Chapter Fifteen
Clay
Clay’s cock had been hard as a fucking rock the moment Harley slipped her hands up to cup her breasts through her tee shirt, but she was a fool if she thought it would be this easy to get him to drop his guard.
He wasn’t a goddamned teenager at the mercy of his own hormones and he’d already lost too much time.
They’d been on the island two weeks. He was burning through his two-month sabbatical far too quickly for comfort. Meanwhile, Harley had lost five pounds she couldn’t afford to lose, and he was no closer to finding out where Jasper was than when they’d started. He’d seen terrorists break faster than this, under very similar sensory exhaustion techniques. It was time to stop fucking around and prove to this stubborn bitch that there would be no escape until she gave him what he needed.
Taser in hand, Clay opened the cell door and stepped inside, his lips twisting in a hard smile as Harley vaulted off the bed and sprinted toward him.
She made it three steps before he fired. The probes connected with her chest and she went rigid as she rocked back on her heels, her body toppling toward the floor. But as she fell, her right arm swept up and out, severing the current. She hit the ground and was back on her feet a second later, dodging around him to the right and lunging for the door.
Even as he grabbed her from behind, pinning her arms to her body and spinning them both back inside the cell, a spark of admiration flickered to life inside of him. No matter how crazy she made him, her will power was completely fucking impressive.
“Where did you learn that?” he asked, grunting as she thrashed in his arms, her heel connecting with his shin with enough force to bruise.
“Let me go,” she snarled, writhing like a serpent, getting closer to squirming free than he would like to admit.
She hadn’t been eating much, but she had been steadily increasing the number of push-ups and sit-ups she completed every few hours. At this rate, she was going to leave her cell in better shape than when she went in.
He tossed her back onto the cot. “Seriously, I want to know where you learned to overpower fifty thousand volts of electricity.”
“Mind over matter,” she said, her eyes darting between him and the open cell door behind him. “I meditate. A lot. You should try it. Maybe then you wouldn’t be such a psychopath.”
“Takes one to know one.”
Her lips peeled away from her teeth. “I hope you shit yourself to death.”
Unexpectedly, laughter rose in his chest, but he smothered it with a rough clearing of his throat.
“Noted.” He tensed, ready to lunge for her if she made another break for the door, but she only hugged her knees to her chest and glared up at him, apparently realizing that escape wasn’t going to happen today.
But who knew about tomorrow?
If she could retain her sanity for two weeks of sensory deprivation and overload and shrug off a law enforcement grade Taser like she was swatting flies, who knew what else she was capable of. They might still be here six weeks from now when his leave ran out.
At the conclusion of his sabbatical, Clay was set to rejoin the task force taking down Marlowe Reynolds. No matter how little he cared about his job these days—living in the shadows had started to lose its appeal around the same time he’d learned that he had a son and something worth living for—Clay wanted to remain a part of that operation.
Marlowe was a disease set loose upon the earth. From the day Clay had walked into a warehouse in Rome and seen ten men hanging upside down from the fifty-foot ceiling, their intestines spilling out to form ropes of gore that trailed to the dirt below, he’d promised himself he would see Marlowe behind bars. He didn’t want to retire before that happened, and he didn’t want to raise his son in a world with Marlowe loose in it.
Especially considering there was a chance Marlowe might decide Jasper fell under his “protection.”
Reynolds had very firm opinions on family. Once someone signed on with the Raposa cartel, they were a part of that family and owed Marlowe complete loyalty for the rest of their lives. In exchange, he made sure anyone who threatened them or theirs was dealt with swiftly and efficiently.
Clay didn’t want to wake up one night to find Marlowe standing over his bed, ready to exact retribution for taking Harley’s son away from her. Even if she had been telling the truth about concealing Jasper’s existence from her boss in the past, he didn’t put it past her to send Marlowe to fetch Jasper back into the fold. Considering how she felt about Clay, she might very well decide Jasper was better off with a drug lord for a father figure.
That’s why you have to make sure Marlowe goes down and Harley believes she’ll end up behind bars if she ever so much as sets foot on U.S. soil, let alone tries to contact Jasper.
Yes, that’s exactly what he had to do. Thank you, inner voice.
But neither of those fucking things was going to happen until he knew where Jasper was.
“Tell me where you sent Jasper and this ends now,” he said, but he could hear the hopelessness in his own voice. She wasn’t going to tell him, at least not now, so soon after getting a reaction out of him for the first time in weeks.
“Sure.” She smiled. “Right after you cut off your balls and shove them up your ass.”
Clay arched a wry brow. “I don’t remember you having such a filthy mouth.”
“Well, I didn’t hate your guts the last time I knew you.” She hugged her knees closer to her chest, her smile transforming into a sneer. “Loathing brings out the crasser side of my nature.”
But you still want to fuck me.
That hadn’t been a lie. He’d heard the truth in her words, in the hunger in her voice. She wanted more.
He wanted more, too. His dreams for the past two weeks had been nothing but non-stop filth. He’d had Dream Harley every dirty way he’d ever imagined fucking a woman, and a few twisted ways his subconscious had coughed up in the dead of the night, and woke up each morning sporting wood for a woman he hated. Aside from Jasper, wanting to get naked and fuck the hell out of each other was the only thing he and Harley had in common.
And Marlowe.
Between the three of those things, you should be able to get what you need from her.
Play to your common ground and show you’ve got the negotiating skills of a new hire, for God’s sake.
“Get up,” he said, motioning toward the door. “We’re going to go for a walk.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “A walk.”
“I found socks and shoes for you in one of the storage rooms. We can grab those and my canteen on our way out.”
“Where are we walking?” she asked, toes curling into the sheets. “And why?”
“The shoes might be a little big, but it will be better than going barefoot,” he continued, ignoring her questions.
He wasn’t sure where they were going just yet, but the why would soon be apparent.
Sensory deprivation hadn’t gotten the job done. It was time to see what a little good old-fashioned exhaustion could do. He would walk Harley until she dropped and then he would remind her of all the things they had in common, all the ways he could make her life better if she agreed to play by his rules.
He hadn’t intended to touch her again, but if it took intimate contact to chip away at her resistance, it was a sacrifice he and his raging erection were willing to make.