by Sophia Reed
It was everything else I was starting to doubt. Because Dave Samuels had sold me?
And Cole St. Martin was telling me I was his for the duration.
And I hadn't yet even tried to drop him to the floor or run or even scoped out the room properly.
There was something compelling about his strength. His looks.
The way he slid his belt out of the loops of his jeans and snapped it through the air so it made a sharp sound.
The way he said that discipline would be an inescapably important component to my recovery.
And told me to turn around, take down my jeans and panties.
To bend over the bed.
To count but otherwise not to make a sound.
I only stared at him long enough for him to get to two on a count I had no doubt would end badly at three.
Then I turned, and pulled down my jeans and panties, and leaned over the bed. Because I couldn't lose the life I loved.
And because, maybe I had just found one addiction to replace the other and I didn't know yet how I felt about that. But Jesse's fist slamming into the pillow, his cock burying itself in me, and Mark's irritating gentleness and my own growing need, they all exploded in me until I complied, turning, half naked, vulnerable, listening as he wound the belt around his fist.
As it split the air with a sound I could never fake or mistake or forget.
There was the first impossible explosion of pain as the belt tore across my ass.
And a new version of deep cover began.
Book 1
Taken by the Billionaire
Synopsis
Annie Knox
* * *
She's a Seattle PD undercover narcotics officer, the only job she's ever wanted. She's on the verge of bringing down a ring of drug dealers when everything in her life goes south. Faced with losing everything she loves, she dives headlong into her own fentanyl addiction. When her handler at PD offers her a chance at a radical cure, one she can only accept in secret, she jumps at it, only to find nothing is what she expected.
* * *
Cole St. Martin
* * *
Billionaire CEO of St. Martin Pharmaceuticals, he's beautiful, driven, a philanthropist – and a sexual sadist. His experimental rainforest cure for opiate addiction could be the answer to Annie's problems, but not until her handler actually sells her to him and Cole has her sign a contract giving him full control over her.
She's convinced she can use her own strength to beat the addiction. He's convinced nothing will be cured until that strength is broken, then built back up again. And he'll do anything to break her.
But even for Cole St. Martin, things are not always what they seem, and for Annie Knox, the path to recovery is anything but straight.
* * *
Taken by the Billionaire
is the first book in the 6-book Deep Cover series.
1
Annie
Pain from the latest beating woke me.
For a few minutes I lay without moving, the old undercover cop trick of feigning sleep until I put together the story I was living under and where the hell I was.
It was obvious I was alone in the big bed. The room was completely silent. All sound was coming from outside where blue jays were arguing over something in what sounded like a calm summer’s day.
When I moved I felt the stiffness in my muscles from having fought the blows that had rained down on me, and the fiery ache in my ass from having been strapped.
What the fuck? Clearly I wasn't in Seattle with Mark Tomlin. The most my sweet, intern-on-rotation fiancé ever did was hold my hands over my head when we made love. Or if I'd been gone long enough on assignment, we might shed our clothes in hurried bursts as we made our way from the front door to the bedroom.
I definitely wasn't "home" with Mark.
So, I'd awakened in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room with sunlight coming through the un-curtained windows. From outside I could hear birds, songbirds as well as the jays, but that didn't help in placing where I was.
Ever since I'd gone undercover, not knowing exactly where I was when I woke was an occupational hazard. Then for a while after I went deep cover, I woke every day in Jesse's bed, whether or not Jesse was in it.
That thought was enough to snap me back to at least some idea of where I was. I was Annie Knox again, not Lily, the deep cover name I used when I’d infiltrated the Brotherhood for Seattle PD's narc squad.
I was Annie because I was taking down time after an assignment ended badly. I wasn't with Jesse because Jesse was dead. That didn't mean the Brotherhood wasn't still dealing China white to younger and younger clients. It didn't mean they weren't responsible for middle schoolers OD-ing on fentanyl. It just meant Jesse was gone and I didn't have much of a reason to go back to that group even if I hadn't been pulled from the assignment.
By now the gang would have drunk themselves silly and fucked every whore they could get their hands on, all in honor of their fallen leader.
I wasn't even with him when he died. Not that I was in love with Jesse. Not quite. But he hadn't turned out to be the cut and drawn gang leader slash drug dealer I'd expected. Jesse lived in a state of perpetual rage and more than once I'd felt the brunt of it. During our few short months together he'd dislocated my jaw and raped me more than once.
The other times weren't rape. There was some weird respect between us, so weird I sometimes wondered if he knew I was a narc. Knew, and had no intention of letting anyone else know. He watched me. He probably would have taken me out if I'd made a move against the Brotherhood, but I was looking for their sellers.
Some part of Jesse wasn't all bad. Not salvageable, but if I'd learned he was making sizeable payments to organizations that helped opiate addicts get clean, it wouldn't have surprised me. He ran his dealing like a business, and a good one. His soldiers were mostly clean. They drank, they smoked, they indulged, but their product was off-limits and if they didn't listen, the best they could hope for was expulsion.
Being expelled from the Brotherhood was as much a death sentence as having Jesse put his .44 to their heads and pull the trigger.
He'd done that, too.
I sat up in bed and looked around the room and remembered. The pain in my backside upon sitting was one of the clues. I had stripes from the belt, still welted, soon to bruise, where Cole had whipped me the day before. I was in an undisclosed location with billionaire Cole St. Martin, a pharma king whose company dealt with rainforest naturals that he was developing into a variety of pharmacological uses.
Including natural remedies for opiate addiction.
Because I'd left Jesse after a buy went really bad and at the same time my family, somewhat estranged just because I was always, always, the stranger in their midst, had called to say my dad was facing open heart surgery and was in cardiac ICU.
Even biker bitches have fathers. Jesse told me to take my time. See my dad through it. I truly believe he would have waited for me if a bullet hadn't put paid to that.
My dad was the only one in my family who got me. Career cop, recently retired at fifty-nine and now facing death in a whole new, much less macho way. He understood what drove me. If I'd been unable to break cover to go to Portland and be with him, he would have understood that, too.
My mother and my three sisters? Absolutely not. The Knox girls were all about marriage and babies and dresses and nails, about all the feminine things that had never meant anything to me. The fallout from totally failing the feminine side of the family would be epic. Worse than Jesse really learning I was a narc.
So I went home.
That was when internal affairs started an investigation into some old cases that involved my dad. And that was when they decided to press charges against him for some not quite right behavior when he still wore the uniform.
My dad wasn't a bad cop. He just walked the line a lot. If he thought something needed doing bad enough to blur the boundaries of the law, he did it. In
my eyes, that made him a hero. He’d cleaned up more of the streets than I had.
But there was his health. And the investigation, which I couldn't even testify in because by the time that all came around I'd be back undercover.
At least I thought so. Then Jesse was killed and Mark was at work when I found out. I was doing laundry in our apartment and in the pockets of my jeans I found a roll of money from a buy, more money than I'd see working PD without saving for months and none of it traceable. The gang wouldn't even miss it.
In the other pocket, I found the little glassine baggies of fentanyl. I didn't throw them out. And then the shitstorm of my life got worse and worse instead of better, one time trying it led to two and two led to more, and more led to actually needing to make my own buy and that led –
That led to Mark finding out and walking out on me. Not for good. He lived there, after all. But things became a whole lot more strained than they already were with a fiancée who wouldn't say where she was and rarely even called to check in.
When my handler in PD found out…
He sold me to Cole St. Martin.
Who wasn't just a billionaire pharma king putting together remedies for opiate addicts.
He was a sadist with his own ideas about recovery. And penance. And getting clean.
I stood and felt the pull of skin across my ass. The welts were swollen, a couple of them beaded with blood around the edges. Gingerly I reached back and put both hands on my sore ass.
"If you soak in a hot bath, you'll feel a lot better."
The voice came out of nowhere, scaring the beejezus out of me. I whirled around, already going into fighting stance like I had a clue what was going on. At the same time I recognized Cole's voice.
That really didn't mean I could stand down.
"You really did a number on me last night. What the fu –? " I caught myself. Billionaire, pharmaceutical genius, benefactor of a whole slew of charities.
Control freak, sadist, bastard.
Master.
He had a weird streak of propriety. He did not like hearing me swear and I did not like being corrected.
"What did I do to deserve that?" Just shy of two weeks into my month off, that PD ordered me to take because of my father's impending charges and his health. Part kindness. Part administrative leave because he was a family member being brought up on charges. For those two weeks – twelve days – whatever, it felt like forever the way my skin crawled and everything itched and the impatience drummed in me day and night like fire in my in my veins, making me want to run and run but my conditioning was kind of out the window.
I'd been off the fet. So what the … hell?
Cole tilted his head to one side and considered me. He was hot, so hot he took my breath away, with the kind of cruel looks I was coming to realize were my personal turn on. He had a wide mouth, endlessly mobile, and when he grinned, those piercing eyes and the triangular smile all came together to make him look like a mischievous forest sprite. Mischievous. Or malignant. He was taller than six feet, buffer than shit, built like a bodybuilder but with the long lanky muscle of a tall man. He wore clothes effortlessly and took them off just as effortlessly and unselfconsciously, though I had yet to see him totally naked. I'd felt him though, pressed up against my still stinging, throbbing flesh after he'd taken a belt to me, or his hand. His own hand with nothing else felt like the worst kind of punishment.
He had more. He had a leather paddle I hadn't felt yet, and a wooden one with holes drilled through it. He had hairbrushes the way my sisters had shoes. He had a variety of canes I trembled at the sight of.
But so far, in my recovery, he'd only used the belt, well worn and buttery soft when it was threaded through the loops of his jeans or when he held it out to me to kiss before he ordered me off my knees and across his. Or face down on the bed. Or his desk. Or hanging on to a kitchen counter.
He'd kept his word. So far. And I hadn't asked for anything else. He'd told me from the beginning I didn't have to sleep with him, though I'd seen the outline of his enormous erection pressed against his jeans or sweats or once, memorably, his boxers. He got off just on the beating, I thought, but there'd be no problem applying that to me.
I hadn't asked. I was still processing Jesse's death. I was still engaged to Mark who didn't even know where I was, didn't have any way of knowing my undercover assignment right now was off the books. Having been sold by a fellow cop into the keeping of a man who meant to keep me sober by way of natural pharma and routine punishment.
For everything. For asking for my phone. For finding my phone and liberating it from the locked cupboard where he'd been keeping it. For getting online. For not calling him sir.
For talking back.
For trying to run. That was early though, when despite the herbs and derivatives of vines that he was giving me I craved the fet. China white. I woke sweating from dreams of it. I cried for it in the shower while I ran my hands over my aching bottom and sometimes my thighs and once my back.
I couldn't tell. Maybe the addiction was easing. Maybe it wasn't.
But I was trying. So – "What the hell, sir?" I asked.
He raised one eyebrow, looking more like Loki from the movies than ever. Instead of answering he simply held up the bottle of Advil I'd liberated from his bathroom and relocated to mine.
It had been mostly full when I picked it up. Not that I'd counted.
Okay. I had. Of the 250 caplets listed on the bottle, there'd been 249. Obviously Loki didn't need a lot of painkillers. Go, trickster god.
The bad news was, I did need it.
The worst news was there were probably about 20 left.
And I'd been in residence how many days? Even I knew that was bad news.
I was invested in coming clean. There was no way I was weak. I went through SEAL training. I didn't go out for SEALs, just did the Bud-K training to see if I could. I was strong. I could deadlift 400 pounds. I could bench 150. I could throw a man over my hip and break his larynx before he got back up. I could take Jesse's rage sex and pounding and I could fight for my father in any way possible and I could deal with the death of a high school senior who was bright and funny and cute and hooked on the China white dealt by my deep cover boyfriend.
I could kick the fucking addiction.
But. It. Fucking. Hurt. Even with the rainforest pharma which, yes, it was doing wonders for me. It made me feel clear-headed even without the fet. It gave me energy and it cut down the nausea and headache and diarrhea and everything else that opiates did as they left your body.
"I'm trying," I said. All the things that made me shoot up the first time were still happening.
"That's not good enough." He sounded so patient. A teacher waiting for the somewhat stupid student to make a connection.
Instead, all the usual anger bubbled to the surface. "Do you think this is easy? Have you ever had to sweat poison out of your system? Even with what you're giving me, it's like flu times ten. I'm sick, I'm scared, I'm somewhere I don't know where and my father – "
I was starting to cry. I never cry.
He just waited.
"Fuck you!" I threw the bottle at his chest. The instant it left my hand, both my hands went up over my mouth. I didn't want to be punished again. I didn't. I still hurt. I slid to my knees without knowing I meant to do it.
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Sir! I didn't mean to! Please don't be angry!" I risked a look at his face.
It was as impassive as ever. His voice sounded like the voice of a million fathers worldwide though he was nothing like a father. "I'm not angry," he said. "I'm disappointed. Stand up."
No.
I stood. My legs shook so hard they barely supported me.
"Do you still have the same goals? The same desires? Do you still want to kick this and go back to your job before your month’s leave ends?"
You know I do. Don't make me beg. "Yes. Sir." I couldn't help it. The sir always got tacked on at the end.
"Then I
will help you." He pulled a hardback chair out from the desk beneath the window.
No.
"Come over here."
No.
I moved across the room on shaking legs. My teeth had started to chatter. On one stupid, entirely absurd impulse, I bent and picked up the Advil bottle, offering it to him.
"Thank you. Put it on the desk."
Shit.
I put it on the desk and faced him. I didn't see where he got it, but he held one of the hardwood hairbrushes in his hand.
"Pants and panties down to your knees."
I'd woken in sweatpants I couldn't remember putting on. But then, I couldn't remember getting to this house. Just that there had been a flight from where we were to here. Wherever here was.
"Annie."
I hooked my thumbs into the waistband and pushed them down. After ten days of this, it shouldn't have bothered me, but shame blushed my face. I hated facing him naked. I hated even more facing him only partly unclothed, my sweats and underwear pushed to my knees, bare from the waist down and waiting to be punished.
"Across my knee."
I was shaking almost too hard to comply. He helped me, guiding me down, laying me across his lap. He wrapped one leg over mine to stop me from kicking.
"I suggest you don't fight me on this."
I couldn't answer. I bit back a sob.
"Annie? Grab the chair legs. If your hand gets in my way, I'll just hit it."
My hair was in my face, my dark curls long now, catching in the sweat and tears on my face.
"There were 249 caplets in the bottle."
Oh, god. Oh, please.
