by Shelly Bell
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Shelly Bell
Cover design by Elizabeth Turner. Cover image © Shutterstock. Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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LCCN: 2019932462
ISBNs: 978-1-4555-9603-4 (pbk.), 978-1-4555-9602-7 (ebook)
E3-20190502-DANF
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
Discover More
Also by Shelly Bell
About the Author
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ONE
Dreama’s bones ached as if she’d spent the last twelve hours hog-tied by a Dom to an unforgiving steel punishing bench. Not that any Dom she knew would commit such an egregious act. In her circles, leaving a sub bound like that for twelve hours would violate the BDSM principles of engaging in safe, sane, and consensual activity. Therefore, she’d never been hog-tied for more than minutes at a time. But she imagined if she had been, her bones would ache like this.
She thought back to the night before. The sexy Dom she’d scened with had worked her over with a flogger pretty hard, but it wasn’t her first rodeo at the end of a whip—or even the hundredth. And she wasn’t hungover; she hadn’t drunk a sip of alcohol. Granted, she’d only gotten about six hours of sleep, but that wasn’t unusual for her.
On a sneeze, she rolled over in bed and shut off her alarm clock.
Three more sneezes followed. Ugh. Her head felt as if it were stuffed with cotton.
Damn it.
She could not afford to get sick right now. Not while she was in the running for the supervisor position that meant a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year raise and the ability to have more of a voice in the parole office she currently worked in. Equally qualified, Meg was the only other person being considered for the job. Since the day she and Dreama had begun working together, Meg had treated Dreama as a competitor rather than a coworker. Meg had rejected every one of Dreama’s attempts at friendship. If Meg got the job, Dreama would have to constantly watch her back because Meg would fire her ass the moment she got the opportunity.
Naked and shivering, Dreama threw off the covers and got out of bed, grabbing a hooded sweatshirt and a pair of sweatpants from her dresser and putting them on. Even the simple act of dressing exhausted her. This was more than a cold. She’d bet anything she’d caught the flu that had been going around her office.
Maybe if she medicated herself enough, she could see her morning clients and make alternative arrangements for her afternoon ones. She snatched a tissue from its box and opened her bedroom door, intent on searching the bathroom for something that would make her feel halfway human.
Even with the blinds covering the windows, it was way too bright for her eyes as she stumbled out into the family room. She blinked, realizing she wasn’t alone.
Her roommate, Jane, placed a blanket over her baby, Maddox, who was babbling happily in his car seat. Beside them stood Maddox’s father, Ryder, who, until recently, had been out of the picture. Dreama’s heart warmed at the sight of the three of them together. She hoped this meant Ryder and Jane were working through their issues.
“Oh. I thought you’d be at work,” she said to Jane. Normally, Jane would have dropped Maddox off at day care by now. She acknowledged Ryder with a short wave and asked her roommate, “Do you have any cold medicine? I ran out.”
“Yeah. It’s in my bathroom, underneath the sink.” Jane’s expression morphed into one Dreama recognized as motherly concern. “You look terrible.”
Just what she needed to hear. She looked as bad as she felt.
“I feel terrible.” Dreama blew her nose and when she stopped, the room started to spin. Forget the medicine. She needed more sleep. “I think I have the flu. I’m calling in to work and going back to bed.”
Starting toward her room, another wave of dizziness crashed into her and she held out her hand to steady herself. Suddenly, Jane was beside her with an arm around her waist. Rather than take her to her room, she led her into the bathroom. Jane flopped the toilet lid down and pointed at it. “Sit.”
Dreama was too tired to argue. She collapsed onto the seat and held on to the sides for balance.
Crouching, Jane opened the cabinet below the sink and riffled through it, standing up with a full bottle of cold medicine and a thermometer in her hands. She turned to Dreama and dangled the digital stick in front of her mouth. “Open.”
Dreama plucked the thermometer from Jane’s fingers and slid it under her tongue. Ten seconds later, it made a fast beeping noise. Jane pulled it from Dreama’s mouth and frowned as she read it. “One hundred and three degrees.”
Dreama’s teeth began chattering. “I’ll be fine. I just need to get some rest.” She watched Jane pour the orange liquid into the tiny measuring cup, thankful to have such a kind friend. “Things looked pretty cozy between you and Ryder. I have a feeling I’m going to need a new roommate soon.”
Jane handed her the medicine. “We’re taking it slow.”
As sick as she felt, she couldn’t suppress her smile. “You forget how thin these walls are. I heard how slow you were taking it last night.” She knocked back the liquid as if she were doing a shot.
“Yeah, well, sex isn’t one of the problems between us,” Jane mumbled. She folded her arms and pursed her lips. “We were going to go to the community center to get a picture of Maddox on Santa’s lap, but maybe I should stay here. I don
’t want to leave when you’re this sick.”
Shaking her head, Dreama stood, which was a bad idea because now the room was spinning again. She leaned against the wall to keep from tumbling to the floor. “No. I want you to go. I want a copy of the photo for my nightstand.” She loved Maddox as if he were her own. She’d hit the jackpot when Jane had answered her ad for a roommate and moved in. Other than her cousin Isabella, she didn’t have a closer friend. “I’m really happy for you, you know. Ryder’s a good guy. He might have his head up his ass right now, but he’ll come around. Mark my words. By this time next year, you and Maddox will be living with Ryder. You’ll have everything you ever wanted.”
Jane’s eyes shone as if she was about to cry. “I love you. Promise me that no matter what happens, we’ll always be friends.”
The thickness in Dreama’s throat had nothing to do with the flu. “Promise.”
Jane helped Dreama back to her room, where Dreama got back into bed and called in to work. By the time she hung up, she’d drained every remaining drop of her energy. And her cell’s battery. She must have forgotten to charge her phone last night. Coughing, she eyed the charger sitting across the room by her sewing machine. It was soooo far away.
Placing her dead phone on the nightstand, she decided she’d charge her phone after she took a nap and closed her eyes. She heard the front door close and drifted off sleep.
The next thing she knew, her body jolted awake.
She was no longer freezing. In fact, she felt sweaty and overheated, and her heart was pounding much too rapidly. How much time had passed?
She eyed her clock and did some math. She’d only been sleeping for about twenty minutes. Weird. Normally if she was sick and took that medicine, she’d sleep for hours.
A loud crash in the family room had her holding her breath.
Had Jane and Ryder come back already?
She was about to call out to them, but a strange sense of foreboding sat heavily in her gut, warning her to stay quiet. Attempting to suppress the need to cough, she swallowed repeatedly. For once, she agreed with her mother’s motto: Better to be safe than sorry.
Eyeing the charger, she grabbed her dead phone and slid out of bed. Why hadn’t she plugged her cell in before she went back to sleep?
Her hands shook as she connected her phone to the charger. The red light appeared on the screen, indicating there wasn’t enough juice yet to even make a call.
She was probably under some medicine-induced paranoia, but her instincts were screaming to get out of that apartment.
And she never ignored her instincts.
Problem was there was only one exit to her apartment and that was the front door. If there was a burglar in there, she couldn’t get out without him seeing her.
As her phone charged up, she pressed her ear to the door. There was a moment of silence before she heard the slam of a drawer and an unfamiliar male voice swearing.
Okay, okay. okay. Not medicine-induced paranoia.
She needed a weapon.
She quietly opened her closet and pulled out a baseball bat, grateful her mom had told her all those terrible news stories about what happened to single women who lived alone. Her mom had intended those stories to change Dreama’s mind about moving out of her parents’ house, but instead, it had served to remind Dreama to keep something in her apartment to protect herself. She didn’t feel comfortable with a gun, so she figured a baseball bat would have to do, at least until she could get to the kitchen and grab a knife. Never in her wildest nightmares did she ever think she would have to use it.
She returned her ear to the door and checked her phone again, but it still hadn’t turned on. The intruder’s footsteps grew louder. She was running out of time.
Maybe she should hide in her closet?
She didn’t get the chance to decide.
The footsteps stopped and the doorknob turned.
Arm cocked with bat in hand, Dreama took a step back.
Her phone lit up with energy.
But it was too late.
The masked intruder filled her doorway.
TWO
Thirteen months later…
With every step Dreama Agosto took, pain blasted through her right coxal bone and femur. A year ago, she didn’t even know what a fucking coxal bone was (turned out, it was the hip), but after spending months in the hospital and then a physical rehabilitation center, she could probably pass the damned medical board exams. It was information she would rather not have learned if she’d had a choice.
Which of course, she hadn’t.
Because a guy wielding a baseball bat and a temper had taken the choice from her.
And her body never let her forget it.
Most people wouldn’t consider the walk from the parking lot to her office a long one.
But those people weren’t her.
Those people hadn’t spent hour after hour in surgery, having their shattered bones repaired with metal screws, pins, rods, and plates.
Those people didn’t suffer from constant swelling and pain.
Those people didn’t have to look in the mirror every day and see ugly surgical scars all over their bodies.
No one had ever told her that scars could hurt.
But they could. And hers fucking did.
The doctors didn’t believe her at first.
Later, after much debate and numerous tests, they’d labeled it as scar neuropathy. Nerve damage. Already she suffered from continuous pain, but when she walked more than a few feet, the pain elevated to a fifteen on a scale of one to ten. It was like her nerves were being stabbed by a butcher knife.
Physical therapy, biofeedback, antidepressants, psychotherapy, creams, injections…nothing diminished the pain.
And so, she’d learned to live with it.
Hard to believe a little more than a year ago, she’d enjoyed a bit of pain at the hands of a Dom.
But erotic pain was quite different from the kind she’d come to know. This pain had taken away her control and stolen her ability to feel physical pleasure.
Inside the one-story brick building, Dreama nodded to the young security guard as she placed her purse and winter coat on the conveyor belt to be X-rayed.
He was new, at least to her, since she hadn’t set foot in this building since her attack. For all she knew, he could have been working there for months.
She ambled through the metal detector, hoping to make it through without drawing any attention to herself.
Any hope of that deflated when the light on top of the machine flashed red and a triple beeping alerted the guard.
“Take out everything you have in your pockets,” the guard said, stopping the conveyor belt from moving. “Keys, cell ph—”
“I don’t have anything in my pockets,” she explained to him. Hell, her conservative black pants didn’t even have pockets. “The metal is inside my body.”
“Ma’am,” he said, speaking as if she were ninety-two rather than twenty-seven.
Really? She’d left the workforce for a year and was considered a ma’am now? She couldn’t be more than a year or two older than him.
He continued. “An implant or small amounts of metal inside the body will not set off the alarm. Please go back and walk through the detector again.”
She wasn’t going to cry.
She didn’t do that.
Ever.
And she wasn’t about to start just because a long line of people was waiting behind her or because taking an extra ten steps to her would be like running an extra ten miles for anyone else.
No, she wouldn’t cry. But she would make a scene that was likely to end with him crying for mercy on his knees and her getting thrown out of the building. And if she couldn’t be in the building, then she couldn’t work, and if she couldn’t work, she couldn’t pay for her new apartment, and if she couldn’t pay for her apartment, she’d have to move back in with her parents, and if she moved back in with her parents, she’d go insane over
her mother’s incessant hovering.
“Listen, I’d really rather not have to go through the detector again,” she said, flashing her pearly whites and batting her eyelashes at him. “So maybe could you just…I don’t know…use a wand on me?” She gestured to the parole office sign in front of them. “I work here—my badge is in my purse—and since we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other, and this is likely to happen every day because I practically have enough metal inside me to make me the star of RoboCop, we should find an alternative arrangement to the metal detector.”
As if considering her request, the guard tipped his head to the side. “Again, ma’am, employee or not,” he said, the emphasis on the word employee making it clear he didn’t believe it, “you are not permitted inside the building unless you successfully clear the metal detector.”
The people standing in line started to get restless, their whispers and frustrated groans reaching her ears. She stared at that damn metal detector wishing she had the ability to melt it with her eyes.
“Excuse me, sir?” said a man from behind her. “As an employee of the state’s parole office and this building being her place of employment, the lady is entitled to reasonable accommodations under both federal and state law in light of her disability.” At the guard’s blank look, the man added, “She indicated she’s setting off the detector because of the metal inside her body and if you had observed her walking through the detector instead of checking your cell phone, you would have noticed her slight limp.”
Damn. And here she’d thought her limp wasn’t that noticeable.
“Furthermore,” he continued, “she’s asked for those reasonable accommodations. Denying her would violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. If you don’t have a wand, I’m sure the security guard manual you keep quoting says something about alternative methods in lieu of the metal detector.” He kept going, calmly reciting all the specific federal and state laws the guard was violating.
Her jaw dropped.
And if she’d met this guy at a play party, her panties would have too.
He was tall. Like, seriously tall. Probably a good foot above her five-five frame. And broad shouldered, filling out every inch of his black Henley perfectly. His dark brown hair was shaved close to his scalp in an almost military fashion, accentuating his sharp, high cheekbones. His nose was a bit off center with a slight bump on the middle as if it had been broken a few times, but somehow it worked for him. Gave him a dark and dangerous edge that she used to find physically attractive.
