“Is it safe to send Sara out to you?” she asks, and then ends the call, looking at me. “Get out of the car, Sara.”
“Not without you.”
“Get out of the car, Sara, so I can kill the bastard.”
“You think Evil Eye is bad?” Neuville snipes back, though I have no idea what the heck that means. “Kill me,” he adds, “and the wrath I have planned for Kayden will make him wish he were dead.”
That I understand and my mind is instantly in the threats that he made against Chris and nothing I’ve endured matters if I saved him. What happens to Chris is what matters. What has already happened to Chris? A thought that is jerked away from me as the door opens to Ella’s right and a dark haired, intense looking man climbs in beside Ella, and looks at me. “Your husband says to get out of the damn car, Sara,” the man says, as if he’s the answer to my thoughts.
“Chris,” I whisper, the confirmation that he’s alive, everything to me right now, especially when fear for him is how I’d ended up in this car. Certain this is Kayden, and Ella’s clearly safe, I can think of nothing else but Chris, and the hell he’s been living since my capture. I slide across the seat, and the minute the cold Paris winter air envelopes me, I start to shake, though I’m not sure it’s really about the weather.
“Are you hurt?” Blake demands, stepping in front of me and wrapping a blanket around me.
“Chris,” I breath out. “Where is Chris?”
“Are you hurt?”
“No. No I-”
“Come with me,” he orders, grabbing my arm, and whisking me away, and down a sidewalk, while another man I do not know steps to my side, his refusal to speak of Chris stirring fears, that Chris isn’t okay.
“Answer me about Chris!” I order, trying to turn, but both men grab my arms. “I need to know he’s okay.”
“I am answering you,” Blake promises me, leading me around the corner where we enter a well lit alleyway, a parked dark sedan the only vehicle present and almost instantly the back door pops open. And oh thank God, Chris emerges, still wearing his tuxedo pants, his white shirt rolled to the elbows, his rainbow colored dragon tattoo displayed. His tie and jacket gone. His longish blond hair a rumpled. His jawline shadowed.
He starts moving toward me and Blake and the other man let me go and allow me to rush forward, and in what feels like an eternity that is only seconds, I’ve let the blanket slide away and I am in his his arms – his strong, wonderful arms – his hand sliding behind my neck. “Tell me you’re okay,” he demands.
“I am now,” I promise, my hands wrapping around him. “I am now.”
“Tell me he didn’t-”
“No. No I-”
“Sara,” he breathes out, and in what is a rare display of public affection for Chris, his mouth slants of over mine, and he is kissing me deeply, passionately, desperately, fear and torment, bleeding into my mouth.
“I need you two out of here,” Blake orders, his hand coming down on my back, and Chris tears his mouth from mine to look at him. “I need you out of here,” he repeats. “We have a plane waiting on you.”
Chris gives him a nod, and Blake wraps the blanket around me again while Chris maneuvers me in front of him, and urges me into the back of the car. The minute I’m inside, I note the driver that will keep me from speaking freely, but Chris is already joining me, shutting us inside, and that’s enough for now. We are here. We are together. We’re alive. Still I turn to him, and I whisper, “There are so many things I want to say to you right now.”
He breathes out, his forehead finding mine, and we sink back against the seat, and the dark energy, the torment, I’d tasted in his kiss, radiating off him, guts me. But I don’t speak. I don’t risk setting off the firestorm in him, that I can feel brewing. It’s coming though. It’s coming.
***
It’s not until we arrive at the airport that I discover we’re not heading back to San Francisco. “What is going on?” I ask as Chris and I walk toward the stairs.
“I’ll explain inside the plane, baby,” Chris promises, and his urgency to get us on board, and secure, tells me that the threat I’ve just left is not the only one we face. A reality that has me hurrying up the stairs, eager not just for safety, but for answers. Entering the plane, I barely notice the fancy sitting area to my left, or the fancy leather seats. I just keep walking until we’re near the back, and slide into a window seat, with Chris, joining me. A text from Blake, who stayed behind, pings on Chris’s phone: “As soon as Kayden and Ella get there we’ll take off.”
“Kayden and Ella are coming with us?” I ask. “Where are we going?”
“Kayden’s castle in Italy, it’s secure,” Chris replies.
“In other words, the threat isn’t gone,” I say, confirming what I’ve assumed.
Another text from Blake pops up: “I’ll text you and give you a head’s up when they arrive.”
“Who is Ella? What is Ella?”
“Some sort of special ops.”
“I loved her like a sister. I still do, even though I think I should feel betrayed but I can tell you right now, she would have died for me tonight. And who knows. Maybe she will. Maybe we will. What did I get us into when I looked for her?”
“This isn’t your fault, Sara.”
“It is. I hunted for Ella. I pushed and pushed and pushed. I-”
He leans in and kisses me, his hand at my neck. “You cared about someone you see as a sister,” he murmurs against my lips, his voice radiating with the kind of emotion I know he shows only me.
I cup his face. “Chris-”
He tangles fingers in my hair and looks down at me. “Do not ever take off like that again.”
“He would have killed you, Chris. I believe that after being with that man. He would have killed you and I can’t live without you. Do you not know that? Do you not see that?”
His grip in my hair tightens, rather than softens. “I never wanted to love anyone like I do you, Sara. You knew that going into this. And you know, that I will go the grave with you, not without you. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I whisper, and I do. I know the loss that has touch his life. I know this man, and his pain, and he knows mine. “I’m here.”
“Tell me what happened,” he orders, and I know why, too. It’s control. He needs the control tonight has stolen from him.
And so I tell him everything, right down to the last moments, before I exited that car, despite how horrible they were. Because I can tell him. Because I have to tell him. Because I have no secrets with this man. But I am just to the place where I have to tell him why my dress is ripped. “I’m okay,” I tell him, and it’s remarkably true, when the past could haunt me right now, but is haunting Chris. “Do not blame yourself for this. You didn’t do this.”
“I should have gotten us the hell out of Paris.”
Paris. The place his mother died. The place his father died. The place he was forced to do the unspeakable to save lives. The place he just recently lost someone else who meant a lot to him. “We love it here. We love it together. We love the art and the memories. Please don’t let this-”
His cellphone phone buzzes with a text message from Blake. “They’re boarding,” Chris tells me and tries to reply before they do. “Sara you-”
It’s too late for him to finish that thought. Voice lift in the air, and Chris’s expression shutters, his eyes darkening. “When we’re off this plane we’ll talk.” He cups my faces and kisses me hard and fast. “When we’re alone.” He doesn’t give me time to reply. He stands, lacing his fingers with mine, and leading me into the lounge area just in front of us as Ella and Kayden, who is indeed the man who’d joined us in the car, meet us there.
Chris and Kayden instantly square off in an obvious alpha-to-alpha one-on-one, while Ella and I step aside and the instant we are together again our friendship explodes between us. It’s real. We’re real and all of my questions fade away. The n
ext few minutes with her, we hug more than we talk, and promise to talk about everything. Just not right now. Right now, we both have men who almost lost us, and us them. So, Ella and I don’t linger. We promise that will come soon though. Tomorrow maybe. I don’t know when. But it will come.
Chris and I move back to our seats and buckle up, and we are already mentally back in the conversation we were having before they’d arrived. But we don’t speak. He lifts the arm or the seat between us and pulls me to him. I rest my head on his chest, and whisper, “I love you.”
“I love you, too, baby,” he says, and I know my husband. The rough sandpaper quality to his voice, when he says it, tells me that the storm inside him, is contained, but not for long.
I snuggle closer to him, inhaling that spicy wonderful scent that is Chris Merit, and it’s not long before the plane lifts off for the two-hour flight to Rome, the hum of the engines a lullaby, singing me to sleep. And I’d like to say that as I lay on Chris’s chest I simply sleep. I’d like to say that I don’t think of the night I’ve just endured or of Garner Neuville. But I do, and unlike the Sara of the past, I do not force away the memories. I don’t suppress the bad, hiding from it, and ultimately allowing it more control, not less. I don’t suppress what I don’t want to be real. I face it now, so it cannot intimidate me later, sprinkling in every bad piece of the puzzle, with a memory of me face planting my foot in that monster’s face. I have no regrets about how I handled tonight. I saved Chris’s life. I fought when I needed to fight. No. No regrets for tonight but plenty from the past. If only I’d face planted a shoe in Michael’s face. But then, had I done that, perhaps I wouldn’t have been the Sara that was right for Chris. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been the Sara who was like him in ways, only he understood.
I think of the way he used to torture himself before we met. He’d dealt with his perceived sins not with denial, like me, but with torturing himself for them over and over. I say I have no regrets from tonight, but I cannot, I will not, allow these events to become another perceived sin Chris believes he owns. He will not torture himself for this night. I won’t let him.
***
When we land in Rome, Kayden and Ella, hurry us into a car with one a woman that works for Kayden as our driver, and I get the impression that Sasha, is as comfortable with a gun as I now know Ella to be. I try not to think about why we need someone like Sasha as our driver, but then, we’re in Rome, because we need someone like Sasha as our driver. Chris is feeling the same way. I know this by the hard lines of his body, and the equally hard set of his jaw. He is not pleased that we are in danger, or rather that I am in danger. He is not pleased that he let this happen when he didn’t let anything happen at all and my urgency to get him alone, and out of his own head, expands tenfold.
In what is only fifteen minutes, that feels like hours, we pull inside the gates of what is literally a castle and an underground parking garage. We enter the foyer, stone floors beneath our feet, and a stunning high ceiling above our heads, to be greeted by Marabella, a plump Hispanic woman, who with all her pleasant, motherly love, makes it easy to forget we’re hiding from danger. She leads us to a giant, arched doorway, punches in a code, and the door begins to lift.
By the time we are on the other side, walking up a giant winding staircase, we’ve been promised homemade chocolate croissants for breakfast, and told there is a tray of snacks in our room. I chat it up with Marabella, as does Chris, and I am amazed at his ability to be charming to all, no matter what burns beneath his surface. It’s a part of him I both love, and fear, as I know that the thicker the exterior shell, the more beneath it to hide.
For this reason, it is with great relief that Marabella leaves us at a high, wooden doorway, having left us with her cellphone number in case we need anything. “The fireplace is on so the room should be warm.”
“Thank you Marabella,” I say and when she starts to turn away, I stop her. “Marabella.”
“Yes?”
“Ella. She’s happy here?”
“Oh yes,” she says. “And Ella is a light in the darkness this castle, and Kayden, need.”
I nod. “Thank you, Marabella.”
“Of course.” She turns away, and before we can turn in, Ella and Kayden come up the stairs.
“Let us know if you need anything, though I know Marabella will have that fully covered.” Ella says smiling fondly when mentioning the older woman. When her hand comes up to sweep her hair behind her ear, a glittering pink diamond ring that wasn’t there before winks at me.
I gasp, “Ella! Oh my god! What is this?” Grabbing her hand, I inspect the beautiful jewel.
“Ah… it’s an engagement ring,” she stumbles over her words a bit, all the while smiling like a bit of a fool up at Kayden.
“Wow we really do have a lot to talk about, huh?” I question, feeling the need to reacquaint myself with this woman who was once, and I know still is, my best friend. But right now I just need Chris. And I can see in Ella’s and Kayden’s gazes that they need each other alone, just as much.
“Tomorrow,” I say. “I want every single detail… about everything.”
“Everything, I promise. Over chocolate croissants and white mochas,” she grins at me, remembering two of my favorite things.
“Sounds perfect,” I reply, leaning over to grab her in a hug. The men do their head nod to one another, and then Kayden takes Ella’s hand, pulling her close, as they retreat down the hall.
Chris opens our door for us, allowing me to enter the room first. I’ve barely had time to take in the high ceilings, the massive bed covered in white down blanket, and the fireplace beyond it, already burning at a low glow, before Chris has snagged my hand. In the next moment, the door is shut, I’m against the door, and his big, wonderful body is framing mine, his hands on the wooden door at either side of my head.
“The idea that you were-”
“I wasn’t,” I say, before he can utter the word “rape” that I do not want spoken out loud. I just…don’t. “I wasn’t. And you didn’t do this. You didn’t let me down. You didn’t fail me.”
“I didn’t protect you.”
“Chris. You did.” My hand flattens over his chest, resting on his heart, that thunders beneath my palm. “You had guards. You had security.”
“We should have skipped the show.”
“It was for the charity you love and so do I.”
“I knew Ella was involved with dangerous people and that she connected to you.”
“Stop,” I say. “I talked you into staying. This was my fault. I almost got you killed. I did this. I just didn’t want my obsession with Ella to impact those kids you help or those people that trusted you to come through for them at that event. That felt selfish.”
“There are so many ways I can help them, and I do help them, but there is only one you, Sara. I let that man-”
“No. You didn’t let him do anything and neither did I.”
“He touched you.”
“And yet you are not. Why?”
“You know why.”
“Because you use sex to gain the control you don’t feel right now? Because you think that might make you want too much from me? Well you can’t want too much from me. How do you not know this by now? What have I done to make you feel you can’t be you?”
“Tonight-”
“I need you to be you more than ever. Because you are what washes away him.”
He stares at me, the hardness in his eyes, simmering, heating. He cups my face, and kisses me, a deep, drugging kiss before he orders, “Undress and meet me on the bed.” He turns and walks away.
I immediately understand why. Because Chris takes control by giving control. Nothing I have ever done with him, has been anything but my choice. And so yes. I choose to undress. I choose to go to him tonight. I choose to explore every dark, tormented part of him. I strip away my clothes, and nothing that happened in the past, recent or far away, matters.
There is just this man and how much he has come to complete me. Naked, and willingly exposed, I walk to the bed, to find him standing in front of the fireplace, still fully clothed, of course. That is his way. His control. And as I cross the room, his smoldering stare, tracks my every move, the edgy darkness that radiates from him, telling me, dark passion, awaits, the very idea heating me inside and out. The way he will own me tonight, and always, inside and out.
I stop in front of him, and he doesn’t immediately move, or touch me. But when he does, he does that thing he does so very well, that balance of gentle and commanding alpha male, that arouses me in ways I will never fully understand. He closes the small space between us, and without any other part of his body touching mine, his cheek slides to mine, his lips brushing my ear, as he whispers, “Do you now what I’m going to do to you?”
Heat rushes through me as he goes on in detail down a list of naughty deeds, that promises he will own me inside and out, by the time this night is over. Of course, he already owns me inside and out. And I would have it no other way.
Bonus Kayden & Ella Scene
This is a bonus scene from the Careless Whispers series.
AFTER SURRENDER ends…
***SPOILERS FOR SURRENDER (CARELESS WHISPERS—ELLA’S STORY—BOOK THREE) ARE IN THE FOLLOWING EXCERPT!!!***
Kayden and I are ensuring the castle is locked down tight, after having secured the necklace away, when Sasha meets us in the garage. “They’re all tucked into bed?” she asks of Chris and Sara. “Did I mentioned Sara’s a lucky girl being tucked in with that man?”
“They are and yes you have, several times,” I assure her. “But you know. There are any number of women who would say the same of you with a certain man.”
Kayden glances at me. “Who are we talking about?”
“You are not that blind,” I say.
“Adriel and I are fuck buddies,” she says, her expression fierce. “We will always be just fuck buddies. And on that note. I’m leaving to go find a different fuck buddy.”