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Fuck. He squeezed the phone to keep from throwing it through the windshield. Then he did what he always did when he heard her voice over the recording. He closed his eyes and visualized her gorgeous blue eyes and blinding smile.

“You’ve reached Kilroy Tattoo. I’m either inking or sleeping. Leave your deets and I’ll holler back.”

“Hey, Charlee. It’s Jay Mayard again. I really need to talk to you…uh…about finishing the tattoo. You should have my number”—he’d only left it a hundred times—”but here it is again.”

He rattled off his digits. What else could he say to convince her to call him? “You know, I realize I might’ve come across like a dick the night I was there. If I did, I’m sorry. I…um…”

Christ, he was fucking this up. “The tattoo…it…well, it changed a lot of things for me. Made me look at things differently, and I’m anxious for you to finish it. I’ll be there in a month, but I would really like to talk to you about it ahead of time. Just…just give me a ring, okay?”

His voice was dripping with desperation. Time to shut it down. “Well, I’ll…uh…catch you later.”

He pressedEndand stared at the phone with an ache in the pit of his stomach. He left messages every day. Several times a day. At all hours. How could she not answer the phone for thirty-three days?

In the back of his mind, something murmured. Deep behind his longings, buried beneath his Charlee dreams, his greatest fear whispered.

Heat flared through his face. No, he hadn’t lost her. Her voicemail box was never full. She was picking up the messages. She was just busy. Or annoyed.

He’d give his Martin acoustic for her cell phone number. Hell, he’d give his soul for her returned call.

10

Cross-legged and naked on the cold hardwoods, Charlee leaned her forehead against the floor-to-ceiling window and waited for the sunrise to cast its glow on the Golden Gate Bridge. But it was the sensual voice humming through her ear buds that held her frozen to the glass, as though under a spell.

The music player was the first thing she’d earned in her two months of perfect obedience. Roy allowed her one song. When she requested anything byThe Burn,he gave her their only hit single.Huntress.

She closed her eyes and let the deep, velvety voice she remembered from that night in her tattoo shop wrap around her. “Huntress of the room in my head. Fearless and knowing.” The melodic voice hit the high notes and sent a shiver through her. “Your blue eyes plunder the depths of my song. Tonight is only the beginning.”

A flutter unfurled in her chest. Then his voice dove so low she felt it in her belly. “Nothing can stop me. To be who you saw. To be the steel. To be yours.”

His words…God, his words stole her breath.

The instrumental change in rhythm seemed to lead to a close, but it didn’t. His whispered baritone sent a chill down her spine. “You showed me beauty in survival. I’ll show you strength in healing.”

She sucked in a breath.Blue eyes.Steel.Survivalandhealing. He was singing to her, about her, about his tattoo. She looked down at the leather bound sketchbook in her lap, the only other thing she’d earned during her captivity. Flames leapt around the sketched scars and bled off the page beneath her pencil.

Jay was the only memory she allowed herself to linger on. He was alive, andHuntressconfirmed he hadn’t forgotten her. The power in that was fortifying. She could suffer another two months, hell, she could endure years beneath Roy’s whip knowing someone out there thought of her and maybe even missed her.

“Come back to bed!” Roy’s shout bellowed over the music.

The lead tip of her pencil snapped and rolled off the paper. She lifted her head from the window, yanked out her ear buds, and blew the graphite dust from her drawing. The graphite that had enabled her to hold onto the vividness of her memories. “What time is it, Sir?”

“Five in the fucking morning. Bring the book.”

She hugged it to her chest.Not the book. Please, not that. She ate with it, slept with it, staved off insanity with it. She’d drawn the same flames over and over again, perfecting the illustration. Someday she would finish Jay’s tattoo, and her conviction in that was often the only thing that got her through another day.

“Now.”

If she disobeyed him, he would destroy her music player. She set the device aside and rose from the floor, an effort that sent her molars crashing together. The hours spent hanging from the ceiling the prior night had torn something in her shoulder. Just thinking about it sprung tears in her eyes. She swiped them away, kicked the chain from her path, and trudged to the bed.

The pencil was plucked from her hand and flung outside the reach of the tether. Didn’t matter. A few practices on her wrist confirmed it wasn’t strong enough to pierce his trachea.

He gripped her hips and pulled her over to straddle him. Then he opened the book to the last drawing. His customary callousness blanked his expression as he studied the page. “Always fire. Why?”

“A couple months without clothes.” She shrugged. “I’m drawn to warmth, Sir.”

He set the book aside, stared at it, then swung his hand and struck her face. The force of it whipped her head back. “That was your only warning.”

Perfect obedience hadn’t warded off daily beatings. His strikes still hurt like hell, but her body had grown pliable. When the hand reared, she didn’t stiffen. She bent with it. “It was the last tattoo I did when I was free.” Truth, yet it meant so much more.