Page 5 of Wanted
“Not a chance,” Marcus replied. Having already seen hints of temper in Pony, he wasn’t about to go anywhere. Then it occurred to him… not only was he in the civilian world, but he was in the vanilla civilian world. A hospital, a place full to the brim with mandatory reporters who wouldn’t understand or care that his rules were geared toward Pony and the world she’d been living in for so long that she could no longer function anywhere else. He would need to make concessions.
“Fine.” He stood up, catching himself mid limp as his sore leg protested being too long in its prothesis. Steadying himself, he turned his back, folded his arms across his chest, and did his best not to sound disgruntled about having to bend to the will of the twenty-year-old behind him. “This is as close as you’re going to get to me leaving. Now, get her changed or I’ll walk her out of the here as she is.”
“Um… I just... I don’t think…”
He could all but hear the young assistant tapping her fingers in indecision. He really did roll his eyes now. He didn’t have time for this. “I’m her legal guardian and I am backed by a court order. I’m not leaving this room without her. Get her dressed. Now.”
He turned his head far enough to pin the young woman with a look that had rarely failed to make any of his past submissives jump to obey. His disapproving frown was utterly wasted on the assistant, but not Pony. She stared back at him, her body stiff and her hands clenched in tight fists on her thighs. That serene and unreadable mask she’d tried to don had slipped, laying bare the wistful sadness underneath. The rise and fall of her small breasts had quickened. The white and blue fabric of the hospital gown wasn’t thick enough to hide the fact that her nipples had stiffened into peaks.
For all that she was hurt and angry, she was also still a submissive and her body yearned to be taken under a competent dom’s command.
“Get out of bed,” he told her, more than capable of fulfilling that need. “Get dressed. We’re leaving.”
That glisten in her eyes became downright watery, and her bottom lip quivered. “I don’t want to go with you.”
The trickle of that first tear spilling over her lashes to roll unhindered down her too-thin face sparked an unexpected heat in the pit of his belly. Not now, he told him, but his cock stirred against his will. Of all the inappropriate times to get a fucking woody, but he couldn’t help it any more than, apparently, she could stop herself from crying. She scrubbed the errant tear away as if embarrassed, but another slipped free and the equally inappropriate urge to taste it on her cheek made his mouth water. Once upon a time, back before his accident and before he’d retired, when he’d still had a submissive of his own, tears used to be his aphrodisiac.
He faced forward again, killing the inappropriate hunger growing inside him under a heavy roll of irritation. “Take the IV out of her and put her goddamn clothes on. I won’t repeat myself again.”
Two steps was all it took to carry him, despite his gut instincts and earlier objections, out of the room. He stood sentry with the door cracked at his back so he could hear it if Pony’s earlier aggression resurged, but the only thing he heard was the aide’s nervously whispered, “Should I call someone?”
From Pony, he never heard so much as a sniffle. A few minutes later, the door at his back swung into the room and the young assistant backed out.
“I’ll check with her nurse to see where she is in the discharge process.”
“Tell her she has fifteen minutes and then we’re leaving. We’ve a long drive and a long day ahead of us, and I’d just as soon get started.”
She walked away, glancing back at him over her shoulder. Once upon a time, he’d have gazed back at her with a dominant’s assessing eye and a mind tuned toward what kind of kinky play he might be able to coax out of her.
A spanking, the lecherous half of his brain decided. She was young, not yet grown out of her little girl mindset. He was willing to bet he was just ‘Daddy’ enough to convince her that a trip across his knee was exactly what she needed.
His good knee, preferably.
Which was all it took to kill that half-hearted fantasy. No submissive wanted a broken half-man for a dom.
He turned on his prosthetic and went back inside, to the empty chair waiting by Pony’s hospital bed. She sat exactly as he’d left her, back stiff as a broom handle, her masked gaze staring straight at the wall ahead of her. The chair was on the opposite side of the bed behind her. She did not acknowledge him when he came in, batting not so much as an eyelash as he eased into the chair to study her back.
What had it been, three years since he’d last done this? What a disaster that had turned out to be. The client in that case had been a man, trapped inside a cult, in fear of his life and desperate to get his family out. He’d called his parents. His parents had hired him. He’d gone in with a county sheriff at his back, and what should have been a peaceful extraction had turned into a gunfight. The bullet that had shattered both his tibia and fibula never should have claimed his leg, but for the tiny shred of cloth from his pants that got left in the wound after surgery. The resulting infection had hit so hard and fast, it had almost taken his life. He’d been lucky, his second surgeon had told him, to only lose the lower part of his leg. Had they not caught it in time, it could have been worse.
In the end, it hadn’t mattered. He’d retired from his job, because a half-man couldn’t meet the physical requirements of a bounty hunter and bad guys didn’t magically comply just because the dude hunting them was disabled. He’d lost his fiancé and submissive; not that Megan had ever said anything, but because he knew what she’d been thinking every time she’d crawled into bed beside him. He wasn’t fit. He wasn’t whole, how could he possibly make her submit when one of his legs ended in a fucking stump?
Oh, she’d tried to make it work. After four months, he’d finally released her just so he wouldn’t have to endure it when she finally gave in to the inevitable and broke up with him.
He’d retired his membership from Black Light shortly after that. He didn’t even go to watch anymore, because it wasn’t watching that he wanted to do. He wanted to touch, god damn it. He wanted to get his hands all up in some hot, little submissive and wring gasp after moan after cry from her while he bent her to all of his basest desires. A half-man couldn’t do that, and he’d be fucked up the ass before he let himself be objectified by some amputee fetishist, because that was the only reason anyone would let him top them at this point.
What was he doing here? Mentally, he had no doubt he was exactly what Pony needed, but physically? Why had he taken this job?
Spencer, that’s why. Years ago, Black Light’s grumpy, taciturn manager had been the only one stubborn enough to keep hounding after him after Marcus had shut everyone else out. Over the course of the eight months following his accident, he’d closed himself off from the world so effectively that all of his friends, his working acquaintances, even Megan had stopped coming by his house to check on him. And that Christmas, when he hit rock fucking bottom, who was it who showed up on his door not two seconds after he’d loaded his gun and just before he tucked the muzzle up under his chin?
Spencer. With a fucking fruit cake and a bottle of brandy.
They’d got drunk together, and for the first time Marcus bitched, and moaned, and even broke down and cried over his stupid, fucking leg. If he lived to be a thousand, he’d never forget what Spencer said to him: “Are you fucking done yet?” Spoken in that bored ‘what the hell are you complaining for’ tone that he could have patented, he had it down so well.
Marcus had sat there, drunk, the awful taste of fruitcake in his mouth, and the realization slowly sinking into every recess of him that, yeah, he was done.
The next day, he’d woken up with the mother of all hangovers. He’d thrown away the fruitcake, unloaded the gun, ordered what would end up being the first out of the five prosthetics it took before he found one that fit him the best, and then he’d gotten back to living his life.
He was here today because Spencer had known a bottle of brandy at the right time might get him to open up and because he’d cared enough to tell him to get the fuck over himself at that dark moment when he’d needed most to hear it.
