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  Handcuffed By Her Hero

  By Angel Payne

  Handcuffed By Her Hero

  The W.I.L.D. Boys of Special Forces, Book 2

  Copyright © 2013 By Angel Payne Writes, LLC

  All Rights Reserved

  eBook ISBN 978-0-9888701-4-7

  If you have purchased a copy of this eBook, thank you. Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book. This purchase allows you one legal copy for your own personal reading enjoyment on your personal computer or device. You do not have the rights to resell, distribute, print, or transfer this book, in whole or in part, to anyone, in any format, via methods either currently known or yet to be invented, or upload to a file sharing peer to peer program. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Such action is illegal and in violation of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. If you no longer want this book, you may not give your copy to someone else. Delete it from your computer. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Edited By:

  Jacy Mackin

  Meredith Bowery

  Tracy Roelle

  Cover Art:

  Dee Allen

  www.deeallencoverart.com

  Meredith Blair

  www.authorsangels.com

  Romance readers and reviewers are wild for the W.I.L.D. Boys!

  Praise for Saved By His Submissive: The W.I.L.D. Boys of Special Forces, Book 1:

  -- “TOP PICK! Saved By His Submissive is a wonderful, adventurous, suspenseful, erotic read that will have you panting for much more. My emotions were all over the place…I totally love military men, and Garrett is one hot man, but what makes him hotter is his undying love for Sage.” – The Romance Reviews

  -- “Wow! This book was a total surprise for me! Truly, this was one of the most beautiful love stories I have read.” – The Delighted Reader

  -- “This is an awesome new series, with a nice blend of suspense and D/s.” – Under the Covers Book Blog

  -- “Awesome plot…and what an ending!” – Proserpine Craving Books

  -- “…keeps you glued to your e-reader, making this novel a great start to a promising new series.” –The Jeep Diva

  -- “After reading Saved By His Submissive, I have added Ms. Payne to the short list of writers I will automatically buy a book from…the book provides a refreshing change to the standard romance novel.” – Sizzling Hot Books

  -- “This book will have you going through a range of emotions. A four glass wine toast!” – Reading Between the Wines Book Club

  -- “I found that this was a book I just couldn’t put down. I got hooked from the beginning and then I just couldn’t stop reading. Garrett and Zeke are…good dream material.” – Love Romance Passion Blog

  -- “Sage is one of the best lead heroines that I’ve come across in quite some time. I need plot, heart and the female to do me proud, and Sage Weston delivers, absolutely! The dialogue between these two characters is so beautiful, raw and intimate, it would be hard not to fall in love with them as a couple.” – PRUF Reads Blog

  Dedication

  Humble, happy, amazingly grateful, each and every day, to my beautiful Sir. Thank you for being there. Thank you for you.

  Acknowledgements

  Words can’t encompass enough thanks for the bloggers, reviewers, and readers who enjoyed W.I.L.D. Boys 1 and contacted me about it. I wasn’t sure about whether to do this series or not, and your love for Garrett and Sage meant more than you’ll ever know.

  On that note:

  I’ve never been more thankful for my beautiful Angel’s Wings Street Team. THANK YOU to every single one of you—even though now my “Shoe Want List” is now a mile long. Ha ha!

  Special thanks to:

  Jenn Zane, for all your amazing support over the year.

  Sir Danny Greene, for keeping it real lifestyle-wise, and for making sure my Star Wars deets were right.

  Shannon Poole, Angie Barrett, Adrianne Ross – the best damn beta readers on the planet.

  AND

  The selfless men and women of our nation’s military. God bless you.

  A portions of the profits from this book will be donated to the following fine organizations.

  Please support them:

  Wounded Warrior Project

  Special Operations Warrior Foundation

  DAV Homeless Veterans Initiative

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter One

  A woman screamed.

  Normally, that sound got the Dominant in Zeke Hayes’ blood pumping in all the right ways. Into all the right body parts.

  Tonight, the wail reached into his chest and gave a terrifying twist. It grabbed his legs next, hauling them into a sprint up the front walk to Rayna Chestain’s Tacoma bungalow. Past his thundering heartbeat, he muttered, “Hang on, little bird. I’m here.”

  Little bird? Fuck. He’d given her a nickname. When had that happened? Why had that happened? He’d known the woman for all of three months, the last two happening via web chats and texts from over five thousand miles away, thanks to a “little day job” called the First Special Forces Group.

  Even if that wasn’t the case, they weren’t supposed to be in nickname territory. He didn’t go to that domain with any woman.

  Especially this woman.

  The admission slid him to a stop. He cracked his neck, trying to knock his thoughts back into their proper peg holes. All right, Rayna was special. All right, she was different. All right, she was the first woman in years he hadn’t instantly slotted into one of his three preferred categories: all-kink-no-strings, flogger wench, or horny-and-flexi rope bunny. He had no illusions about the reason why. On the night they’d met, a shithead madman had done the honors of tying Rayna up already. The bastard had left nothing to the imagination, and not in any of the good ways. Zeke would never forget the sight of her, head sagging and shoulders slumped, her knees bloodied by the packed dirt floor of a Quonset hut in a remote jungle. She’d accepted her fate, that she’d soon be someone’s new slave, a conviction that didn’t disappear even when he’d gotten to her. She’d kept her wrists pressed together even after he cut the zip ties from them, and shook like a leaf when he’d pulled her close.

  Finally, she’d gazed up at him. Tears had pooled in the dark green depths of her eyes, like he’d pulled down a star from heaven just for her. And what had he done? Cracked a stupid-ass grin as if she’d just done the same. It had been one of the best moments of his life.

  Which still doesn’t earn her a pedestal in your brain, jackass.

  The second car in her driveway had a parking sticker for the courthouse, meaning whatever brother was here on guard duty had some heat and knew how to use it. That would buy him a few seconds—if Rayna was scr
eaming at anything other than a bug or a nightmare. Goddamn, he prayed it was just a bug. He could squash the fucker, make sure all the doors were secured then get the hell out before said broheim made with the Ward Cleaver foot tap, waiting for him to ask if he could take her to the movies and hold her hand. He didn’t do the hand-holding thing. Life had yanked that circuitry from his brain over twenty years ago.

  Rayna needed to have her hand held. She deserved it.

  Yeah, he’d be in and out. Make the fast SitRep then beat feet for the ex-fil. He’d text her tomorrow to check in. That’d be good. Maybe they could meet for coffee sometime. Someplace public and safe, no hand-holding required. No mess. No nicknames.

  Another shriek ripped through the air, longer and louder than the first. Z broke into a new sprint. The mist seemed to part for him as he neared the bungalow’s door. The action wasn’t necessary. A man yanked back the portal, clearly having heard his approach. The guy’s dark auburn hair was disheveled, and his scowl fell just an inch short of meeting Zeke eye-for-eye, meaning he could turn himself into a six-foot-five big brother blockade if he wanted to.

  Despite that recognition, Z was in no mood to play diplomat with Trevor Chestain tonight. Yippee. He’d drawn the short straw and gotten lawyer brother tonight, along with an empty living room and an otherwise peaceful house.

  “Sergeant Hayes. What a pleasure. Long time, no see.”

  “Trevor.” He managed to keep the tone civil as he dropped his car keys on the table inside the front door. Damn, he wished for a robber instead of the guy who rocked back on a pair of classy cowboy boots. The shoes were a weird but perfect match with his staid threads, giving Z a couple dozen openings for some smart-ass quips, but he stayed his tongue. Rayna was proud as hell of her brother, despite how his overprotective act danced on the edge of asshole. For her sake, he’d zip up the wisecracks.

  Didn’t matter the next moment, anyhow. Another whimper filled the air, shooting from the hallway that branched to the bedrooms.

  Zeke grimaced. “She’s gotten worse, hasn’t she?”

  “A lot worse.”

  “Fuck.”

  Trevor let him squirm through a silence thicker than the fog outside. Finally the guy said, “You were gone longer than she expected.”

  The comment fit Trev’s M.O. Simple statement transformed to instant accusation. The man never left the courtroom, did he?

  “Sorry about that. Next time I’m undercover in a South Pacific rogue state, I’ll stroll next door with a Bundt cake, tell ‘em I’m on a time schedule and ask if they can help out with a few nukes in return.”

  “Or you can delete my sister off your contacts list.”

  So much for lawyerly subtlety. Zeke spun a glance around the room, wishing a jury and judge really would spring out of nowhere. Judges came with gavels. Gavels could do serious damage to a jerk brother’s head, never mind that said brother was soon going to get his way about the issue. Not that he was going to spill that nugget for the asshat.

  He just had to see her one more time. Especially now. He couldn’t leave when she was in torment. Not when he knew he could ease her pain and chaos. Not when he could help her, even in this little way, once again.

  He crossed Rayna’s living room without a backwards glance at Trevor.

  She cried out again as he got to her bedroom door.

  He blinked for a second, letting his vision adjust to the dim room. Everything was the same as he remembered, decorated in soft shades of cream and blue, except for a small lamp on her vanity table. That was new. The bottles of medications at the lamp’s base? Not so new. Zeke scowled at the containers on his way to the bed. All of them were still close to full. She wasn’t sticking to her plan. No wonder she was worse.

  Two more steps got him to the bed. To her side at last.

  He was grateful for the excuse to let his knees give way, plummeting him to the mattress next to her. He couldn’t account for why the rest of his body felt like C-4, mush with the capacity to create craters, only needing the fire in his chest to detonate.

  Wait. Of course he could explain what was happening. Absence made the heart grow fonder, but when the real estate in a guy’s heart was limited, fondness found a home elsewhere, like the rest of his body. Suddenly, all sixty days of their separation weighed on his muscles like bricks of the explosive—and damn if he didn’t yearn for a few to go off, too. God please, only a few. To let her get to him…just a little. To know what it was like for the simple nearness of a woman to heat his blood, to storm his senses, to flood his cock with need…

  But that was impossible. He only got that rush in one way. It was a fact, plain and simple, another default setting on the Zeke Hayes re-wire project. His body’s explosives only got discharged by one thing.

  Control.

  A hell of a lot of control.

  That was another zip code he’d filed into No-Man’s Land with Rayna.

  Her tears pulled him back to the real reason he was here. Hell. Huge drops soaked her copper eyelashes, still closed in sleep. They flowed over her high cheekbones and across the slender plateau of her nose but never made it to the tip of her heart-shaped chin, because she backhanded them away. All this, and she didn’t wake up once. Zeke watched in amazement—and anger.

  “You shouldn’t be wiping your own tears, Ray-bird.”

  His whisper was only heard by the shadows. Rayna cried out again. She flailed, fighting off an attacker only she could see. Her hand whacked the heavy oak headboard but her nightmare had her mind trapped tight. She whimpered and thrashed the other direction.

  Her arm headed toward the nightstand, and the large glass of water on it. Zeke caught her wrist half an inch before it would’ve collided with the container and sliced up her hand. He got in a breath of relief before realizing, too late, that he’d probably just intensified the torment of her subconscious.

  “Noooo!”

  Sure enough, she started fighting his hold.

  “Fuck,” Zeke muttered. “Rayna.” He jerked her hand to his chest, crushing her knuckles against his sternum. “Sshhh, bird. It’s going to be—”

  “You’re dead! You’re—you’re supposed to be dead!”

  He kept her hand locked to his chest as he forced in a breath. Her words, twisted with her despairing tone, painted a searing picture of what was happening behind her twitching eyelids. She was ranting about the cocksucker who’d been part of the human trafficking network she’d run from for over a year. Once she’d gotten recaptured, King transferred her to Thailand then gotten ready to sell her as a sex slave without a flicker of hesitation. That’s when the squad had stepped in, busting up the bastard’s party to rescue Rayna, her best friend Sage, and five more American women. It had been damn satisfying to lock King away in a Bangkok prison—until they’d learned the Feds had extradited King’s sorry ass back here. Inside a day, King pulled a fucking Criss Angel on them all, his backside never seeing a second of time inside FDC Sea-Tac, thanks to switching places with a secret twin brother he had waiting on the back burner.

  “I’m—I’m going to kill him. I need to kill him. Wh-where’s the gun? Where’s the gun?”

  Despite his tension, a proud grin jerked up the corners of his mouth. The angels knew what they were doing when making her hair the color of fire. “That’s it, honey,” he murmured. “Fight back.”

  He was pretty damn certain where her flashback went now. King hadn’t been happy to slink back into the gutter from which he’d slithered. The monster had the goddamn nerve to take Rayna and Sage again, along with Josie Hawkins, Sage’s pregnant houseguest. King had gleefully enjoyed the triumph until he realized the stateside “clients” who showed to buy his booty were actually trained Special Forces operatives. Correction. Trained and pissed operatives. Sage’s fiancé, Garrett, was one of those men. Josie’s husband, Wyatt, specially reactivated for the off-the-books mission, was the second. Zeke was the third.

  Once the jig was up and the women were safe, King had b
een taken out—but the bullet hadn’t been fired by him, Garrett, Wyatt, or any of the FBI agents stationed outside the target house. The finger on the trigger had been Rayna’s.

  To the day he died, he wouldn’t forget that moment. Tiny redhead. Tiny blue latex fetish dress. Trembling arms. Shaking lips. Complete resolve. Total bravery. Incredible. Beautiful. She’d taken his breath away. What breath he had left, anyway. Having just taken a knife in the gut from King himself, staying conscious had required a deep tap into the determination reserves. It hadn’t stopped him from dreaming about kissing her, though. Oh yeah, that would’ve been good. It wouldn’t have been like the chaste lip brushes he’d indulged with her until then, either. He’d yearned to open her wide, filling her mouth, tasting every corner of her. Taking her fear and replacing it with his adoration.

  Exactly like he longed to kiss her now.

  Rayna moaned and flinched again. She kicked at the covers. Her hand wrenched in his. Z’s chest felt like cracking ice. His thoughts of passion were demolished by fantasies of fury. He’d never thought of exhuming a guy just to kill him again, but putting a few more bullets in King’s carcass sounded really fucking good right now.

  “Ssshh.” He ran his other hand gently up her other arm. She was breathing fast, gripped tight by the dream. Breaking her out of it at this point would be worse for her psyche than letting her process the memories. “Rayna, it’s all over. You got the gun. You killed the bad guy. You got him, honey.”

  “No. He’s—he’s coming.” She sobbed and kicked. “Bringing guards this time. Th-they’ve got the woman with the n-needle. Don’t. Please don’t. Not down there!”

  Z’s muscles went to sludge a second time. Relief had liquefied him the first time. Rage was the villain now. He forced his way through it, wrapping her hand tighter in his.