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  “You’ve been so damn brave, Zoe,” he murmured. “So strong. Just like Mom was…especially after Homer left.”

  “What happened?” You can now return to the innocuous part of our programming, everyone. Thank God. “Did they finish the project? Or did Washington just summon him back?”

  “Neither.” He spoke it with certainty. “My research doesn’t bear it out, and neither do my memories.”

  “Okay,” she returned. “What do you remember?”

  “Fights. Bad ones.”

  She pressed her hand over his when shadows took over his face. “Ugh,” she whispered. “So your dad and Homer finally had enough of the gentleman’s agreement?”

  “Oh, no. It wasn’t my dad and Homez. It was Mom.”

  “And Homer?” She didn’t hide her bafflement. “But why? Weren’t they going to be the new Fonteyn and Nureyev of science?”

  “Who and who?”

  She couldn’t help a beguiled smile. He really was such a big, burly military hunk. Her imagination went off like a sparkler, thinking about all the classic dance videos she wanted to make him sit through. “Maybe one day, I’ll have the chance to enlighten you.”

  “Maybe one day.” His gaze turned a soft butterscotch, threatening her focus yet again.

  “What happened?” she forced out. “Between your mom and Homer?”

  The softness dissolved from his gaze. Then his whole face. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Their fights were loud enough to wake Tait and me, but the dialogue itself…either it was too muffled by the lab walls or I just don’t remember.” He shook his head. “But after the dustups, Mom would bawl and Homez would leave.”

  “Back to DC?” she ventured.

  “That’s what we assumed.” He pulled his hand away to rub the back of his neck. “It got to be that his time there outweighed his days in the lab with Mom. She was miserable.”

  A huge fist lodged beneath her ribs. “And your dad definitely noticed.”

  “Every second,” he confirmed. “Finally, after one really bad blowup, Homez bugged out for good. Took everything except Scout, the dog. By that point, we were all kind of relieved. Even Mom.” His shoulders clenched. “But Dad didn’t see it that way.”

  The fist punched hard, banishing her breath. “Oh, no…”

  His shoulders clenched. “He was drunk,” he muttered. “And she was distraught. Conclusions were reached. His temper blew.”

  “Shay,” she rasped. “Lo siento. I’m so sorry.”

  “It wasn’t the last time.” He flattened his lips, as if berating himself simply for the defensive tone, before going on. “But for some reason, every time, she just took it. Fuck, Tait and I were so angry—at her as much as him.”

  She gulped. At least there were no tears to worry about this time. The grief in her heart tore past the realm of tears. She ached for the little boys he and Tait had been, forced to become men far too fast. “And I’ll bet you both tried to stand up to him.”

  “Fuck, yeah. Of course. But one time, she actually screamed at us to stop. She said…”

  “What?” she rasped into his lead-heavy pause.

  “She said we were only making it worse.”

  “Ay.” She shoved back her bitterness to ask, “What did you do then?”

  He squeezed his neck harder. “What could we do? We moved the hell on and tried to stay out of Dad’s way as much as possible, especially after she disappeared in the middle of the night, about three months later.”

  For a second, she let her jaw plummet in freefall. “She just left? No note? No goodbye? No explanation?”

  “Oh, there was an explanation. It came from Drake Bommer, who was happy to tell us about the ‘stone-hearted bitch’ who’d left us and him for Homer, the hunk of scientific hotness. Thanks to his new bestie, Mr. Jim Beam, we had the treat of hearing that one over and over—and over.”

  “Higueputa,” she spat. Son of a bitch.

  “It wasn’t an easy time for him.”

  “Are you making excuses for the cabrón?”

  “You think that’s what this is?” He nailed his stare back into her. “He was a shit, okay? No pardons for that. But he was also a Bommer—and if I’ve come to understand anything about that while growing up, it’s that his pain ran through deep fucking canyons.” He pulled in air through his nose, bitterness still gleaming from his gaze. “Thanks to Cameron Stock, I almost lost my brother to those same canyons last year.”

  “Don’t forget the fine example your father set,” she grumbled.

  “Well, Tait pulled through. He let his heart, his character, his stubbornness—and yeah, the love of a great woman—take him to a better place. I’m damn proud of him.”

  Her heart clenched once more. He and Tait were as tight as she and her sister. Like Ava and her, they’d had to be. Would she be as strong if she’d lost Ava’s devotion, even temporarily? Would she be strong enough to keep such a huge secret from her sibling? The conflict had to be tearing at Shay.

  “So what did you two do then?” she queried, hoping to refocus him. “You had someone to go to, right? Someone to talk to?”

  He actually laughed. “We were boys, Zoe. The sons of an alcoholic abuser, at that. We sucked it up and moved on because we had to. We were old enough to know that talking to someone would likely mean being placed into separate foster homes faster than you can say ay caramba.”

  His words forged new hardness in his face. Zoe watched the transformation in wonder. She and Shay had to be near each other in chronological age, but he suddenly seemed eons older. “So you clung to each other for strength,” she whispered.

  He reeled back a little. “Don’t get carried away, Miss Tiptoe Tulips. I don’t cling to that dork-ass for anything. He smells like a goat and he snores.”

  Just like that, the man again melted her like a brick of chocolate in the sun. She gazed up at him, hoping her face conveyed the depth of her gratitude for his honesty in revealing his past and his bravery in confronting it for himself.

  “Thank you for clearing that up, Sir.”

  He grinned and bestowed a deep kiss to her mouth. “You’re most welcome, baby girl.”

  She yanked on his shirt, keeping him near for one more moment. “I mean all of it.”

  He kissed her again. A little longer. A lot deeper. “I know.”

  “So, what happened then?” she asked. “How did you two little men do your not-clinging-to-each-other thing?”

  “We carried on. Went to school. Kept our noses clean. Worked hard. We had one angel on our side, our Uncle Jonah, who took care of crap like signing the school papers and making sure we even got to school—every day. No such thing as ditching when Uncle Jonah was around. We made that mistake only once. Shit wasn’t pretty.”

  She brushed her knuckles down the side of his face. “Did you get to have any fun?”

  “Hell, yeah. Mrs. Verona, our neighbor, sometimes let us help her bake cookies. And once a week, we treated ourselves to the half-price movies. They didn’t show the latest shit, but they showed the best. Every Saturday, we survived on a cultural diet of Stallone, Willis, and Schwarzenegger. Take a wild guess what we both wanted to be when we grew up.”

  She added her grin to his. “Special Forces?”

  When Shay nodded, somberness stomped back across his face. “It was good timing for both of us. In Tait’s senior year of high school, Dad’s liver finally gave out. By the middle of that summer, I took the equivalency exam and became a grad, too. Uncle Jonah put us up for six months while we sucked raw eggs for breakfast and trained like goddamn Olympians, preparing for the physical requirements of the job.

  “By the time we signed up for the big green machine, we were ready. We didn’t make it a secret to anyone that Special Forces was our ultimate goal. They all told us we were crazy to think we’d both make it past the cuts, but we did.” His gaze sobered by another degree. “It was harder for Tait than me—I saw it in every step he trudged and test he took—but damn,
I was proud of him. He hung in there, sometimes literally by the skin of his teeth. He’s a stubborn fucker.

  “For the next few years, life became a blur of working hard and playing harder. When I wasn’t training for or actually out on an op, I was increasingly fascinated by the connection that BDSM offered.”

  Zoe slipped her hand to his neck and squeezed. “Connection. I like that description too.”

  He scraped his fingers across the back of her hand. “I know.”

  Before she succumbed to the longing to pull him down and mash their mouths again, she probed, “So what led you to start looking for your mom?” The question was hard to get out. There was a good chance he’d explain that he’d been involved with someone else and the importance of that relationship led to the desire of completing his psychological circle with his mother. She didn’t enjoy even the concept of Shay with somebody else, period.

  Stop it. Crazy circumstances aside, you’ve known the man less than twenty-four hours. It was nice with him. It is nice with him. But he’s a Special Forces soldier with a thousand other priorities higher than you, including the mission he’s on right now. Get over it. Get over him. Now.

  “It was an act of fate, I think,” he started, in answer to her question. Oh, great. An act of fate. Here it came. “My CO pulled some strings and secured me ten days of leave in order to be with Tait after the conclusion of that insane op they accomplished in LA. T was a train wreck. Just needed to talk about a lot of shit. Needless to say, Stock’s name came up a lot in the conversation. It nagged at me. I knew I’d seen Stock’s name well before that.

  “Well, one morning, the dots connected. A few months prior, I’d screwed up the nuts to go through the last of Dad’s shit. One of the boxes actually turned out to be Mom’s. It looked like a lot of old notes from the lab, pages of scribbled shit and scientific formulas that all could’ve been written in Chinese for all the sense they made to me—but there were lots of names in the notes too.”

  “And Stock’s was one of them,” she supplied.

  He touched a finger to his nose, indicating she was right. “I didn’t think anything of it when I went through the box—just wrote him off as one of the Pentagon’s financial guys. But one morning in the shower at T’s, everything slammed together, and—” He stopped when he noticed her expanding grin. “What is it?”

  “Sorry.” She couldn’t help the provocative bite to her bottom lip. “I’m stuck on the part where things slammed together in the shower.”

  His lips curled up too. He trailed a hand down to her hip. “Are you telling me you’re not such a good girl after all, Miss Chestain?”

  “I have no idea what you mean, Sergeant Bommer.”

  He brushed his lips across hers. “Any other time or place, I’d call your bullshit on that, baby girl.”

  The sandpaper he’d scrubbed over his voice rubbed her in so many new places, in so many right ways. Against her better instincts, Zoe sighed, arched, and pushed her hip higher into his touch. Shay didn’t miss the opportunity to grasp more of her flesh, kneading her with spread fingers before heating every drop of her blood with his rough moan.

  “This is crazy, right?” she rasped.

  When he responded with a silent nod, she knew he understood. Not just the word she used but everything she encompassed with it.

  Crazy.

  Two syllables that stood for so much more. Like every electron that ignited the air between them. Every perfect minute of the power they’d exchanged with each other last night. And in a strange, sweet way, every day of every year that had guided their life paths to collide in that one airport bar, on that fogged-in night, in a city known more for fabricating connections than really having any. And a final twist, carrying them to the most secret section of desert in the world. Throwing them together once more.

  Throwing them?

  Or placing them?

  Yes. Crazy.

  And extraordinary. And incredible. And so damn good.

  Okay, so things with him weren’t going to end with a marriage proposal. But things with him were also…unlike they’d been with anyone else. He saw every part of her. The good girl and the bad girl. The lioness who guarded her inner kitten. The She-Ra who so desperately craved the chance to be a submissive one more time.

  Who yearned to be his submissive one more time.

  “Shay?” Half of it was drowned in her breath instead of her voice.

  He lowered his forehead to hers. “Yeah?”

  “I’m technically still your hostage, right?”

  Every tendon in his perfect muscles stiffened. He released the tension by measured increments, reminding her once more of a mountain lion. Carefully coiled. Hypnotically lethal. “Yeah, baby girl. You definitely are.”

  His breath heated her lips as he slid his beautiful fingers along her inner thigh. He brought his thumb up, rubbing into the valley there, pushing her open a little more for him. Caramba. She almost lost her nerve to press on. Almost.

  “So, technically…you can do whatever you want with me…right?”

  Nothing changed about him except the aroused tic in his jaw. Mierda, she adored that tic. “Is that what you want, baby girl?”

  “I’m the hostage. What I want doesn’t matter…Sir.”

  The other side of his jaw gained a tic. She didn’t have time to revel in it, though; Shay swept his hips between hers with such stunning speed, even her gasp of astonishment was submerged beneath the harsh grunt of his command. Maybe three seconds had passed, but she treasured each one, knowing he’d understood her emphasis on his title with the crystal insight he had into her needs, her desires, her soul.

  She’d given him one word but meant so many more. With her raised eyes and soft smile, she added an underline to all of them.

  Take me.

  Fill me.

  Dominate me.

  Please.

  Chapter Eleven

  With his heartbeat filling his throat and his blood swelling his cock, Shay slammed a finger to the comm piece at his ear, sending an exclusive hail to Justine’s nurse station. As he’d hoped, the woman picked up instantly. As he also hoped, her game show hostess voice seemed a little forced. Things must have been getting intense on Dance Moms.

  “Good day, Shane. What can I do for you?”

  “Lock the door and turn off Miss Chestain’s monitors. I’ll take responsibility for her condition now.”

  “Oh! Is she awake?”

  “Those were orders, Justine, not requests. Do it.”

  “Of course.” He allowed himself a beat of relief. While Justine’s devotion to Stock tiptoed down the path of fanaticism, the woman couldn’t be totally blind to the kind of pigs he hired. One of them wanting a quick “sample” of a hot little hostage should have barely lifted her brows. In the end, it didn’t. The nurse clicked off the comm with businesslike speed.

  Shay jerked the line free from his ear and then tossed it to the mattress behind him. With his other hand, he snatched the monitors off Zoe’s fingers but stopped her from pulling the line free from her IV tube.

  “Leave it in,” he commanded. “I need you good and hydrated, baby girl.”

  Warmth suffused him at the upturn of her exotic lips—and yeah, about a hundred pounds more pressure to his dick—but in that moment, she gave him more. So much more. For the first time in six months, he was free of every mask he’d had to wear, pretense he’d had to erect, and lie he’d had to tell. The step was surreal, a moment he’d often lost hope of ever experiencing. It washed him in pure euphoria. And terror.

  Zoe, noticing every moment of that conflict on his face, pulled him down again. “And I need you to keep being honest with me,” she murmured. “So out with it.” Hastily she amended, “Please, Sir…out with it.”

  He pressed a long kiss to the sumptuous flower of her lips before pushing her legs apart with his knees. “You’re still the hostage, baby girl—but I’m not still your abductor.”

  She bit her bottom lip, a
dorably somber. “I’m not sure I—”

  “I’m not Shane Burnett.” The bark was harsher than he intended. He nipped at her nose as a softening measure. “With you, I can’t ever be him again. Do you understand that?”

  Her head tilted. “The only differences I see between you and Shane are a nice suit, a designer wallet, and a cell phone that wouldn’t leave you alone last night. Gucci and Prada are just window dressing to me, and your cell is probably Stock’s, which sure as hell doesn’t make it important to me. So what’s your problem, Bommer?”

  He almost laughed. Her clarity astounded him. Humbled him. And he wished he could take it as the complete truth. “My beautiful little dancer,” he murmured, “there’s a significant difference…you didn’t quite catch.”

  He filled the pause in his assertion by fitting the ridge of his body against the perfect triangle of hers. Zoe gasped, her gaze widening and her torso arching, giving him a perfect eyeful of her sweet breasts. “Ohhh,” she moaned. “That.”

  “Uh-uh.” The denial was hell to get out. Every corner of his mouth was poised to give her a groaning uh-huh instead. “That’s not the difference I’m talking about.”

  “Ay Dios mios,” she mewled. “It’s…it’s not?”

  Damn it. The woman continued her undulations like she was a cloud and his chest her sky, inciting him to react with equal ferocity. Driven by a gust of heated lust, he shoved at the hem of her T-shirt until her bra was exposed. The contrast of the cream lace against her copper skin incinerated his control. He shoved back both cups, revealing the perfect mahogany discs that gave rise to erect dark brown tips.

  “Difference number one.” He paused long enough to open his mouth against one firm swell, soaking her nipple with the flat of his tongue. “Shay isn’t a goddamn gentleman like Shane. Not when it comes to your beautiful tits.”

  “Ohhhh.” It was the only sound she gave as he shifted to her other breast, this time dragging the tip out with the force of his teeth. Her moan lifted into a scream. Her hands, roaming under his shirt, turned into claws against his spine.