Page 178 of Deep Cover

I'd been trying to get off. Afraid that I'd never find Cole, afraid that I'd never again feel his hands on me, I'd gone looking for a substitute. Physically I'd found many of the same things. Emotionally? Not even close. And I so wasn't willing to admit that.

The instant he found me and took me back, all the longing and searching and need for sensation drained out of my head and like a sane person, I realized that pain hurts and sex doesn't save you and I started to fight him again.

That either makes me a good and exciting submissive or an idiot. Or maybe it's normal. I'd found that however much I thought I wanted something, some promised punishment from Cole, like he was going to crop me or take a paddle to my ass or a whip to my back or a cane to the back of my thighs? No matter how wet thinking about it made me, when it was actually happening - It hurt.

That should have reduced the craving. It didn't. Need and want would build up again over the days until something happened and he punished me again. Then I'd hate him. Then I'd plan how to get out of the remote desert compound and back to civilization where maybe I could get myself into an actual rehab program. As if I didn't know how often those failed.

I needed him. I needed his rainforest cure. I needed to get straight and get back to my life in Seattle with Mark. My job. To go back undercover. To make a difference. I needed to be able to face my father, my role model for police work, with my head held high and my opiates behind me. And to get that, I needed Cole.

Life with Cole St. Martin had become some weird form of normal for me. I'd resist. He'd insist. I'd fight. And he'd beat me or fuck me or –

Auction me off to another billionaire, the proceeds of which – this amused the billionaires in their little wife-swapping and submissive-swapping group – going to combat sex trafficking.

Isn't that funny? It certainly cracked them up.

But Cole. He'd auctioned me and that was a fuck up. Because Vincent placed the highest bid, a whopping $5.5 million. All for a good cause.

Cole reneged. Cole said ‘not yet’. She's not ready yet. Cole didn't want the sadistic son of a bitch to get his hands on me and so he said Vincent would have to wait and Vincent didn't like the idea of waiting. Vincent let Kie hurt me and Kie was punished.

Kie already hated me.

Vincent already hated Cole and saw me as a way to get back at him.

Now I was between them as the plane landed. Between Vincent and Kie physically. Between Vincent and Cole figuratively. And I didn't know where the plane was landing or where they were taking me.

And there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it even if I had.

I am no longer completely certain what normal is.

Normal people don't play sexual games, right? I was raised to believe that. Well, no, I wasn't, I was raised to be vanilla in a household that didn't acknowledge even knowing that vanilla was anything other than a spice to bake with. I was raised by parents who had three other daughters who grew up and got married and started having babies or trying to have babies and cooking and cleaning, and if they accidentally got divorced, they got married again quick as quick can be. They had careers that could be abandoned at a moment's notice, the instant the first inkling of those babies showed up.

I was the daughter who wanted to be what her father was: A police officer, preferably in Seattle. Preferably doing something that utilized the fact that I looked so much younger than I was. Even with a smattering of college behind me and enough time on the force to be allowed to go deep cover into drug cases, I could still pass for seventeen or eighteen and infiltrate high schools and bring down the dealers inside those schools and outside.

When one of the girls who had actually become a friend, a beautiful, smart, college-bound girl who really was seventeen, died in my arms of an overdose of fentanyl, that's when I went deep cover enough to hook up with a biker gang selling fet all over the Pacific Northwest. And when, after months in the bed and on the bike of the leader, Jesse, my hero cop father fell ill with heart attacks, I took the time to go be with him and that didn't break my cover.

Even biker babes have fathers.

While I was gone Jesse was shot and killed. And me? I found out there were charges against my father. Some of his cases had not just toed the line between good cop and bad, not just walked it, but maybe nudged it hard. Maybe even played jump rope with the line.

In spending time with my father, I was staying again in my own apartment, with my fiancé, an intern at a local hospital. Mark and I – we didn't always see eye to eye.

Normal people don't want to be handcuffed to the headboard with their work handcuffs. Do they? Or if they do, it's a game. It's not a real hit me, please, hit me - it's a tease.

It wasn't a tease. When everything with Mark and my father and Jesse's death and more deaths of teenage kids and I hadn't brought down the Brotherhood yet, and not being undercover felt more stressful than being undercover, and my sisters both wanted me to be a normal member of the family and there for them 24/7 - by which they seemed to mean there for them because they all had husbands and families to deal with during Dad's illness, so it wasn't there for my father but for my sisters who didn't usually want me there at all – when everything sped up like that, one thing after another after another and then it all came crashing down on me...

That's when I broke.

That's when I found the glassine baggies of fet in my jeans as I went through the pockets before starting a load of laundry.

That's when I fell.

Normal is not being kidnapped by the billionaire who believes he bought you body and – not soul – for two weeks – and who now intends to keep you because he's angry the billionaire who believes he owns you wouldn't share.

Normal is not Kie, her Asian features pulled into a masque of great beauty and rage. The cuts on her cheeks seep clear fluid. She hurt me badly at the last dinner party, one Cole insanely gave even after the auction had gone so poorly. Kie had been given permission to play with me but she'd used a jalapeno, scraped the skin back and stuck it inside me.

The remembered pain is enough to make me want to panic.

Once, when a deal had gone sour, when he thought he'd been betrayed, Jesse nearly broke my jaw when he hit me during rage sex.

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