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Right?
Then get back to Seattle. Get out of the apartment. Get my own place. Get a job. I didn't care, I could wait tables. If I ran into any of the gang members I'd uc'd with, so what? Biker babes could wait tables.
And then school. I could – fuck, probably I could just ask Cole St. Martin to pay for it. Failing that I could blackmail him. Or my father. Or Mark. Or all fucking three. Jesus, men!
Only it wasn't happening. Because a part of me still wanted to go back to St. Martin. To figure out what had happened between the man who kissed me in the desert before I was kidnapped and the man who sent me away for telling him it was a bad idea to keep psychopathic killers in your basement.
"Take her hands," Claude said. It was pretty clear it wasn't the first time he had said it.
Chloe lay across his lap, her ass up in the air, the sleek dress pushed up to her waist. Her legs were spread wide, apparently on command, and I looked away fast and moved to the other side of her, looking to both of them for guidance.
Chloe just reached out and took both my hands in the seconds before she let her head drop, signaling her surrender, I guess.
Claude looked at me. "Don't let go. You're her support."
This made no sense to me. She was just getting a spanking, wasn't she? Same thing she got on a weekly basis from what I'd gathered. But Chloe was crying and Claude hadn't started yet, and everything I'd eaten was rolling around inside me.
I tightened my grip on her hands, confused.
Claude nodded at me, ran his hand over his wife's ass, then reached down beside the couch and drew out a long, hardwood paddle, drilled liberally with holes.
My heart stopped pounding. Or doing anything.
"Don't. Make. A. Sound," Claude said.
And the first blow landed.
29
Cole
In early May, less than two weeks after I sent Annie to stay with Claude and Chloe, I got a call from David Lin. A tall, spare, rangy man, he exuded the kind of smoldering intensity that drew stares from women. He was silent, deadly, brilliant. At sixty-two, he was one of those men like Cary Grant or George Clooney who age beautifully, becoming more handsome and more rugged.
He was also totally straight, and devoted to his wife. He knew about my choices and my life, and because of his tacit acceptance, I called him the freak.
"You need to get down here. They're trying to clearcut." His voice sounded tired and angry.
Lin was my number one in Brazil. There are rainforests around the world. In Africa. In the US. But it was Amazon rainforest, the one that stretched over Brazil, Peru, Columbia, Venezuela, Ecuador and several other countries, where both the worst burning and clearing took place and where the best raw ingredients for cures could be found.
What St. Martin Pharma did was remove natural growths from the forest. That was, potentially, a danger to the forest. If American medicine with its greed and dollar signs for eyes understood the full potential of the vines and leaves and bark and probably even the rocks in the region, they'd do as much if not more damage in short order than all the clearcutting had already done.
Fortunately most of us working with naturals were considered tree-hugging freaks.
If only they knew. My freak flag flew in such very different ways. And the truth was, one or two companies, like St. Martin Pharmaceuticals, could harvest for decades before causing a significant problem. We brought money into the region and hope to the people the cures could reach. Not all of our medicines were FDA approved. The naturals I'd used to treat Annie certainly hadn't passed testing, or even been submitted yet.
I just knew what they could do and that there were people desperate enough to try them when they'd only gone through the in-house, admittedly very thorough, tests.
Sometimes human need outstrips the need to wait for permission from a balky, reactionary government entity.
The trip was straightforward enough. Go down, take an entourage around the land we now owned. Be seen. Make some threats. Make a lot more bribes. Find some new substances for testing because why not, as long as we were already there.
Fly back home.
Easy and distracting and sex-free, because I didn't generally mess around outside my own country. Self preservation and all. In the end the trip was quick and uneventful and totally didn't get my mind off Annie for more than an hour at a time.
I told myself it did.
Halfway into May we returned to the U.S. Reports had been coming through regularly. Ariel was restless and working out for hours every day, working online, studying college catalogs and reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Questionable reading material and if she was contemplating choosing a career based on US Government stats, questionable sanity. So it was probably good she was also spending hours every day with both her companion and her therapist.
