Page 32 of Dominated

If they wanted in—and they did—they would get to her.

That put me in a precarious situation.

And the one rule I had, the one that had stayed with me since my very first job, was that once I was gone, I never looked back.

But—fuck me—that sight was one I missed.

SEVEN

Pepper

Iknew Bale wasn’t coming back. I knew, in my gut, I would never see him again. What I couldn’t explain was the pain that realization caused.

Why was I still missing him when I felt so duped?

Why did it hurt to breathe?

Why didn’t it get easier with each day that passed?

Because it should. Time was supposed to heal, but all it did was make me miss him more. Make me wonder if it had really been one-sided. Make me question if every word he’d said was a lie.

I believed the attraction.

The chemistry.

The desire for more.

And if it had been as strong on his end, then why wasn’t he here? Why hadn’t he reached out? Why had he let three weeks pass without so much as a whisper?

I looked for him everywhere.

In my home whenever I entered.

In my driveway when I left.

At the restaurants I ate at.

Along the path where I ran.

Even at Lush—although his presence would be known the second he stepped inside and security took his handprint, and then an alert would come through on my devices.

One of the first things I’d done after I returned from Jacob’s home was flag his account. Whether he came to LA or the Miami location, I would know.

That notification was the only thing I could control.

Everything else was completely in his court.

And as the hours passed, turning into days, I felt less hopeful that I would ever hear Bale’s voice again.

Surely, if there had been feelings on his end, he wouldn’t have waited this long. He would have made some type of effort. He would have attempted to justify why he’d vanished and left me stranded at Jacob’s.

But, alas, there was only silence.

And just like Scarlett had assumed, Jacob had no idea who Bale Pierce was.

All he knew was that Thursday evening, the day before he was supposed to meet me for our weekly session, he had gone to a bar in South Beach. The next thing he could recall was waking up in a hotel room in San Francisco. He didn’t know how he’d crossed to the other side of the country. Or why, when he finally opened his eyes, he didn’t have his phone or wallet.

He also didn’t know I had been in his house—a fact I decided to withhold as his voice turned panicky when he retold the details of what had happened to him.

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