Handcuffed by Her Hero (15 page)

Round Face took care of that
delusion the next second. He reappeared from the same shadows that had first
spawned him, stalking at Zeke with the same determined pace, though the reason
for the guy’s disappearance was clear. He’d gotten a wardrobe change. His tight
black Henley was now covered by the gear of a Seattle cop, complete with badge,
shoulder radio and fully-stocked weapons belt.

Like Z even saw all that. Or
cared.

He crouched low and spread the
chain wider, half a smile sliding across his full lips. “Aww, baby, you came
back for more. I’m so happy.”

Round Face grinned past his huge
shiner with entirely too much ease. “Enjoy it while it lasts, motherfucker.”

Forget the lust. Rayna grabbed
Sage, clutching her friend desperately to avoid letting her knees buckle. “What
the hell is he doing?”

“My question exactly.” The
utterance came from Garrett. “If that asswipe is a badge, I’m Kim Jong-un.”

“You’re not and he’s not.”

Max’s interjection was far from
reassuring. Rayna flashed him only a second’s glance before looking back to Z,
but she made the glare count. “I can back that up, but what are
you
talking
about?”

Max strung out a dark growl.
“He’s one of Mua’s guys.”

Sage gasped. Garrett’s whoosh of
shock came right after it. “Mua?” he fired. “How the hell does he have
guys
?
And how do you know him?”

“How do
you
?”

Their astonishment got put on
hold as the darkness across the street gained human form again. Rayna’s heart
froze but the figure wasn’t Mua. It was a new stranger, again garbed in black,
only this guy wore a rain jacket emblazoned with the KOMO 4 NEWS logo. A plastic-covered
TV location camera was planted on his shoulder. As Round Face rushed Zeke and
got himself a gut full of chain for it, the camera’s recording light flashed
on.

“Shit.” Rayna sputtered it at the
same time as Sage.

Garrett spoke again, his voice lined
with gravel. “I helped take down his snake of a twin brother, three months
ago.”

Max flashed him an awed glance.
“That was you?” He shook his head. “Motherfucker of awesome. The hero who took
down King is one of my club Doms.”

Garrett snorted. “I said I
helped. You’ve got Rayna to thank for the ‘awesome’ trigger-pulling part of it.”

“Holy hell. Serious?”

“Head up her fan club later, Max.
I need to know why you turned three shades of white when you said Mua’s name,
and how—”

“Hell.” Max’s interruption coincided
with the first wail of a police siren. “I’m gonna be three shades whiter than
that if all those police get here and find Z doing this. Goddamnit, Hawk, go
give him a verbal Quaalude. He’s gonna kill that jerk. Not that I wouldn’t
mind, under any other circumstances.”

“How do they even know?” Sage
asked. “If that asshole is a fake officer, then who called them?”

Rayna winced. It wasn’t just from
her bleeding cheek or her friend’s question. Max’s tension went beyond the aspect
of a guy concerned about half the Seattle PD swarming the street in front of his
kink club, not to mention its discretion-centric members. She sensed that he
knew why a one-man news crew had showed up
before
the cops, as well. The
only way she’d find out for certain was to come clean.

“It was me.” She grimaced as they
all peered at her in confusion. Damn, her face hurt. “You can resign from the
fan club now, Max. I told your receptionist to call them, just now when I went
to find you guys.”

“No.” It was more a command from
Max than a negation.

“Yes,” she insisted. “Great legs,
pretty eyes? Getting ready to belt out
We Found Love in a Kinky Place
? I
practically taped the phone to her face.”

“And I guarantee you she peeled
it right off. Mira knows better. My whole staff knows better. We don’t call the
cops for help, Rayna.”

A violent oath burst from him as
Zeke took another rush from Round Face, who got a hand around to his back and
twisted a screwdriver into the existing wound there. Rayna screamed as fresh blood
rushed down his spine, but the asshole might as well have thrown gasoline on
the weapon and tossed it into Zeke’s brain for all the stopping power it
yielded. Like a gargoyle broken out of its stone shell, Z let out a gothic
bellow before twisting the chain around the guy. He used that leverage to flip
Round Face into the gutter next to his friend.

“Hell,” Max spat. “This isn’t
good. Not at all.”

“Wait,” Garrett interceded. “What
the hell? Why not the cops? You running something illegal out the back door,
Brick?”

“No, goddamnit,” Max growled. “When
we call the police, there’s a price, okay?” He grunted. “And it’s not always
money.”

Sage stepped forward. “What do
you mean?”

Max prefaced his reply by peering
around, looking like the raindrops themselves might have tapping devices on his
utterance. “I mean that King had at least half the police on his leash, whether
it was bribes, extortion or both. And now that he’s gone—”

“Mua’s moved into that throne.”
The certainty of it permeated Rayna’s words, just like the new layer of bile
coating her stomach.

“Fuck. Me.”

The moment Garrett finished
gritting the words, red and blue lights flashed between the buildings, turning
the street into a soaked, surreal disco. The police sirens howled closer,
threatening to drown even the din of the rain.

Max ran to where Zeke was booting
the two goons’ guts a few more times for good measure. “Z, you need to get out
of here. Now!”

Zeke glared back at Max but
didn’t see him, lost behind eyes that were so afire with violence, Rayna could
see their glow from where she stood.

“Damn it.” Max pointed down at
Round Face. The badge on the guy’s chest was shiny and obvious. “Those bastards
will be here any minute. Even if they don’t belong to Mua, you know the shit
that’s going to fly, right?”

Garrett raced to his friend.
“Zeke.
Ezekiel.
Listen to me. Listen to Brick. He’s right, man. You’ve
been set up. They’ll arrest you then use that footage to convict you.”

Zeke didn’t move. The sirens got
louder. The nausea in Rayna’s core turned to aching dread. She forced herself
forward by a few steps, close enough to hear how he answered Garrett.

“Is Rayna safe?”

She closed the distance to him.
“I’m right here, Z. I’m fine.”

He whipped his head and lashed
his stare to her. Her breath caught for the fiftieth time in the last ten
minutes. Water sparkled on his eyelashes, nose, and lips, a weird and beautiful
contrast to the violence that etched every plane of his face. Only one instinct
outweighed her longing to run her fingers over every noble feature. She grabbed
his massive bicep and jerked him around. Though she had to stand on tiptoe to
do it, she started assessing his gash as clinically as she could.

“You need stitches.”

“Not gonna happen,” Garrett
asserted. “We’re on borrowed time, Ray.”

“Garrett, this wound is deep!”

He grabbed Zeke by the other arm.
“You have to get out of here, Z.”

Max rushed forward. “Final
jeopardy, boys. Alex Trebeck has to get the fuck out of the building.”

Rayna fumed. “He needs this
injury looked at!”

Garrett’s glare was a blue glow
against the night. “If he doesn’t cut a chogey now, the prison doc will be the
one ‘looking at’ him.” He jerked on Zeke to force their gazes to lock. “You
wanna keep her safe, Z? You can’t do that from jail. You think Mua hasn’t
twisted all this around to his advantage now? He followed her here tonight.
He’ll follow her again, and he’ll probably get her the next time. And you’ll be
nowhere nearby, will you? That prison cell is going to give you nice, blank
walls to imagine Ray drugged out, trussed up, and tossed into the hold of a
plane bound for Bangkok again.”

That got Rayna to drop her hands
from Z. A terrified sob spilled before she could hold back. Zeke wrestled from
his friend’s grip. He threw the chain down with a vicious jerk. “You’re a harsh
asshole sometimes,” he snarled at his friend.

“I love you too, honey. Now you gotta
pop smoke, dude.”

Z didn’t waste time on a
comeback. He swung his stare back at Rayna. She returned a tremulous smile. The
intensity on his face dissolved, giving way to a look of raw anguish. She
started backing away, until he pulled her back and raised his hand, gently
outlining the bruise on her cheek with his thumb. A crazy, deep part of her was
moved by his pang for her. A bigger part overrode it with the reminder that she
had no right to tie down his emotions, his fingers, or any more of his time. This
insane incident didn’t change a word of what he’d said in his harem den.

She only wished her heart was
listening to her brain. Instead, the thing was on a clear channel with her
body, which shirked its shivers the second Z tucked her good cheek against his
chest. Her senses gave in to a peaceful softness. Her blood was suffused with
the warmth that belonged solely to him. The chaos and rain of the night vanished.
If only for one moment, they were reconnected.

One perfect, precious moment…

The first police sedan screeched
around the corner. Max pulled at Zeke. “Can we spare the
Lifetime
movie
ending? Z, if you don’t get your ass out of this street in thirty seconds,
you’re going to be the lead story for tomorrow morning’s CNN feed. I’ll bet my
left nut you’re already being loaded up and edited at KOMO. Anyone want a wild
guess at who’s feeding them the news angle?”

“Shit,” Garrett muttered. “Mua’s
probably in the control booth writing the script for the anchors.”

Max turned Zeke’s hand over and slammed
a set of keys into it. “Get out of here. You’re taking my car.”

Zeke gaped. “Oh, hell no.”

“Don’t argue. They’ll be looking
for yours
and
Hawk’s.” The club owner cocked both brows. “More
importantly, nothing’s gonna get you out of town faster than they can get
checkpoints up.”

“Good point,” Z muttered. He
clapped Max on the shoulder. The guy nodded in silent acknowledgement of the gratitude.

Nearly at the same time, Zeke
slipped his hand into hers. He gripped her tight, pulling her across the street
and back into the alley behind Bastille at a run that spattered puddles in
their wake. Max, Garrett and Sage followed. By the time they got to the little
parking lot behind the harem room and its patio, her heart was pumping with two
elements: adrenalin and apprehension.

She swallowed hard as Zeke tugged
her near a gleaming silver car that really did look fast enough to beat the
police. The round Jaguar logo and the initials
R-S
gleamed on plates
embedded into the front grill. Witnessing the way Max gazed at the car like a
man about to put his thoroughbred down, she sensed the two men had a
relationship way beyond kink club owner and star staff Dom.

Max proved her even more right by
literally giving Z the shirt off his own back, too. He shirked his tight gray
T-shirt, revealing a physique as beautifully sculpted as his friend, though his
shoulders and chest were also defined by a maze of Maori tattoos. Other than
that and the slight difference in their hair colors, the men could be brothers.

There was no time to delve into
it now. She meshed her fingers tighter into Z’s, clinging to every last second
before he had to get into the pseudo spaceship.

“Thanks, man,” Z said to his
friend. “I mean it, Brick.”

“Yeah, yeah. Send me pictures,”
the guy returned. “But whatever you do, don’t stop at home. Don’t stop
anywhere.
Delphine’s got a full tank, so that should get you pretty far.”

“Delphine?” Rayna muttered it as
Zeke turned to her.

“Don’t ask.” The flash of mirth
in his eyes turned to copper intensity as he looked down to her again. His lips
went tight as he stroked her bruised skin again.

“Stop it.” She grabbed his
fingers.

His face tightened. “Does it hurt
that bad? Damn it, if that cock knocker gave you deep tissue damage—”

“No. I meant stop fretting over
me, when you took a damn screwdriver in the back from the asshole and won’t
even let me—”

“It’s easily handled on the road,
bird.”

She longed to slap him. He was tossing
his health aside like a snack he was packing for a road trip. But she sighed and
reminded herself he was Special Forces. God only knew what medical attention
he’d been required to give himself at Mach Five.

Instead of whacking him, she lifted
a gentle hand to his jaw. “Where will you go?”

To her surprise, a quizzical grin
teased his lips. “Don’t you mean, where will
we
go?”

She stilled her fingers. Forget
that. Her whole body froze. “What?”

He braced his hands to her waist.
Rayna stared at him without blinking, half expecting to find little gold flecks
that meant he was teasing. But there were none. He was calm and serious as he
softly thanked Rihanna—er, Mira—for bringing out a bottle of ibuprofen, a tube
of antibacterial cream, and a huge gauze bandage.