Yield (2 page)

“Well?” I pulled my hand away a fraction, but the electricity of his presence drew me still.

“The man you want is called Vetrov.” Ugh, and even his voice seemed to stroke between my legs. Testosterone concentrate.

I swallowed and made myself listen.

“He organizes human trafficking. I know where to find him.”

To business. I’d get the person who had done this and to hell with my life until I did. No brother, no mother, no father – only I remained. Most days I wanted to weep despite the millions Dad had left me. My vet science degree could wait. This money, what better thing to do with it than destroy the man who’d killed my father?

“Give me his name, where he lives, and I’ll pay you very well. Once I know for sure he’s the right man, one hundred thousand is yours.”

For the first time he truly studied me. When his eyes lowered, my breasts tingled, my nipples tightening until they were aching and hard. They’d be showing through my skimpy shirt.
Focus. Business.

His mouth twitched and he lifted his hand and trapped mine. What the hell?

“Remove your hand.” I tugged but he held on tight. The creak of the chair warned me that Hugh had noticed. I shook my head at him and he subsided into his chair.

“First hear my terms. Two hundred thousand. You’re going to need me with you to help fine tune the location of Vetrov.”

I frowned and was still considering when he spoke again.

“Also, I want you.”

Time shivered. “What ?” I’d heard wrong.

“You.” His smile was hard, uncompromising, and so lethal every hair on my body stood on end. “I want you in my bed. Once. After that, you won’t want to leave. No you. No deal.”

He didn’t wink or move in any way, just waited while examining my face, and that floored me. Arrogant bastard.

Was this blackmail? Yet he intrigued me. I shook my head, jarring myself out of the state of shock. “Ummm.”

One eyebrow rose. “Dare to take a chance for once, Wren. Life is better with surprises.”

One night. Why was I even thinking it was possible?

I blinked, running through crazy thought after crazy thought. What would it be like to have sex with such an overtly dangerous man? All my past lovers had been students. Young
safe
men who’d never done more than go to university, parties, maybe the beach.

Insane to say yes.

I opened my mouth and was caught by how he stared at my lips. His large hand squeezed down harder until where his thumb pressed hurt. The pain brought another level of scariness to this. Now I was aroused and afraid in equal proportions.

The words seemed to blurt out without my mind having much say. “Once, only. And it’s one hundred thousand if you want me as part of the deal.”
Let’s see what the smart ass thinks of that.

“Done.” He drew my hand to his mouth, kissed my knuckles like a gentleman, then he singled out my forefinger and sucked on it.

I could feel the movement of his tongue.

In one second, my finger became hot and wet and his.

Tremors ran through my pussy. Breathing halted. My eyes must be so very wide. The man had turned me on so much with that simple action, as if it were a button to my sexuality.

Holy fuck.

His murmur rumbled past my last defenses. “Keep looking at me like that and I’ll bend you over this table now, pull down your underwear...”

...and fuck you.
I could hear those unsaid words in my mind.

He released my hand. I snatched it away.

What had I just agreed to?

*****

Moghul

“Moghul! Problem.”

At the sound of my name, I shut off the phone and swung back to the naked model my rigger had suspended from the ceiling by hooks. Her frantic pleas to be let down were worrying my men but the film crew kept to their task. Randy was working methodically to get her down.

The ropes lowered the last foot. Her bound breasts, then the rest of her front, gently kissed the floor.

“Way to go,” I muttered. Maybe I could salvage something from the footage.

Not all the scripts worked, especially when we tried something new, like hook suspension.

The crew relaxed and Randy went to one knee beside Mel to extract the shiny hooks.

“Thank you, Randy!”

The Texan gave me a thumbs-up then resumed soothing and freeing the girl. The man was a find and a half with all his skills – big attitude, bad jokes, and big dick. If anyone else had been handling the submissive, she’d have been screaming the room down.

My second phone buzzed and I walked carefully backward until I found the wall.

I did a last check on the scene.

There was nothing sexy about the next part. Not with her panicking. Maybe if we were a torture snuff porn site but Kinkaverse was a straight up BDSM porn site. Domination, humiliation, and bondage of every sort while the models got fucked every which way. All above board and legal.

I pursed my lips and, just for a second, allowed myself the leisure of imagining Mel being made to stay up there. Enticing situation. Suspended on hooks, with her arms bound and anchored to the wall by other ropes, blood trickling from the points of entry, gagged maybe. Then she could be fucked by the Texan, and one or two others.

I smiled and let the little vision slip away.

It wasn’t often I let myself dwell on the possibilities. Not while at work. My employees would be aghast, but not at my fantasies, at my realities.

“Got ya, sweetheart.” Randy removed the last hook then cuddled her to him.

I snorted and glanced down at the message on my screen. Military-grade encryption but it never hurt to be careful. Someone reading over my shoulder could be as disastrous as the message being sent in plain text.

The woman in Moresby is not a friend of Jazmine Foulkes. She’s Gavoche’s daughter, Wren. She’s trying to figure out her father’s death. Dangerous if she links you and the House.

“Fuck,” I said softly.

The spotlights in here were overcoming the aircon. I wiped my forehead with the back of my arm then stared up at the ceiling for a while.

The slave House, in Papua New Guinea, I’d written off. The place was being closed down anyway and the only liabilities, my men there, had been killed by the men who’d rescued Jazmine Foulkes. Those rescuers had also killed Wren’s father.

Which was good, really, even if the man had been a friend.

I smiled thinly. No one left alive could connect me directly to anything as illegal, immoral, and depraved as sex slavery. Vetrov was a name I kept in quarantine from the legal, if dirty, businesses I ran as Moghul.

What were the odds Wren would connect me to the House? Low, as in very.

I should have her killed. It was final. It was sensible. People were loose ends because of their nosiness and Wren had met me, even if she knew nothing of her father’s fetishes. Once all the immediate family was gone, no one was likely to see anything except an old man’s kinkiness exposed in a tawdry fashion by his death in Papua New Guinea.

I grimaced. What a waste. The last time I’d seen her, the girl had blossomed into a beauty.

The hooks called to me. Someone needed to try them out properly.

I never took things that far on my home turf. Absentmindedly, I tapped my finger on the mobile phone.

Yet a woman caught on those hooks, for me, just for me... Definite possibilities there. It would be karma in a way, considering Andrew’s proclivities.

Glass

The last flicker of the white painted metal of Wren’s four-wheel-drive showed between the heavy green leaves of the trees.

What a woman. What a surprise that’d been – her agreeing to get in bed with me. I grinned. The buzz from that might take a while to die away.

That road wound down the mountain for miles and miles then back to the coast and Port Moresby. I whistled once. With the driver’s side door of my Land Rover propped open with my boot, the sound carried well.

From the jungle to my right, Pieter emerged. His leonine dark locks had been tied back, revealing the heavy bones of his face. He was a man who looked like a brick to the face would barely dent him, and that he’d then apply that same brick to his attacker and make him wish he was home in bed. His looks told no lies.

He jogged over, yanked open the door, and slid into the front passenger seat, making the car creak.

“Lose some fat, man. You’re killing the suspension.”

“Har har. It’s muscle not fat.” Pieter pulled out his shiny Glock and laid it across his lap.

Seconds later, Jurgens appeared from behind the vehicle and hauled his ass into the back seat. Enough ink on the man to make a tattooist salivate. Enough metal to set off detectors at fifty feet. South Africa had lost a couple of predators when these guys left the country.

Their doors slammed and I pulled mine shut.

“Go,” murmured Pieter.

“What did you find?” I turned the wheel and gently accelerated.

“Two men in the bush watched while you spoke to her. They must have their own car back there. We took them both down. Ziptied them. We’ve got everything from their pockets –

phones, and a camera, wallets. We chucked away their weapons. Next time we won’t get to sneak up on them so easily.”

That was the drawback of not acting while we had an advantage. I’d known this and yet I still hadn’t given the go ahead to terminate them.

As I steered around the long swooping bends of the track, the bumps of a poorly maintained bitumen surface shuddered up through the seat. Birds whooped and whistled above the subdued growl of the engine. I settled my hands on the leather steering wheel cover. Land Rovers had an elegance to them even when they were working hard.

If I didn’t tell Wren what had happened...

I fished my phone from my pocket and tossed it to Pieter. “Text her that they’re back there. Where you left them. Tell her no security when we meet in town or the deal is off.”

A few minutes later, Wren’s vehicle passed us going back up to the café.

“You should’ve let us take them.” Pieter cocked his head.

Yeah, maybe I should’ve.

“Why didn’t you?”

I took too long figuring out my answer and Jurgen popped in with his view.

“Glass isn’t into killing ladies. None of us are, come to think of it.
Fokken
bad business that is.”

From the corner of my eye, I spotted a nod from Pieter.

“True.” The man shifted his shoulders to lean into the doors and angle himself toward Glass. “But we had other plans for her, didn’t we?”

“
Ja.
I think she confused Glass. That one could make you think with your cock instead of your head. Pretty little thing.”

Pieter grinned. “Was that it? Though, hell, taking her would’ve solved that problem right smart.”

“Taking her?”
Bloody hell.
It
had
been the plan. I grunted and kept steering. They let me have the silence.

Good men. Despite the joking, none of us thought lightly of kidnapping Wren or killing her guards. We were all ex-military with jungle actions in Africa under our belts. We’d killed, close up, many times. War had toughened us but it had also made us aware that death was final and life wasn’t something you extinguished on a whim.

I glanced across at Pieter. “Did they get pictures?”

“Probably.”

Shit.

“There’s no internet access here though. Once these are gone we’re okay.” He pulled out a phone then dismantled and mutilated the sim card. “Jurgen, we may as well toss these out here.”

“Sure.”

To let them throw the bits as deep as possible into the jungle, I pulled over for a few seconds.

I didn’t mind killing, when I absolutely had to, to keep my friends and employees out of jail and healthy. Wasn’t that. Admit it, I had reservations about doing anything to a woman. Made my bloody toes curl.

But...I’d let Pieter do whatever he’d wanted to Jazmine. They’d deserved each other, though. From the first moment I saw Jazmine, her devotion to Pieter had shone through. She might not have seen it in herself, but it’d been there. Now she was his happy little slave. They were in love, for whatever strange reasons rocked their world.

Pieter and Jurgen deserved an apology. “I fucked up. I’m sorry. We’ve lost the initiative.”

Concealing ourselves from any police inquiries was the prime, A-grade reason for this meeting. We needed to stop Wren chasing down clues. Even if it hadn’t been a bullet from my own sniper rifle, I’d been in charge of the assault that had freed Pieter and Jazmine and killed Wren’s father.

We should’ve stayed away from her and prayed she found no witnesses, no clues.

As if. I smiled to myself. As if praying was ever going to be our first line of attack for any problem.

Besides, if we’d stayed away, I’d never have met her.

A rich little spoilt bitch in the middle of the New Guinea Highlands searching for the answers to her father’s death. If ever there was a man who deserved death it was him. Perverted sick bastard.

Would she still follow through with the meeting? Fuck, I hoped so. Still driving, I drew on memories.
Petite
, that was the word for Wren. She’d acted bold as brass but with that neat black hair flipping across her shoulders, and those big eyes peering at me when I’d suggested anything shocking...and that body, she seemed ripe for the next unscrupulous bastard to take advantage.

What was it about boobs, body, and cleavage, that enticed a man when he’d seen it a thousand times on porn sites on the internet and on every woman who’d ever graced his bed?

Nothing but her had existed as I’d threaded between the tables and chairs on the approach to her table.

That bright lipstick was such a contrast when the rest of her was faded denim shorts, white T-shirt, and pale skin. Red on cream. When she’d spoken, I’d imagined kissing those glossy lips, shoving her against a wall and kissing her.

Instant hard-on material.

Wasn’t there some theory that women’s lips were supposed to remind you of their pussy? I could go with that idea.

But kissing? Only kissing? How undirty and unnasty was that? I was slipping.