Free and Bound (A Club Volare New Orleans Novel)

by Chloe Cox

  Cate tried to shake her head, and banged it into the steering wheel.

  “Oh, come on.” She laughed softly to herself. “You know what? Screw this.”

  She poked her head up with every intention of finally getting out of the car, Patrick Cross and his big mouth be damned. She would get out of her car like a normal person, strut like a boss over to her meeting with Ford and Soren the mystery rock star, absolutely own that freaking meeting, and then she’d find the guts to ask about Volare memberships. That was the plan. But then she got one good look at Patrick’s face and she thought about what Jason might try to do to her career if he thought she was a member here. Or what he might try to do to her.

  She flinched.

  It was the real her, the inner her, that had an interest in Club Volare, not her public face. Maybe she wasn’t ready to have inner Cate meet the whole wide, mean world quite yet.

  “Compromise,” Cate said to herself, and scooted over the gearshift to the passenger side door.

  She only had to make it as far as the delivery truck where two men were unloading cases of high-end liquor before she’d get to the side door of the next building over in this ridiculously swank compound. She could duck in there and Patrick would never know. It wasn’t the Volare office building—in fact, it looked like it was the actual club part of Club Volare—but it was good enough for now. She still had time before the meeting, anyway.

  She took a big breath.

  “One, two…oh fuck it,” she said, pushed open the door, and barreled into the late afternoon sun.

  She kept her head down while she did it, knowing her auburn hair might give her away if Patrick happened to look over. If she hadn’t, she might have seen the guy carrying a big ol’ box of bottles.

  But she didn’t.

  Cate crashed into a never-ending wall of muscle, tripped, and then knocked into the box itself, which hit the ground with the loudest crunch of breaking glass she’d ever heard.

  There was no way that Patrick hadn’t heard that.

  There was no way that most of Venice Beach hadn’t heard that.

  Cate didn’t even look to see if Patrick had recognized her. All she could think about was Jason and his ability to further ruin her life. Instinctively she ducked behind the unidentified wall of muscle that had been carrying the box, cursed, and said, “Please don’t move.”

  In the next few seconds, Cate noticed a few things. One, the man she was using as a human shield was even more built than she’d thought. Two, he was wearing a plain white shirt that Cate, for no reason at all, was gripping hard in her hand, like she could steer him around as the perfect shield with just a handful of thin, flimsy, does-nothing-to-hide-those-pecs shirt. And three, he smelled amazing.

  Normally she might have introduced herself, but for some reason those three things combined with fear-induced adrenaline and her irritation that another human being was now a witness to this absurd and embarrassing situation made her feel a little…tongue-tied.

  “Are you hiding?” the man said.

  That voice. Deep, resonant. Amused. Like it was a joke.

  But his words reminded her that she was, in fact, hiding, and not for entirely stupid reasons, either. Cate looked up. She was nearly blinded by the sun over the man’s shoulder, which meant she couldn’t see the man’s face, and she couldn’t see whether or not Patrick had seen her. She felt real fear begin to return. Jason would lash out if he knew. She was certain of it. He would come after her. She gripped the man’s shirt harder and willed her hand not to shake.

  “Actually, yes,” she said, and tried to keep her voice even.

  Didn’t work. She heard the tremor in her own voice, and knew what it meant. She was starting to panic, her muscles stiff and unmoving, her breathing coming fast.

  God damn her asshole abusive ex-husband.

  The man she was using as a human shield bent his head toward her and she heard him inhale. She knew he was looking at her, but she couldn’t look up, into his eyes—it was too much, the idea that this stranger might also see her both afraid and humiliated, on top of having to be ashamed of herself for being afraid in the first place. Then, as though he could sense her fear, the man turned and looked over his shoulder to where Patrick had been standing.

  She thought she heard him rumble.

  There was a pause, and she got a glimpse of longish blond hair before she suddenly felt big hands around her waist and she was being lifted up and spun around the corner of the building. Cate grappled wildly with the stranger’s arms as he set her down on a windowsill, her eyes wide and her body on high alert, and all of her now totally shielded from view of the office building.

  “Safe and sound and out of sight,” the stranger said.

  It took Cate a second to get her bearings. The window she was sitting in was open. She could lean back and fall right into Club Volare if she wanted to. There were shutters blocking her peripheral vision. And the strange man who’d put her here was standing, hands on either side of her, right in front of her.

  She had to look now.

  And oh God, his face.

  Oh God, the rest of him.

  He was beautiful. Norse-god beautiful. Except Norse gods probably didn’t have much opportunity to get a tan in Asgard or wherever it was they hung out; this guy had the SoCal thing down. Almost shockingly blond, shaggy hair framed a tanned, chiseled face, his features rough and craggy and beautifully masculine.

  He had ice-blue eyes.

  He was studying her.

  He was very nearly touching her. That body of his, that warm, hard body, was so very, very close.

  Cate’s mind went blank. Adrenaline always made her kind of dumb, and this was adrenaline with a chaser of impossibly attractive man. She couldn’t tell if it was the fear or the man that kept her heart pounding, but she supposed it didn’t really matter. She was now officially in Club Volare Venice. Or at least her butt was. She looked down to see that she was gripping the windowsill so that she wouldn’t fall backwards through the window.

  Holy shit, Club Volare.

  She didn’t want to be impressed. But she was. Maybe she could blame that on the adrenaline, too.

  Because this, right here, this place was the realm of fantasy for her, of books and message boards and late nights in front of her computer. Part of her hadn’t really accepted that any of it was real, but now that she was here, she couldn’t escape the knowledge that for these people, the members of this club, it was real. All of it. What would that feel like? To be so unafraid of what people might think, of how they’d react to your secret fantasies? Or of how you could be hurt? These people, this place, it was real. Was it just a world where people like Jason didn’t exist, where…

  Cate’s eyes met the Norse god’s, and her wandering mind slammed back to the present. The man standing in front of her was one of those people.

  Holy shit, the sequel.

  He’d just been watching her carefully, this whole time. Now Cate watched a slow, gentle smile spread across his face, and realized that she was no longer terrified. Apparently there wasn’t room enough in her head for both the Norse god and terror. Norse god won.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Cate.”

  Some expression that Cate couldn’t quite place flickered across his face, gone before she could get a read on it. His eyes seemed to dance for a moment, and then his tone changed. Serious. Searching. Gentle.

  “So does this help, Cate?” he asked.

  Cate wanted to laugh. Was it possible this man knew how loaded that question was? The contrast between the way he’d picked her up and thrown her around and the way he was now very carefully asking if the manhandling “helped” was disorienting enough. Even weirder was that it had helped—besides getting her out of Patrick’s line of sight, it had also given her something else to think about.

  But the weirdest part was that this stranger had known that she’d been genuinely frightened, and he’d known what to do for her,
even if what he’d done would look highly questionable to an outside observer.

  Cate was too stunned by that to do anything but tell the truth.

  “Yes,” she said simply. “It helps.”

  “Good,” he said.

  He didn’t move.

  He didn’t look at all uncomfortable with his proximity to a woman he didn’t know, either. In fact he looked like he was enjoying it, and like he didn’t care who knew. And yet just that question—“Does this help?”—made her feel like he’d back off if she even looked at him sideways.

  Cate studied him the way he was studying her. Something about the way he carried himself, his head high and his shoulders back, demanded attention. She was jealous of his easy confidence, his apparent calm, as though he personified the traits that Cate only felt she had when she was working. Everyone but Jason thought she was like this Norse god. No one knew about the way she felt inside, about the fear and the self-doubt and the way she put up with Jason’s treatment for so long. About the way she’d believed the things Jason said.

  Except, apparently, for this stranger. He knew. He’d just seen it. Or he’d just seen part of it, anyway.

  That was not fair. Cate straightened her spine. She hated being afraid, and she hated being exposed even more, and damn it, she was not going to do this. Part of getting away from Jason was actually getting away from Jason in her own head, which meant not running like a scared rabbit every time she saw one of his friends.

  If Patrick saw her, she would deal with it. And if Jason found out she was at Club Volare, she would deal with it. God damn it.

  She looked up to find the stranger looking at her with interest.

  “Excuse me,” she said politely.

  The stranger took a step back and offered his hand. Cate took it, and hopped down from the windowsill. She took a deep breath, did her best to smooth her suit, and walked out from behind her makeshift hiding place.

  Two things happened: one, she realized she still didn’t know where to go, since Ford had only specified “meet me at the club,” which in a compound this extensive left far too many options, and two, she saw that Patrick Cross was no longer hanging around outside the office building.

  She looked back at the strange Norse god, who was still watching her. He’d had a perfect view of the office from where he’d been standing.

  “The man who was standing out there,” she said. “He’s gone.”

  “Yup.”

  Cate raised an eyebrow. She wasn’t about to let any bullshit fly. The Norse god had absolutely known who she was hiding from.

  She said, “You could have told me.”

  “You came out of hiding anyway,” the Norse god said. Then he grinned. “Besides, I didn’t exactly mind.”

  Incredibly, she blushed.

  “And he’s not gone,” the Norse god corrected. “His car is still there. He went back into the office.”

  Cate felt a chill run down her back and ignored it. She refused to let this affect her—at least in theory. She could see the man was watching, still, and he’d already seen her more vulnerable than she was entirely comfortable with.

  “So you want to wait inside?” the Norse god said. He leaned against the wall of the building, his arms crossed in front of his powerful chest, appraising her. “Or do you want me to go get rid of him?”

  That shouldn’t thrill her. But it did.

  “I have a meeting with Ford Colson,” she said. “If you could show me where to wait, I’d be grateful.”

  “No problem,” he said, pushing off the wall. “Give me a second.”

  She watched in a kind of daze as he picked up the box of now-broken bottles and led her into the building through the side door. What was it about this guy that made her feel so…raw? Was it just that he’d seen her in a very private moment of craziness? It made her want to keep her distance from him, to keep a definitely safe distance, and, at the same time, as they walked together to the darkened bar, she found herself compelled to explain herself to him.

  She didn’t want him to think she was a coward. Some kind of ineffectual waif, constantly in need of rescue. That wasn’t what she wanted to be.

  “I’m not normally like this, you know,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything. Cate found that she almost kept talking—almost actually told him that this morning she’d gotten her divorce papers back in the mail, unsigned, but with a helpful note scrawled across the top page: “You’ll come back,” in Jason’s slanted, ominous script, and that it was messing with her head, as Jason meant it to—and she had to actually force herself to keep quiet. This tall, tan, blond knight in low-slung jeans knew too much about her already. She couldn’t let him become part of her actual, real life. She wouldn’t even ask him his name.

  Not that he’d offered it.

  She watched him set the box on the bar and turn to look her up and down, unhurried and unashamed and unbelievably hot.

  “What are you normally like?” he asked after a moment, taking her by surprise.

  Cate realized she couldn’t answer that, and laughed out loud.

  “So you’re normally unpredictable,” he answered for her, letting himself in behind the bar.

  This Norse god was the bartender? Seriously? Even the bartenders at Club Volare were more impressive than literally all the other men she’d ever met. If Cate had worked with a man like this back in her waitressing days, she would have enjoyed her shifts a whole lot more.

  “I prefer the term ‘interesting,’” she said.

  He grinned at her. That grin…damn, it was sexy.

  “And what else?” the man asked.

  Not for the first time today, Cate found she didn’t know to respond. This was getting to be a terrible habit. But what was she supposed to say? Well, sometimes I’m a total badass who will kick your ass up and down a courtroom, and sometimes I apparently cower in fear, and I don’t want anyone to ever know what I’m really like.

  How was she even thinking about this? She was here in a professional capacity. Ridiculous.

  “Can I have a glass of water?” she said. Her mouth felt dry.

  The bartending Norse god looked at her carefully before he went about getting a glass, and it felt like he’d seen right through her. Cate shivered. Maybe that was just where her head was at because of Jason. She could actually hear him say, “You’ll come back,” with that particularly arrogant yet disdainful tone that was designed to make her feel like crap. And it made her think about what horrible things Jason would do if he knew she was sitting at the Club Volare bar, checking out the bartender’s ass.

  On the other hand, it was a great ass. And she had already decided not to be the kind of person who would take Jason’s abuse anymore.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me about what happened out there?” she blurted out.

  “No,” he said. “You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

  Cate cocked an eyebrow, which went ignored. Well, maybe Norse gods had reason to be full of themselves.

  “So this is your first time here,” the Norse god said, putting a slim glass of water down in front of her. Cate picked it up and downed it in two gulps. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was.

  “Yes,” she said. She wiped her mouth and saw that her hand was shaking again. “That obvious?”

  The man didn’t say anything. Which was just as well, because Cate was avoiding that ice blue stare; she didn’t need him to uncover any more of her secrets. Of course, that meant her eyes roamed over the bar.

  It was not a normal bar.

  There were metal rings on this bar. Embedded in it. The sorts of rings you’d attach things to. Things like rope or chains or…

  She was staring.

  “Are those for what I think they’re for?” she asked.

  “And then some.”

  Cate bit her lip to conceal a smile. She felt hot. She felt exposed. She’d never told anyone but Jason, in a moment of incredibly poor judgment, about her interest in
BDSM. She’d never trusted anyone with that part of her. And yet here she was, getting worked up at the sight of restraints in front of the mystery man.

  “Look at me,” the man said.

  She did. Jesus. He took her breath away.

  “Why is this your first time?”

  Cate blinked.

  “What?”

  A smile played at the corners of his mouth. Slowly, he said, “Why is this your first time?”

  “I don’t…” She lied. “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  “Yes you do,” he said. “You know the reaction you’re having right now.”

  He looked pointedly at the metal ring she’d been staring at.

  Oh, how is that fair.

  For just a moment she forgot herself. She stared at that ring and her mind fell away, down a rabbit hole of sexual fantasies, all of them at once…

  Cate licked her lips. “I’m sure many people react to these things the first time they see them.”

  It would be wrong to say she was proud of her demeanor as she said those words. It was more that she was surprised. Because she’d said that in a way that felt confident, sure, strong—not things she associated with the parts of herself that surfed BDSM sites late at night with a glass of wine by her side, half afraid of what it meant or who might find out.

  “It’s not the first time you’ve seen them though,” Norse god said.

  Now she blushed.

  “How on earth…” she muttered.

  “You get to know the signs,” he said.

  He wasn’t doing anything behind the bar. Just standing there, leaning on his powerful arms, his big hands splayed out in front of her. They looked strong. Didn’t he have work to do?

  “How do you know I’m not just scared?” she asked.

  “I’ve seen you scared already,” he said. “This isn’t that.”

  She forced herself to meet his eyes. It was true. This man she didn’t know already knew more about her than people who’d known her since she was a kid. It seemed like there was no point in hiding, in lying, in trying to scramble together some sort of protection. He already knew.