Page 139 of Deep Cover

24

Annie

Morning routine behind me, run, weights, oh-so-boring yoga, massage, back on track, and Cole's adherence to the new schedule of cleaning me out and then filling me up with the cure. Apparently there wasn't going to come a time that I didn't feel my heart pounding in the base of my skull and my skin turning red in humiliation.

Today he kept me over his lap, his hands stroking my ass and making it all that much more obvious I was naked. His voice, musing, came to me where I hung over his lap, the blood rushing to my head.

"How long have you been on the cure now?" he asked and thinking back, I came up with somewhere around eight or nine months.

He walked me through the symptoms of withdrawal, which obviously I didn't have by now but many of which I had never experienced. I was more than ready to thank him for everything he'd done, but I also really wanted off his lap. I wanted my clothes on and my dignity back and if we were really going to discuss it, I wanted to be back in Seattle and back on the job.

Without warning he gave me a hard smack where my butt cheeks met my thighs and said, "Sit up. Get dressed. I need to talk to you."

"Yes, sir." I stood, tottered a little, drew my thong and my sweats back up my legs and knelt on the floor in front of him.

"There's going to be a formal dinner party very soon. Valentine's day, in fact."

Undoubtedly he'd seen my face fall.

"Relax. There's no auction to this one. Just very rich men with very beautiful women."

She kept her face down and didn't say anything derogatory about her looks. Good girl. It wouldn't change what I was going to do to her before I let her leave this little chat.

When she came back in, I picked up where I'd left off. "The men that we were discussing before. The men you were in contact with your friend about."

I thought that might be stretching the meaning of the word friend to apply it to Tad Charles, even if I did like him, but okay. "Yes, sir?"

"They're dead." He said it flatly and afterwards the room was so silent my swallowing sounded huge.

"Sir?"

Because something felt off.

"I didn't have the hit. I mean, I hadn't ordered the hit." Yet hung in the air.

"But then what – " I was too bewildered to add sir to that.

"The easiest way to understand it is that they were killed naturally."

I glanced up at him. He was smiling, predatory. "I don't understand what that means."

"It means," he said, standing and pulling me to my feet, stripping off my sweat pants and telling me exactly how many times I'd left off the sir, "That they were killed by others in the trade. They were killed because they were human pond scum."

So I don't owe him anything!

"But since you agreed to the hit before knowing that, I suggest you remember our agreement is in place and the contract holds. Here, I'll take your sweats. You go pick out a riding crop. I'd like one with a very small tip and one of the newer ones. Hurry now. For every second you're on your task, another swat is added."

Once I would have just stared at him as several seconds ticked by, understanding much too late that Cole St. Martin rarely kidded around.

I ran, feeling absurd without my pants but still wearing my t-shirt and jog bra. I collected a crop so new it didn't have any bend marks, with a small triangular tip that was going to bite like shit. I had it back to Cole in record time.

I had all kinds of questions about the dinner party coming up.

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