Vicious Carousel (Suncoast Society #25)

Vicious Carousel (Suncoast Society #25)

Tymber Dalton




Chapter One


I am a cliché. Worse, I’m a cliché of a cliché.

She’d known all the “right” things to do, and yet still, she’d found herself slap in the middle of her worst nightmare, the situation everyone had warned her not to let herself get into.

A situation she never thought she’d be in, because here she thought she was different.

Special.

Smarter.

Elizabeth Lambert, known as Betsy to her friends, cowered on the far end of the sofa, sitting with her legs drawn up under her as her boyfriend, Jack, stormed around their duplex apartment. She knew the neighbors next door weren’t home, and so did Jack.

Meaning he could ramp up the abuse full-bore without worrying about someone calling the cops on him.

Tonight, Jack was supposed to go work his part-time job as a bouncer at a friend’s bar in Bradenton. On most weekdays and every other Saturday, he turned wrenches at a Chevy dealership in Sarasota.

She suspected there was more going on at the bar besides drinking, but she didn’t ask.

There were a lot of things she didn’t ask anymore, things she should have asked a long time ago, before she’d gotten herself into this position. Eight months ago, she’d had a job as a secretary at a real estate office, a car, a small one-bedroom apartment of her own, and friends.

Now…she just had Jack, and what few things he’d allowed her to keep.

She didn’t even have her dignity.

Worse, she wasn’t sure exactly how she’d ended up here.

What had happened to the laughing, smiling, charming man who’d swept her off her feet? Who’d said all the right things? Who’d made her feel loved and special?

Yes, she’d only been in the local kinky community a few months when she’d met Jack. He’d just moved down from Michigan, said he wanted to retire in a couple of years, so he’d arranged a transfer from a dealership near Detroit. He was divorced for over twenty years, no kids.

And this Detroit Dom, who seemed to have his act together, who seemed to be able to read her mind about what she wanted and needed, had soon collared her and become her Michigan Master.

The duplex apartment, he’d told her, was temporary. He’d needed a place to stay when he first moved down here, and wanted something economical while he looked for a house. He was waiting for his house in Detroit to sell.

Seemed logical.

So what if it wasn’t in the best part of town? It wasn’t a crackhouse.

He didn’t want any slave of his working, so he’d ordered her to quit.

Since she wouldn’t be working, she wouldn’t need a car. She could save the expenses by not having one.

When she’d sold it, he’d put the money in his bank account.

She would, of course, live with him. Her apartment lease was due anyway, so he moved her in with him. But he had his own stuff and didn’t need hers.

Before she realized it, she was under his thumb, under his control.

And then…

Once he had her trapped, the nice guy she’d fallen in love with disappeared, replaced by a snarling, vicious man she didn’t recognize. During one long, lonely day at home, with no access to the Internet because he wouldn’t give her the password to the laptop computer that had been hers before he’d confiscated it, and no phone, she was cleaning and came across papers he’d hidden in a suitcase in his closet.

The house in Detroit he’d kept saying he was having trouble selling because of the depressed market there wasn’t for sale.

It’d been foreclosed on. Right about the time he’d moved to Florida.

When she’d angrily confronted him about it, that was when the real beatings started.

Followed by the revelation that he’d taken pictures of her while she was blindfolded during some of their private play, and if she didn’t toe the line he set for her, exactly the way he set it, her parents would get an earful as well as an eyeful about what their daughter had been up to.

Not that it had stopped him from doing that anyway.

Her parents had disowned her when he told them she was his collared slave.

He’d completely cut her off from everyone and everything.

He owned her, and wouldn’t let her go until he was ready. Not that she could go anywhere, without a car. Or afford to go anywhere, without a job.

So she sucked it up and tried to figure out a way to get free, except it only got worse.

And then he came home one night a month ago with the chain. Long enough for her to make it all around the apartment, and to the bathroom, but not out the door.

Padlocked tightly around her right ankle when he wasn’t home, and securely bolted into the base of the hall wall.

Two weeks earlier, when he’d taken her to the club and marched her around, she’d managed to get permission to use the bathroom. There Loren had slipped a small, pink sticky note to her under the bathroom stall door.

On it, her cell phone number, and Tilly’s.

“Call us. Day or night. We’ll come get you,” Loren had whispered before quickly leaving the bathroom.

Betsy had committed the numbers to memory before tucking the note inside the cup of her bra where the push-up pad went.

Right now, she sat cowered at one end of the couch, with her legs tucked under her because she was sitting on the chain, finally free of it. Today, she’d decided she was going to run, with only the clothes on her back, if necessary, and make her escape. She thought she’d have it done and be gone before he returned home, but it had taken her longer to finally work up the nerve to claw it off.