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It's hard to look big and Dom-ly when tripping over one's own weapons of pain.
" I don't want to sit down," Annie snarled. She looked at me, paused in her furious pacing and looked down at the crop in her hands. With a look of fury, she lobbed it across the room where it fell harmlessly and lay on the hard, shiny tile floor.
I crossed the floor in three steps and caught her by the shoulders, shouting into her face. "See, this is where you don't quite get what you signed. I don't care if you don't want to sit down. I didn't ask if you wanted to. I told you to do it. Do it."
Surprisingly, she did. Instead of kneeling, she sat on the bed, next to where I had been sitting. When I looked at her incredulously, she moved around, pulled the top blanket off the bed, and wrapped it around herself.
"Are you finished?" I asked. "Can I get you anything? A glass of ice water? A tea and croissant?"
I had never been this angry at her and for half a second, maybe a shorter amount of time, whatever that would be, I couldn't remember why I was punishing her.
The next breath I remembered. That we'd signed the contract and then she'd done one thing after another to show she thought nothing of having done so.
"Look..." she said.
I interrupted. "No, you look. You signed a contract. I don't care if you thought you could just honor the parts that pleased you. I know you're a police officer. I know you're bright. But I didn't want you at that meeting. I didn't want your input at that meeting. And you had no business at all getting mad and walking away from it."
Her expression was as mutinous as a sixteen year old's. It was almost laughable except I didn't feel like laughing.
"Kie is my business. Did you forget what she did to me?" She was standing again, as if she just couldn't do what she was told.
What I wanted to do was knock her feet out from under her, cuff her with flexicuffs, gag her, drop her onto the bed and then make her listen.
What I did was nod. Quietly. "Yes, Kie hurt you. No, extracting revenge is not your business."
"What the fuck," she said wonderingly and I stored that one away for later.
"What the fuck, as you so eloquently put it, is that punishing Kie is my business."
"You're setting up a relationship for her that she'll love!"
The only thing that kept me from backhanding her for that was under the protest were tears. They were cascading down her face, dripping off her chin into the weave of the blanket.
I studied her, her wet chin in my hand, turning her face to look at her. The reasons she'd given me and the surface reasons I'd extrapolated were that she was a cop, she was an undercover narc, she knew about dangerous people and she was worried.
But under that?
"You don't think I'm doing enough to get your honor back," I said. It was a question.
Her eyes went big and round, as if of all the other things she'd already done, that one she couldn't dare to.
"And you don't think I'm doing enough to protect myself." That one came out a second later, out of nowhere, just knowledge blooming in my brain with a sense of wonder. My eyes searched hers and I said, "You care what happens to me?"
Annie made a face, as if she was trying very hard not to say, Well, duh or even Well, duh, Sir and she reached out, very gingerly because it was without permission, and touched the side of my neck. When her fingers stung there against the flesh, I realized that Kie had actually cut me, sliced into the vulnerable skin when she'd stood behind me with the knife in her hand.
Annie's eyes searched mine. "Of course..." she started and stopped and tried again. But there was a pause just long enough that she changed what she was going to say. Maybe it would have been; of course I care about you.
Did I want it to be that?
But what she said instead was, "You saved my life, Sir. I care about what happens and I would obviously do the same and save yours."
The end of that sentence hung so heavily in the air and so loudly between us I said it; "If only I'd use some common sense and let you do so?"
"With all due respect, sir..." she started.
I snorted.
"...You don't make it easy," she finished.
