Page 2 of What About Love

But they couldn’t let down their guard. There were still a lot of loose ends, like power hungry low-level cartel members interested in moving up and making their mark, and Angie’s shooter, Richard Stapleton. With warrants out for him statewide, the bastard was in the wind.

He shifted, his attention returning to the feisty police detective who had, in short order, gotten under his skin. He wasn’t sure why. She swore she wasn’t submissive and claimed to be as vanilla as they come. Yet he saw shades of something else buried deep. Curvy, easy on the eye, with long legs that went on for days, all of which he liked, Angie was nothing like his usual type. He was drawn to sexually adventurous yet submissive women, willing to try whatever he wanted: toys, bondage, erotic pain, ménage, or group play.

The running joke at the club among the submissives—although none had ever dared say it to his face—was that Master T was try-sexual, willing to try anything. He saw nothing wrong with that, always pleasing his partner, or partners, and making it clear from the beginning that he was in it for the play, nothing more.

His friends, all older than him, used to be the same way. Topping a bevy of different subs, pushing the limits of BDSM, especially in the more daring clubs in Europe when they’d been on leave. In the past few years, however, they’d turned monogamous—or what he called monotonous—and possessive, ready to kick the ass of any dom who dared give their sub’s a second look.

He got that. If he had a steady woman, he’d be protective, too. That’s why he usually limited his one-on-one encounters to a single night, or engaged in threesomes and group play with committed couples. There was no risk of attachment that way, no commitment, no strings or ties, no matter how silken they might be. He planned to keep it that way, too.

A soft groan from the bed drew him instantly to her side.

Hazy green-flecked brown eyes blinked up at him. Her voice was a barely audible rasp when she said one shaky word. “Hurts.”

“I know, darlin’,” T murmured as he leaned over her, stroking her hair back from her forehead. He wanted to take the pain away and see her back to her usual vibrant self. “Try to lie still. The nurse will be back in a minute and we’ll ask her about something for pain.”

Clearly puzzled, her brows knitted together, and she glanced around. “Where?” she croaked. “How?”

“You were injured at the courthouse. Don’t you remember?”

Her eyes flew wide and shifted to him. “T. My god! It was Stapleton. He stabbed me.” She tried to sit up but fell back, hissing as her hand pressed against the bulky bandage over the knife wound in her side.

“Easy, darlin’. Lie still or you’ll hurt yourself further.” He turned to Sean and demanded, “Go see what’s keeping the nurse.”

His friend nodded though he was already on the move to the door.

The few words she uttered and the movement, or maybe it was the pain, seemed too much for her and she quickly faded. Right before she drifted away, she murmured in words almost too soft to make out, “You and Sean, you saved me. I remember...”

T would never forget holding her hand in the ambulance when her heart stopped, pressing the wad of blood-soaked gauze to her gushing wound as Sean started CPR, or being pushed aside as the emergency room personnel took over. They wheeled her into a trauma room while listening to Sean, who was still doing chest compressions, recap her status. The images, sounds, and smells of that awful time were all imprinted on his brain permanently.

There was something else etched in his mind and emblazoned on his heart from that day.

“Now I’ll never know what it would have been like to love you.”

Angie's heartfelt words, filled with such depth of emotion as if she knew they were her last, tugged at his icy heart. What made it worse, she was right. She wouldn’t ever get the chance to know, even when she recovered, because he couldn’t go there with her.

The nurse returned with a young guy—mid-twenties—a kid even to him. “This is Dr. Yantz.”

“Your friend said she woke and recognized you. And, that she spoke,” the scrub-wearing, Doogie Howser look-alike asked.

“Yeah, she said she’s in pain.”

“Excellent,” he murmured, putting his stethoscope in his ears.

“Her agony is a good thing?” T exclaimed. Were all the medical personnel around her sadists?

“No,” the doctor said, his gaze meeting his. “It means her brain is working.”

Relief, more profound than he’d felt in longer than he could remember, swept through him. As the doctor and nurse examined Angie, he backed up and gave them room. He also started distancing himself more than physically.

He and Angie Hixson would never work. She was interested in more than merely playing with him. She wanted the total package: a husband, 2.5 kids, a big dog, a house with a huge grassy yard, and the requisite white picket fence. That was for Angie and his friends, not him. Not after...

He shook off the bitter memories that gnawed at his psyche like a festering wound. The past would stay in the past, and Angie would need to stay at arm’s length. Opening his heart had nearly destroyed him the first time, and he’d sworn to let no one get that close again.

When the doctor and nurse left, T approached the sleeping woman. “I’m glad you’re still with us, baby.” Leaning forward, he pressed his lips to her forehead. “You deserve to live and laugh and love, and to get your happily ever after. But it won’t be with me. This is goodbye. You’ll have to find someone who can love you a helluva lot better than I can.”

With one last caress—the backs of his fingers brushing down her cheek, his forefinger tracing along her jawline and over the fullness of her lips—and one final lingering look, he said goodbye, ignoring Sean’s call and the pain in his gut as he walked away.