Saved by His Submissive (13 page)

“Wait!”

She didn’t alter her stride. She couldn’t—and wouldn’t—handle his chest-beating bullshit another second. How had she considered this stuff even kind of cute during the trip home, when he’d called her on the flirting act with Ethan, pulling rank so he could sit with her instead? She’d outright adored him for it once they got to Sea-Tac and the waiting ocean of media, especially when a lot of the reporters followed them to dinner with Mom, Rayna, and her friend’s small village of a family. Yes, she’d been grateful for his blistering glares and dictatorial orders then. They’d been
appropriate
then!

She looked down at the water and fumed deeper. There were still a few ripples left over from where she’d been lost in the first peaceful moment of the last four hundred thirty six days of her life. But they were fading fast. Way too fast.

“Sage. I said
wait.
”

She hated herself for stopping. The ire soaked the words she turned and spat at him. “Right. The same way you stopped and waited when walking out on me at the embassy?”

For a second, remorse flashed across his features. It got burned away the next second, as usual, by the overbearing jerk he pulled on more comfortably than those shorts. “
Damn it.
I’ve explained myself for that. I’ve eaten my hat with you for that. Don’t go piecing that one together on me again, sugar.”

Before she could help herself, she marched over and jammed a finger in his chest. “
Don’t
‘sugar’ me.”

“Fine. But you won’t leave the house again without telling me where you’re going.”

She jumped both her brows. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me, sug—” He jammed his lips together. “You heard me.”

Those last three syllables made Sage’s pulse freeze on a few beats. No, not the words. His inflection on them. Low. Anxious. Ominous. Sage raised her gaze and looked at him.
Really
looked. As she did, slivers of ice shot through her body. Holy crap. She’d been slammed so senseless by Garrett’s fury, she didn’t have time to breathe and remember one of the most basic psychology rules they were taught in Medical Department Basic. Anger was most often spawned by fear.

He wasn’t mad at her. He was afraid for her. From the staunch set of his shoulders to the pulse hammering in his throat, the truth of it came into glaring focus. He was terrified.

Sage pulled her hand back, but didn’t surrender her position. “What’s going on, Garrett?” she asked softly. “What are you not telling me?”

He turned his gaze back to the shore. That didn’t prevent her from watching more smoke drop over his eyes. “Just leave me a note the next time you go swimming.”

She blinked. Well, hell. So much for the whole attempt at understanding the ogre. His fist of a tone became a punch to her gut, twisting around everything there in a mix of dread, fury and frustration.

“Fine,” she spat back. “And I’ll eat my damn cauliflower too. Thanks, dad.”

It was more than a snarky comment, and they both knew it. The guy who’d contributed his sperm to create her hadn’t been around for her since a drunken rant after her tenth birthday party. She’d been through enough therapy since then to realize she’d likely never speak the word “dad” with affection in this lifetime. Garrett loved her anyway. At least he used to. She wasn’t so sure what he felt for her anymore.

Remarkably, her little bratty test made the slash of his mouth soften a little. He reached and palmed the back of her head, making her breath catch from the warmth it spread through her. When he pressed his lips to her forehead, she released the breath on a sappy sigh.

“You hate cauliflower,” he whispered.

His steps back up the dock were wide, heavy, and resigned.

Sage yanked the towel tighter as she watched him eat up the distance with his strides, letting an equally long thread of bittersweet emotion wind around her heart. A little smile curled her lips. He really remembered…even all the little stuff. And his whisper, given with such tenderness, told her that more than a few embers of his old self still burned inside his warrior’s shell.

Those sparks gave her hope. Maybe, if those cinders were mixed with the smokescreen he’d billowed to keep the whole world out, they could kindle into something new, some
one
new. A Garrett who was burned yet better. Different but stronger.

A man who could handle the woman
she’d
become.

She realigned her stance and held her head high. Okay, there was hope. Yeah, it was going to take more bratty moves, more pissing him off, and a lot more of staying one step ahead of him, especially to find out what had caused that new fear in his stare and that new coil of tension in his shoulders. But the hope was here. The hope was real.

As she let it fill her heart, she smiled and murmured, “Yeah, dork. You hate cauliflower too.” And as she followed him back up the dock, she deliberately set a slow, thoughtful pace. Plans like this took time and care, especially when it came to an attempt at changing the will of her intractable, adorable fiancé. And despite his every-move-you-make watchfulness, she found it funny that Garrett hadn’t grabbed a huge clue about their new reality. The last year had molded
her
will into an entity as formidable as his. She would
not
fail this mission, even if she damn-near killed herself in the process.

Chapter Nine

The woman was going to kill him.

If she didn’t take out her own gorgeous ass first.

Garrett shook his head with those thoughts as he got to Gray Airfield and slammed his Sierra hybrid into park. Had it really been only seven days since they’d gotten back from Bangkok? It felt like eight decades.

If murder
was
her intent, she was hell-bent on robbing him of his sanity first. And no, it didn’t matter that he’d deduced her little plan from the second she’d smiled coyly at Archer during the trip home. It was all pretty transparent, her grand scheme to keep him so busy “protecting her from
herself
” that he forgot his original monster act on her in Bangkok.

Right.

He would’ve laughed at the ludicrous track of her thinking if he weren’t so hideously aware of the bigger threat that shadowed her each day. Zeke made that official less than ten hours after the first time he’d called. One line of text was all it took to turn Garrett’s cautious trepidation into full-blown paranoia.

Bounty on S and R is at $50K each. Don’t leave her side. I’ve got Rayna. ~Z~

Garrett had taken the charge as serious as a mission order from the guy. From that night on, he left the den couch and sleeping bagged it on the bedroom floor instead. His ass and the dock got to be good friends during Sage’s morning swims. As for his chaperon duties during
any
of her off-condo excursions? There was actually an upside to that. He was developing some damn good skills for bodyguard work after he left Special Forces. He couldn’t imagine any spoiled Seattle heiress or Hollywood starlet jacking his blood pressure the way Sage had the last week.

At first, her antics were mildly amusing. Day one, she’d announced she wanted a tattoo. Aside from helping her with the pain by getting her hammered at Scotch & Vine afterward, that went surprisingly well. Days two and three, she’d subjected him to nonstop trips to six different malls, where he contemplated a few water boarding sessions against holding her bags and following her through every store. Just when he thought the torment couldn’t get worse, she announced she was going back to the custom lingerie boutique for a fitting on new bras.
It’s okay,
she’d told the attendant,
he’s my fiancé. He can watch.
When he’d been able to break away from the torment of watching someone else play with her breasts for half an hour, he impaled the minx with a glare that told her payback was a bitch—and somehow, he
would
make sure that was the case.

Day four didn’t bring him the chance. Nor did day five. She’d learned there was a two-day emergency preparedness drill going on at Tacoma General, and she wanted to help by being a fake disaster victim on which the hospital’s staff could practice. Garrett had grudgingly agreed to the choice, figuring King’s street spies would never think to look for her under wound makeup at a major city medical center, though the drill wasn’t the simple role play he’d expected, either. She’d “left out” the part that she’d be constantly sped into and out of the ER, jostled onto stretchers, dropped
from
stretchers, gotten her limbs twisted and banged in a variety of ways, and the rest of her body jabbed in ways that had Garrett rearing off the wall a few times to remind the bozos they were working on an actual person, not their personal version of Fix-Me Barbie.

He’d gone to bed that night in a fuming silence. His voice came back with thundering resonance the next morning. He’d been tugged awake by the sound of Sage talking on the phone, in the process of agreeing to a forty minute interview at the KOMO 4 station that afternoon. By the time he barreled downstairs, demanding she tell the fuckers no joy, she’d already confirmed the interview time and hung up. He picked up the headset to call the station back, but Sage stood there with folded arms and a tight glare, made worse by a backdrop of unshed tears.

The shitty thing was, he knew exactly what caused those tears. She didn’t give a crap about the interview, but his unexplained tension was clearly eating at her. If he canceled the interview, she’d demand some answers, drill at him for explanations. That was so
not
going to happen—so the interview would.

He’d stormed back upstairs and called Zeke, who relayed that Rayna received the same call and had pulled the sulk on him, as well. They’d both shown up to the station and tried to comfort each other with the “let’s hide the targets in plain sight” logic, but it didn’t prevent the afternoon from being one of the longest of his life. While the girls had fun, and the phone lines were jammed with Seattlites clamoring to welcome their miracle nurses home, he and Z tried to keep vigil over the fifteen semi-secure entrances into the building. He remembered missions in Bumfuck, Egypt that had been less stressful.

Today’s little “Sage adventure” was going to be worse.

If he didn’t kill her first.

He locked the truck with a flick of the fob over his shoulder. As he stuffed his keys into his backpack, his cell rang. When he saw it was Z, a fusion of dread and relief hit him. He could almost predict what Zeke’s opening comment would be in response to the frantic text he’d fired off before driving here, but his chest already felt lighter knowing one other person on the planet understood the agony assaulting him right now.

He leaned against the outside wall of the hangar then pressed his wireless earpiece to answer the call on the third ring. Zeke’s roar filled the line as soon as the line activated.

“Is she fucking nuts?”

Garrett grimaced as he glanced up. On the tarmac forty yards away, a DHC-6 Twin Otter was getting checked out, fueled up, and loaded. Several guys in nylon parachute suits strode out to the plane with pre-checked jump packs. “Apparently, that answer would be yes.”

As he spoke, he swept his stare around the rest of the area.
Goddamnit.
The Fort Lewis airfield backed right up to several of the McChord Air Force Base tarmacs, making this area one giant snatch-and-go opportunity for any of King’s minions who still knew the base and could get around the security gates in their sleep.

“How the hell did she slip out on you?”

“I took a shower,” he responded. “So sue me.” Hell, he felt like doing much worse than that to himself already. “I thought it was okay. I left her on the couch, half-dozing under a blanket and watching a
Friends
marathon.”

Z made a gagging sound. “
Friends.
Shit.”

“Uh, yeah. Needless to say, she knew I’d linger in the rain locker.”

“And the second you were under the spray, she left.” His friend blew out a harsh but sympathetic breath. “But she left a note too? I don’t get it.”

Even forming the answer to that made Garrett’s gut feel like a chunk of the concrete under his boots. “The note told me nothing except she was safe and not to worry.”

“Huh?”

“The first ten pages of the Airborne Jump School study guide, dropped in the middle of the driveway, told me something different.”

His buddy chuffed. “Somebody was in a hurry to get into somebody else’s car.”

“Yep.” He emphasized the last of it with a pop of fury.

“And something tells me you know who volunteered for shuttle service.”

“Ditto on
that
affirmative.” It was all he had to say. He knew Z would figure out the rest. He could practically hear the gears of the guy’s mind at work over the phone.

“Yo, Hawk?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t kill Archer.”

“Is that an absolute order?”

“He knows four languages, and he’s one of the best heads on the team for negotiating.”