doesn’t do it for me. She does it for me.

  “Why do you want to kiss me?”

  “Because I’ve always wondered what it would be like to kiss you.”

  “You have not.”

  “I have too!”

  I can’t believe she’s saying that when it can’t possibly be true.

  With her hand on my face, she turns me, forcing me to see her in the faint light coming from the nightlight I put in the room for her. “I have always wondered what it would be like to kiss you, among other things.”

  “You… you’re injured and…”

  “I’m fine.”

  I should get up, leave the room, walk away from her while I still can. Except I can’t seem to do anything but breathe and wish I was a better man so I would deserve a woman like her. While I’m paralyzed, she’s not and moves toward me slowly but intently. I want to tell her to stop, to not do something that can’t ever be undone, but she’s undeterred by my silence and my paralysis.