Page 6 of Wanted
He owed the man. It grated, but he owed him.
Ever so slightly, Pony turned her head. She didn’t look back at him, but it was enough for him to know she was past trying to ignore his presence. “Are you a dom?” she asked, her voice whisper soft.
“I was. Once upon a time. But don’t go getting ideas,” he wasted no time telling her. “Just because I was one doesn’t mean I’m yours. I’m just a guy who knows the verbiage.”
She looked down at her hands. After a moment, even more softly, she asked, “What’s going to happen to me?”
The pale softness of her hair spilled in tangles down her back almost to her butt. It was pretty. She was pretty. Thin as she was, it wasn’t hard to see how she might once have been beautiful.
“I’m going to take you home,” he said gruffly. “I’m going to give you rules and then I’m going to teach you how to survive. You’re going to learn how to do things for yourself again. You’re going to dress yourself, cook for yourself, clean up, pay bills, work a job, make a decision—all of it.”
She raised a hand to her face. He couldn’t see for sure, but it wouldn’t have surprised him if she’d just wiped away another tear.
“What if I don’t want to?” she asked, her voice thick with countless more still unshed.
Marcus resisted the urge to rub his leg. It wasn’t aching anymore, but he almost wished it would. It had been too long since he’d last had anyone hitting so many of his ‘subby in need’ triggers, but she was doing it. She was hitting them fast and hard, and the long-denied dom in him was fighting not to respond.
“Unfortunately, we don’t get to make that choice,” he told her. “We don’t get to curl up our toes just because we lose someone, or our way of life.” Or a leg. “We don’t get to sulk. We don’t get to cry. We sure as hell don’t get to make it the problem of everyone else around us. Like it or not, the only thing we get to do is figure out how to keep going. You might very well hate me for it, but at least you’ll get the chance to hate me outside of a mental hospital.”
She looked back at him over her shoulder. “What about Puppy?”
“She’s not your crutch. You don’t get to lean on her anymore, and you sure as hell don’t get to keep hurting her.”
She flinched and quickly dropped her eyes to her hands.
“You don’t get to keep hurting yourself either. Rule number one: No more self-harm. That rule starts on the honor system. Give me one reason to believe you’ve violated it and I’ll strip your ass naked for inspections every day, multiple times a day, until you win my trust back again. Look at me.”
He saw that order shiver through her. Almost as if against her will, she obeyed, locking her blue gaze with his steel gray one.
“I’m not a nice man, and I don’t have a lot of patience. I knew Ethen O’Dowell, and I know some of what you’ve had to do since he went to prison. I sympathize, but I’m not your dom. I don’t love you, or cherish you, and I sure as hell won’t put up with any manipulative attempts to top me from the bottom. I give the orders, you obey them; it’s just that simple. Be a good girl and the next thirty days will go by as painlessly as I can possibly make them. Fight me, and I will make your life absolutely miserable in ways you can’t possibly imagine right now.”
“You’ll punish me,” she said flatly, no inflection in her voice.
“You weren’t broken in the vanilla world,” he confirmed. “You won’t be fixed in it either.” He could see the direction her thinking now wandered in, and he had to squash his inner dom before it could see this as a challenge to be immediately taken up. “Don’t.”
She didn’t move. “Don’t what?”
“Just. Don’t. I’m not your master, but I’m not going to give you what you want either. I won’t put you over my knee and spank your naughty bottom. In fact, I promise if you force my hand, you won’t like a single one of the punishments I devise for you. Here’s rule number two: in my house, there are no safewords. Earn it, you’ll get it. It’s that simple.”
Her expression didn’t change. Not only was she not scared, but his gut said she was going to test that just as fast as she could manage it. He wasn’t surprised. She’d been punishing herself for months in what was, for all intents and purposes, a long-distance relationship. Her inner sub had to be desperate for the physical disciplinary contact of another. His dominant side twitched, only too happy to feed those needs. But, Marcus knew, he would need to tread carefully. He had no intention of becoming her next Ethen O’Dowell and thirty days from now, she would need to be able to take care of herself enough for the courts to deny the hospital’s claim that she was incompetent. He had to get her ready so he could release her back into the world with a clear conscience. Then and only then, would he be able to retreat himself, obligation fulfilled, back into the quiet of his self-imposed isolation.
He couldn’t afford to fall into the trap of thinking she was his, even if only temporarily. He certainly couldn’t afford to fall into the trap of liking it.
He steeled himself. Pony was a victim in need of help, but she was also the enemy, and if he dared to let himself think about this any other way, then it would only make it that much harder in the end, when it came time to release her.
And he would. Because he didn’t need any more problems and she certainly didn’t need him.
Chapter 2
Pony/Anna
Pony sat silently in the backseat of Marcus Hawke’s maroon SUV. The child locks were engaged and there was a barrier of plexiglass between them. She suspected it might be bulletproof. There were rings tucked half-hidden between the seat cushions by the seatbelt buckles. She didn’t know if that was added security for unruly passengers who had to be handcuffed, but there was also an eyebolt for ankle cuffs fixed into the floor between her feet. For kickers? She didn’t know, but she wasn’t struggling and she wasn’t kicking, and she really didn’t want to find out.
Or did she?
It was a forty-five-minute drive from Washington D.C. to Centreville, Virginia, where he lived in a two-story farmhouse on twenty secluded acres just off a quiet country road. The entire way there, she’d tried not to stare at him. Every time she did, he seemed to sense it and his gaze would find hers via the rearview mirror. Then her stomach would clench, her palms would sweat, and she’d quickly avert her eyes again. She rubbed her hands against her skirted thighs. Her head still hurt, but that wasn’t what bothered her the most. It was the things he’d said at the hospital.
That he wasn’t her Dom. Of course, he wasn’t.
