How could he have thought he’d really be able to go through with this against Erin’s will? It was madness. What’s more, it was cruel. No matter what Erin had done, no matter how she’d made him feel, he was supposed to be better than this. At least, that’s what he’d always told himself.
Now…he wasn’t so sure.
Right now, he was behaving more like every piece of shit foster father he’d ever had than he’d imagined possible. If he looked in the mirror right now, he knew he’d see darkness in his own eyes. Darkness he’d seen in the men who had beat him, the men who’d starved their own biological kids to pay for beer, the men who had hit their wives and terrorized their families. He’d once watched his first foster dad chain a seven-year-old girl in a doghouse for the night because she’d taken the change from the couch cushions to buy candy.
That night, as ten-year-old Blake had listened to his foster sister cry and beg for someone to come get her, he had vowed he would never hurt anyone the way he’d watched so many people be hurt. He’d sworn he would be the type of man who helped people, who made their lives better.
But now he was standing above a woman he’d forcibly bound to a bed, listening to her cry.
At that moment, something inside him snapped.
He had to stop this. Now.
Before he hurt Erin any more than he already had, and before he committed an act of violence that would haunt him forever.
CHAPTER TWO
Erin
“I’m sorry, Erin. Please, don’t cry.” Blake flipped off the tattoo machine and stripped his gloves off with two angry motions. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I never should have started this fucking crazy shit.”
Erin felt him working to untie the ropes at her feet, but even knowing she was soon going to be free didn’t help stop the tears. If anything, it made them worse. She was crying so hard her entire body ached and her chest felt like it would implode at any second.
The sobs echoing through the room didn’t even sound like hers. She sounded like a wounded animal, a creature that had been caged for too long.
All the pain of the past three years, all the fear and anger and despair, hit like a physical blow. It was as if Blake’s tattoo needle had torn a hole in her heart and everything she’d held inside was spilling out all at once.
“Please, babe. Please, I’m sorry,” Blake whispered into her hair as he worked the key into the cuffs on her wrists. “I’m sorry.”
Erin wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault, at least not all of it. His betrayal was the cherry on top of a shit sundae of hurt. She wanted to tell him that it was okay, that he’d stopped in time and she wasn’t as angry as she’d been before. She wanted to say it wasn’t the tattoo modification, but the lack of respect for her free will that had finally pushed her into a meltdown.
But she couldn’t stop crying long enough to say anything.
So she did the only other thing that felt right. As soon as her arms were free, she rolled onto her back and reached for him, holding both arms out like Abby did when she wanted to be picked up. She was still crying and could feel her nose beginning to leak, but for once she didn’t worry about what kind of face she was putting on for the man in her bed. She just needed Blake to know she cared about him, no matter how insane the past few hours had been. She just wanted him to hold her, to wrap her in his strong arms, and tell her everything was going to be okay, even if it was a lie.
“Erin.” All he said was her name, but she saw the shine in his eyes before he pulled her close, crushing her against his chest.
He loved her. He really did.
The thought made her sob harder, more tears pouring out to soak his sweater.
God, this was so fucked up. Blake was insanely fixated on their matching tattoos, thought she was a criminal, had kidnapped her—twice—and was clearly as in need of serious therapy as she was, but…he loved her. Blake loved her: maybe madly, but truly, deeply. She could feel it every time they touched, in the way being close to him made her chest ache, mourning the loveless years she’d wasted with a man who thought of her as just another decoration for his Bel Air mansion.
Erin snuggled closer to Blake’s chest, reveling in the foreign sensation of being home. The urge to cry slowly vanished in the wake of that warm, sheltered feeling, the feeling she always had when she was this close to Blake. He was the only man who had ever been able to turn her on and calm her down at the same time.
Even now, when he was the person she should be afraid of, his arms felt like the safest place in the world.
“I’m so sorry.” He kissed the top her head, the tension in his voice making it clear how grueling he’d found her crying jag. Poor Blake, he’d never been able to handle seeing a woman cry. “I’ve obviously lost my damned mind. I never wanted to hurt you, sweetness, I never—”
“It’s okay,” she whispered, not wanting to lift her face from his chest.
“No, it’s not okay,” he insisted. “But I’m going to make it okay. We’ll leave whenever you want. I’ll take you home or to the police or wherever you want me to take you. I’m just…so sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Erin said, hugging him closer. “This wasn’t all your fault, you know. That had been building up for a long time. I mean, I’ve done my share of crying the past three years, but nothing like that.”
Blake’s muscles relaxed a bit and one hand began to smooth idly up and down her bare back. “Your marriage was that bad, huh?”
He reached over to the side of the bed and plucked a Kleenex from the box. Erin took the tissue and did her best to mop up her face without moving too far from Blake. She needed to be close to him right now. It made her feel stronger for some reason.
“Yes, it was that bad.” She sighed, amazed that thinking of Scott no longer summoned the familiar rush of hurt and rage. It was as if she’d finally cried him out of her system.
Now she just had to get him out of her life and she would truly be ready to move on.
Blake grunted. “You want to tell me about it?”
“Not really,” she said. “I haven’t told anyone. I’ve been too ashamed.”
“I’m sure you have nothing to be ashamed of,” he said, kissing the top of her head again, sending a wave of melancholy rushing through her.
“Oh, I do.” Erin laughed, a short, sad sound. “I was really, really stupid. Crazy, fucked in the head, stupid.”
“Hey, you’re talking to the guy who kidnapped his high school girlfriend.” He smoothed her hair from her forehead. “You can’t get much more fucked in the head than that.”
This time her laugh was genuine.
Jesus. Only Blake could make her laugh a few minutes after crying her eyes out.
“So spill it,” he said. “I’m not going to judge. I’m in no position to.”
Erin took a deep breath, not certain how to begin. So she started with the basics, how she’d met Scott at one of the classier BDSM clubs in town. How he’d captured her interest from the start, seeming so much more Dominant than any of the other men she’d met. She told Blake how Scott had swept her away for long weekends at posh resorts up and down the California coast, and then surprised her with a giant rock four months into their relationship.
“We were married two months later, near Santa Barbara, at a winery,” Erin said, feeling oddly detached from the story of her life. All of those happy memories seemed like they had happened so long ago, like they were the backstory for a different person than the woman she was now.
“Sounds like a fairy tale so far,” Blake said. “If you’re a submissive woman who’s into really rich guys.”
Erin smiled. “Yeah, it was pretty good. We had a great time together, and he was always respectful. Scott kept the Dom thing going just about all the time, but he never pushed my limits. I guess that’s why I had no issue with signing the paperwork he had his lawyers draw up before the wedding. And I was twenty-one and stupid, that was a big part of it, too.”
“A prenup agreement?” Blake asked.
“Well, there was that, but there was also a master-slave agreement.” She lifted her head from his chest, glancing up at him through her lashes. “You ever heard of those?”
“I have.” The dark note in his voice made it clear he didn’t like the sound of them. “I don’t know too many long-term Dom-sub couples, so I don’t have any personal experience, but I’ve heard of them.”
God, how she wished
she
didn’t have any personal experience with them.
If she could go back in time and refuse to sign the thing, she’d do it in a heartbeat, even if it meant she had to relive those years with Scott. No matter how awful they’d been, her beautiful, sweet Abby had come out of that time, so Erin could never count them as a waste.
She sighed, not in a hurry to get to the next part of the story. “From what I understand, there isn’t a standard boilerplate contract for the master-slave agreement. It’s as open or restrictive as the Dom and sub decide for it to be.”
Blake hummed beneath his breath, making his chest vibrate. “Let me guess, this guy wanted it as restrictive as he could get it.”
Erin wet her lips. “Yep. I signed over control of almost everything. My money, my right to drive, to leave the house without Scott chaperoning—all kinds of things that should have rung alarm bells, but didn’t.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Like I said. I was stupid.”
“But those contracts aren’t really legal, Erin,” Blake said. “It’s not like a Dom-sub agreement would stand up in court.”
“Oh, I know,” she said, bitterness creeping into her tone. “But that didn’t matter once we were married. I had no money, no car to drive. No way out. Not that I wanted out, not then anyway. I started to get tired of the full-time control, but we were making it work.”
Erin’s jaw clenched. It was time to drop the big bomb. She knew it was though she feared what Blake would think of her when he discovered how she’d failed her child. “Things didn’t get really bad until I accidentally got pregnant.”
She risked a peek up into his dark eyes, but he didn’t look surprised.
“You knew?” she asked, brow wrinkling in confusion.
Blake nodded. Just once. “I had a friend check up on you while you were getting ready. He told me you had a one-year-old little girl. Abigail?”
“Abby, she’ll be one in a few weeks,” Erin said, anger spiking in her bloodstream as she remembered what she’d overhead. “And I heard you talking to your
friend
, trying to see if I had a criminal record.”
She propped up on her arms, glaring at Blake. “What the hell, Blake? I’ve never done anything illegal, except get a tattoo when I was sixteen. I never even drank that much until I was twenty-one.”
“Is that why you ran? Because you heard me on the phone?” He looked so hopeful Erin couldn’t hold on to her anger.
She let out a long breath as she propped her chin on top of her fists. “It made me feel like you didn’t trust me and that hurt so much. I mean, I’d given you my trust, even though you were the one who—”
“Abducted you and hauled you off to my mountain lair?”
She lifted a wry brow. “Yeah. That.”
“I know. And I’m sorry. For all of it.” Blake leaned close, kissing her on the lips for the first time since they’d fought. “Can you forgive me?”
Could she?
Of course she could. She was already halfway there.
The better question was: should she?
Should she let herself forgive Blake, even when he’d proven he was as crazy as she was?
CHAPTER THREE
Erin
Electricity swept over Erin’s skin, tightening her nipples, making her keenly aware that she was almost naked in Blake’s arms.
“Maybe,” she said in a breathy voice, her gut telling her she’d never be able to hold a grudge against this man, no matter how hard she might try. “But it hurt, Blake. A lot.”
“I understand, but I was only trying to help,” he said. “You said you had secrets and I wanted to make sure that, whatever those secrets were, I could still make things okay for us. I was trying to make sure I was in a position to protect you, Erin. That’s all.”
“Oh.” When he put it like that, it was…sweet.
Controlling, but sweet.
Still, she wasn’t up for another relationship like the one she’d had with Scott and Blake needed to get that message—right now. “But you should have trusted me to tell my secrets when I was ready,” she said. “Not gone behind my back and violated my trust.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” He reached up, cupping her cheek tenderly in his hand. “And I should never have forced you to come back here with me. It was wrong.”
“Well…don’t let it happen again,” Erin said, trying hard to resist the urge to claim his lips and kiss him until they both forgot all the mistakes they’d made. After years of celibacy, her libido still hadn’t gotten enough of this man.
Celibacy.
Unfortunately, that brought her back to her story. She might as well finish the sad, stupid tale and get it over with.
“So, anyway,” she said with a sigh. “I got pregnant with Abby and I was so, so excited. She wasn’t planned, but I’d always wanted kids. I figured it was a happy surprise and expected Scott to feel the same.”