Page 96 of Stolen By the Billionaire
“Well, I think I lost it. I left it on the table because no one ever comes to my house, let alone inside my house, not even thieves. Criminals can tell there’s absolutely nothing worth anything in my house and don’t even bother. Abigail didn’t say anything about the money when you were on the phone with her, from when she went inside to get Muffintop.” She stared at the tiled floor. “I’ll bet those guys who tried to kidnap me went inside my house and stole it.”
“I’ll replace it,” he told her. “As soon as I get my finances in order, I’ll reimburse you. Don’t give it another thought.”
“It was my fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t even have told you.”
“Let’s make it twenty-five.”
And yet the guilty nugget in his lungs didn’t soften.
She shook her head, her black braid sliding over her shoulder and catching on that oversized tee shirt. “You don’t have to do that. I don’t want your money.”
“Get Charlie and HowNow the good oats. They deserve it.”
“It feels wrong to take your money.”
Blaze walked into the bathroom and eased himself down to the floor to sit beside her, the bathroom cabinets hard against his back. “I am sorry I threatened you to get to your aunt. It weighs on me. Accepting the money would do a little to ease my mind.”
She shrugged. “You said you were sorry right then in my house.”
Blaze shrugged. “Words. What are words worth? Not a damn thing. Just a puff of vibrations in the air that float away. I need to do something to apologize. If not the money, I should rebuild your fence or something.”
Sarah chuckled, or giggled, or something. Blaze wasn’t sure how laughs were delineated. She said, “The fences always need mending. There’s always something that needs to be done on a farm, you know?”
No, Blaze didn’t know. Since he’d resigned his commission, he did not know what it felt like to have someone or something counting on him, not even a fence. The suicide-prevention hotline was a volunteer gig, and they probably wouldn’t notice too much if he fell off the face of the Earth and plummeted into the void of space forever.
But he nodded. “But the money is a start.”
“Maybe you could mend my fence, too.”
Was that an invitation?
Blaze looked down at Sarah and caught her staring at him with her big doe eyes.
She was so near that the baby warmth from her arm trickled onto his.
A power differential existed between them because he was her captor, essentially, and she had much less wealth than he did. No matter the realities of military life, the US military taught the US Code of Military Justice and honor.
Kissing Sarah now, taking her eggshell head in his hands and feeling her lips under his, was probably prosecutable under the USMJ if he were still in the Navy.
Which he was not.
And yet last night, she’d been so lovely, so submissive, when he’d bound her with the kinbaku ropes like his will was an iron cage wrapped around her.
When she’d come just from the ropes’ nipple stimulation—and he was sure she had, twice—the thought ran through him that he could bend her lush body into whatever shape he wanted and take her. He could force her to orgasm a thousand different ways or deny her that pleasure until she begged and then unleash it like a nuclear blast.
A tsunami of absolute power had rushed through him, driving every impulse except wanting her from his body.
But he was responsible for her, so he’d pulled the cord on the slipknots he’d tied into the back of the corset and walked away.
It was good that the Navy and SEAL program had installed discipline in him like gristle. Leaving Sarah the night before had been harder than holding a leg lift for an hour while the frigid waves of the Pacific Ocean waterboarded him and a drill sergeant barked at the line of Navy SEAL wannabes that they should DOR.
And thus, as they sat on the cold tile floor of his bathroom, while she gazed up at him with wide eyes like she was waiting for him to make a move, discipline restrained him.
Blaze had put her in danger by using her as a pawn to threaten her aunt, a crime boss he had known was dangerous as hell.
It had just never occurred to him that Mary Varvara Bell would send a hit squad to summarily execute her innocent niece who lived on a farm in the middle of an Iowa cornfield just to make a point.
It should have occurred to him. He’d studied the situation. He’d planned. He should have known.
