Page 98 of Dead Serious with Benefits
I chuckled. “You know, you don’t need to ask, but...yes. Nothing would make me happier.”
“Good,” he said, kissing me gently. “Now, how much fun will it be to take weeks to tell my mother that you and I are actually a couple? It’ll drive her crazy, first because she’ll think we’re still screwing around, and then because I took so long to tell her.”
“If I ask Mason to help you come up with ideas to mess with your mother, do you promise not to use him to get on everyone else’s nerves?”
“Mmm, I will do my absolute best, but I make no promises if he comes up with an exceptionally good idea.”
“Good enough, I suppose. I can’t expect any miracles.”
He laughed as we stepped through the doorway, and I realized the interior lights were also off. I frowned as I stepped toward where I could see light coming from the hallway and jerked to a halt when I found someone standing there. At first, I thought it was a staff member since it was someone I didn’t recognize. I opened my mouth to ask a question politely, and saw the large rifle in their hands.
Behind me, Ward yelled a warning, but it was too late. The hefty butt of the gun swung up and slammed into my face. Blackness swirled and collected about my vision, and my legs gave out from under me. Darkness took me as I barely registered hitting the floor, or the strangled cry of outrage from Ward behind me.
But amongst all the darkness, there were finally stars.
WARD
The coppery taste of blood wasn’t as strong as it had been earlier, but my mouth still ached dreadfully. I could officially add that to the list of reasons why my body was unhappy with me at the moment. That list included not just my jaw, but my arms and shoulders from being tied to a damn post, my ankle from twisting it after I’d fallen after taking a punch, and, of course, my ass because I had decided lube and not patience was the best way to get laid. Perhaps if I had known I was going to get attacked and bound, I might not have been so swift to make my ass hurt on top of everything else.
No, that wasn’t true.
Sighing, I leaned back and closed my eyes, trying to calm my thoughts. Of all the ways I expected the night to go, this was nowhere close to the top one hundred, let alone the top ten. I had only counted three men in black outfits, each with a rifle and a pistol on their hips. The one who had grounded Arlo had taken offense to my reaction and decided that, apparently, I wasn’t good enough for the butt of the gun and had decked me with his fist instead.
Now I was tied up snugly with zip ties in a storage room, my back pressed against what had to be a load-bearing pillar in themiddle of the godforsaken room. They had dragged Arlo in with me, but considering I couldn’t see behind me, I had zero idea if he was okay. My only solace was that I could hear his breathing in the silence between shouts coming from elsewhere in the house.
That didn’t answer the question of what was going on. There had been shouts and orders that I couldn’t make out, but no gunshots. If there had been, I wasn’t sure I would have been able to continue to sit there on the floor and listen to people being gunned down without losing my mind.
“Mmmf,” came from the darkness, and I sat up, eyes wide.
“Arlo?” I whispered into the dark. They had left us here, but they were bound to come back. Somehow, I had the feeling that gun-toting men willing to attack and tie us up probably wouldn’t be that patient about their captives talking.
“Ow,” came from the dark, and I heard the rustle of clothing and a slap against the hard floor. “W-why am I tied to...what is this?”
“I have no idea what you’re tied to,” I said with a sigh of relief. The asshole had hit him pretty hard, but he had woken up with enough brain cells intact to get a good understanding of the situation at least. “I’ve never been in this room before; it’s a storage room for the staff.”
“Shelving,” he said, and I heard him grunt. “Very heavy shelving. I can’t move it.”
“Yes, well, I’m sure my mother told them to order whatever when they were stocking this room, and they went for the shelving that would last the longest,” I said.
“I’m not sure blaming your mother for this is quite the right angle. It’s not as if one plans their supplies around the possibility of being tied to it.”
“Really? We’re going to defend her now?”
“Defend her for not planning for an event no one could predict? Yes. For being a nasty woman with an ugly combination of an inferiority complex and a superiority complex? Yes.”
“It’s nice to see your sense of humor is intact; that’s helpful right now.”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
“That makes it worse.”
Was this really the conversation we were going to have right now? God, when life got awful, the weirdest parts of ourselves had to go and assert themselves. I’m sure someone could explain why, but that person wasn’t me.
“Do we know what’s going on?” Arlo asked quietly. “My parents?”
“I don’t know,” I had to admit with a wince. “After you were knocked out, I reacted...poorly. I took a swing at the man who hit you and called him...what was it? Something like a pus-covered son of a whore. I’m not sure if it was the insinuation that he was covered in pus or the remark about his mother, but he took issue with it and showed me he was a far better fighter than I was. I took a fist to the jaw for my idiocy, and I was dragged in here and tied up. They tied you up afterward. There was some shouting, but no gunshots.”
“That at least is something,” he said, sounding like he was holding onto a thin thread of hope, and I couldn’t blame him. When you found yourself in a kidnapping or hostage situation, you took whatever victories you could get. “Is there any point in wondering what’s going on?”
