Page 127 of Stolen By the Billionaire
Sarah ventured, “When you say you’re a possessive—what you said.” Her voice died in her throat under his hand.
He held onto her throat with his palm and fingers, just tightly enough to keep her from ducking away but not to bruise, and growled, “It means I possess you, that your body is mine to command and take and use, and that I am yours and will protect you from yourself and the damage you would cause to yourself, and from anyone who tries to fucking touch you against your will.”
She drew a breath and blinked. “What are you going to tell Logan?”
He scowled. “I’m working on it.”
He backed off, letting her go, and she sagged against the wall.
“Now go sit in my car like a good girl, or I’ll spank your ass until you cry and then fuck you without letting you come.”
33
Green
Sarah
Sarah slipped her hand through Blaze’s offered elbow even though she suspected he was keeping track of her more than being gallant and floated through the hotel’s hallways and corridors and down the escalator to the lobby, bobbing along with him like a balloon on a string tied to his wrist.
A small part of Sarah’s mind berated her that she should not be cozying up to her kidnapper, that he’d said all those glorious things to manipulate her, and that she was a fool and an idiot, and what the hell was Sarah doing going along with an abductor and a murderer, all because of the dick?
But she ignored it.
Even though she probably shouldn’t.
For years, maybe forever, she’d been slithering on the fertile soil of the farm as everyone who gave a darn about her fell away or died.
Memories of Logan were surfacing, snippets of moments where he’d taken her along to the henhouse to hold the spring chicks, their fluff almost weightless in her kindergartener hands, lying in the straw in the barn with the half-feral barn cats swarming all over them and darting away, and teaching her as a toddler to milk Louisa-Louise, the cow before HowNow.
He’d been there, and then he’d been gone.
And then her parents had died, one after the other.
But now, there was Blaze.
Yes, maybe he was a possessive A-hole, but he was possessive about her. He was callous and crude, but maybe that was how the world had not sanded him smooth but roughened him until he was splintery and hard-angled. Maybe life had taken a rasp to him against the grain and torn him into jagged pieces.
That would certainly explain his jawline and ridged abdominals.
And now, Sarah might be getting Logan back.
Whatever her parents had said about Logan might be wrong, at least a misunderstood mistake, but maybe actually, solidly, harshly wrong.
Her parents had been unforgiving in everything.
They’d broken with the Orthodox Church they’d attended because the priest had read the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats from the Gospel of Matthew, the sermon that Jesus had preached about giving money to the poor, helping the sick, visiting prisoners, and helping immigrants. Her father had been “triggered” by the sermon and refused to return, withdrawing his support for the church and forbidding Sarah from seeing the few friends she’d made there.
When her mother’s sister had gone away to college in California and wasn’t around to help out in Iowa anymore, everything Aunt Jackie had said had become a transgression. When Jackie had visited and laid down clear boundaries about what kind of cruelty she would not be subjected to, Sarah’s dad had violated them within an hour. When Aunt Jackie got mad that he’d said some things about her husband, he used her anger as fuel to turn the rest of the family against her. Jackie never came back to Iowa anymore and never called.
Sarah wasn’t even sure if she was alive anymore. When she’d tried to call her aunt when each of her parents had died, the phone number was disconnected.
Her father had moved away from New York to Iowa due to the great rift he’d opened between himself and his father, and he’d refused all overtures of reconciliation. Aunt Mary Varvara had only reached out to Sarah after his death and established tentative threads.
With Blaze’s hand in hers, Sarah might have a future with people instead of toiling on the farm, of the farm, for the farm.
They walked outside the hotel into the glaring morning sunlight that flashed between the squared-off spires and over the white sidewalk, street, and Blaze’s black sports car waiting for them at the curb.
A bellhop wearing a green uniform stood beside the open driver’s side of the car, gesturing with a white-gloved hand like he was holding an invisible serving platter. His face stretched into a rictus of a grin, and his iron-gray-streaked hair lay flat under his pillbox hat that matched his verdant uniform. His rough skin made him look a little old for a bellhop, but doing an honest day’s work was a virtue.
