by Sophia Reed
Chloe didn't play any word games or hedge. "Sure."
Back on PD, I worked with guys. Guy-type guys. Cops are very alpha. And when I was undercover, I worked with bikers and bad guys and dicks and the occasional confused male who nonetheless was being a dick in his actions. I had no problem being indiscreet. I was straightforward and I'd learned, at least with the guys, not to let too many things rattle me. Probably because at PD nobody was apt to strip me naked and stick me in a stress pose.
What they would do was respond to some real or imagined slight by saying something completely unallowed like, Geez, what's your problem, Knox? Your time of the month? When I was in high school and the little bit of college I had, that made me cringe. Once I started working with PD, I just responded, "No. Is it yours?"
But talking to Chloe, I felt my way. Cautiously. Thoughtfully. Maybe because I cared about her or maybe because it was personal.
Whatever.
"Did you really raise your family while... " I gestured and when she didn't hear the end of the sentence, Chloe turned to see what I was talking about.
And laughed.
"Did I raise my sons while living as a slave to Claude? Yes." She smiled. "Their mother had been a dancer so the idea of her sitting on the floor a lot didn't seem strange to them. Everyone took off their shoes in the house, not just the mother their father wanted to control. So that wasn't strange. If occasionally mom winced when she had to sit on a wooden chair, well, to be honest? They were boys. By the time we were really established, they were teenage boys. I was the mother of teenage boys."
I shook my head. So?
Chloe laughed. "I couldn't have gotten any less cool or less interesting if I actually tried. Believe me, the slave thing flew under their radar."
I almost asked, but then I didn't. The question didn't need Chloe to answer. The same way she'd been normal for her boys, she'd be normal – a judgmental word, but after a year of living with sadists, normal was attractive and normal was not what these people were – when we were alone together. Add Claude into the mix, and we were – what? Rivals? Or just not friends. Two slaves who had to act accordingly.
That was fine. This was her world. My issue was with St. Martin. With, if necessary, giving him the time that Chloe seemed to think he needed, and then getting back to him because for now, Cole was home and I felt in need of home.
At the same time, my anger at him was growing so that I thought if and when I did get home, however temporary, the residents in that home had best be wary. There wasn't a single man around me right now I could trust. Not a single man I could think of who hadn't fucked up or lied or done something on purpose.
That thought made me sit down abruptly. Chloe had gone off into the bathroom and so I sat, thinking it through.
Mark Tomlin, soon to be ex-fiancé. Lied. Worked with my father to have me committed. Wanted to punish me after the trauma I'd just gone through by putting me through an invasive exam himself.
My father. Mr. Super Cop, who used his contacts to get me committed, who used his own values or morals or whatever it is that says My version of sex is fine. Whatever it is you're doing is deviant and needs treatment. My father. Mr. Super Judgmental.
Claude. I didn't even know his fucking last name. Claude, who put me into a stress position, who groped me and kept me naked, who treated me as one more asset, one more piece of property. Who I didn't trust. I'd liked him at the dinner parties. Sure, why not? Back then I just had to worry about St. Martin.
Vincent Geddes. No, not so much. He was dead. I'd killed him. And he'd at least been honest – he was a bad guy from start to finish. Funny how being honest about how horrible he was moved him up in ranking.
Because the last man was St. Martin.
Chloe came back out of the bathroom just in time. I took one look at her eyes and said, "Coke? Or something else?" substituting "else" at the last minute for "worse."
She blinked rapidly. "You're not going to tell on me, are you?" She sounded twelve. A very keyed-up, very sexy twelve, wearing a low cut slinky dress.
By comparison, I was practically in a bathrobe. Scoop neck, thick shoulder straps, cotton, came to my knees. It was a dress, yes. Kindergarten children could wear it.
I didn't say, Not unless you force my hand. I didn't even pretend to think about it. I had three sisters who didn't like me, a mother who didn't understand me, and a dearth of female friends.
"Don't worry about it," I said. "I won't."
She nodded, looked relieved, and then said, "Are you wearing panties?"
The question came out of nowhere and struck us both as funny. The laughter took a while to die away and then I said, "I suppose I'm not supposed to."
"What do you think?" she asked. "And heels. Four inch."
I laughed. "I've just mastered a little over two."
Chloe wasn't laughing though. She said, "Then hang on to me. But heels."
Dinner was dinner. We talked about Claude's work. Chloe talked about art, losing me frequently, and since none of these people would ever know the people who couldn't know I was undercover, I talked about my work.
Even as I did so it started to occur to me for the first time that being here, with Claude and Chloe, maybe even with St. Martin, was a type of deep cover. I had no choice but to adapt and become someone who fit into this world. It was accepted that I was new to it, but it wasn't a world that treated mistakes because of lack of knowledge kindly.
Then again, what world does?
"I'll clean up if you want to get started without me," Chloe offered at the end of dinner. When she stood her dress rode up, showing an expanse of beautifully shaved and tended skin. I looked away, uncomfortable.
With St. Martin, sex always hung over every encounter, but rarely materialized and when it did, that was one place he made certain there was consent. Except – a couple times it had been a form of punishment.
Not one I really hated. Cole St. Martin was gifted and Cole St. Martin was gifted. He was big, he got really hard, he was really talented.
I shifted in my seat. Not a good thing to be thinking, then wondered what Chloe had meant by getting started.
"Leave the dishes," Claude said. "I want both of you."
And my stomach dropped.
Normalcy was over for the day. He led us into the living room where the couch was vast, and synthetic leather. Probably not due to saving money as much as saving cleanup time, a thought I instantly wished I hadn't had.
Looking at me, he said, "It's time for Chloe's maintenance spanking and we might as well get started with yours, so you're in rotation."
My heart started to pound in my chest, fight or flight kicking in with the opinion being offered up by brain and body that both were a great idea.
Fight. Then get the hell out of here. Find a phone. Call a friend. I had to have some left who weren't PD and weren't apt to commit me.
Right?
Then get back to Seattle. Get out of the apartment. Get my own place. Get a job. I didn't care, I could wait tables. If I ran into any of the gang members I'd uc'd with, so what? Biker babes could wait tables.
And then school. I could – fuck, probably I could just ask Cole St. Martin to pay for it. Failing that I could blackmail him. Or my father. Or Mark. Or all fucking three. Jesus, men!
Only it wasn't happening. Because a part of me still wanted to go back to St. Martin. To figure out what had happened between the man who kissed me in the desert before I was kidnapped and the man who sent me away for telling him it was a bad idea to keep psychopathic killers in your basement.
"Take her hands," Claude said. It was pretty clear it wasn't the first time he had said it.
Chloe lay across his lap, her ass up in the air, the sleek dress pushed up to her waist. Her legs were spread wide, apparently on command, and I looked away fast and moved to the other side of her, looking to both of them for guidance.
Chloe just reached out and took both my hands in the seconds before she let her head dr
op, signaling her surrender, I guess.
Claude looked at me. "Don't let go. You're her support."
This made no sense to me. She was just getting a spanking, wasn't she? Same thing she got on a weekly basis from what I'd gathered. But Chloe was crying and Claude hadn't started yet, and everything I'd eaten was rolling around inside me.
I tightened my grip on her hands, confused.
Claude nodded at me, ran his hand over his wife's ass, then reached down beside the couch and drew out a long, hardwood paddle, drilled liberally with holes.
My heart stopped pounding. Or doing anything.
"Don't. Make. A. Sound," Claude said.
And the first blow landed.
29
Cole
In early May, less than two weeks after I sent Annie to stay with Claude and Chloe, I got a call from David Lin. A tall, spare, rangy man, he exuded the kind of smoldering intensity that drew stares from women. He was silent, deadly, brilliant. At sixty-two, he was one of those men like Cary Grant or George Clooney who age beautifully, becoming more handsome and more rugged.
He was also totally straight, and devoted to his wife. He knew about my choices and my life, and because of his tacit acceptance, I called him the freak.
"You need to get down here. They're trying to clearcut." His voice sounded tired and angry.
Lin was my number one in Brazil. There are rainforests around the world. In Africa. In the US. But it was Amazon rainforest, the one that stretched over Brazil, Peru, Columbia, Venezuela, Ecuador and several other countries, where both the worst burning and clearing took place and where the best raw ingredients for cures could be found.
What St. Martin Pharma did was remove natural growths from the forest. That was, potentially, a danger to the forest. If American medicine with its greed and dollar signs for eyes understood the full potential of the vines and leaves and bark and probably even the rocks in the region, they'd do as much if not more damage in short order than all the clearcutting had already done.
Fortunately most of us working with naturals were considered tree-hugging freaks.
If only they knew. My freak flag flew in such very different ways. And the truth was, one or two companies, like St. Martin Pharmaceuticals, could harvest for decades before causing a significant problem. We brought money into the region and hope to the people the cures could reach. Not all of our medicines were FDA approved. The naturals I'd used to treat Annie certainly hadn't passed testing, or even been submitted yet.
I just knew what they could do and that there were people desperate enough to try them when they'd only gone through the in-house, admittedly very thorough, tests.
Sometimes human need outstrips the need to wait for permission from a balky, reactionary government entity.
The trip was straightforward enough. Go down, take an entourage around the land we now owned. Be seen. Make some threats. Make a lot more bribes. Find some new substances for testing because why not, as long as we were already there.
Fly back home.
Easy and distracting and sex-free, because I didn't generally mess around outside my own country. Self preservation and all. In the end the trip was quick and uneventful and totally didn't get my mind off Annie for more than an hour at a time.
I told myself it did.
Halfway into May we returned to the U.S. Reports had been coming through regularly. Ariel was restless and working out for hours every day, working online, studying college catalogs and reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Questionable reading material and if she was contemplating choosing a career based on US Government stats, questionable sanity. So it was probably good she was also spending hours every day with both her companion and her therapist.
That sounded to me like she'd made the decision to live and another to leave, and was contemplating a future. Not something I thought she'd ever do and the indications of it made me both overjoyed and worried for her. They were big steps she was contemplating but she was probably right to tackle them all at once. Baby steps would make it too easy to fall back into captivity if something went wrong.
Prisons easily become safe places. The rates of recidivism show that. If Ariel could get herself out, I wanted her to stay out. In many ways I'd miss her. Even when she was nearly catatonic she was special. She just didn't know it.
Kie had attacked a guard right before I got back, putting the man in the hospital before going into a decline herself, refusing to eat or drink or get up at all apparently. So Norcross had been contacted. He was in Europe attending to his businesses. My agents requested he cut his trip short or at least video conference with Kie. She needed something.
For once I was glad Annie wasn't with me. She thought what Kie needed was a white walled cell 24/7. I understood her hatred and pain but Kie wasn't dead and despite some of the things I'd done, I wasn't in the habit of making people dead.
If I could help it.
We flew home, the locals around that stretch of forest both threatened and paid to stop trespassing and clearcutting. Norcross contacted me to say that he'd be back days after I was. Kie would be gone before I even contemplated bringing Annie back to the compound. That was good. Lots of things could be taken care of in her absence.
She was in a good place learning good things she needed to know.
And I didn't miss her and wasn't thinking of her constantly.
At all.
30
Cole
The trip successfully accomplished and behind us, I ran into something far more fearsome when I got back. Even before Norcross could come get Kie and before I even considered taking Claude up on his invitation to dinner and sport, I got a call from someone I absolutely didn't want to hear from.
Annie's fiancé.
31
Cole
"This is Mark Tomlin."
I'd been back in my office about two hours. On the flight back to southern Nevada I'd compiled an impressive action list. It covered properties and permissions I needed to get lawyers working on for real estate in other countries.
It covered how I wanted to change my workouts and meals and how Annie's were going to change once she was back with me.
It listed people I wanted to talk to about changing Annie's routine so she had either more or less down time with nothing to do. I wanted to see what that would do to her attitude.
It listed the idea of putting Annie on a regular maintenance spanking schedule like Chloe was on and seeing what that would do to her attitude.
I wanted to review surveillance footage Claude had provided. There were plenty of times he wasn't covering her but Annie had been in his care a couple weeks. There would be a … "greatest hits" video. Also, possibly, bloopers.
Work and play. I'd had a successful trip, walked off with more land and hopefully resolution for the problems we'd been having. I was ready to let off steam, workout, eat my own Cole-prepared clean foods for a while. Make plans.
Not deal with a man who didn't yet realize he was part of Annie's past. Partly my fault. I needed to insist she decide what she was going to do about him.
I rethought that. She needed to deal with her own personal life, the one on hold, on her own. Mark was a part of that. I thought he was an ass. I thought she'd already made up her mind what she was going to do.
But it was all up to her.
"Do you know who I am?" was the second thing he demanded over the phone.
"Of course I do," I said mildly. I can control a room full of commercial real estate speculators and face down the federal government when it comes sniffing around my company.
I can deal with a nobody like Mark Tomlin without it becoming a situation I had to contain.
"Look, you son of a bitch, whatever it is you think you're doing... "
Then again, I didn't have to put up with abuse.
The idiot wasn't even in the same state as I was. Probably. And Annie wasn't anywhere he'd be able to find her without going through me or making enough waves and i
nquiries I'd find out about it.
I hung up on him.
Waited.
Answered the phone when he called back. "How did you get this number?"
I could hear the rage in his voice. "That's what you think is important? You think you're fucking untouchable? You don't realize what kinds of friends Annie has on the force. Do you think... "
I thought a good many things, including the fact that Annie didn't actually have a lot of friends on the force. Police were still largely alpha males who had a hard time with a not-that-huge woman showing them up on a regular basis. The alpha female out alphas the alpha male every fucking time.
I also thought he was on the wrong track again.
I hung up.
It took him three more times and longer spaces between calls before he was able to modulate and moderate his tone and his words so that I'd stay on the line with him.
"Don't hang up on me."
"Don't give me a reason to," I said. "Mr. Tomlin, you seem to be under the misapprehension that I in any way owe you anything."
There was a short silence during which I wondered if he'd hung up. The only reason I cared was that if he had, I was wasting my time waiting for him to speak again.
Finally, his tone still moderate, he said, "I want to know where Annie is."
"Annie is fine. You didn't know where she was when she was undercover, and you wouldn't necessarily know where she was in rehab. She is, essentially, still in rehab."
"Bull – " He must have realized he didn't want to restart this conversation once again, because he caught himself. "That's nonsense. She was hospitalized before you got your hands on her again and they couldn't find anything that made them think she had an addiction."
I allowed myself to laugh. "How about that? Perhaps my methods work." It was the tail end of twilight. I wanted to eat something just to get back on a regular schedule, work a little and go to bed. "Mr. Tomlin, what is it you called for?"