Page 108 of Bad Enough

Floors eight and nine were open doors with no one there.

Floor ten was the penthouse. The elevator moved to the tenth floor and stopped, but the door didn’t open.

“No telling what the Big Boss would have done if the door had opened at his apartment.”

“It wouldn’t have been confetti,” came the dark voice over the speaker in the elevator. “I’d have been much more creative.”

TB rolled his eyes. “Figures you’d be watching. Just so you know, I’m not cleaning this shit up.” The floor was covered with paper, as well as sticking in places to both of them.

“Oh, no. That’s Nemo’s job.”

“You’re paying him too much if he can afford all of this crap all the time.”

“He doesn’t pay for it. I do. We have it built into the annual budget. It amuses the hell out of me to watch his war with you.”

“Shithorn. I quit.”

God laughed hard at that. “Yeah, right. I’ll see you on Monday. Don’t you dare come back before then.”

He should have known it wasn’t over, but he’d forgotten about Nemo. When the door opened in the garage, there he stood with two canons that he let fly. Flame was clinging to him, and she was laughing so hard she could barely stand. TB swept her up in a bridal carry and brushed past his nemesis, heading straight for his Humvee. He grumbled silently in his head, but secretly, he was a little bit amused. His team sure knew how to inaugurate a new person into the fold.

Thank fuck Kubrick isn’t here. She would have had Silly String.

Sylvan’s house was only about twenty minutes from the office, but for whatever reason, those twenty minutes felt like an hour. He couldn’t even blame it on rush hour. It clearly had everything to do with needing to be alone with the woman next to him in the truck.

Fuck “with” her. I need “inside” her. Now!

When they finally arrived, he barely had the vehicle in park in the garage and the garage door down before the vehicle was turned off, and he was sliding out of the seat onto the pavement. He stormed around the back of the truck, yanked her door open, unbuckled her seat belt, and had her over his shoulder, ass in the air.

“TB,” she hissed. “You’re being a caveman!”

“Don’t care,” he grunted. “Your steps are too tiny, and I don’t want to pull your arm out of the socket.”

“Well, if you weren’t so Frankenstein-huge, it wouldn’t take three of my steps to keep up with one of yours,” she shot back.

Swinging the inner door open, he hustled her through, closed the door, locked it tight, put her down, then rearmed the alarm panel. Once he had, he turned to her with an index finger pointed at her. “Upstairs. Now. Clothes off. I’ll be there in three minutes, so you had better be ready.”

Eyes wide, Flame didn’t even hesitate. She turned and flew up the stairs.

The grin on his face was that of a predator who knew his prey was a given. He set his watch for five minutes just to make her wait a little, then began to do a perimeter of the interior of the house, verifying that everything was locked up and the curtains were drawn. Once done, he headed to the kitchen and grabbed several bottles of water because when he was done with her, he knew she would need hydrating.

Just as he closed the refrigerator door, his watch alarm beeped. Turning it off, his smile turned even more wolfish, and he stalked to the stairs, purposefully letting his heavy tread be heard as he climbed.

Navigating the wrought iron spiral staircase to the third floor, he made sure to hit each stair with a heavy step and made sure to climb slowly to increase her awareness of his arrival. His mouth was watering in anticipation of what he was going to find. A small part of him hoped she wasn’t quite ready so that he could mete out a little punishment.

The saliva in his mouth dried up in a single second.

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Late afternoon sunlight shone through the skylight in the center of her sanctuary. In the middle of the pool of light it created, she knelt, completely naked. She was sitting on her heels, hands clasped behind her, gripped at the small of her back, the position forcing her generous breasts forward. Around her eyes was a white silk blindfold, knotted so that she couldn’t see a thing. Lying on the floor in front of her was a skein of white silk rope in a loose coil.

“Sylvan,” he whispered.

He watched her chest rise and fall, saw her body tremble, and heard the slight gasp that she couldn’t contain at hearing him call her by name, something he had never done before.

He crossed over to the bed and set the water bottles in the alcove above the pillows. Then he moved to stand in front of her.

Her braid lay over the front of her shoulder, the end tied with a pink silk ribbon. He fingered the end of it. For a heart-wrenching moment, it reminded him of what he’d found in the box. Five red hair braids and one blonde braid neatly chopped from a young woman’s head. Mentally, he shook himself, collecting his wits to find the Dom within.

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