by Lea Griffith
It had been a week since he’d taken her in exactly the way she’d dreamed. A week, and the burn from his flogger and crop had faded. She could no longer feel the tenderness of his marks, and for some reason it made her melancholy. He held her every night, sometimes taking her gently, sometimes demanding a little more, but never taking them both where they needed to go.
He was treating her like spun glass and it was frustrating as hell.
She’d woken up this morning alone once again, Hoenig keeping vigilant watch, but no Tobias. He called her frequently throughout the day and she heard Hoenig giving periodic updates, but he didn’t come in until late, and then he normally headed right back out again.
She missed him. They hadn’t had time to cement their dynamic, though the initial foray into D/s play had been amazing. She’d never felt as at ease as when she’d woken the morning after their play. They’d crossed a hurdle, and now he was withdrawing.
It just made no sense and it forced worry into her heart.
Ruthie removed her earbuds and turned her head in his direction. “I know you’re there.”
He laughed, low and deep, and her body heated. Just that quickly she was ready for her man. “You always do. I’ve always wondered at your ability to see more than somebody who has twenty-twenty vision.”
He padded to her, and if she hadn’t been listening for his movement, she wouldn’t have detected him. For such a large man he moved like a wraith. Ruthie smiled and leaned her head against the back of the couch.
He stood behind her and bent over, kissing her jaw as his scent wrapped around her, doing its own fair share of fanning the flames of her arousal. “I missed you,” he whispered at her lips.
In spite of her need, she recognized he was upset. “What’s going on, Toby?”
“We need to talk, but first, we need to eat,” he informed her, placing one more soft kiss on her neck before he walked to the kitchen.
Ruthie set her iPad down and followed him, taking a seat on a bar stool. “What are we having?” she asked impishly.
“Well, since my woman didn’t have dinner ready and waiting, I thought we’d order something from Hsu’s. You still love Chinese?”
“I don’t cook, Toby—you’ve always known this. I burn water,” she reminded him. “And yes, I still love Chinese.”
“It’s a sad state of affairs that I not only have to bring home the bacon, I have to cook it too,” he said, and the fake sorrow in his voice had her laughing out loud.
“I bring home my fair share of the hog, believe that,” she reminded him.
“Ahhh yes…my Blind Painter,” Tobias said against her lips. “My beautiful, blind painter.”
“I really like the sound of that,” she said, and even she heard the dreaminess in her tone. She was in way deep with this man.
Tobias moved away and a coldness seeped under Ruthie’s skin. She refused to ask for assurance. He had a lot on his plate right now and she didn’t want to burden him, but she’d be lying if his lack of a response didn’t cut a bit.
Tobias ordered their food and stood across the bar from her. She pictured him with his arms crossed, a stubborn look riding that stubborn chin, his chestnut-brown hair falling over his forehead in a soft wave. How she wished she could see him just once! She had the picture of him in her mind, her touch giving her probably a deeper look than he cared for, but to see him in all his masculine glory would be amazing.
It was just a dream, though. And unfortunately, it was one that would go unfulfilled.
“What’s going on?” she asked when the silence scraped across her already raw nerves.
“Let’s talk while we wait on our food. Hoenig, Jeremiah, Stanton, and Finch are all headed our way and I’d prefer to speak with you alone before they arrive,” Tobias told her.
Ruthie’s heart plummeted. This didn’t sound good at all. And yet all she could think about was that having many other people in Tobias’s house, no matter how large it was, was going to limit their time together.
He grabbed her hand and walked her back to the living room. The scents here soothed her. The memories, too, for that matter. She’d broken masterfully under his dominance in this room, riding wave after wave of pleasure not even quite a week ago now, and her skin itched with the need to revisit the scenario. Tobias was the profound desire in her body. Her lungs ached to breathe him in. Her skin ached to rub against him.
Her heart ached to beat in time with his as they surged toward ecstasy.
“He’s going to come for me, Ruthie,” he said in a voice so low she had to struggle to hear him.
“Who?” she asked automatically, her brain unable to make the leap from her body’s wants to the dire situation they’d been forced into by a madman. Then it hit her. “Gallo.”
“Yes. Vessi Gallo. He wants to finish what he started in Italy, but this time, he’s willing to use an innocent to see me suffer.”
Ruthie breathed out roughly, but the tension in her body only ratcheted higher. “Me.”
Her heart broke. Right there in her chest, it fractured, the shards ripping through muscle and bone, surfacing through her skin and perfuming the air with her despair and pain. She was going to be used as a tool against the man she loved.
“Yes,” Tobias confirmed. “That’s why the others are coming. He won’t get to you, Ruthie. He won’t fucking touch you ever again. That’s the promise I made to you a week ago and that’s the promise I’ll keep. But the only way for me to get him is for me to play his game. He’s the hunter; I’m the prey. I know it’s hard on you, being cooped up here, but it shouldn’t be for much longer, and then you’ll be free.”
Ruthie didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean by free?”
She knew, though. He was going to push her away again, somehow accepting the blame for an insane man’s actions. That was Tobias—so honorable he’d cut off his nose to spite his face.
“I mean that Vessi Gallo won’t be around to hurt you,” he said by way of avoiding her true question.
He wasn’t stupid. And neither was she.
She stood up, anger rushing through her. The gamut of emotions was a cascading waterfall—love, joy, pain, heartbreak, fury—they wrapped around her like a sheltering cloak until all she could see in her mind was the end of them. It hurt. So badly did that hurt.
“I came back here, gave up all of my pride, and gave you my body with no promises from you. I know how crazy that was, but my love for you is so complete that I’d do it all over again. But I’m not a moron, Tobias. I know you’re going to push me away when this is all over because for some reason you just can’t understand that I don’t need you to protect me. Do you know what I need, Tobias? Do you have any fucking clue?” she demanded of him.
“Don’t curse, Ruthie,” he said in a hard voice.
She pointed at herself, beyond caring that she probably looked like a crazy-ass harpy just then as she stood over him, gesturing wildly. “Big girl here, Tobias. I can cuss, drink, vote, fuck, and what the hell, I can even take care of myself all by myself. Now answer the question.”
He was up then, his frustration bleeding off him in waves. “You need to be safe!”
“I need you to love me.”
“I do,” he told her, and oh, was he tortured! His voice wracked with guilt, pain, and tenderness.
“Not enough to simply take the ride with me,” she pointed out.
He grabbed her arms and got in her face. She softened automatically at the feel of his hands on her flesh. It would always be that way, and the thought pissed her off all over again.
“I love you more than anyone has ever loved another person. You are my sun, my moon, my pleasure, and my joy. You are the best parts of me and being with you completes me. But I won’t fucking destroy you, Ruthie. Don’t ask me to do that, because it’s the one thing I can’t give you.”
She shrugged away from him and wrapped her arms around herself. “If you push me away, that’s what you’ll be doing.”<
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He said nothing. He wouldn’t budge and it would destroy her. This time it would devastate her entire life.
“Why would you push me away again?” she asked calmly.
“Because bad shit follows me. I’m a man with a past, Ruthie, and I won’t subject you to it any more than I already have.”
It was time to retreat, Ruthie thought. Time to pull back and reorganize. She’d come this far; she could travel the rest of the way. He loved her. She could build on that, find a crack in his foundation of denial and rip his protests to the ground.
But not right now. Right now she needed to be alone, and with the men bearing down on Tobias’s house she wouldn’t have much opportunity for that over the next hours, possibly days. She turned and walked away.
His voice stopped her. “You’re just going to walk away?”
The tone of heartbreak in his voice was like a scythe through her hazy rage. It cleared everything to a crystal patina that she could see through. His fight was against himself, and it was one that she might never be able to help him win.
“I’m only doing what you do, Tobias,” she said, weariness tugging at her mind. “Running from the problem is the easiest solution for you, isn’t it? That’s how you always respond, anyway.” She sighed, ignoring his roughly indrawn breath, carrying on. “Well, this time I’m going to run. You don’t have to send me away because once you have Gallo, I’ll walk out on my own. You won’t have to leave notes or anything.”
He was on her then, taking her mouth with his own, swallowing her scream of outrage and surprise as he pushed her back against the wall. He grabbed at her yoga pants, ripping them in a single move and taking her panties with it.
“I said no panties,” he muttered, his breath sawing in and out of his lungs, his heart racing. “You’re wearing panties.”
“You are so damn observant,” she said viciously, doing her best to wriggle out of his grip.
He pushed his forearm, gently, across her chest, holding her still while he worked on getting rid of her shirt. “I said no goddamn panties,” he stated again.
“Yeah? Why the fuck do you care, Tobias? You’re going to make me leave, anyway. Maybe my next man will like my underwear.”
It was clearly the wrong thing to say, yet the response it elicited had her broken heart flying up to meet his sudden rage. He growled, long and low, and feminine fear rippled through her lower body, coating her pussy and making her core clench in volcanically hot need.
“Stop moving,” he demanded.
Her body acceded to his command before her mind could catch up. It would have been so easy to give up control of her emotions in that moment. Her body begged her to ignore her misgivings.
Her shirt was in tatters now, and he ripped it off her as easily as he had the yoga pants and her panties.
He took her breast in his mouth, biting the tip before he suckled her deep into his warm mouth. His tongue flicked her hard nub, and Ruthie’s head fell back so hard it thumped the wall. Her hands rose of their own volition, grasping his hair, trying to push him away even as she pulled him closer.
She moaned, and he lifted her legs around his hips. He had opened his jeans at some point, and the hard length of him pressed against her clit, rubbing through her folds, teasing.
“Nobody will ever touch what’s mine,” he said through clenched teeth.
“If you send me away, it’s no longer yours,” she said in a moment of clarity.
Another animalistic growl and her hands were pinned to the wall as he entered her in a rough thrust. He rode her hard, the slickness of her channel no barrier to his hard, determined thrusts.
He wanted to imprint his body on hers, indeed, into hers. His grunts and growls were so fucking sexy she was nearly begging.
“You’re mine,” he said harshly.
“Not if you send me away,” she responded, then groaned as he sank deep and rotated his hips.
The man could move, and he was using his body to say everything his lips refused to say. But it wasn’t enough. Even as he bit the tendon on the uninjured side of her neck and fucked her mercilessly, sending her shooting into the most intense orgasm she’d ever experienced, it wasn’t enough.
Because her heart knew he was making the right moves and saying the right things but his intent hadn’t changed, and her soul recognized it.
He held her against the wall with his body for long moments and her skin cooled, realization sinking in that this had changed nothing between them.
“Let me down,” she demanded softly.
He stiffened against her, pulling away slowly and slipping out of her body. She was lost and cold now. She had him but she didn’t.
“I love you, Ruthie,” he said as he stepped away.
Ruthie lowered her hands and stood there, struggling to control her tears and the need to fly apart. How dare he show her everything she wanted when she knew he was just going to take it away.
“I love you, Tobias,” she returned, and then she walked away, heading into his bathroom.
He didn’t follow and she was grateful. She heard the doorbell ring before she turned on the shower, stepped in, and washed away their encounter from moments ago.
She cried, her tears mixing with the warm water and heading right down the drain with it. She was clean and altogether hollow inside when she stepped out of the shower. Her tears were gone.
Resolve would come later. Right now she needed rest, but not here in his bed. She wouldn’t sleep here again until he was playing for keeps. Even as she had the thought, she realized that might never happen.
A harsh sob ripped up her throat, but she cut it off, refusing to give any more of herself away.
Ruthie dressed slowly, pulled her wet hair into a sloppy bun, and grabbed his pillow off his side of the bed. Then she walked out of the bedroom and took a right, heading to the last door on the left. It was another bedroom. There was limited furniture, and as she felt her way along the room she found the bed.
She tossed the pillow on the bed and curled under the covers. It was a comfortable bed, but it wasn’t Tobias’s.
The door opened and cedar invaded her space. Then it closed and she was left alone again in the darkness.
Ruthie hated the dark.
Chapter 20
“She’s sleeping,” Tobias said as he reentered the living room.
The men all nodded, probably grateful they wouldn’t have to have this conversation in front of her. Tobias had discarded her shredded clothing in the nick of time. He still couldn’t believe how angry she’d made him with her taunts of another man having what was his.
Logic played no part in it. He was going to do exactly as she’d guessed and push her away again once Gallo wasn’t breathing anymore. But her words, her acceptance of it all, had made him angry beyond belief.
It wasn’t rational—the exact opposite, actually. Yet her words reverberated in his mind, echoing back and forth, preying on his weakness. His only weakness. Ruthie.
Could he let her go again? It was the noble thing to do. He’d sacrificed so much and wondered if he’d been kidding himself to think love alone would make it work. Love wouldn’t keep her safe from his past. Gallo was proof of that.
“Let’s plan this,” Jeremiah said suddenly.
Tobias could still smell the jasmine of her skin and hair. He longed for her ebony hair wrapped around his fists, her silken limbs entangled with his. She’d left his bedroom, and her statement couldn’t be any clearer. She was giving him what he wanted.
Right?
“Tobias?” Finch asked.
He looked at his friend. “Yeah?”
“You in there, my man?”
“Yep. I’m here. Let’s do it,” Tobias said in a dull voice.
Every man was looking at him as if he’d grown a second head. Tobias shook it off and got in the game. His woman’s life was riding on his attention to detail. Gallo was coming—of that there was no doubt.
“Dante said one of his co
ntacts picked up a trail for Gallo. He’s still in the metro, moving sometimes two to three times a day. Dante’s contact said he met with Gallo because the man wanted to sell some diamonds. He obviously needs money,” Jeremiah informed them.
Tobias grunted. “His contacts have dried up. Now that the Axe Man has put out a hit on him he’s desperate.”
“How the fuck did y’all get messed up in this?” Hoenig asked suddenly.
“The Naples port deal three years ago. Tobias went in to secure the rights and Gallo took offense. Cut him up, had the shit beaten out of him daily, starved and thirsted his ass for five days until I found him and got him the fuck out of there. Gallo’s had a hard-on for him ever since,” Jeremiah said to the group.
“I guess that’s Tobias—making friends everywhere he goes,” Hoenig said around a laugh.
Tobias flipped him off. “I’ve got just as many friends as you do, Hoenig.”
“I don’t have friends,” Hoenig replied.
Tobias smiled. “I know.”
Stanton and Finch laughed. Jeremiah didn’t. “He’s a killer and according to Dante, he has zero conscience. He’ll use men, women, or children to effect the results he wants. He’s already used Ruthie and she’s still on his radar.”
“Why hasn’t he attacked you, Jeremiah?” Finch asked.
“I’m not the one who got away, Tobias is. I’m sure if he thought he could use me to get at Tobias, he would. We’re not going to let that happen,” Jeremiah returned.
Tobias rolled his shoulder, the tension not abating an inch. “That’s why we’re here. If he’s coming for me, well, I want to welcome him with open arms. The best way to protect Ruthie is to keep her here. With all of us in the house, he won’t get through. He’s an insane killer, but he’s not going to be able to get through us all.”
The doorbell rang again. Tobias was up, stalking to the door even as he removed his .50-caliber Desert Eagle from his holster. The stopping power of that gun was undeniable. Tobias peeked out the peephole.
