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As Nathan led her to the elevators, she plodded beside him, borrowing his strength to move her legs, to leave behind the guards and their semblance of safety. The further they walked, the more brittle her spine felt.

Should she have handled it differently with Jay? Maybe waited until morning to talk to him when he was sober? What if she misinterpreted what happened? Betrayal gripped her insides. There was no way to misunderstand Ella’s mouth wrapped around his more-than-willing erection. She choked, muffled it behind trembling lips.

Bags in hand, Nathan led her to a waiting cab, his eyes scanning the street and windows of nearby buildings. Following her in, he barked an address at the driver. They made it a block before her grief exploded, trembling her body, clogging her sinuses, and soaking her face. She let it go, let him hold her as she wept the broken pieces.

By the time they pulled into an underground garage of some swanky hotel, her eyes were dry and her breathing had returned to normal. Emptiness set in, deadening her. In a shocked haze, she followed Nathan out and froze.

Edison, one ofThe Burn’s bodyguards, waited behind the wheel of a nondescript subcompact car.

She backed up. “No, I’m not going—”

“He’s driving us somewhere.” Nathan shoved her face first into the backseat, tossed their bags on the floorboard, and crawled over her, his weight pressing her down.

The car moved, but he didn’t. “We were probably followed. This should throw him off.”

Right. Of course. Roy was always watching. Numb and drained from crying, she concentrated on loosening her trembling muscles.

The car stopped. Another underground parking lot. With a nod at Edison, she trailed Nathan up the stairwell and through a tiny hotel lobby.

The mechanics of check-in and bedtime preparation went by in a blur, and she lay on one of the double beds in their shared room, blinking through the dark. Her body, exhausted and weak, would not shut down.

“You want to talk about it?” His bed creaked with his movements.

“I want you to stay with Tony.” Silence. Her chest squeezed. She pushed on. “Do you love her?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to move forward on my own, Nathan. I have to.” Her heartbeat sputtered in terror. “I have twenty grand. I’ll hire a lawyer and a bodyguard until I can build a case against Roy.”

His sigh tumbled through the darkness. “If it were that easy, we would’ve done that three years ago. If you don’t want to talk about what happened with Jay, go to sleep. We’ll discuss everything else in the morning with clear heads.”

Shifting to her side, her back to Nathan, she buried her stinging eyes in the pillow. The horrible feeling clawing inside her had been preventable. She didn’t have to fall in love with a drug addict. She’d let him in, fully aware of the risks. Hell, he’d given her a manual bulleting all the fucking dangers. Yet, looking back, would she have changed anything? A tear skipped down her cheek. She loved him. She would always love him.

“For what it’s worth…” He shifted, rustling the bedding. “Jay’s behavior tonight was unexpected. It doesn’t feel right. He loves you, Charlee. I don’t think he’d ever intentionally hurt you. I don’t…I just don’t understand why he did it.”

A blast of jealous anger broke through the heartache. Image after image of his dick in Ella’s mouth, his hips thrusting, and his mouth parted in ecstasy. She wanted to flush out the acidic hate eating through her gut, and she knew how.

She’d make the phone call in the morning. There were Doms in every city, and she knew enough of them. Someone would be able to give her a referral in Little Rock, Arkansas. Tomorrow, she would replace the internal ache with physical pain, and regain some fucking control.

One decision made, she embraced it, narrowed all her thoughts on it. Her muscles loosened, and her head sunk into the pillow.

84

“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.” Charlee sat on the edge of the chair in Master Conrad’s home office in downtown Little Rock.

The wood boards creaked outside the door under Nathan’s angry back-and-forth circuit. She detested that he came but couldn’t muster the energy to fight with him.

The middle-aged man behind the desk leaned back, his shoulders stretching beyond the chair back. His huge frame dominated the room, his deportment more so. Clipped black hair shaped his olive complexion. The sharp lines of his square jaw reminded her of a battle-hardened Marine, but he’d disclosed his day job was in real estate.

“When was your last BDSM scene?” He stared at her, unmoving in his perusal, a characteristic common to every Dom she’d met.

Duke in New York had been her last contract. “Two months ago.”

“Master Duke e-mailed your contract. With your permission, of course.”

Of course. Duke had referred her to Conrad that morning.

“Why are you here?”