He indulged an inner smirk as he answered himself.

He wasn’t taming himself at all. He was going to drag her naughty little ass upstairs, lock them both in the master bathroom, strip her naked from the bottom down, and order her to bite back her screams as he drove into her with every full, throbbing inch of his cock. And she’d control those shrieks while he described every detail of every punishment he was going to give for her little jaunt downtown without his consent.

He shifted in his seat with a grunt and tried to relax by looking at the lake. The only thing he could think was how dark the waters had gotten now—and how his balls were an even deeper shade of blue.

He snatched up his phone, getting ready to punch in Zeke’s number. How long could a stupid wine sampling take?

Perfect timing. The device rang with an incoming call from Z himself. Garrett jabbed a thumb at the green key.

“Did you forget the access code to our gate again, man?”

Zeke’s response sounded distracted. “Wh-What?”

“The gate. It has a code, remember? The code you never remember, assface?”

The zinger he expected in return from Z never came. In its place were words in a tone he’d heard so rarely from his friend, he could count the occasions on one hand. It was chilled. Choked. Afraid.

“Hawk.” A rough sigh grated across the line. “Garrett. Fuck. You’d better—”

The guy just stopped. He literally couldn’t go on.

“What?” Garrett barked. “I’d better what, damn it? Zeke, what the hell—”

“Just get your ass in the car and get down here.” A tormented growl ripped out of him. “Aaaggh! I can’t fucking believe this.”

“Z. You’re not making sense.” But the second the words spilled from him, instinct clicked into place. A damn few things tore Zeke apart like this. Losing at hockey. Losing a guy on the team. Losing anyone he cared for. Like a certain dark redhead with whom he’d spent nearly every hour of the last ten days.

“Shit,” he muttered. “Shit.”

“I only turned for a second. One of those fuckhead fake cops asked me a question, and when I turned, the other one had three goons with him. They were already throwing Rayna into a van.” His growl escalated into a snarl. “Goddamnit!”

“What about Josie? Did she observe anything?” He fired off the questions as mandates while shutting off the fire pit and then whirling back toward the condo. Wyatt followed, his attention officially engaged the second his woman’s name was mentioned. “And what do you mean, ‘fake cop’?”

“I mean just that. The bastards were planted there. Goddamnit, there’s no end to the toilets King can send his shit up around here!”

“That doesn’t add up. He didn’t know Sage was going to end up at Pike Place today.”

His friend let out a leaden sigh. “Rayna and I made plans for our trip yesterday.”

That added up. “Fuck.”

“Yeah. That about says it all.”

A cobra of terror slithered its way through his chest and sank fangs into the base of his wind pipe. Garrett paced into the kitchen and slammed his fist into a cupboard, answered with the din of shattering glasses from inside. He forced himself to breathe. He forced himself to think. He wasn’t standing here with Sage’s death certificate in his hand again. They had hope. It was only a thread, but he’d take it.

“Josie,” he gritted again. His aunt had a damn good head on her shoulders. Maybe she remembered something vital. “You’ve questioned her, right? What’d she say?”

Wyatt braced himself to the other side of the counter. “Questioned her about what? What the hell is going on?”

“Hawk…she’s gone too.”

He turned from his uncle. “Shit.”

“Garrett, don’t you dare turn your back on me! What’s—”

He silenced his uncle with an upstretched fist. “What’s your twenty?” he demanded of Zeke. After committing the cross streets to memory, he barked, “On our way.”

After punching the line shut, he swung his attention to Wyatt. The man’s face had hard angles that could’ve formed the fifth profile on Mount Rushmore. He hadn’t seen the look since Wyatt got back from his last tour in Iraq, and he hated being the one to evoke it again.

Remorse wasn’t going to serve either of them right now.

“Are you carrying?” he asked his uncle.

“Does a pig blow mud for snot?”

Garrett nodded. “Grab your heat. I’ll fire up the truck. We’re on full-ready mode as of now.”

“Are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on?”

“Yeah. On the way.” When you won’t be so tempted to choke me to death as you think of your wife on a barge headed for Thailand.

Chapter Fourteen

“Well, we could do worse for accommodations.”

Josie was giving the situation her best, including little quips like that. Sage tried to give the woman at least half a smile, especially because Josie had spoken the truth. She peered around again. The space was nearly as big as the backstage of King’s Thailand hut, but the floor swayed beneath them and she could hear the faint horns of the Bainbridge Island ferry boats. The single light they’d been given was attached to a polished teak hull, and they’d been thrown onto a plush bed with satin pillows. She guessed they were on one of the luxury yachts that were moored at the private marina north of the city.

But being surrounded by a music-video fantasy didn’t make her feel like dancing. That could have something to do with the dread. It returned like a creepy ex-boyfriend—wielding a knife and a shotgun. Though she fought to hit the off button on her memory, the damn thing returned to that wrenching moment in the Market, when she realized their fun girls’ field trip had suddenly taken a wrong turn. She’d seen their fate written on the face of the cop who stepped in between Josie and Zeke. Within a second, he’d gone from friendly to feral, a hunter with his prize meat in range. She’d barely been surprised by the hand slapping the duct tape on her mouth, the grip that nearly yanked her shoulders from their sockets, or the body slam that took her from the afternoon sunshine into the dank gloom of a van.

That was when the hard part had begun. Again. The wild wondering of what had just happened. The pounding terror of predicting what would happen next. The enraging silence of the two men who watched over them with aimed pistols and the third who sped the van through traffic with fluid expertise, no doubt experienced at the art of the getaway.

She bent her head back into the pillows, wishing the thoughts would tumble out the back of her head. The only thing that toppled was her equilibrium, thanks to the pitch of the boat and the aftereffects of the wine she’d “sampled.” But the moment also brought clarity. She winced from the blinding force of it. All of Garrett’s guard-dog behavior—the paranoia, the monitoring, the needing to know her every sneeze and step—made sense now. He’d felt, probably even known, that throwing King into a jail cell anywhere in Thailand was going to be a temporary fix. She’d been held by the monster long enough to see how far his money flowed and what kind of people it turned into dancing monkeys for him.

A hard snort escaped her. Shit. It all made sense now. She should have put the pieces together long ago. She should have realized all Garrett’s freak-outs weren’t normal. But their absence from each other had stripped her baseline for clear judgment. He hadn’t been such an ogre before Botswana. A growling grouch from time to time, but not a creature who snarled when she so much as hinted at taking a morning jog on her own. But she never questioned the ogre. She’d figured it was just part of how the last year had morphed him, the same way it had changed her. All the fear in his eyes… She’d yearned to douse it, not deal with it. For nearly fourteen months, she’d lived with more fear in her belly than food. Now that she was home, she’d only yearned to leave all the terror, desperation, uncertainty, and ugliness behind. She’d longed to return to reality and finally be free of the nightmare.

A serrated breath tore apart her throat. Return to reality? That was where she’d slipped on life’s banana peel, wasn’t it? And life was sitting nearby, sipping a mai tai, laughing at her.

The nightmare was the reality.

She squeezed her eyes shut, unable to hold off the attack of the words, worsened by their leaden truth. In the darkness that encased her vision, she embraced a place where she could be free again. She knew that place before it even formed fully in her imagination. She could feel the deep shag of the rug under her knees when she dipped there, offering herself to Garrett. She could feel the response of his body, all its hard striations above her and against her, a refuge that would let her be simply woman again. Simply his again.