Saved by His Submissive (22 page)

Garrett snorted. This still felt like some strange fourth dimension, where nothing was real. “So…what happened then? You just took her to the barn one night and—”

 “Shit, no. There were conversations. Lots of them. I had to be convinced I had my real wife, remember?” A soft chuckle vibrated the man. “But I’ll never forget the first night that beautiful woman kneeled at my feet and surrendered herself fully to me. It was a gift, Garrett. A treasure for which I’m grateful every day.”

They were words for a song lyric. That was all great and dandy. But nobody was paging Springsteen here. Wasn’t Wyatt leaving out a huge chunk of the debrief? Garrett shifted restlessly. “Okay, that’s fine and fantastic—for
you
. But what about her? What does Josie get out of all this? Is she really doing this and—”

“Enjoying it?” Wyatt laughed with heartier emphasis. “Ohhh, yeah.” He sobered fast before tilting a long look at Garrett. “Think about it for a second, would you? Wrap your head around what a soldier’s woman has to go through. When the plumbing busts, we’re not there. When there’s a scary noise at night, we’re not there. And during the shittiest times, when the hormones rage, we’re still not there. Now multiply that by months, by years. When you ask her to hand over everything to you, you’re offering to set her free from all that crap, if only for a little while. The decisions are suddenly not hers to make. The control is gone. The pressure is gone. And she feels completely safe about letting it go, because the man she loves is the one who’s taking care of it.”

Garrett pushed back his hair again. He stared at the fire, wondering if the flames had sprouted an invisible fire bolt and thrown it into his brain.

“Shit,” he blurted. “Holy shit.”

The pictures Wyatt had just painted were the frustrations of a regular battalion wife. But Sage was no normal anything. It was why he’d fallen in love with her inside a month. It was why he’d gotten his ring on her finger as fast as he could. It was why his soul had never truly believed she’d died—and true to her no-normal self, she’d proved him totally right. But in doing that, had he ceased to see her as a real woman, with real passions, fears, insecurities? When she’d begged him to control her, had his soul insisted on worshipping her instead of loving her, of meeting her deepest needs? He’d practiced plenty in the art of pedestal-building, hadn’t he?

She’d needed him. Really needed him.

And he’d just kept pushing her away.

Why hadn’t he seen it that way before?

A breath fell out him that felt like a boulder. Like it did any good. Another stone rolled into place behind it, lodging itself at the base of his throat. “I’ve been such an ass.”

Wyatt huffed. “Oh, hell. Cut yourself some slack, you cocky whelp. You don’t have all the answers.” He flashed a grin Garrett hadn’t seen on his face in over ten years. “That’s my job.”

Garrett smiled back. It felt good; damn good. He was suddenly soaring at ten thousand feet over the earth again, with his pulse pounding like he were about to toss his ass out of a plane. But this time, he didn’t have a parachute, nor did he need one. He had wings of revelation. Wings that would carry Sage and him into a future full of illicit, incredible possibilities.

Fuck. How was he going to keep his hands off her during this impromptu dinner party?

He indulged an inner smirk as he answered himself.

He wasn’t taming himself at all. He was going to drag her naughty little ass upstairs, lock them both into the master bathroom, strip her naked from the bottom down and order her to bite back her screams as he drove into her with every full, throbbing inch of his cock. And she’d control those shrieks while he described every detail of every punishment he planned on meting out for her trip to downtown without his consent.

He shifted in his seat with a grunt and tried to relax by looking at the lake. The only thing he could think was how dark the waters had gotten now—and how his balls were an even deeper shade of blue.

He snatched up his phone, getting ready to punch in Zeke’s number. How long could a stupid wine sampling take?

Perfect timing. The device rang with an incoming call from Z himself. Garrett jabbed a thumb at the green key.

“Did you forget the access code to our gate again, man?”

Zeke’s response sounded distracted. “Wh-what?”

“The gate. It has a code, remember? The code you never remember, assface?”

The zinger he expected in return from Z never came. In its place were words in a tone he’d heard so rarely from his friend, he could count the occasions on one hand. It was chilled. Choked. Afraid.

“Hawk.” A rough sigh grated across the line. “Garrett. Fuck. You’d better—”

The guy just stopped, like he couldn’t go on.

“What?” Garrett barked. “I’d better what, damn it? Zeke, what the hell—”

“Just get your ass in the car, and get down here.” A tormented growl ripped out of him. “Aaaggh! God, I can’t fucking believe this!”

“Z. You’re not making sense.” But the second the words spilled from him, instinct clicked into place. A damn few things could do this to Zeke. Losing at hockey. Losing a guy on the team. Losing
anyone
he cared for. Like a certain dark redhead with whom he’d spent nearly every hour of the last ten days.

“Shit,” he muttered. “
Shit.
”

“I only turned for a second. One of those fuckhead fake cops asked me a question, and when I turned, the other one had three goons with him. They were already throwing Rayna into a van.” His growl escalated into a snarl. “Goddamnit!”

“What about Josie? Did she observe anything?” He fired off the questions as mandates while shutting off the fire pit then whirling back toward the condo. Wyatt followed, his attention officially engaged the second
his
woman’s name was mentioned. “And what do you mean, ‘fake cop?’”

“I mean just that. The bastards were planted there. Goddamnit, there’s no end to the toilets King can send his shit up around here!”

“That doesn’t add up. He didn’t know Sage was going to end up at Pike Place today.”

His friend let out a leaden sigh. “Rayna and I made plans for
our
trip yesterday.”

That
added up. “Fuck.”

“Yeah. That about says it all.”

A cobra of terror slithered its way through his chest and sank fangs into the base of his wind pipe. Garrett paced into the kitchen and slammed his fist into a cupboard, answered with the din of shattering glasses from inside. He forced himself to breathe. He forced himself to
think.
He wasn’t standing here with Sage’s death certificate in his hand again. They had hope. It was only a thread, but he’d take it.

“Josie,” he gritted again. His aunt had a damn good head on her shoulders. Maybe she remembered something vital. “You’ve questioned her, right? What’d she say?”
Wyatt braced himself to the other side of the counter. “Questioned her about what? What the hell is going on?”

“Hawk…she’s gone too.”

He turned from his uncle. “Shit.”

“Garrett, don’t you dare turn your back on me! What’s—”

He silenced his uncle with an upstretched fist. “What’s your twenty?” he demanded of Zeke. After committing the cross streets to memory, he barked, “On our way.”

After punching the line shut, he swung his attention to Wyatt. The man’s face had hard angles that could’ve formed the fifth profile on Mount Rushmore. He hadn’t seen the look since Wyatt got back from his last tour in Iraq, and he hated being the one to evoke it again.

Remorse wasn’t going to serve either of them right now.

“Are you carrying?” he asked his uncle.

“Does a pig blow mud for snot?”

Garrett nodded. “Grab your heat. I’ll fire up the truck. We’re on full ready mode as of
now.
”

“Are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on?”

“Yeah. On the way.”
When you won’t be so tempted to choke me to death as you think of your wife on a barge headed for Thailand.

Chapter Fourteen

“Well, we could do worse for accommodations.”

Josie was giving the situation her best, including little quips like that. Sage tried to give the woman at least half a smile, especially because Josie had spoken the truth. She peered around again. The space was nearly as big as the backstage of King’s Thailand hut, only the floor swayed beneath them and she could hear the faint horns of the Bainbridge Island ferry boats. The single light they’d been given was attached to a polished teak hull, and they’d been thrown onto a plush bed with satin pillows. She guessed they were on one of the luxury yachts that were moored at the private marina north of the city.

But being surrounded by a music video fantasy didn’t make her feel like dancing. That could have something to do with the dread. It returned like a creepy ex-boyfriend—wielding a knife and a shotgun. Though she fought to hit the off button on her memory, the damn thing returned to that wrenching moment in the Market, when she realized their fun girls’ field trip had suddenly taken a wrong turn. She’d seen their fate written on the face of the cop who stepped in between Josie and Zeke. Within a second, he’d gone from friendly to feral, a hunter with his prize meat in range. She’d barely been surprised by the hand slapping the duct tape on her mouth, the grip that nearly yanked her shoulders from their sockets, or the body slam that took her from the afternoon sunshine into the dank gloom of a van.

That was when the hard part had begun. Again. The wild wondering of what had just happened. The pounding terror of predicting what would happen next. The enraging silence of the two men who watched over them with aimed pistols, and the third who sped the van through traffic with fluid expertise, no doubt experienced at the art of the getaway.

She bent her head back into the pillows, wishing the thoughts would tumble out the back of her head. The only thing that toppled was her equilibrium, thanks to the pitch of the boat and the aftereffects of the wine she’d “sampled.” But the moment also brought clarity. She winced from the blinding force of it. All of Garrett’s guard dog behavior—the paranoia, the monitoring, the needing to know her every sneeze and step—made sense now. He’d felt, probably even known, that throwing King into a jail cell anywhere in Thailand was going to be a temporary fix. She’d been held by the monster long enough to see how far his money flowed, what kind of people it turned into dancing monkeys for him.

A hard snort escaped her. Shit. It all made sense now. She should have put the pieces together long ago. She should have realized all Garrett’s freak-outs weren’t normal. But their absence from each other had stripped her baseline for clear judgment. He hadn’t been such an ogre before Botswana. A growling grouch from time to time, but not a creature who snarled when she so much as hinted of taking a morning jog on her own. But she never questioned the ogre. She’d figured it was just part of how the last year had morphed him, the same way it had changed her. All the fear in his eyes…she’d yearned to douse it, not deal with it. For nearly fourteen months, she’d lived with more fear in her belly than food. Now that she was home, she’d only yearned to leave all the terror, desperation, uncertainty and ugliness behind. She’d longed to return to reality, and finally be free of the nightmare.

A serrated breath tore apart her throat. Return to reality? That was where she’d slipped on life’s big fat banana peel, wasn’t it? And life was sitting nearby, sipping a mai tai, laughing its ass off at her.

The nightmare
was
the reality.

She squeezed her eyes shut, unable to hold off the attack of the words, worsened by their leaden truth. In the darkness that encased her vision, she embraced a place where she could be free again. She knew that place before it even formed fully in her imagination. She could feel the deep shag of the rug under her knees when she dipped there, offering herself to Garrett. She could feel the response of his body, all its hard striations above her and against her, a refuge that would let her be simply woman again. Simply his again.

A dream that was never to be.

She ripped her teeth into her lip until the pain prevented her from shedding a single tear. These shitheads weren’t getting a drop of her weakness or an ounce of her fear. She dug deep, lowering a mental bucket down her well of resolve, and praying there was enough to get her through the trip to Thailand. She’d worry about getting more after that.

Especially because it seemed Rayna was going to need a loan.

Her friend’s ragged sob tore the air. Rayna was scrunched against the wall with her head between her knees. Her shoulders formed a horseshoe of taut agony. Sage’s heart wrenched as Ray choked. The two of them had shared enough tears over the last year to fill this bay thrice over, but this was the first time her friend’s grief sounded like this, coming in bursts of unfiltered pain. Even Josie winced from it. Every woman on the planet knew the discord of a breaking heart when she heard it.

“Sweetie.” Josie stretched her bound hands over, trying to stroke her hair. “It’s all right.”