Close Cover (Masters and Mercenaries #16)(38)

Her brother strode off with his wife.

She turned and Remy was looking a little pale himself. “Are you okay? That was a heavy scene.”

“Lisa, I…”

Shit, she was going to kill her brother. Everyone was betting on them. Everyone was looking at them. “Remy, it’s okay. It’s not a big deal. These guys fuck around with everyone.”

He stared down at her. “I don’t want to hurt you. Your brother… I’m not your brother. It’s not going to go that way for us. If I took you with me, god, Lisa, I would be taking you into something you don’t deserve. My family is difficult and the town is weird and you deserve your life.”

He wasn’t changing his mind. She wanted to tell him that she liked weird, but he’d been honest with her. He was worried she would get hurt if she started to believe that she could change him. Hell, she didn’t want to change him. It was okay. “I’m not asking for more than you’re willing to give.”

Maybe if they’d had more time before he needed to leave. Maybe if he’d said yes to her the first time, but he hadn’t and she couldn’t ask a man she’d been with for three days to take her with him when he left town.

Even if she really wanted to.

“But your brother…”

“My brother likes to screw around with people,” she said. “I don’t take him seriously and neither should you. Consider that nothing more than a bit of hazing. And all the betting is going to be for nothing. Maybe we should get in on that. Would that be fair?”

He reached for her hand. “Maybe I should back off.”

Now tears threatened. “If my family makes me less desirable to you, then yes, we should reevaluate.”

“Nothing in the world could make you less desirable to me,” he said. “Not now that I know you.” He brought her hand to his mouth, kissing her. “But I’m not Prince Charming.”

“I don’t need you to be.” She wished he was, but she was going with the flow, taking what life had to offer her. “I need you to be Prince Right Now. And if you want to tie me up and do nasty things to me, all the better.”

He took her hand. “Now that I can do.”

He started to lead her toward the playroom, and she swore that she would live in the moment. It wouldn’t be that hard. After all, the future wasn’t all that bright.





Remy led her to one of the small rooms off the main play area. It was a room specifically done up for suspension play. It was the room he spent most of his time here in. All of his life he’d been around rope, learning to sail from an early age. It wasn’t surprising that a lot of his kink centered around ties and knots. He’d grown up being told to make sure his precious boats were secure or they might drift away and all would be lost.

He felt the same way about the woman trailing after him. He had the sudden desire to make sure she didn’t drift away, the waves of life taking her far from him.

“You know what I like to do, right?” The sex had been fairly vanilla up to this point. Oh, he’d used her panties to bind her hands together and spanked her pretty ass. She had a couple of bite marks because it turned out she enjoyed the sensation, but he hadn’t gotten around to his central kink.

“Suspension,” she replied with a sigh to her voice that let him know she wasn’t going to be scared.

He was starting to think nothing at all scared Lisa Daley. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s in here yet, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be alone the whole time. How far are you willing to go?”

“How fast can you get these clothes off?” Lisa replied.

Damn she was going to kill him. “Pretty fast.”

She followed him into the room. “Does it bother you? I wouldn’t do it anywhere I didn’t feel safe, but that’s kind of the point of Sanctum. And I think I might have some exhibitionist in me. When we were training partners, Linc and I would do it in his truck in the parking lot and the thought that someone could catch us kind of did something for me.”

“Excuse me?”

She flushed slightly, as though realizing her mistake. “The class would get us all hot and bothered and we would… You know how it can be between training partners. Especially when you agree it’s all about sex and nothing else.”

A rush of indignation shot through him. What had she said? She hadn’t… “Lincoln? Linc was your training partner? The same Linc I recently got you a job working under?”

Lincoln ran the bar at Top. Lincoln had smiled brilliantly when he’d been told Lisa would be working with him. Remy had been watching them across the dining room. At the time he’d thought how nice that the big guy would give Lisa such an enthusiastic greeting. He’d thought it was good because she needed some enthusiasm in her life.

That bastard had probably been thanking heaven she’d walked back into his life and he got a second shot at getting into her pretty panties.

“I didn’t mention that?” She had a cute, quizzical expression on her face. “Huh. I guess because it was so long ago and it didn’t mean anything. Now he’s just a friend. It’s cool to be working with him again. You know it’s always nice to catch up with an old friend.”

Oh, but Linc wasn’t old at all. “He was the last sex you had.”