by Sophia Reed
What started gentle turned urgent. His hips bucked, fucking me hard, and I met him thrust for thrust. Our mouths were hard on each other, tongues in each other's mouths, hands touching hair, touching skin, grabbing and stroking and pulling closer and closer still.
He turned off the water without releasing me. I pulled down towels from the racks as we passed, threw them onto his bed before he fell backwards onto it, carrying me down. We rolled and he came up above me, up on his rigid arms, the muscle standing out there as he moved between my hips, stroking in and out of me in long, hard thrusts.
I pulled on him, needing him close, and watched him arch his back, coming in that second, filing me hot and wet, before he went down to his elbows, his forearms up on either side of my arms, his hands in my hair, his mouth on my throat, his breath in my ear. He was hard again without ever pulling out, just hard and in me and fucking, fucking, fucking.
My own orgasm tightened my muscles, coiling everything up until I fell over the edge, pulsing and pulsing around his cock, shockwaves traveling throughout my body, my nails raking his back, my breath coming hard and ecstatic.
He tucked me up against his chest, my head on the hollow between throat and shoulder, and we slept until the sunlight in the uncurtained windows woke us.
45
Cole
I kept her close to me as I called in favors. Annie had no way of anticipating my help with her getting onboard with the DEA would be so useful. She didn't know I had contacts everywhere.
It was a best kept secret, and best kept that way.
By the end of the day Claude was in custody. The instant he was led out, Annie went in. I waited in the car, giving them space, and watched as she went directly to Chloe and put her arms around her, asking what she needed, where did she want to go, what could Annie and I do.
I froze when Annie followed Chloe into the house, but she looked back before she disappeared inside and nodded at me one time. Everything was fine.
So I waited.
Three-quarters of an hour and roughly a thousand fantasies of things I wanted to do to Annie, both those that would hurt and those that would pleasure and those that would humiliate her and – maybe a thousand of those later, Annie came out alone.
I started the Porsche and we drove down off the foothills. "What's her decision."
Annie had been looking pensively out the passenger side window. Now she turned and said, "She's going to stay in the house as long as he gets prison time."
"Oh, my dear," I said. "Don't worry about that." Personally I thought Claude would disappear before he got anywhere near trial. Or even a holding cell and arraignment. Those things happen.
"Then she's keeping the house. They're legally married. This is a community property state?" She asked it though Chloe must have told her, and since it was, she went on. "She's going to dismantle the pain room herself. Bit by fucking bit was the way she put it, and keep the misery stick in her bedroom as a reminder. Then she's turning the room into a nursery of sorts."
I swerved. "She's pregnant?" Because I could call and stop wherever Claude was being taken and it could all be settled right now.
"No." She was grinning. She was crying at the same time and she seemed to glow with a kind of inner light. "She's going to open the home to children who need families. To orphans. To foster children, especially the ones who have such black marks against them no one will take them. She'll hire live-in counselors, a nutritionist who can cook, a coach who can work out all that energy. And then while the coaches and counselors and cooks do their thing with the kids, she's going to write."
"Write?"
"Articles. Books. On what kink really is and what it isn't. On staying safe. On getting out."
I thought that last was something Chloe didn't have a lot of experience with. None of what had gotten her out had been her work. But I didn't say so. I didn't ask any of the questions I wanted to ask, either, about what was going to happen now. What Annie would decide. Her contract was up to her now.
I hoped she would stay.
But I wouldn't decide for her.
46
Annie
The July sky over Seattle was hazy. It had taken a little more than a month to set my plans into motion. By the end of May I had an apartment in Las Vegas though I hadn't told Cole where it was. Only that I'd be attending UNLV and I needed some time by myself.
When I checked my bank account, I was completely unsurprised to find the regular payments for my "sick leave" from PD were compounded now with the tuition for four years of university and four years of rent. I shook my head. For one thing, I'd already told him I'd be moving fasttrack, testing out of those classes like basic math and English and those procedure classes my work as a cop superseded. By taking classes over the two short terms and the one mini term every summer, I'd be out in two years.
That was okay. The money could sit and accrue interest. If he didn't want it back when I graduated, I'd donate it to Chloe's cause. Or buy my own Bugatti Veyron.
Mark wasn't home when I got to the apartment. He hadn't changed the locks on the door. That was something, I supposed, but maybe he just hadn't thought of it.
Standing in the apartment, looking around at the hazy light coming in the windows, I was struck at how it felt both familiar and utterly strange, as though I had never lived here in this life.
Maybe that was true in a sense.
I'd expected there was very little I'd need to take with me. There were a few things I'd miss if I left them behind. My great-grandmother's copy of Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking-Glass, a Windermere edition from a hundred years earlier. The paintings were nearly pastel in it from age and the pages soft from many hands turning them. A framed photo of my father, which I'd take but not display, and a framed portrait of my parents on their wedding day. I'd hoped to have one very similar made when Mark and I got married.
Well. Things change.
Other than that and a handful of fat paperback novels I couldn't remember reading, some t-shirts and jeans, some fluttery tops my alter egos wore, a toothbrush that was practically growing cobwebs, there wasn't much of me here. Hadn't Mark and I shared a life? Apparently what we shared didn't add up to material possessions.
Standing there, looking at the bed, I thought of all the changes I'd gone through. Everyone says undercover changes you. Then again, they say that about anything traumatic. Psychotherapy changes you. Couples split up after one partner goes in and makes changes. Trauma changes you. Parents who lose a child often split.
I was looking for answers, had been for a while. I didn't want to be married to a fellow cop, undercover or not. That was too much of the job and too much stress. I didn't want to marry an adventurer necessarily, someone I had to race to catch up to.
But for the last year I'd considered Mark – not boring - But tame. He was too soft, I thought. Too easily hurt by my job. Too easily afraid. Too prone to feeling abandoned.
That's what I'd been working on while asking myself what I'd wanted from him if he himself hadn't been enough after a while.
But that wasn't it. I stood staring at the bed, where once in a while he'd handcuffed me. Sometimes I reacted in fury, shouting him off me, making him free me. But rough – I'd liked it rough with him, feeling like when he held me down with elbows and knees, he was getting the real me, somehow. Or – what? Just matching the crazy girl who wanted to be a police officer and stop bad guys.
That wasn't quite it either.
Standing here now in an apartment that didn't feel like it had ever been mine, I realized that every moment of our relationship had been dominated by Mark. Before the Brotherhood, before the fentanyl and Cole St. Martin and the rainforest cure, before my search through San Francisco and Las Vegas and all the changes, I'd thought when asked by the PD shrink or my CO or anyone at all that I was with Mark because he was my solid ground. My sanity. My love, my life, the reason I came home again. (Sometimes. Occasionally. When I wasn't undercover.)
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I thought as time went by that I was staying with him because I hadn't found the time to stay home and the emotions and words to release him. Any time I came even close, he begged to stay with me. Determined. Hurt by the idea of anything else. He would wait. I wouldn't be undercover forever. Something would happen and it wouldn't be safe. I'd have to quit. We'd have some kind of a life together.
I thought I was sparing his feelings.
But now, looking at it through the lens of a Master/slave relationship, the version of it I saw with Cole's friends and the version of it I saw for myself, with Cole, I thought that every interaction with Mark had been about control. The things he asked for in the apartment, could I not do this or could I start to do this other thing. He was, I'd think, there a lot more than I was. Would it be so hard for me to grant his wishes?
No. Of course not. Except that it made me feel like I didn't really live there, was more of a guest.
And then more thoughts crowded in, faster. The way he contrived to get the emergency only cell number from my family – only my parents had it for that very reason, that Mark would call and compromise my safety and the job itself simply because he needed to connect with me. When he had called and it had been an emergency, still my first concern had been that he had that number and how very unsafe that was.
There was his desire when I was brought back from France where Vincent had held me. He and my father, tearing me away from Cole's compound. They knew nothing about the rest of the story, nothing about France and Vincent and Kie and still he had repeatedly insisted I needed a full invasive exam before I was admitted into the mental hospital. An exam he was going to do himself. That wasn't just control. That was punishment. For having been gone. For having, though he didn't know it, been abused.
And there was his insistence that he would wait for me. However long it took. That was manipulation and to an extent, it had worked. I never forgot that Mark was back in Seattle, training for his job as a surgeon which would keep him away from home for a lot of years but was apparently Mark-Approved, that he was in Seattle. Waiting for me. Patiently. Lovingly.
Or utterly controllingly.
I finished gathering what I wanted. School started summer session in a couple weeks. I'd be staying in a hotel until I found an apartment. Vegas had plenty of hotels. Cole had offered. But I needed the time.
Making sure I had gathered everything I was taking, I texted Mark.
I'm in town. I'll be at the apartment when you get back from work.
We need to talk.
47
Cole
The compound was silent when I got back from a long run. There were people present, working, but they weren't around me.
That was fine. I needed the time. To process Annie having left for school and that we'd be mostly out of touch.
To process that I missed her.
Ariel was somewhere, probably still in the maze. She still painted down there, though there was better light up top. She'd be with me for a few more months, acclimating, but she wasn't with me.
Kie had gone off in an ambulance with Norcross the day before.
There was nothing I had to do. Maybe I'd work. Maybe I'd workout. Maybe I'd call –
Give her space.
Right.
And then my phone buzzed with a text, from a restricted line and a secure phone, though I thought secure meant less if he was going to text.
Norcross.
One look and no. It wasn't Norcross.
It was his top bodyguard.
I breathed in. Norcross was dead. Kie was in the wind.
And Annie wasn't answering her phone.
* * *
The End of Book 4, Deep Cover Series
Book 5
Freefall from the Billionaire
Synopsis
Annie thought she wanted freedom
Cole wanted the best for her and let her go.
But it turns out she was wrong…
* * *
There are powerful people after Cole.
And they will stop at nothing to destroy him.
And she can't sit still knowing that.
Yes, he's done bad things.
But he's also her savior.
She needs to warn him, she needs to be by his side.
Even if it means giving up her freedom.
She just hopes it's not too late.
1
Annie
"What are you doing here?"
Ahh, that was the loving question my fiancé greeted me with. My third day back in Seattle and I'd forced myself to go by the apartment. There were things there I wanted. My great-grandmother's copy of Alice in Wonderland. Some clothes. Photographs.
Not the fiancé. Or the apartment. Not the car I sometimes drove. That could be hauled off to charity. I wasn't totally certain they'd want it; the damn thing was an early model POS. Despite having been a fully fledged Seattle PD officer before a string of events led me to Southern Nevada, I suffered from the usual fate that befalls public servants: I'd been poor.
I'd also been undercover a lot, which seems like it should pay more, maybe because of the extreme danger and enhanced possibility of dying, but apparently you make the decision to do it, they figure you're crazy enough not to notice you're not making more money. I noticed. I'd been undercover enough to notice. Undercover so much I kind of got mixed up between my pseudonymous life and my real life and got hooked on opiates. Long story.
The short version was I went from coming "home" to the apartment and spending time with my betrothed, Mark Taylor, once every few months…
…to not at all.
More than that, I'd fallen into the hands of (the man who saved my life, actually) a sexual sadist who had me signing contracts that made me his submissive. In return, the sadist – CEO of a pharmaceuticals company – got me off fentanyl using rainforest cures.
Win-win-win, all the way around.
Except for with Mark. Who was standing in the doorway to our apartment, hands on his hips, looking way more buff than he had the last time I saw him.
And plenty pissed.
Okay, maybe I didn't blame him for not being overjoyed to see me. Truth was I wasn't overjoyed to see him, either. I'd put off coming back here for so many months I couldn't remember when I'd last seen him. I'd also been trying to figure out what to do about our relationship for more than a year, since before the run-in with fentanyl and moving to southern Nevada, seeking that rainforest cure. More than one fight between me and Mark ended with my suggestion that he stop waiting for me. It was hard enough for the significant others of regular beat cops or traffic cops. I was undercover. Undercover isn't a nine to five job. I was gone for months at a time, and I wasn't myself, and I wasn't being Mark's fiancée during that time. Undercover for me meant the drug trade and it meant embracing – often literally – the men who plied that trade. That kind of police work is a special kind of hell that takes a special kind of person to deal with it.
I never said so to his face but I didn't think Mark was the right kind of special.
Then too there was the little matter of him working with my father to have me committed.
When I'd returned to PD my last time in Seattle, they'd made me talk to their shrink. One thing led to another in the sessions and the shrink ended up being the first person who asked if I was in the habit of just going on assignment and letting Mark stew while I was undercover.
The question had kind of surprised me. Of course I just took off. It was my job. Mark was training to be a surgeon. He didn't ask me if he could go on hospital rotations for hours upon hours.
The shrink hadn't seemed to believe those things were equal.
My lieutenant hadn't either.
They'd both suggested I either marry Mark or cut him loose. There hadn't been much to say at that time because I still thought I wanted to come home and be Seattle PD again, preferably undercover. So I'd said as politely as I could I'd take it under advisement but it still was my l
ife and Mark wasn't their employee or concern.
They hadn't liked that. They wouldn't have liked Fuck you and the high horse you rode in on any better. Some people are picky.
This time I didn't suppose they'd bother talking about Mark. But this time I was in town to quit Seattle PD. I'd been on administrative leave for nearly a year, recovering from my addiction and making a mess of my life. More or less I'd been living with Cole St. Martin in his weird and reclusive compound in the southern Nevada desert, pretty far way from much of anything. That was when I wasn't being kidnapped from my Master and taken by psychos to Paris.
And during that time, when my ex-gang from a Washington assignment had been assassinated and new drug lords took the streets, I'd begged St. Martin to let me leave. I knew how to handle them. I really did have a solution. I really was needed. It wasn't just ego and it wasn't anything about drugs, meaning procuring them for myself. I needed to get back to Seattle. I had to be able to help.
He refused. The thing with Cole St. Martin was, I could walk out. But I couldn't just walk back. I didn't know exactly where his compound was and if a billionaire doesn't want to be found, he isn't.
That time, St. Martin took care of the problem. Instead of giving me some slack in the leash to go back to Washington and take care of the problem in Seattle as I knew I could and as was my job, he took care of it from southern Nevada to make sure I didn't get hurt.
Took care of it to make sure nobody else got hurt either.
