Page 35 of Wanted
“Then they’ll be a little big, but you are supposed to be gaining. You’ll wear them with a belt if you have to.”
“I didn’t get shirts,” she pointed out.
“You need underwear too, and we’ll have to go to a different store for that.”
“Plus dinner,” she said sadly. Burying her face in her hands, she sighed.
He let her wallow under the insurmountable weight of it all for only a minute before he reached over and laid his hand on her knee. He squeezed once. It was comforting, right up until he said, “Ready to go back in there for the shirts?”
Gathering the pants, she caught herself midway through folding them neatly to put back in the thrift shop bag. Wadding them up instead, she tossed them into the backseat.
Marcus rolled his shoulders, shifted in the driver’s seat, tsked his tongue against his teeth, but said nothing.
“Yes,” she said finally. Taking hold of the door handle, she shouldered the door open again. “Let’s do this.”
She walked into the store for the third time. At least her stomach wasn’t rolling quite as badly as it had been before.
Chapter 8
Pony/Anna
They had nachos for dinner. Pony couldn’t remember the last time she’d had something so fatty, so simple, and so decadent all at once. She put all the fixings on it, everything she liked—beef, tomatoes, lettuce, sour cream, cheese. Lots and lots of cheese, and even jalapenos. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d put jalapenos on anything either, Ethen hated them. Marcus didn’t seem to care, and although she’d had two minor meltdowns as she’d helped him cook supper, worrying about whether or not this was what he’d want to eat or if this was how he liked to fix it, when they finally sat down to a heaping plate placed on the table between them, he ate just as much as she did. He wasn’t even shy about the jalapenos.
“You like Mexican food?” he asked.
She wouldn’t exactly call this Mexican, but she nodded. “I used to eat it all the time. You?”
He smiled, but didn’t fall into her trap. “I like Mexican, Chinese, Italian, steak and potatoes. Basically, I like anything that can’t move faster than I can. I will say, I’m glad you didn’t try to do a low-fat, low calorie salad.”
Picking up two chips at once, she stuffed them both in her mouth and although she knew she deserved it, for the first time didn’t feel that phantom smack upside the head from Ethen’s ghostly hand. “I don’t like diet food. It’ll serve you right if you get me so used to eating stuff like this that I’m wearing your pants by the end of the month.”
He laughed. “Yeah, nice try putting the blame for that on me. I don’t care what you weigh, honey, but an unhealthy gain is as bad as being too skinny. Unfortunately for you, the cure is in the basement and I will happily put you down there to run it off.”
“I used to jog every morning,” she countered, using another chip to scoop up a hefty bite of seasoned beef, cheese and sour cream.
“Your choice or his?”
She shook her head. “He required we stay within a certain weight and punished us with exercise and fasting if we gained, but I mean before I met him. I used to run track in high school and even my first year of college. It was one of my favorite ways to unwind. I’d jog in the morning to get myself in the right headspace for school and then I’d jog at night after studying to relax again. Threaten me with jogging all you want. It’s not a punishment.”
“Good to know.” He smiled and took another bite. “You put on ten pounds, and we’ll talk about incorporating jogging into your exercise routine.”
She was surprised. “Kind of counterproductive, isn’t it? Jogging and trying to gain weight.”
“It’s not about gaining weight. It’s about gaining the right kind of weight, muscle weight, healthy weight. The right ratio of healthy body fat, and above all, it’s about finding something you can latch onto mentally and physically that you can control. You’re the boss of it. Nobody else, not even me, even if I am making you go down and do it.”
“I kind of like the yoga,” she admitted.
He glanced at her sideways, then smiled. Reaching over, he stroked her hair. It was wordless praise, but it still lit her up from the inside out.
“I liked it too. Yoga was my first attempt at finding something I could do after I lost my leg,” he said. “I didn’t get my prosthetic for a while after. I hated the first one so badly, I didn’t want to use it. Then I realized I was self-sabotaging and I had to find a way to change my thinking so I could climb out of the slump I’d fallen into.”
Folding her arms on the table gave her all the excuse she needed to lean in just a little closer to him as she listened. Over the last week, they’d spent so much time talking about her, that these few unguarded moments when he actually opened up a little to share parts of himself were fast becoming the highlights of her days. “How did you lose your leg?”
“Job went bad,” he said honestly. She liked that about him. Marcus could clam up faster than... well, a clam when he wanted to. But for as long as she was willing to be open with him, it seemed he was braced to return the favor. When she asked a question, he answered her with the kind of blunt honesty that made her envy him. He’d given her enough glimpses into his past to know he’d been through hell. A different hell than she, but hell just the same. They had that in common.
“It was a rescue attempt,” he explained, pouring a little more salsa over the patch of nachos he was eating. “I had been approached by the family of a guy who was trapped in a religious cult. He wanted to get out, but his wife and baby were being kept away from him and he wouldn’t leave them. So I went in, negotiations went bad. They sometimes do. Next thing I knew, everyone had guns and things escalated. Long story short, we did get all three out, but shots were fired and I got hit. The bullet shattered my leg, it got infected, and I ended up...” He gestured through the table at the limb in question, then kept eating. He was quiet for so long, she assumed he was done sharing. She was still trying to figure out what to say when he added, “Long story short, I spiraled. No one wants a dom who can’t stand on his own through a scene. Subs want a big cock and a lover with two legs. That sort of thing.”
Pony stared at him, uncomprehendingly. That wasn’t how she saw him at all. She couldn’t imagine anyone seeing anything other than what she saw—a man in full control of himself. A man who had no problem at all taking control of her. His hand on the back of her neck, his sheer size and strength when he loomed over her, commanding all her attention when he wanted it.
