I couldn’t have been more wrong if I’d tried. She not only knew what it was like to come, she knew what it was like to fucking hurt for it.
I’d misread every single thing about her. “You’re his sub,” I accused.
Her nipples hard, her thighs shaking, she stared at me guiltily as she rushed to get up. “You’re bleeding.”
How long had she been on her knees? “How deep?”
“Wh-what?”
Goddamn it. “You want out?” I’d heard enough of her side of the conversation. I saw the look on her face. She was so fucking far past desperation, she wanted back in because she couldn’t see a way out.
She averted her gaze. “My husband is coming to get me. Do not shoot him.”
“I asked you a question.” Something had happened. She was here for a reason.
She lifted her head only enough to look at my side. “You are hurt.”
“Not like you.” My wound was physical.
She reached for the towel hanging on the oven door. “You are making a mess all over the floor.” She dropped it at my feet. “Stand on that. I will help you before he gets here.” She spun.
“If you don’t tell me why you ran, he’s not going to make it up the driveway.” I didn’t make idle threats.
“Men,” she huffed in irritation as she walked down the hallway. Seconds later, a completely different woman than the one who’d been on her knees on my kitchen floor was in front of me. She dropped a larger towel at my feet and held on to another. “Tell your dog to come here and not bite me.”
“Hunter, come. Sit.” My German shepherd circled her then sat next to my feet. “He won’t bite.”
She bent and quickly towel dried his fur. Then she stood and eyed me. “Take your shirt off,” she demanded.
Staring into her ice-blue eyes, I grasped her chin and she went dead still. I searched every inch of her face, but she didn’t even blink. “You like giving orders?” I quietly asked. “Or taking them?”
She drew in a breath at my second question, but none of the defensiveness or attitude she had earlier returned. “Do you like bleeding all over your floor?”
I stared at her. I was no longer looking at another man’s submissive on my floor. I was looking at a desperate, broken woman who was holding herself together. She wasn’t just beautiful, she was fucking stunning. The instinct to protect kicked in and I wanted to kill Viktor Fedorov. “Tell me why you ran.”
“What happened to your side?” she deflected.
I dropped my hand and pulled my shirt over my head one-handed. “I was stabbed.”
Her gaze cut to my ribs then to my shoulder. She tried to hide her surprise. “And your shoulder?”
“Shot.” She was no longer the inconvenience I’d encountered an hour ago. She was a fucking disaster about to detonate my life to hell. Every instinct I had said she was going to shred my careful existence worse than any fucking IED.
She scanned the other scars on my chest, then she pressed the kitchen towel to my ribs. “Your stitches aren’t holding.”
I lifted my arm to give her better access because I was a goddamn fool. “I broke through them in the barn.” Her scent was pure woman and desire, but she smelled like fucking trouble.
Oblivious to my thoughts, she nodded once. “Do you have a first aid kit?”
I peered down at her, wondering how far I would let this go. “Would you know what to do with it if I did?”
“I guess you’re about to find out. Where is it?” Her straight white-blonde hair covered her face as she pulled back the towel to see the wound.
Already pushing at the last boundary I had in my life, I brushed the strands behind her ear.
She flinched, then sucked in a breath and glanced up at me.
“You okay?” I quietly asked.
Her chest rose and fell, and she looked at me like she was seeing me for the first time. “Yes.”
I didn’t do affection. Affection was complication and complication was attachment, and I didn’t get attached. Fucking ever. “Linen closet, top shelf.” I brushed the back of my hand across her cheek.
Her small fingers closed over my wrist then she placed my hand on the towel. “Hold this.” She walked to the closet a second time.
Every step she took, she transformed from a spoiled Goldilocks to a woman I wanted to fuck. Despite the pain in my side, despite the fact I shouldn’t even be thinking about touching a woman as fucked-up as her, my dick took notice of her every movement as she set my kit on the counter.
“Wash your hands.” I clipped out the order, then gave Hunter a hand command to do an interior patrol of the house.
The dog took off, and she did as I said without comment.
“There’re gloves and peroxide in the kit. You good with a needle?” I hated staples, almost as much as I hated complications.
She put on a pair of gloves. “No.” She opened the peroxide. “This is going to sting.” Not waiting for a response, she pulled the towel back and poured the liquid all over my wound.
I inhaled through my nose. “Grab the skin stapler kit.”
“You already have stitches.” She took out one of the packaged sutures that was already pre-threaded with a needle.
“Stapling will be easier.” I shouldn’t have cared about wanting to make it easier on her. She wasn’t going to make my life easy.
She shrugged and ripped open the preloaded single-use stapler. “Whatever.”
“You need to—” I didn’t get the rest of the sentence out.
She’d already pinched the sides of the wound and pressed the handle. “Staple. I got it.” She put in another one.
I clenched my jaw. “You’ve done this before?”
Another. “No. But I sewed my mother’s finger together when I was twelve.” She put in one more, then leaned back to look at her work. “We grew up poor. I didn’t have much choice. She’d cut it cooking dinner.” She grabbed two sterile gauze pads and antibiotic ointment. “And I saw one of Viktor’s bodyguards put staples in another bodyguard after a fight once.”
Fuck. I needed to remember who she was. “Do you know why your husband needs personal security?” I looked down at my ribs. Two staples would’ve held the wound shut.
“He is Russian. Does he need a reason?” She smeared antibiotic ointment all over my stapled wound, then pressed the gauze over it. “Hold this.” She put more of the ointment on the second gauze pad, and rested it on my shoulder. “Where is the dog?” She grabbed the tape from the kit.
“On guard.” I whistled and Hunter came over. “Hunter, lie down.” He lay down at my feet but kept his gaze on her. “Do you know what your husband does for a living?”
“He is in real estate.” She put tape over both gauze pads. “There.”
“That isn’t how he makes his money.” She had to know what he did.
She pulled her gloves off. “I learned a long time ago not to interfere.”
“Why did you call him?” Her phone call made me angrier than my mark getting the jump on me earlier today, exponentially angrier. And that was a bad fucking sign.
Her back stiffened slightly as she looked around for the trash can. “He is my husband.”
“Second cupboard under the sink. You said he kicked you out.” I didn’t know why I was asking, let alone talking to her. I should’ve stayed in my command center and let her husband come for her, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think that would be the end of it with a man like Viktor Fedorov.
She threw the gloves away and ignored my statement. “He will be here soon.”
“Give me one good reason to let him on my property.” I’d closed the gate at the end of the driveway, but it wouldn’t stop him or his men for long.
“So you can get rid of me, so he doesn’t put more holes in your body, and so you can have your house back. There are three.”
I didn’t give a fuck about the second one. It was the first and third reasons that were pissing me off. “I’m going to change.”
“Watch the bandages.”
“They’ll be fine.” I walked to my bedroom, and Hunter followed. I couldn’t reconcile the woman who’d put four staples in me with the woman on her knees on my kitchen floor. I threw on clean clothes and boots and switched out my holster for a dry one.
My instincts had already fucked me twice today, with the mark and with my first impression of the woman in my house. I wasn’t taking any more goddamn chances. Grabbing my retrofitted AR15 out of my closet, I walked back into the kitchen with Hunter on my heels.
Alarm spread across the blonde’s face when she saw the gun. “What are you doing?”
I pulled my phone out and set it on the counter, then I sat on one of the stools at the island. Hunter lay down at my feet and I eyed her. “Waiting.”
She glanced at my dog then my rifle. “You are not going to shoot him.”
“Not unless you tell me to.” Or he fires first.
She exhaled, then tried to look unaffected. “Why do you have a gun like that?”
Who she was married to, why she’d landed on my doorstep, what was about to happen—I made a calculated decision. “I kill people.” I told her the truth.
Her gaze drifted to my arm and then my haircut. “You’re in the military?”
“Former.”
“Marines?” There was no surprise in her tone.
“He tell you that, or are you making a lucky guess?” I’d bet three of my bank accounts that Fedorov had run a background on me the second he’d realized where his wife was.
Heat hit her cheeks. “How do you know my husband?”
I checked the ammo clip. “Who says I know him?”
She watched my movements. “You know of him.”
Who fucking didn’t, besides Vega? “I know a lot of people.” I slammed the magazine back into place.
She flinched. “In real estate?”
I stared at her for two breaths. “Gun trafficking.”
The tint on her face turned red. “My husband is not into that.”
“Isn’t he?” My phone lit up with an alert. “Company.” My rifle in one hand, I walked to the security panel on the wall by the front door just as the intercom buzzed. I pulled up the video feed on the panel and zoomed in to the front windshield of the car parked at my gate. It wasn’t Fedorov. I glanced over my shoulder at her. “Who is this?”
She gracefully moved next to me and peered at the screen. “I can hardly see through the rain, but it looks like Peter.”
I peered down at her. “Last chance,” I warned. I wouldn’t suffer one second of hesitation or guilt over killing Fedorov. “You don’t have to do this.”
She looked up at me with colorless blue eyes as her throat moved with a swallow. “Let them in.”
I knew fear when I saw it. “Do you need me to make the decision for you?” I dropped my hand from the security panel.
“I already told you to let them in.”
Her determination made her even more stunning. “I’m looking at a woman who thinks she doesn’t have a choice.”
“You’re not my choice,” she whispered.
“He is?”
She hesitated. “Yes.”
Goddamn it. I tried another tactic. “Do you think I’m going to hurt you?”
“You live in the middle of nowhere. You have a trained attack dog. You’re shot, stabbed and armed. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know what you’re capable of… except murder.”
So she had taken me seriously. “You think you know Fedorov?”
This time she didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
“How long you been married to him?”
“Five years.”
“That doesn’t sound like a marriage. It sounds like a sentence.”
The intercom buzzed again as the driver pressed the gate button impatiently.
She crossed her arms. “Well, it’s my sentence.”
Realization dawned. “What are the terms of your arrangement?”
Her eyes cut to the screen and she shifted nervously. “What are you talking about? Let them in.”
“What did he offer you to marry him?” Bribe or blackmail. It was one or the other. “Tell me,” I demanded.
“Five years, five-hundred-thousand dollars,” she snapped. “Okay? Now you know. Hurry up and open the gate or he’ll be mad.”
I opened the gate, but I made a decision.
She wasn’t getting in that fucking car.