Handcuffed by Her Hero (30 page)

The sobs hit her as fast as the
comprehension did.

Zeke pulled out the second her
shoulders started shaking. As soon as her mouth was empty, she erupted with high
cries of astonishment and amazement. She drenched his chest as he hauled her up
into his lap in a swift sweep, wrapping her in the lap blanket as she began to
shiver. He didn’t say a word. His hold was complete yet gentle, as possessive
as it was ten minutes ago, absorbing every shaking sob and pitiful blubber.

When she finally collapsed her
head against his shoulder, Zeke spoke. His voice was as soft as the caresses
her gave her shoulder with the back of his hand. “You want to talk about it?”

She felt like punching him—before
telling him to stop reading every need she had before she knew it existed.
Instead, she curled her knees up and burrowed close as fresh tears plagued her
eyes.

“I’m…a submissive.”

The confession was as terrifying
as she thought it would be. This wasn’t like admitting she didn’t like
shellfish, or only flossed every other day, or liked masturbating in the
shower. This was a huge damn door being opened in her soul, never to be closed
again. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping to find the Close button again. Yet
praying she never would.

Zeke turned his hand over and
closed it around the top of her arm. “Yeah,” he murmured, “you sure as fuck are.”

She held her breath at that and
wished she didn’t know the reason why. More ominously, she wished that moment wasn’t
the one in which she’d predict exactly what
he’d
say.

“I can’t be your Dom, Ray-bird.”

His embrace suddenly felt like
bricks. The same ones that crashed on top of her heart.

She rose, clutching the blanket
with her. Confusion declared mutiny on her logic. Pain hit the override lever
on her brain—and the thousands of things it told her about why Zeke was trying
to speak his truth in as diplomatic a manner as he could.

Gazing at him now, gloriously
naked and freshly satisfied
by her
, didn’t put her in the mood for
diplomacy.

“Is that so?” She flashed a grim
smile while tilting her head. “All right, then. Can you explain what you’ve
been doing for the last three days, if you not being my Dom?”

His face, full of firm resolve,
didn’t change as he rose. “The last three days have been incredible, but
they’ve been a dream. This isn’t reality. You know it as well as I do,
Ray-bird. We can’t stay up on this mountain forever, and we sure as hell can’t
throw it on a trailer and drag it back to Tacoma.”

The bricks in her heart started
pounding together, pulverizing everything as they went. She spun from him. “Why
not?” She hated the pitiful pitch in her voice. She hated him even more for
causing it.
You rescued me from the dead. How hard can it be to move a damn
mountain?

His long sigh weighted the air. “Because
you’ll hate me even more than you do right now. Not tomorrow, probably not next
week, but if we even attempt this thing long-term, I’ll fuck it up. I’ll fuck
you
up. It won’t be pretty, and—”

“Pretty?” She whirled back around.
“Seriously? You think I want
pretty
, Zeke?” She advanced and stabbed a
finger into his chest. “You think I even remember what pretty is after what
King did to me, and what Mua is still trying to do to me?”

He wrapped her hand inside both his
own. “I think you deserve a man, a Master, who’s going to give you everything
your heart desires and everything your soul needs.” Before he spoke again, he
dropped a soft kiss onto her knuckles. “I can’t be that man, honey.”

He pushed back from her with a
violent growl. “I fucking hate saying this to you. I hate being the one
standing here and telling you that I’ve tried already, okay? I tried the whole
goddamn D/s dream on, and I burned it to shreds. Badly. I’m not going to do it
again. I fucking refuse to send you up in flames.” Her chest roiled as their
stares locked. His eyes, usually adoring her or laughing with her or desiring
her, were now filled with nothing but ashen sorrow. “Not you, Rayna. Not. You.”

“Damn it,” she rasped. “Do you
think we’re that flammable, Z? Do you think
I
am?”

That put his jaw on full
lockdown. He swallowed hard. “Sit down.”

“What?”

He pointed at the bed. “There.
Now. Sit.”

She really,
really
wanted
to defy him. The twisted torment on his face canceled every viable reason to do
so. Gathering the blanket tighter to her chest, she lowered to the edge of the
bed.

Z braced his hands to his hips
and sucked in a deep breath.

“Her name was Marie,” he finally
said. “She was a hell of a lot like you, Ray-bird. Beautiful. Kind. She was a
vet’s assistant…she always had a dog or two around that she’d saved from
euthanasia the night before. We met at a kink party down in Portland. After a
year, I figured…maybe things could be good. I gave her a lifestyle name. Treasure.
I had a collar made for her, inlaid with rubies. She moved up here for me.” He took
a determined step back in front of her. “You getting the picture now? We were
unshakable, Rayna.” A sad smile moved across his lips. “We were flameproof.”

She threaded her fingers into his
and gently pulled. Once he sat beside her, she took in every inch of his
beautiful, formidable face before forcing out her question. “What happened?”

 He pulled her grip out of his,
digit by digit. With unwavering purpose, he flattened them all against his
chest. “We didn’t leave all the ugliness behind us in the city, bird. A shit
ton of it came up with us. It’s right here, beating in what’s left of this
heart. It’s bloody and it’s crappy and it doesn’t get better, because that’s
what happens when your soul is sliced open at the age of eight, watching them
bring home your dad in pieces from Somalia.”

Her breath clutched. Somalia,
roughly twenty years ago…
Shit, no.

“Mogadishu?” she whispered.

His lips twisted. “Ding, ding,
ding. Give the girl a golden trophy. The glaring military mistake that everyone
up top wanted to sweep under the rug, including the families who had no
husbands or fathers anymore. They tried some great parting gifts on us all, of
course. I got to keep dad’s medals. Mom got a great gift out of the deal, too.
A newfound craving for vodka.”

She moved her fingers to his neck
and squeezed, trying to show him how sharply his disclosure moved her. “Oh,
Zeke. Oh, yuck.”

“That’s not where my vocabulary
was going, but sure,
yuck
will do.” He left her and paced to the window.
His steps deepened his confession in their tight restraint. “After a year, she
decided she was actually quite fond of that little perk. She wasn’t home a lot
but it didn’t matter. When she
was
home, she wasn’t the person I knew as
my mom.

“On my ninth birthday, I had a
delicious dinner of Spam on saltine crackers followed by a friendly visit from
Child Protective Services. Mom had decided to go to bingo night and took her
own ‘beverages’ to the party.
They
decided that foster care was the
better route for me—but the trouble was, I’d had a preview of what that foster shit
did to a kid. His name was Kier Montague, and he’d beat the crap out of a
couple of first graders the day before. And as we both know, he ended up on the
streets, anyway. I decided to cut to the chase. I’d already packed a bag for
the contingency. Birth certificate, some cash, a couple of bags of Skittles, an
easy shimmy out the bathroom window, and I was gone.”

“Just like that?” She frowned.
“Didn’t you ever try to go back, to see if your mom—”

“I went back every night for a
year.” He slammed a fist to the window frame. His silhouette looked like a
furious Michelangelo nude cut and pasted against an Ansel Adams slide. “I
scrubbed the house from top to bottom, wanting it to be perfect for her when
she decided she wanted to come home and be a family again.”

Rayna dropped both hands to her
stomach and clenched them. She hated what she said next, especially because she
sensed it was the truth. “But she didn’t.”

Zeke shrugged. “I don’t know. The
city put the house up for sale, citing abandonment by the owner. After the sign
went up, they locked it up like the goddamn White House.” He turned and stared
at her with finality. “I was on my own.”

He turned back. Her stare fell to
the ink across his lower abdomen with new understanding. “That’s what your
tattoos mean,” she murmured. “Those are tear drops.”

“One for every year between the
day I left and the day I enlisted.”

Rayna swallowed hard. Her chin
started to tremble. The bricks had stopped trying to macerate her heart. They
were a pile of useless chunks now, shoved into the corner next to her soul so
she could finally see through the dust—at Z’s pile, too.

“And you’ve been gone ever
since.” It was a revelation, not an accusation, though Z’s glower told her
otherwise. “You really haven’t stopped running, Zeke, have you? Because the
only time you tried, you couldn’t deal with what it made you feel about that
woman. You couldn’t deal with feeling for a woman at all because of the last
one you ever felt anything for.”

He didn’t reply until he’d
crossed back over to the dresser, not sparing her a single glance in the
movement. “I’m fine with feelings, bird. It’s commitment I’ve got issues with,
remember?”

A messy laugh sputtered off her
lips. She raised a finger high. “Taxi? You got room for one party of seriously
confused?”

He pulled out a pair of sweats
with the letters A-R-M-Y down the leg and jammed his legs into them. “I’m going
to let that pass because you’re angry.”

“How about answering to it because
I’m right?”

He wheeled back toward her. His
stance was menacing, his hair wild as he dragged his hand through the unruly
waves. “You calling me an unfeeling bastard, Rayna? I have news for you. I feel
just fine, goddamnit. I have eleven guys who depend on me to have feelings and
act on them when necessary. Their lives and mine depend on it.”

She didn’t blink as she returned
his glare with a slow nod. “I know,” she said. And she did. In the revelations
he’d given her, she was able to connect more back to his finality about pushing
her away now. More than she wanted to. More than her heart might be able to
handle.

“Thank fuck for the day job, huh
Z?” she went on. “No wonder you’re really good at it. Makes a nice little
paint-by-numbers for the emotions. Take loyalty and brush it here. Anger is
best dabbed there, there, and there. Fear? It belongs right there. Joy waits to
get put there. Perfect and neat. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody goes home in pieces
in a casket. Nobody goes to bingo night and never comes home again.”

He cinched the sweats in with
harsh jerks. Every lurch of the movements told her she’d come close to, if not
spot on, the truth. She hated that surety because it put the emotional stick in
her hand for poking the puma in the hardest way.

“That’s why things were good with
Marie, too—for a long while. In many ways, BDSM is a neat box of its own,
right? Even during the short time I was at the Bastille, I saw that. There’s a
code. Manners. Ways of doing things, clear-cut sets of actions and emotions. A
plan.”

That yanked up his head. He
returned his hands to his hips, too, doubling his daunting factor again despite
the bed head and the sweats. “You think
that’s
why I’m in the lifestyle?
Why I’m committed to making it better? Why I’ve mentored people in it?” His
glower narrowed. “Because of boxes and plans?”

“I think it meets many needs in
you,” she replied, “the same way Marie did. You wouldn’t have called her Treasure
if she didn’t. But once the relationship expanded outside the dungeon and you
couldn’t predict every shot, things got scary. Maybe your heart started to
open.” When a pulse jumped violently in his jaw, she affirmed, “Oh, yeah. It
opened a lot.”

The other side of his jaw ticked.
He cocked his head. “Should I cue the Coldplay ballad now? You going to wrap
this up by saying how I took a chance with Marie anyhow and opened myself up, but
then she shattered me by running just like Mom? You going to sob about how I’ve
roamed the world a broken man, vowing never to expose myself like that again?”

She shook her head with sad
surety. “No, Z.”

He dropped his hands, though
continued to flex them as if stretching out tension. “Good.”

“Good? Well, that’s a subjective
term, isn’t it?” When he answered her rhetoric with carefully cocked brows, she
continued, “Broken isn’t your style, Hayes. Broken means that at some point,
you lost control.” She didn’t avert her gaze from him. “Which means that this
one ended with you putting Marie on a plane back to Portland, promising you’d
call  the next time you were in town—and how you’ve made it a point not to be
back in Portland since.”

His fingers froze at his
sides…silent confirmation of everything she’d just spoken. Which made her next
words complete agony to utter.

“Guess that leads me to the logical
conclusion here.” She dropped her head, kicking at the carpet. “My own time on
the magical Master Z timer is just about expired, isn’t it?”