PrimeDefender (2 page)

Chapter One

Current year

It felt good to be back in Savannah. Keisha
Harris–Rubin sighed as she set her luggage down in the foyer and took her
briefcase to the office she’d created out of what used to be a small parlor in
her century-old home. As soon as she put a DVD in the stereo and turned it on,
the majestic sounds of Beethoven’s Third Symphony filled the silence of the
big, empty house.

Once she’d settled in at her desk and
started her desktop computer to transferring information from the laptop she’d
taken to Chicago, she called Matt. It wasn’t often in their relationship that
she’d allowed her sex slave out of her sight for as long as ten days, but
business was business. His as well as hers. “I’m home. When will you be through
with minicamp?”

“In an hour or so, Mistress. How was your
trip?”

“Tiring.” It seemed each business trip was
taking more out of her these days. “I missed you bein’ with me.”

If Matt hadn’t had to attend minicamp,
Keisha would have taken him along. Negotiating on behalf of the players she
represented was getting tougher every year, and the general manager of the
Chicago team had always been a bastard to deal with. Since four of her clients
played there, the negotiations had resulted in four times the usual headaches.
“Be sure to tell Dad hello for me. And come on home as soon as you can.”

“I will. Gotta go now, though. We’re
winding up the minicamp with a team meeting. Coach Zanardi doesn’t much like
guys comin’ in late. I love my Mistress.” He sounded okay, properly submissive
as usual.

Keisha smiled into the phone. “I love you,
too, slave. I’ve missed you, and I’ll see you when you get home.” After she
hung up she wondered if she might not be all that okay. If she could be sick,
not just awfully tired. She’d felt lousy since leaving the hotel in Chicago
that morning. It wasn’t anything she could put her finger on—fatigue, she
guessed, but she couldn’t recall ever having had so much trouble breathing. She
shivered and that scared her. She’d never felt as cold as she felt now, at
least she hadn’t when it was close to eighty degrees outside.

Maybe if I go on the porch for a few
minutes and get some fresh air?

It couldn’t hurt. She saved the file she’d
just opened and tried to get up from her desk. Couldn’t. Damn it, she had to
get outside before she choked to death. She pushed herself up against the front
of the desk with her hands, tried to get her balance. As she hit the floor she
tried to reach for the phone but it was out of reach.

Matt, you get yourself home right now. I
need you
, she thought as everything went black.

* * * * *

Matt Rubin whistled a happy tune as he
headed to their place west of Silk Hope as soon as Coach dismissed the players
from the first minicamp of the season. He’d missed Keisha—a lot. It was crazy,
but he felt naked because he’d had her collar off for ten whole days—five for
the camp and five before that because she’d removed it before leaving on her
business trip.

If anybody had told him nine years ago that
he’d not only switch positions and become a star for the Savannah Rebels rather
than a reserve player always worrying about being cut, but that he’d also
become the 24/7 sex slave of the woman he loved more than life, he wouldn’t
have believed them.

I wouldn’t have believed I’d be so
comfortable in my own skin, either.
A lot had
happened to the twenty-two-year-old who’d taken out his aggressions on the
football field but shied away from sexual relationships for fear he’d end up
like his abusive father. He’d played football in the fall and winter, gone to
law school the rest of the time until he got his
Juris Doctor
four years
later.

What had changed him most, though, was
Keisha. Bold, brash and unashamedly dominant, she’d made it clear from the
first time he dared to ask her out that she’d be in charge. Even though he was
a big, tough athlete—his teammates had nicknamed Killer—he’d realized she was
big and strong enough that he’d never feared hurting her. What’s more she
relished doling out the sexual punishment he’d always believed he deserved.

He could hardly wait to get home, feel the
weight of her collar and bury his face in the hot, musky softness of her cunt.
That thought made his dick try to get hard for the first time since she’d
locked it up before he’d left for minicamp.

At first he’d tried to hide the symbols of
his sexual submissiveness whenever he could, but every year since she’d
collared him he’d grown less uncomfortable revealing it to new, vanilla
teammates. This year he simply stripped off his jockstrap at his locker the
first day of minicamp and strode naked to the showers, making no effort to hide
his dick that Keisha always locked down when they were going to be apart for
more than a few hours.

He’d just enjoyed his best minicamp since
his rookie year. That made him feel damn good. The thirty-five pounds he’d lost
since the end of last season improved his raw speed and agility without hurting
his ability to pull opponents down. Matt liked the prospect of being the
Rebels’ starting inside linebacker, the position he’d taken on last season
after the team had lost its starter to a career-ending injury. He even had a
chance now to be a defensive team captain, something that never would have
happened if he’d stayed at the tackle position.

Matt patted his midsection. Keisha would be
able to feel the outline of his ribs now beneath a layer of hard muscle. He’d
gotten rid of the roll around his middle. By the end of offseason training he’d
be down to two hundred fifty pounds—downright svelte compared with the three
hundred plus that he’d been carrying around since college, weight a tackle
needed but a linebacker didn’t. He laughed out loud.

His Mistress had tried to diet and exercise
with him, but for every pound he lost, she’d seemed to gain one, probably
because she didn’t run and lift weights every day the way he did. Pretty soon
she’d outweigh him if she didn’t, already. Matt didn’t care. He adored Keisha,
loved every voluptuous inch of her. He wouldn’t change a hair on her beautiful
head.

In a great mood, he turned off the winding
asphalt road west of Savannah onto their gravel driveway, slowing down so he
could appreciate the beauty of century-old oak trees dripping Spanish moss.
Palmettos sprouted up out of blue-green grass on either side of the white-rock
drive that rambled through the very private place he and Keisha called home. He
pulled his truck up outside the garage next to her white Escalade.

Home. Twenty acres of privacy with a
six-thousand-square-foot, white-brick house that could have come straight out
of
Gone with the Wind
, complete with a porch held up by ornate, Grecian
columns. Keisha’s dream house, its basement was complete with a well-equipped
dungeon for nights when they wanted to play but didn’t want to drive to the
BDSM club at Rebels’ Roost. Matt looked over at the paddock encircled with a
white, rail fence. He couldn’t help thinking of how they used to use it when
they’d first bought the property nearly three years ago.

He’d whined and begged whenever she rigged
him up in his pony gear, hitched him to a cart and whipped him while he pulled
her around in the grass until he’d be so exhausted he could barely move. But
his rewards had been worth the effort and the pain, because whenever he’d done
a good job, she’d unhitched him, braced herself against the paddock fence and
let him fuck her from behind. Her stallion, she used to call him. Coming that
way, in a dominant position he was rarely allowed, had felt good. Better than
good, it had been fucking awesome.

Matt missed that. He’d found it incredibly
arousing as well as humiliating as hell, knowing some visitor might drive up
anytime and see him on all fours, wearing pony shoes and headgear and hitched
to a cart. As he walked up the stairs to the house he thought about how long it
had been since Keisha had wanted to play that way. Sure, she still liked to see
him trot around the dungeon on all fours, a pony or dog tail swinging from the
plug in his ass. She enjoyed having him lap her cunt while one of the club subs
tortured his locked-down genitals, or fucking his ass with a strap-on in plain
view of everybody at Rebels’ Roost.

Over the past couple years, he’d noticed
her cutting back a little at a time on BDSM play that involved much strenuous
effort on her part, even at the dungeon. He couldn’t recall the last time she’d
striped his back with the cat-o’-nine or locked him onto a St. Andrew’s Cross or
spider web so she could adjust his position to enhance her pleasure. The last
time she’d put on a strap-on and personally given him a hard ass-fucking had
been in January, right after last season had ended.

Matt frowned when he noticed their horses,
Barney and Bill, munching grass at the far end of the paddock. Over the past
few months Keisha had even quit taking morning rides with him, and she’d said
something before he left for minicamp about selling Barney, the big chestnut
gelding that was her favorite.

Is Keisha sick? If she is, I doubt she’d
tell me. She’s the most disgustingly self-reliant human being I’ve ever known.
I wonder, though.

He shoved that worrisome question to the
back of his mind. Right now he wanted to get inside to his Mistress. She’d
ordered him to get home as quickly as he could, and he always obeyed her.

Wanting to greet her properly, he toed off
his shoes and went down on his hands and knees as soon as he stepped through
the carved-oak double doors, into the foyer. Crawling as fast as he could, he
moved toward Keisha’s office, a former parlor where she did her legal work when
she wasn’t flying off somewhere to take care of her clients. Sounds of the
Eroica
symphony, the somber second movement if his ears weren’t playing tricks on him,
flowed from the stereo system as he crawled along in time with the
adagio
assai
.

Keisha loved classical music. She’d even
majored in piano as an undergraduate before deciding her real calling was the
law. He’d learned to appreciate the classics from her. Before they’d gotten
together, his idea of music had been hard rock and an occasional jazz piece.
Reaching the office door that she’d left slightly ajar, he pushed it open and
crawled inside, anticipating that she’d want him to strip naked for her pleasure
the way she’d mentioned when she called him earlier.

But she wasn’t at her desk as she’d said
she’d be, putting the final touches on a couple of clients’ new contracts. He
stood and hurriedly scanned the room. No Keisha. He stepped past her desk to look
out the window, thinking she might have stepped out on the porch as she often
did on warm spring days like today.

Then he saw her. Deathly still, she was
lying facedown between the desk and credenza. Matt went back to his knees
beside her, panicked when he didn’t see her chest moving up and down. No! He
brushed her long hair away, searched for the artery in her neck. Only when he
felt a faint pulse did he let out his breath. Her smooth skin, usually warm,
felt clammy. “Mistress? Keisha?”

When she didn’t respond, he reached in his
pocket for his phone and dialed 9-1-1. Terrified for the woman he practically
worshiped, Matt’s breath caught in his throat, so much that he was barely able
to answer the dispatcher’s questions. As he waited for help, his gaze locked on
his Mistress—his wife under the law for a little over three years. That vow had
just been a formality necessitated before they’d bought their house, and was
not more important than the first promises they’d made to each other in their
earlier commitment.

He prayed. Nothing formal, just simple
words that he spoke directly to God, pleas to make Keisha well. Prayers
punctuated by memories of what she’d told him about the music that was building
to a crescendo in his head.
Tragedy without redemption
, was what he
recalled her saying this movement represented. He raised his hands, covered his
ears. He didn’t want to believe the music she’d chosen was prophetic—an omen.
That thought turned him icy-cold from the inside out, made him want to scream
above the dark
adagio
he never wanted to hear again.