by Sophia Reed
"All right," I said finally. "All right. I'll find an excuse. I'll meet this man. They'll all just think I'm undercover again, right?"
Dave didn't actually answer.
"Right?" I was crushing the phone in my hand.
"Let me tell you what you need to do," Dave said.
7
The town car that picked me up had windows tinted so dark it had to be illegal but though we passed several state police units, no one stopped us. There were no identifying marks on the car, no license plates, and my phone had been taken before I could have dreamed of running anything through DMV.
There were no handles on the inside of the car in the backseat. There was a dark walnut and glass wet bar, with a silver bar attached to it for a towel to hang decorously upon. To my credit, my cop-ish paranoia suggested it would be a good place to cuff someone.
I carried very few belongings, only toiletries and a couple changes of clothes, a small bag containing my drug of choice and my kit.
Halfway through a very long drive, the car stopped and a woman met us, escorted me to a restroom inside a convenience store in an Oregon town. When I got back in the car, we continued. Into California. Into Nevada. All the way south to Las Vegas.
On the outskirts, the driver pulled over, put down the window between us, holding a taser trained on me and held out a thick black scarf. "Tie this over your eyes and nose." He didn't bother to threaten what would happen if I didn't. He was, after all, holding a weapon.
A month here, with whoever the reclusive billionaire with the pharma miracle was, and I'd return to my life on Seattle PD, clean again. Safe again. Ready to work.
It was worth this indignity. Once I'd tied on the blindfold he said, "Hold your hands out to me."
I did, unsurprised when cold metal cuffs went first around my left wrist, then around the silver bar on the wet bar that graced the back of the front seat, up the other side, I could assume, and snapped around my right wrist.
"We're almost there. You get carsick?"
He hadn't been actively mean. Just quiet. "I don't know," I said. "I don't usually ride in bondage."
He gave a short laugh and I heard him turn back to me. "Open your mouth."
He sounded calm and kind but I didn't.
Pause, and then, "It's crystallized ginger. Feel." He brushed my fingers with it and that's what it felt like. "Combats nausea. Even people who don't get carsick can when blindfolded."
I took the ginger. I thanked him.
And I rode to Cole St. Martin's enormous walled estate in the deep desert, blindfolded, trusting, and already craving.
8
Cole St. Martin. He looked exactly like a billionaire should. Tall and imposing and impossibly self-confident, he looked like Loki from The Avengers but with more muscle.
He greeted us at the door, wearing jeans with a thick, well broken-in leather belt, a white linen button up. Bare feet. He accepted my bag from the driver and carried it himself.
The instant I'd been taken through the door the blindfold had been removed. I'd seen Cole come down the wide, curved staircase and shuddered with the force of something I couldn't explain.
His hands were long-fingered and strong. His voice brooked no argument. He had the situation, whatever it was, totally under control and I had yet to say a word.
Something about him made me uncertain I could.
"Annie Knox." It wasn't quite a question but he did wait for a response. How many blindfolded and handcuffed women did he expect to take delivery of in a single day?
"Will you join me for a light lunch? Or are you feeling sick?"
I was starting to shake, but the fentanyl hadn't robbed my appetite yet. "I'd like something to eat," I admitted. "Thank you." Unconsciously, I rubbed my wrists where the cuffs had been.
"Thank you, sir," he said.
Confused, I looked up, then looked around. Had I mistaken the man the driver had meant? Sir? And then I understood because he was watching me.
Sir?
I met his gaze, cool brown eyes appraising me. Abruptly he nodded to himself and turned into the house. "Follow me."
Simple but lavish, every part of the house, the formal and informal living rooms, the formal and informal dining rooms, the buffet lunch laid out in the sunny kitchen, and beside the place set for me, a handful of capsules and a glass of water.
"Go ahead and read it. I have to see to the salmon," he said, and rolled up the sleeves of the button-up, all the way to mid-biceps. He pulled on a stark white apron and busied himself across the expanse of kitchen while I read about the experimental, non FDA-approved, rainforest-based drug that could cut through opiate addiction safely and completely. ]The capsules bore the mark of the drug, a stylized "SM" in a circle, for St. Martin, I guessed. There were side effects, very few and infrequent, including stomach upset, fever, headache, sleeplessness. If that was it, I'd take it. This was the way to get my job back.
This was the way to get my life back.
Over lunch he read peer review journals to me, which could have put me to sleep but I spent the time watching his face, the square jaw, the stubble gracing it, the sensual, full lips, the brown eyes that looked up to find mine.
"If you're in agreement, then," he said as I ate the last bite of salmon. "Swallow the pills."
I took them without question. Nothing I had ever done rendered me high enough on anyone's radar to do something this elaborate just to hurt me.
I stood then, at his bidding, and he took my hand, his strong and dry. Holding mine firmly, he led me up the stairs and into a bedroom holding only a bed, a four poster that dominated the small and barren room.
If sex was what I had to pay, there were worse things. He was beautiful.
He'd explained very little during our lunch, but now, taking me by the shoulders, he stood me in front of him. "Your body is yours to take or give by your own consent," he said, his voice calm, a little formal. "But your wellbeing has been placed into my hands and the person who did so has been paid a handsome fee."
My attention had strayed but now my eyes snapped back to his. "What?"
"Your Mr. Samuels," Cole St. Martin said. "He is hoping for the best for you, and doing what he can to help you. He has been compensated for finding you for me."
My breath stopped coming and his words stopped making sense. I heard snatches of things - that I wouldn't be permanently harmed, that I might find I liked it, that I could sleep with him or not, or change my mind about either whenever I chose, that the cure was real and the cure worked, and after all those articles I didn't doubt that.
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.
A Preview of Taken by the Billionaire
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.
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.
