Taken and Tamed (8 page)

He stopped to deliver a volley of harsh smacks. “That’s for the scratches all over me. You’re lucky I don’t give you a whack for every one.”

Cass howled. With her bottom still tender from last night’s spanking, every fierce wallop sent a shudder of pain through her. Zander kept up the lecture, punctuating his words now and then with an extra-hard thwack. She gave up trying to be brave and dissolved into wracking sobs.

Finally she heard a thud as the board dropped to the floor. Cass dropped to her knees, cowering in a fetal position.

“Get over there. In the corner, facing the wall. And you stay there until I give you permission to come out.”

She couldn’t move. Hands covering her head, she huddled on the floor, shaking.

“Get up.” He grabbed her elbow and hauled her to her feet.

She flinched as though he’d struck her.

Zander swore and pulled her roughly into his arms. “Dammit, woman! Why can’t you do as you’re told?” He held her tight against him and she felt his heart thudding in his chest. He pushed her away just as quickly and marched her into the corner by the fireplace, placing her hands on her head. Turning her face to the wall, he left her there.

Cass stood with her hands laced together on top of her head, tears streaming down her face. Her bottom burned, her head ached from crying so hard. Gradually her sobs turned into sniffles. She heard water running in the bathroom and Zander came out. He had a cold cloth in his hand. He turned her to face him as he wiped away her tears, then folded the cloth and held it against her forehead.

She slumped against him. Still shirtless, he’d washed off the blood on his chest and arms and his body was cold. She began shivering. Once she did, it was as though an earthquake hit her inside. Her body shook uncontrollably. He swore again and picked her up in his arms. Carrying her to the bed, he laid her on it and folded her into the threadbare quilt. Then he got in bed next to her, wrapping his arms around her and rocking her gently until the shaking subsided.

“Shock.”

She stared up at him drowsily. “What?”

“That reaction was shock. The irrational terror even after it was all over, the uncontrollable shivering. I’ve seen it before. PTSD.”

“I waw… was never in the army.” Her words slurred.

“You don’t have to be in combat to get PTSD. Any traumatic event can leave you with the symptoms. Later, even the smallest thing sets it off again. I’m sorry, Cass. I didn’t realize how bad it was. Sleep now. I’ll see if I can find anything else for us to eat and when you wake up, I’ll make you another pot of coffee.”

Cass nestled against his warmth. “More of your coffee? You really want to punish me. Could you just spank me again instead?”

To her surprise, he actually laughed. Just before she drifted off, Cass swore she felt his lips brush against her forehead.

She opened her eyes to find the room dark. Somehow she’d managed to sleep until nightfall. She sat up, wincing as her bottom made contact with the bed. Zander was nowhere to be seen. Wrapping the quilt around her body, she struggled to her feet.

He wasn’t in the bathroom or the kitchen alcove or up in the loft. A fire crackled in the hearth. Maybe he’d gone out for more wood. It was a little frightening to wake up all alone in a deserted cabin in the middle of nowhere. She kept her head turned away from the dark wall of glass, her mind filling with images from every scary movie she’d ever seen.

She tiptoed to the front door and opened it, planning to call out for him. Then she froze. He was talking to someone, his voice hushed.

“…still out like a light. I had no idea. Nothing in her dossier about it or Lord knows I’d have done something different back there.”

There was silence, then he spoke again.

“Carter is clean. Otherwise he’d have been here by now. He knows where the place is, we were both up here once with Dave during hunting season. It’s time to try closer to home. Yeah. Jacobs. I know, I know. Me either. But she’s the only one left.”

More silence.

“You’ll be here tomorrow to take her out? She’ll be royally pissed but you have to keep her locked up somewhere until it’s over. Yeah, that sounds good. Hey, do me a favor? Bring me some grub. Anything. I’m so hungry I’m ready to rustle up a pot of roadkill stew. Thanks, I will.”

* * *

Zander opened the door with one hand, his other arm gripping a load of firewood. He stopped dead. Cass stood in the center of the living room, her body tightly wrapped in the quilt, hands on her hips.

“Okay,
Mr
. Coleman, if that’s your name. Time to quit the bullshit. Who are you and why are we really here?”

He opened his mouth but before he could get a word out, she’d gone off on a rant.

“I know you’re not a stone-cold enforcer for some mob boss. You’d have gotten rid of me a long time ago. And that escape in Atlanta—way too easy. It was obviously planned. I just happened to walk back in unexpectedly. You’ve been improvising ever since.”

She marched toward him, but her aggressive stance was doused somewhat when the quilt slipped down, baring one firm tit. She caught the sudden glint in his eyes and grabbed the hem, pulling it back up and clutching it tighter around her, all the while without missing a beat.

“So what is it? You’re some kind of undercover agent? You’ve got a…”

“Yes.”

His response stopped her in her tracks. She gaped at him, mouth open like a fish.

“Yes?” Her voice rose to a shriek. “
Yes?
That’s all you’ve got to say? You dragged me out here into the middle of nowhere, threatened me, stripped me naked, spanked me—
twice
— and practically starved me. And when I finally figure out you’ve been lying to me all along, all you can do is say yes?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

She ignored his grin. “Don’t think you can charm your way out of this, mister. You had me pegged right with whoever you were talking to. By the way, whatever happened to ‘there’s no cell service here’? I
am
royally pissed. I’m going to charge you with kidnapping a private citizen, for one. Then there’s assault. And, and…”

“Don’t forget fingering your ass last night until you came. I’m sure there’s a statute somewhere to fit that. Sodomy, maybe? No, for that charge I’d have had to use my cock. And by then you were begging me to ram that into your pussy.”

She spluttered for a moment, enraged. Unable to find words, she resorted to throwing things at him. First, the pillow off the couch. Then she scooped up the wooden cutting board off the floor and lobbed that. He ducked and it went sailing over his head and thunked against the wall.

“Don’t you
dare
try to weasel your way out of this! You… you
asshole!
You had me scared to death.”

His grin widened. “Yeah, you were so scared you spent three hours outlining the best-seller you were hoping to get out of this whole thing. I read through your notes while you were asleep.”

“That’s how I cope. When I’m stressed or angry or depressed or worried, I write. It’s better than getting hooked on crystal meth.”

“Those are your only two choices?”

“Quit trying to change the subject. You owe me an explanation.” She plunked down in the middle of the couch, gathering the quilt around her, and glared at him. “Talk.”

“You’re right. We planned the escape. The security guard was a plant. He was the only one in on it. Nobody else, not Marshal Jacobs or Agent Smith—none of them.”

He started pacing back and forth in front of her as he laid out the story.

“There’s someone dirty working for the witness protection program. Four prospective witnesses have either vanished or been found murdered in the last year. All of them connected to organized crime. So far, we’ve been able to keep their connection to the program out of the news while we conducted our investigation. It seems Big Tony has somebody inside the U.S. Marshals service on his payroll, leaking their locations and new identities.

“I’m with the FBI. The head of the marshals asked us to step in because he didn’t know who he could trust in his own organization. None of the marshals knew I was there undercover. They all believed I’d been one of Tony’s enforcers.”

He stopped and looked into Cass’s eyes for the first time. “The interview with you? That was my boss’s idea. He wanted to get a buzz going inside the Atlanta office, make sure everyone knew one of Tony’s trusted men had turned on him. Zander Coleman is an alias. Tony doesn’t have anyone by that name working for him. So he wouldn’t know which of his men had broken ranks and was about to sell him out.

“We figured if I tried to escape, whoever was on Tony’s payroll inside the marshal’s service would grab the opportunity. They could take me out, even do it right in front of other marshals, since I’m now a criminal on the loose. So I had on a bulletproof vest under my tailored suit.”

“But then I walked back in.”

He nodded. “Yeah. You screwed up our plan. I couldn’t risk a shootout with you there, so I improvised. Believe me, I planned to drop you off as soon as possible. But there didn’t seem to be a good time. And after all the effort we put into this plan, I hated to throw it all away by having you go straight to the nearest cop and get me busted once you were free.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me the truth once we got here?”

He shook his head. “That could have been even more dangerous—for you. If the rogue marshal managed to track us here and you acted like we were on a friendly basis, he or she might kill you too. If the whole operation went south, as long as you believed I was the bad guy, you’d welcome whoever shot me as your rescuer. They’d never expect me to confide in a hostage. You’d be no threat to them.”

“So I’m supposed to believe that you tied me up and spanked me for my own good?”

He made an x across his heart. “Scout’s honor.”

“I just have one problem with that. I don’t think Boy Scouts fuck the little old ladies after they help them across the street.”

“They’d probably wish they could if little old ladies were as hot as you are.” He saw the spark of fury in her eyes and hurried on. “Look, I’m sorry I was harsh with you. But I had to make it believable. As for the… the fucking, well, that wasn’t part of the plan.”

He shot her a smoldering look. “You got turned on and when I realized it I got
really
turned on by that and things just got out of hand. But I said it before and I’ll say it again. I’m not sorry it happened.”

She blushed then and clutched the quilt tighter around her. “So now what? I heard you arranging for someone to pick me up tomorrow and lock me away somewhere.”

“Rod Carter. He’s a Fed too. I’ve known him for years and I’d trust him with my life.
Your
life. He’ll take you somewhere safe till this is all over.”

“I heard you mention Katherine Jacobs too.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I hate to think it, but the field has narrowed down to her. The head of this operation has gone to everyone else on our short list privately, given them false information about where I’ve supposedly been tracked to. All the locations have been monitored. But so far, no one has shown up to take me out at any of them. So tomorrow the director will contact Jacobs personally and tell her I’ve been spotted. If she shows up at that location alone instead of bringing a team along to arrest me like protocol requires, well, we’ve found our mole.”

“What about this cabin? If the operation was planned all along, why the hell couldn’t they at least have stocked it with some real coffee?”

“Believe me, I wish I’d stopped for groceries. But this wasn’t part of the plan either. I was supposed to show up at an abandoned motel out in the sticks north of Ellijay—one of those rundown places with individual little cabins. I’d take one and the Feds would already be in place in the others, staking the place out.”

He shrugged. “Once I had you in tow, I didn’t dare risk going there. If you got away from me somehow, flagged down a passing car, and managed to get the local cops involved, it would have blown an operation we’d spent months planning, certainly alerted the mole that we were on to him. Or her. A buddy of mine, a fellow FBI agent, bought this place after he spent months here in the mountains looking for Rudolph. Dave fell in love with the area. He’s retired now, spends most of the year in Florida, and only uses it in the fall as a hunting cabin. I’d been up here a few times with a bunch of the guys and I knew it would be vacant this time of year. So I improvised.”

He sat down on a wooden rocking chair near the fire, wincing as he leaned back. “Damn thorns. I think there’s still one stuck in me.”

* * *

Cass sighed and gathered up the quilt in both arms, hobbling over to where he sat. “Let me see.”

He leaned forward and she gasped. His back was a mess of deep scratches crusted with dried blood.

“Come on.” She headed for the bathroom. “Do we have any hot water?”

“I turned on the propane water heater while you were sleeping. You were shivering so hard earlier I thought a hot shower might be just what you needed.”

She led the way into the bathroom, closing the toilet seat and pointing for him to have a seat. “Turn sideways a little more. The light in here is pretty dim.”

She took a washcloth from the stack on a shelf above the toilet and filled the sink with hot water. Dipping the cloth in, she gingerly dabbed at the worst of the scrapes.

“Ouch!”

“Don’t be such a baby,” she snapped. “Where’s the big tough lawman who got all these scars? You’re lucky I’m not smacking
your
ass with a wooden board.”

“Yeah, well, if you don’t take it easy on me, I may have to do it again. Besides, I had heavy-duty painkillers to get me through those.”

He let out a curse.

“I found it. It’s not a thorn. It looks more like a long splinter. You must have fallen on a branch at some point. A piece of it broke off and stuck in your back. Lean forward a little more.”

She rinsed out the cloth with more hot water and laid it across his back, then turned and headed out of the room. “I have a pair of tweezers in my bag,” she called back. “Stay put. I’ll be right back.”