Have Gun, Will Travel (The Bare Bones MC #5)(29)

And then he’d never be able to leave me.

“No! Stop touching me! I didn’t give you permission to touch me, father!” I loved playing the twisted sort of Daddy Dom/religious game. It suited me, and it obviously suited him. I wasn’t sure which way Sax was approaching it, but they both worked for me.

Slap! Another wrench of my hair. “I didn’t give you permission to talk back to me, Sister!”

Dear Lord! The idea that he’d discovered my dirty secret, that I’d been a novitiate, that I’d been studying for my vows, had me giggling, laughing lasciviously like a drunken slut.

This time his slap connected directly with my soaked * lips.

“Ow!” I dared crank my head around and glare at him angrily. He was angry, too, probably for a different reason. His eyes flashed with a diabolical authority, and I knew I could never top him at his own game. Because the next thing I knew, I was on my ass on the carpet, and he was looming over me.

All brawn and muscles bulging, his nipples poked like pebbles under his wifebeater T-shirt. From this angle, the shelf of his erection loomed even more massively, and I was sure, in the slant of dusty sunlight coming through the blinds, I could see the outline of the mushroom head.

I just sprawled there stupidly, my panties around my knees. Was he stopping our scene because I’d dare push back? I sat dumbfounded, making a wet spot on Lytton’s carpet.

“Enough!” he barked. “You’ve been—you’ve been punished enough.”

But his words didn’t have the ring of authority, and he seemed unsure what to do. He seemed… flustered. Sure, he was probably overwhelmed with lust for me. I was learning about lust quickly. I was learning there must be a strange, obscure something about me that attracted certain men. I could play that up, if I could just figure out what it was.

I hung my head. “Yes, Master.” Then I remembered our scene. “Yes, Father. Your spanking has taught me that I should not go places alone until Tony Tormenta has been caught.” I meant killed, but as a former novitiate that was still hard for me to say.

His frustration must have built up, for he exploded. “God damn it it, girl! While you were out getting your nails done playing f*cking Nancy Drew, do you know what was going on? Your BFF Brenda Ridings has been slashed to smithereens by that maniac Tormenta.”

What? Our sexy, exciting scene instantly evaporated from before my very eyes. I even tried to stand, forgetting where my panties were, and wound up wobbling like a newborn colt.

Sax reached to help me, no longer the Dom in charge. He pulled my panties up for me as though dressing a small girl.

I stumbled toward my shorts, crumpled on the floor. “What do you mean, Sax? How the hell did he get ahold of Brenda? She said she was going to hole up in Harte’s house for a few weeks, not even go down to the clubhouse, to hide like the rest of us while all this blew over.”

“Blew over? Girl, do you know what sort of wasp nests you opened up with your bounty offer? I’m almost positive word has gotten back to Tormenta, thus why he slashed Brenda. The only way we even figured out it was Brenda was because Tormenta referred to her as ‘Smoky’ in his Facebook posting.”

“Facebook? You’re f*cking kidding? I thought he stopped doing that childish crap a long time ago?”

“Apparently the taunt you gals issued was too much for him to take sitting down.” Sax even helped me button my shorts. He was suddenly very gentle, for a guy who had just been whaling on me to beat the band. “I’m just wondering if that Santiago Slayer joker somehow blew something, like stopped to comb his hair in his rearview mirror, or posted a music video about his quest on YouTube. Did you…you didn’t happen to tell anyone about the bounty, did you?”

“I…doubt it.” I wasn’t certain, though. Word of something that huge would be sure to get around. That was the point, really, wasn’t it? We welcomed even more bounty hunters—in fact there was word that the famed Lock Singer of our brother club, The Bent Zealots, might have time to track down Tormenta. Lock actually had a bounty hunting business that tracked fugitives, bail jumpers, over in Lake Havasu City.

“Are you sure? Could there have been anyone, even someone you thought was trustworthy, outside your circle of sweetbutt—”

“Harte.” It struck me like a wooden dagger to the heart. “When I was waiting for you at The Drawing Board, when you went out to Winona. A few other sweetbutts were still hanging around, although Brenda had gone to Harte’s. We just started…” I shrugged. “Talking. Harte’s always been our friend, Sax. He’s always been on our side. We couldn’t not tell him about the bounty. He was the only one who came running when Cassie got slashed. He was the one who thought of hiring Lock Singer.”

Sax even straightened out the lower hem on my shirt. He brushed it off as though it had cookie crumbs. “Never mind. Don’t worry yourselves about it. We should’ve made a better plan for covering our asses, maybe just kept it between us and Slayer. But listen, before we go back out there. We need a safe word.”

“A…what?”

Sax almost rolled his eyes, as though it was typical I would have no clue what he referred to. He patiently explained. “A safe word. A word you—or I—can use when we want the scene to stop, when it gets too intense for us.”

I thought I’d heard of that idea before. It was a good one. “Oh. Okay. Although I doubt we’ll have need for anything like that.” I grinned. “You seem to have everything under control.”