Willing Sacrifice (Knights of the Board Room) Read online

  “The drug cartels run Mexico. I’m sure that’s not news to you.”

  Though he shook his head, confirming it, she didn’t register his response. Her gaze was on that window, the raindrops slipping down it. “He was upper middle management in one of them, I guess. I never saw an organization chart.” Her lip curled. “The moment the company left Mexico, I became his possession. To his credit, I did dance in a few performances with a substandard company. My classical training made me shine, a swan among the ducks. At first I overlooked it, delighted to be the one soaring across the stage, hearing the crowds gasping at the more dramatic moments. I was at last the prima ballerina.

  “It only took a few reviews from respected critics for me to realize I hadn’t achieved greatness. I’d simply denied the limits of my talent. When I accepted that, I knew my career would go further as part of my old company than as a prima ballerina in Mexico City. I told Jorge I wanted to leave. My fascination with him was dimming in the light of reality, and I was starting to notice things. I knew by then he wasn’t the kind of businessman he’d told me he was when we met. When I told him I was leaving, that was the first time he beat me.”

  Max put his lips on her shoulder, brushed it with his jaw. Her skin was cool, and he adjusted the robe so she was more covered. She tilted her head to him, pressing her cheek to his temple. Closing his eyes, he held that connection, but the images she planted in his brain unfurled an old, deadly rage inside him.

  “He didn’t do things in half measures. He beat me so severely that first time he broke ribs, but he limited it to what wouldn’t show. I was his little china doll, his ballerina on the music box, and he wanted to show me off. I escaped twice, and he caught me both times. He had people everywhere. The third time, he had to make an example of me, because his men knew I was running. This lowly puta had defied their boss. He used a baseball bat on my face and legs.”

  Goddamn him to hell. Max touched her face, brought her eyes back to him. “You don’t have to do this,” he said.

  “I know. But you made a valid point. I can trust you.”

  Because of the type of person she was, never saying what she didn’t mean, the impact of the simple statement on him was tremendous.

  “Yes, you can.” He cupped her jaw, ran fingers over it. “With anything, Janet. Now, tomorrow, forever. No matter what happens with us.”

  “I know. Matt seems to attract that type of man. Like Arthur and the knights who flocked to his table. Though I think Arthur might be too moderate for Matt.”

  Max’s lips twisted. “Yeah. Matt’s more like a savage Celt king. I can see him drinking the blood of his enemies with no problem at all.”

  He was rewarded with a faint smile, then she returned her attention to the window. “Jorge put me back together. Imported a European plastic surgeon, paid to have my face reconstructed. My legs were set and healed, but he left those scars untouched, because he wanted me to have a permanent reminder of who owned me. It ended my dance career, of course. There are rods in both my legs. No shock absorbers.”

  He heard the quaver in her voice, even as she firmed her chin, lifted it. Her hands were gripped together in her lap now, her back rigid where it rested against his arm, as if she’d donned armor against what she was telling him.

  “He’d touch my face and tell me that he’d re-created me, just like God teaching Lilith to be Eve, obedient to her Adam.” Her lip curled again. “I think it challenged and aroused him as much as it angered him, that he could never get me to submit to him without a fight. Except for the time he used the bat, he always had to tie me up when he beat me, because I fought him so hard.”

  Which was why she didn’t tie her subs down, not so they couldn’t get away. He thought of the night he’d asked her about it, the shadows that rose in her eyes. Murder hazed his vision again.

  “I would never cower from him like the house staff did, but I got smart. Except in private, I became the dutiful show pony, a credit to his household. And then one day I met Matt Kensington.”

  * * * * *

  She needed a break after that. She rose from his lap and they went downstairs. This time Max fixed them both a straight whisky in shot glasses from her wet bar. She tossed it back and her eyes didn’t even water, though he knew how the stuff burned a trail.

  “Jorge and he didn’t do business together, of course. It was a chance meeting. Jorge was having dinner with his associates, and Matt was at a table nearby. He was so young then, in his twenties like me, but when I first met his eyes, I got caught by that still, raptor look he has. A man in control of things around him. Very different from the illusion of control Jorge had. His was based on a deceptive mix of charm, lies, fear. Matt’s was based on intelligence, a keen grasp of the details and his unfailing sense of right and wrong, moral versus immoral. Concepts he never confuses with legal or illegal.”

  Max felt a vibration on that thread, another thing that connected him and Janet. Matt hadn’t had a hand in that “moral versus legal” part of Max’s life, but Max knew the K&A CEO was fully aware of it. It hadn’t stopped him from hiring Max as a driver. In fact, it was possible it might have influenced Matt’s hiring decision.

  She pushed the glass toward him. “Another.”

  He poured it, and she downed it the same way she’d done the first. “As long as I stayed in his line of sight, Jorge didn’t care if I sat at the table with him and his dealers while they talked business. I could feel Matt watching me when I moved to the bar, drank my cocktail, stared out into the night.

  “After the baseball-bat incident, there were a lot of times I kept my mind blank, because to think was to go mad. I was always watching, though, waiting. Jorge thought my increased interest in his life and business was evidence that I’d accepted his ownership, but I knew my next escape attempt had to work. If it didn’t, he’d kill me for sure. At that point, I was ready for that. I would have preferred it to staying with him any longer, but I really didn’t want to give him that satisfaction.”

  She lifted her head, stared at Max. “I never gave Jorge any real power over me. Even now, I think of him in a detached way, the way I’d think of a piece of furniture. To give him more than that would give him a piece of that power, and I refuse to do that. He beat me up because he was stronger than me physically, not emotionally. You understand?”

  Max nodded. When she tapped the glass, he didn’t suggest she slow down. He’d seen things that a whole bottle of whisky wouldn’t even dent, and he had a feeling the worst part of her story was to come, if her desire for the liquid fortification was any indication. Even now, however, her back stayed straight, her hand steady and gaze direct. What would it be like, standing inside Janet’s mind and heart, seeing the tides of emotions she’d learned to mask and rein back to be the formidable woman she was? He’d caught glimpses of them, moments he knew were rare gifts. She had a softer side, but not what he’d call a vulnerable one. The Domme side of her was too overwhelming to permit that.

  As she’d said, she hadn’t given Jorge power over her, a drug dealer who’d nearly beaten her to death. Her will was far beyond a mere physical thing.

  She took a swallow of the whisky, put it down. “When Matt came up to the bar to refresh his drink order, he put his business card down in front of him. He was close enough I could see it, and he’d written his cell number on it in large print. He never looked at me, but he spoke. ‘Memorize it, and if you ever need a friend, call me’.”

  She shook her head. “When it was all over, later, I asked him what had made him do that. He said as he watched me that night, he saw certain things in my body language, my expressions, which told him I was in trouble. I was standing on a ledge where I was willing to be free or die, which likely meant I would end up dead. He knew Jorge’s connections, knew better than to speak to me directly or give me something Jorge would find on me later. Matt has that canniness to him, you know.”

  When Max nodded, confirming it, Janet’s lips twisted. “Matt said he fig
ured if he’d read me wrong, I’d simply see him as a crazy person and forget the number. Or tell my cartel boyfriend this gringo was hitting on me, and they’d dump his body in the trash.”

  She sat down on the barstool across from Max, rotated the shot glass in one hand. “My opportunity came about two months later. There was a war going on between competing cartels. I plotted out every detail, had everything ready. Late one night when Jorge was asleep on the couch, I hit him in the head with a skillet until he stopped moving. Then I took a power drill and drilled out his eyes. Used a butcher knife on the tongue. It took a heavy-duty meat cleaver to sever the head. Fortunately, his cook kept one stored in the pantry.”

  She delivered the words in a flat monotone, but the air vibrated with everything behind them. Max found he had one hand clenched on his knee, the other on his forgotten drink. She lifted blank eyes to him. Those perfect nails tented over the top of her glass, spun it in circles, over and over, like a nervous tic, except all of her had gone so still.

  “That’s the way the competing cartel was dressing their kills. Jorge had found some of his dealers left that way. I didn’t care if they took revenge on the other cartel for what I did, as long as they weren’t hunting me. But when I took the head, something funny was going through my mind, like this absurd knock-knock joke. ‘What comes back after you cut off its head? Absolutely fucking nothing’.”

  She nodded in a decided sort of way, finished the whisky. She shook her head when Max offered to refill it. “I broke up some furniture, cut my wrist to leave blood and tore off a fingernail. I wanted it to look like I’d been kidnapped. If they couldn’t find me, they’d assume I’d been used and killed, or sold on the black market. Another huge insult to Jorge, selling his woman into white slavery.” Her lips curved grimly. “Because I was so free with him, right?”

  Max remembered a night he’d slipped into a dingy gasoline restroom, washing gunpowder off his hands as he thought of two weighted bodies, shoved into the river. He hadn’t been thinking of the horror of that, but going back over all the important details. All the brass policed and bullets dug out of the corpses, no ID left on them. Yet he remembered the look in his eyes when he’d glanced up in the mirror. He’d seen that look in Janet’s face, that night in the hospital bathroom. Because of what he himself had done and experienced, he could reconcile the brutal images she was painting with the woman before him now. A human being was capable of incredible, terrible things.

  “I called Matt. I never questioned that was the right thing to do. He really could have been some idiot, living dangerously, flirting with the drug dealer’s girl, but I knew it wasn’t that. He was back in Texas. He asked me if I could get to the border, and I said I could, but I didn’t have a passport, any way to get through. Jorge had locked up my passport, which probably wouldn’t have done me any good anyhow, since the picture had been before my face reconstruction. Matt told me not to worry about that, and set up the time to meet me there. I had the cash I’d taken off Jorge, but I didn’t take anything else that might connect me back to him. I slipped past the guards he kept posted on his grounds—to keep threats out—and stole a car, which I planned to ditch at the border.”

  She shook her head. “When I arrived at the border, they made me leave the car and come into their office for further questions. I figured I was about to go to a Mexican jail, where I’d be tortured and killed by Jorge’s associates as retribution. Instead, Matt was waiting for me. I assume he bribed whoever needed to be bribed, because he merely thanked the guards as if they were returning an errant, mentally defective relative to him. He took my arm, and I walked with him to the American side. He walked me around to the passenger door of his car, held it open for me.”

  That seemed important to her. She closed her eyes, her fingers stilling on the glass a long moment before she continued. “He’d brought his own vehicle, no driver. I remember him driving twenty miles without either of us saying a word. I looked at all the empty, flat land around us, nothing significant, but all of it U.S. soil. I looked down at my hands, and saw I still had blood under the nails, staining the cuticles.

  “It wasn’t until he pulled the car off to the side of the road and put his arms around me that I realized I’d started crying. It took me a couple hours to stop trembling.” She lifted a shoulder. “Shock.”

  She rose then. “I want you to go home now, Max.”

  What the hell? “No.”

  “Yes.” She met his gaze. “It’s not a request. I need the space. You wanted to get a sense of what’s going on between us, what it means to me. You needed some kind of reassurance that you’re different from Thor, or any of the men I’ve dominated at Progeny.”

  He rose as well. “Then don’t fucking treat me like one of them.”

  As soon as he said it, he could have bitten through his tongue. She’d just told him something only one other person knew. But his response wasn’t based on that. It was based on his own demons, the empty face of his mother in his mind, forever beyond his reach. There was no way in hell he could countenance leaving Janet now, not when he hadn’t been there to protect her, irrational as that kind of thinking was.

  But that was obviously what she wanted. She was showing him a window in her soul, then slamming it down on his fingers, shutting him out. It fucked with his mind, twisted in his gut and became something ugly, cutting the intent connection they’d shared.

  She didn’t say anything, remaining still as a statue. Her expression didn’t change, but he could feel a radical shift in the air, as if she’d physically stepped onto a whole different continent.

  “Is that what you do?” he asked. “Give them that vibe that tells them they’ve fucked up, earned your displeasure? It cuts them, slices out their guts and makes them willing to do anything to make it better, right? Don’t work me, Janet. I’m not wired that way.”

  “No,” she said. “You’re not. I’m not like most women you know, Max. When I let down the shields, I need you to stand at a distance for a while, so I’ll be sure you’re not going to rush over the boundaries, attack what I’m revealing.”

  “I won’t. But we can’t figure out how to make the different pieces of who we are fit together if you won’t let me close enough to get a good look at them.”

  “Do you usually walk into an enemy compound to check things out, or do you survey things at a distance first, moving in closer as you verify the safest approach? The shape of those pieces?”

  “I don’t see you as an enemy. But maybe that’s how you see me.”

  A muscle twitched in her jaw. “No. But your lack of trust, the way you pulled back earlier, that disappointed me. I do understand trust must be earned, and a lot of this is unfamiliar territory for you. You’re adjusting, but I have to adjust too. We both feel it’s worth it, because neither of us has backed off yet.”

  Now she seemed to be talking to herself more than him, but then she brought her attention back to him. “I need you to trust that I mean what I say. Give me space. Go home. I’ll contact you when I’m ready.”

  “Your terms, your way.”

  “Yes. On that I don’t compromise. I’m sorry. If you can’t accept that, then it’s time to finish this.”

  Wow, just like that. His emotional radar was screwed up here, things spiraling in a wrong direction that he didn’t really understand. He wanted to make it better if he could, but she seemed locked out at all levels, frustrating him.

  “Do you have to hold on to all the control? Is it the only way you can feel anything? Can’t you let yourself be a normal person for one minute?”

  “No. Being a deviant is what works for me. And until now, that hasn’t seemed to bother you.”

  Okay, so the wrong tactic. When she gave him a searing look and began to pivot on her heel, he moved to stand in front of her. This time he didn’t touch her, but he held up a hand. “Damn it, just wait a second. That’s not what I meant. Yeah, being a Domme is real for you, but sometimes it’s not. I don’t want to
make you mad by saying that. But earlier tonight, being a Mistress was something you embraced for your own pleasure, your own reasons. It was real. Now you’re using it as a wall, hiding that real part of you. One’s your true face, the other’s a mask. Tell me if I’m wrong, Janet. Tell me.”

  Damn it, he couldn’t even touch her, hug her like he would any other woman when he acted like an ass. She obviously wouldn’t welcome that. All he could do was what she demanded. Which was what the whole Domme thing was about, wasn’t it?

  Her gaze was frosty, mouth set. “I need you to go,” she said, her voice jagged glass. “Now. Don’t make me say it again.”

  Everything about her body language, her eyes, rejected him. It did cut him deeply, such that he realized exactly why Thor and the others were willing to do whatever was needed to stand within the circle of her approval. Even now, he remembered the warmth of her body, her generosity in the hot tub and in her bed. But he couldn’t take back what he felt was truth. He wasn’t sure what he was seeking from her at this exact moment, but whatever it was, she wasn’t in a giving mood.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m going. Whatever you decide…I’m sorry.”

  Picking up his keys, he left her there, standing in the middle of her living room.

  * * * * *

  He had plenty to keep him busy. He steered clear of “the tower” for a while, what they called the executive offices. Janet cooperated, choosing to update the scheduling grid online and send text alerts to the affected drivers, including himself. When something needed to be couriered, she delivered it through one of the interns, or he delegated another driver to pick it up from her. He was the boss, after all.

  Besides that, he had a lot to do outside of work. His visits with Amanda, some time spent with guys at the VA. He helped Dale out at Eddie’s place and with building the swing set. While he was doing that, he didn’t talk about Janet and Dale didn’t push, especially when he realized Max wanted to think the problem through without help.