Page 12 of Hooked

Mara stood, too. “That’s him. Do you know him?”

“Oh, my god!” she repeated, as her eyes darted frantically around the room.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Mara drawled.

“She’s gone white as a sheet,” Lexie remarked with concern. “Maybe you should sit back down.”

Mara ignored Lexie’s suggestion and pressed the newcomer for more information, although she wrapped a supportive hand around her arm as she did. “How do you know our Master Joseph?”

“I freaking work for him.” Panic had entered her voice, which had risen a full octave. “Merciful heavens! He can’t see me here. I’ve gotta go.”

She whirled and started pushing her way through the crowd, her focus on the front doors.

“Olivia, wait,” Mara called after her.

She didn’t slow or look back, having only one goal in mind, getting out of the club unseen. When she pushed through the heavy double doors and entered the lobby, thunder rumbled long and loud. There was a man at the desk she hadn’t noticed on the way in. Dressed in all black, the snug T-shirt he wore had “Rossi Security” written in gold letters across his left pec.

“It’s a gully washer out there, miss,” he cautioned. “You’ll need to wait until it slows.”

Disregarding his warning and refusing to be waylaid by the weather, she started for her only means of escape. “I need to go. Now.”

When she pulled the heavy doors open, wind and rain assailed her, the force of both ripping the handles from her grasp. Immediately, she moved to close them, struggling against the torrent’s sustained force when large male hands appeared next to her smaller ones and easily pushed the doors shut.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped, leaning against the doors, already feeling the chill from the drenching as the A/C wafted over her wet skin. “I had no idea it was storming so badly.”

Livia turned back to the security guard to further her apology for not listening. Only it wasn’t the guard whose hands curled around her upper arms. It wasn’t his black T-shirt-clad chest that filled her vision, either. Instead, she stared at a burgundy vest and a gray-check tweed jacket.

Following it upward, she encountered a perfectly knotted gray tie, a clean-shaven, tightly clenched jaw, and full, sensuous lips set in a hard line. She stopped there, knowing who she’d find if she went farther. Closing her eyes tightly, she prayed for the power of teleportation as her face burned.

“Olivia.”

His voice, usually a mellow tenor, rang sharp like a hammer forging steel.

“Look at me, little one.”

The endearment he’d used with her before but only outside the office in high-stress situations. Like when her mother passed two years back and the time she’d had a debilitating case of the flu and he’d dropped by her apartment to check on her. The pet name, common to the lifestyle, hadn’t registered then. Now, using it as a dominant with an errant sub, its meaning rang through loud and clear. He was in charge and she was in big trouble.

She swallowed hard. With the giant doors and severe weather on one side and Joseph on the other, she felt trapped, like a mouse in a maze. Dear heavens!

“I won’t ask again.”

With his tone deep and uncompromising, she responded as though she had no will.

She looked up into his familiar green eyes. As they gazed intently down at her with more fire than she’d ever seen, she got dizzy. Maybe it was the alcohol or the stress of coming here all alone, or it could be low blood sugar because she’d skipped dinner, much too nervous to eat. No matter the cause, her world turned on end.

Her legs got all wobbly, and she tumbled right into Joseph Hooks’ arms, the head honcho at Hooks, Jeffers, and Mahoney, her boss, her dream dom, and the secret love of her life. Then Olivia did something she’d never done in her entire thirty-five years. She fainted dead away.

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