by Avery Gale
The ShadowDance Club 5
Reborn as Bree
After being kidnapped by terrorists, Sabrina Gillette is rescued by a Navy SEAL she only knows as her Cajun Angel. Jamie Creed can’t forget the battered woman he carried out of hell, even after he hears she died from the injuries she’d sustained. Now, nearly a year later he feels a strange familiarity in the beautiful Bree Hart when she appears at The ShadowDance Club as a guest of the club’s owners.
Jamie and his best friend and former fellow SEAL Ethan Jantz have been looking for a woman to share, and watching their friends find their own women has only made them more anxious. Jamie and Ethan vow to protect Bree from multiple threats, including those from her own family. But will they be able to convince Bree to stay at ShadowDance so they can protect her? And can the two Doms show her the pleasures she seeks are real and within her grasp?
Genre: BDSM, Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quatre
Length: 60,832 words
REBORN AS BREE
The ShadowDance Club 5
Avery Gale
MENAGE AMOUR
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Ménage Amour
REBORN AS BREE
Copyright © 2013 by Avery Gale
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62242-823-6
First E-book Publication: April 2013
Cover design by Harris Channing
All cover art and logo copyright © 2013 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
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REBORN AS BREE
The ShadowDance Club 5
AVERY GALE
Copyright © 2013
Chapter 1
One Year Ago
Jamie Creed had always agreed with his teammates when they had likened his role on their Special Forces team to a quote by the Joker in the movie Batman…Do you ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight? It really was an apt description of how he spent a vast amount of his mission time. As one of the two snipers on the team, he often found himself high above the actual action, watching everything unfold in the darkness below through a night vision scope that turned the world ominous shades of green and black. His dance with the devil was always two-fold, first he ended the lives of enemies, people whose absence actually helped mankind, but even then, those actions were not without consequences. The largest consequence was his karma debt, and he was afraid that was going to be more than he’d be able to clean from his slate in the next several lifetimes.
His grand-mère had always stressed to him that “a soul is a soul and they are not ours to judge or take.” His mother’s mother was a Cajun priestess. She’d been a healer and prophet her entire life. Grand-mère was both revered and feared around his small bayou home. She had never seemed to spend much time with his numerous brothers and sisters or any other member of their enormous extended family. Some of the family was scattered to the far corners of the world but most had remained fairly close their bayou home. For some reason she had always taken a particularly keen interest in Jamie.
He remembered sitting on the back step of her small shanty late at night listening as she told him stories about his ancestors and all the ways juju had influenced the fates of various family members. She’d explained the power of destiny and tried to explain that he’d have many opportunities to make what she called “heart choices” and she encouraged him to follow his “internal light.” He hadn’t understood the power of her words until his first mission as a SEAL sniper. He had been lying on the roof of a building in temperatures so sweltering he’d been sure the tar was going to glue him down permanently. He’d managed to stay motionless for nearly thirteen hours when his target finally emerged from his home. Jamie’s objective had been simple, eliminate the man and then disappear, but just as he’d pulled in his breath and was releasing it slowly and pulling back the trigger, the man turned and he noticed his target’s hands. The disguise had been flawless, except for the hands. The bastard had dressed a young woman in his clothing and then sent her out the door first. Had Jamie not listened to that inner voice, he’d have killed an innocent and the man who was selling weapons to any terrorist with the cash would have escaped once again. Jamie had always considered that his defining moment as a SEAL, at least until he’d been a last-minute add-on to a rescue mission.
Thinking back over all the life-altering moments Jamie Creed had given others, it mystified him that the most significant one hadn’t occurred behind the anonymity of a long-range rifle shot. His own had come as he carried a battered waif from a rattan hut on the fringes of the Congo. While he’d been running from the rat-infested hole where they’d found the young woman chained to hooks set in concrete he had looked down at the badly swollen face of Sabrina Gillette and wondered how many bones her captors had broken while beating her and how the hell she’d managed to survive the horrors they’d inflicted upon her. There wasn’t a single place he could see where she wasn’t bloodied or bruised. He’d hated scooping her up so hurriedly, but the whole team was racing the clock and he certainly wasn’t going to risk her being recaptured by the madmen who’d bee
n holding her.
He’d known the instant she had realized she was no longer lying on that filthy floor but was in fact being cradled in the arms of a man she didn’t recognize because her body had responded with a primal surge of fight-or-flight fear that had almost been palpable. But when she had fleetingly opened her eyes he’d smiled and whispered, “It’s alright, chère, you’re safe. I’m taking you home.” At his words she had let her eyes drift closed but not before he’d seen the gratitude that had been clearly written in them and he’d been haunted by the misty grey of her eyes ever since. Jamie had been relieved when she’d slipped back into unconsciousness because he was certain that even though he was running as smoothly as possible, the jarring movements had to be creating excruciating pain for his precious cargo.
Looking down at her as he’d laid her on the pallet inside their “evac-chopper,” he was stunned by the fact that despite the damage her captors had done she was still an ethereal beauty. Her long hair appeared to be blonde beneath the caked-on dirt and filth and he’d wished she would open her eyes just once more so he could memorize their color. But she hadn’t and he’d been forced to rely on his memories of that sweet moment. Since that afternoon, he’d seen the color a thousand times, in the softly falling mist of a rolling fog, in the swirling depths of the Atlantic Ocean, and painting the feathers of a dove. But he’d never seen another person with eyes that shade of grey. That was the only time he’d even spoken to her. But he’d always been grateful she had realized he wasn’t going to harm her and that her expression had changed from fear to trust and relief.
It had been those brief moments that had changed the course of Jamie Creed’s path in life. He’d been due to sign the paperwork to extend his service in the Special Forces when he returned stateside a few months later, but, instead he’d made a phone call to his former team leaders. Jamie had accepted the job offer Alex and Zach Lamont had extended numerous times during the last two years of Creed’s military service. Ending his military service had been the smartest decision he’d ever made.
Jamie’s friend and fellow sniper, Ethan Jantz, had followed his lead and while Jamie had spent a month with his family in the bayou, Ethan had visited his family in Houston. Jamie had always laughed at the disparity in their backgrounds. His family had always been poor, but hardworking and honest, while Ethan’s family was ungodly rich but from what Jamie could tell, they rarely worked. How Ethan’s family maintained their wealth when they appeared to be as lazy as slugs and about as loyal as swamp snakes with the personalities of pissed-off gators was a mystery indeed. With their obligatory visits home completed, they’d met up and traveled to Colorado together.
Working for the Lamonts as contract black-ops operators was much more rewarding, both personally and financially. But even though the money was a great perk, Jamie knew the allure of the work was more altruistic and he never turned down a job that involved the rescue of a hostage. He had thought about Sabrina Gillette many times since her rescue and when he had finally been brave enough to Google her name he’d been devastated to learn she hadn’t survived her ordeal. Thankfully the press hadn’t printed any of the more gruesome details of her captivity. Jamie was sure her family had suffered enough without letting the entire world know that because of their chosen line of work, their daughter had died.
Chapter 2
Present Day
The rain ended as quickly as it had started. The weather in Colorado had always fascinated Creed. Being from the bayou, he was well accustomed to rain that came in torrents or as a slow-soaking mist that could stick around for days on end. After accepting an offer to join the crack team of operatives his former teammates had assembled, he had grown familiar with the sudden cloud bursts that seemed to race over the mountain peaks to raise holy hell for a few minutes to an hour and then disappear as quickly as they had arrived. He’d heard visitors to The ShadowDance Club comment on the inconsistency of the weather in Kansas and he’d thought to himself if it was worse than Colorado, he’d have to pass on “The Land of Oz.” He did enjoy trying to calculate the amount of time it was going to take a rainstorm to race over the mountains. He and his teammates were usually happy to bet on anything.
Moving through the trees rather than using the road was more out of habit than from necessity, and having just returned from a particularly brutal mission in a jungle sauna on the other side of the globe, he was enjoying the cooler temperatures, so the extra time it would take to make his way back to The Club wasn’t a hardship. He loved the smell of the mountains and spent as much time outside learning every little secret there was to know about the area around ShadowDance Mountain. Alex and Zach had grown up on the mountain so they had been great sources of information in the beginning, but it was teammate Cash Red Cloud who had shown Jamie all the small caves and hiding places where he could stash weapons. Cash’s Native American heritage was full of warriors so he understood better than anyone Jamie’s need to always have a weapon nearby. The two of them had spent many hours uncovering the secrets the ShadowDance Mountain seemed to guard so fiercely.
Jamie stopped suddenly when he heard the sound of a car coming up the long winding drive. Looking through the sodden branches of the pines that lined the driveway, he watched as a young woman drove carefully up the road. Her eyes were glued to the blacktop, and Jamie wondered for a moment if she might not have run over him if he’d been on the road.
Sprinting the last one hundred yards to the mansion, he was in place and well hidden by the time she pulled to a stop at the bottom of the wide staircase leading to The ShadowDance Club. It was Monday, so The Club wouldn’t be opening until the next afternoon and that information was clearly stated on the sign at the end of the drive, so he watched and waited to see exactly what she was up to. But oddly enough she just sat in her car for so long that he was just getting ready to tap his ear mike and ask his partner in the Crow’s Nest if he had an ID on the women yet when she finally opened her car door.
* * * *
Bree sat in her small car and stared at the beautiful building looming over her and wondered if perhaps her information had been wrong or that she was lost…again. Was it really possible that one of the most well respected BDSM clubs in the country was housed in such a picturesque location? And it looked like there was another even larger structure extending off from the one she was facing. Holy shit, how big is this club anyway? I know Mrs. Lamont said her sons had built a successful club, but damn!
Bree had met Catherine Lamont a few months ago when she’d volunteered at a rape crisis and domestic violence prevention center in Denver. Having moved back to the United States after living and working in the Congo for the past five years, Bree had seen a lot of violence directed at women and had experienced it firsthand a year earlier. She’d followed her missionary parents all over the world during a childhood that was anything but dull. After spending her college years stateside she’d chosen to return to one of the most troubled spots in the world because she’d known just how valuable her medical training would be to the war-ravaged nations of central Africa.
She hadn’t found out until after her kidnapping that missionary work had merely been a cover for her parents and that nothing she’d thought she knew about her family had been the truth. She still struggled to accept the fact that John and Christina Gillette had both been highly trained operators and their frequent trips for “supplies” were actually highly orchestrated missions. While recovering she’d been faced with indisputable evidence but something had never rung entirely true about the story. And while a part of her had been relieved to discover the hatred the terrorists had displayed toward her hadn’t been personal, it had been devastating to learn she was being forced to walk away from the work she had dedicated her life to. After her rescue, Sabrina Gillette had died and Bree Hart had been born. Shaking off the dark memories that were threatening to bubble up and swamp her, Bree got out of the small car but didn’t move up the stairs. Instead, she chose to sit at the bottom a
nd just take in the spectacular view.
* * * *
Jamie sat in the shadows and watched as the stunning woman slowly got out of the tiny car and moved toward the steps. He had expected her to go up the steps and he’d started to give the inside watchman a heads-up when he noticed she’d sat down on the bottom step and looked out over the fountains and hedges. She seemed content to just take in the beauty surrounding her and he found himself taking a good look at the landscaping for the first time in the year he had been living here. Watching her closely he wondered what was going through her thoughts. Double-checking his rifle to be sure it was clear, he raised it so he could use the high-power scope to get an up-close and personal look at her.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was absolutely stunning. Her hair was the color of sun-ripened wheat and fell to her waist in gentle waves. Her skin looked like it was a flawless ivory, and he’d bet his last nickel her eyes were blue and wasn’t that going to be disappointing. He was forever going to be haunted by the misty grey eyes of Sabrina Gillette. Trying to follow her line of sight he was surprised to see that she seemed to be just looking out over the beauty surrounding her.
When she seemed to tense he lowered his scope. The woman obviously had good instincts because she had apparently sensed that someone was watching her. He didn’t want to spook her so he moved quickly to a small alcove at the side of the building and secured his gear before sauntering around the side of The Club. His plan was to be clearly in her line of sight long before he was close enough to speak to her. She would have plenty of time to see him before he got near her, ensuring she wouldn’t be startled by his presence. His years of Special Forces recon training and experience could have gotten him close enough to touch her before she would have even known anyone was within a mile of her, but he’d seen the tension race through her and the telltale stiffening of her spine when she’d felt his gaze. He could think of a thousand and one things he’d like to do to her and scaring her was one of the last things on the list.
