"Take it easy," he said. "I'm not here to punish you."
"Yes, sir," I thought, but I was happy when the little voice in my head said, Ya think maybe I've had enough? Because I didn't want to lose that voice.
If he ever broke me to the point where I was afraid of him, all forward progress would stop. There was a level of afraid that meant I was going to have to prove something to somebody, like in a test to get onto PD or prove myself in oral exams or infiltrate a group.
There was the level of afraid that woke from nightmares, and the level that feared something had happened to my father or Mark or someone else I loved.
But if Cole made it through to the level where I actually feared him rather than fought him, to where if I had the choice of fight or flight, I'd run - It would be game over. All I would do is fight.
"How long did I sleep, sir?"
"Not long. About an hour and a half." As if he hadn't had me monitored the whole time and could tell me to the minute.
So I'd slept about the same amount of time that I'd been in that room.
"Sit up," he said, and when I did, he arranged the fleecey blankets around me so I didn't get cold, allowing me to cover up in his presence. He held a glass of water with a straw in it and let me drink. I swallowed half of it in one go, then reached out to take it from him before realizing my hands were shaking so hard I'd end up baptizing myself in it.
"Adrenaline and reaction," he said, nodding to my hands. He held up the water, silently asking, and I shook my head, answering the same way. "I'm going to draw you a bath," he said, and then surprised me and possibly himself by saying, "Doesn't that sound like an art project? And your response would be something like – "
"I'd rather have water in a tub, sir," I said and for a second we shared a goofy grin and the world became even more inexplicable than it had been for the past - how many months?
I heard him in the bathroom, getting the water the temperature he wanted it, then he must have added product, because I suddenly smelled orange, cinnamon and cloves. It made me hungry. My stomach grumbled.
He had returned to the bed. At the sound, he laughed. "I've sent Geo out to get a stack of pizzas for dinner. You okay with pizza, Officer Knox?"
"After doughnuts, it's my favorite food, sir," I said and he laughed again.
Wonders would never cease.
He drew me up out of the bed and made me turn around and bend over it. My heart rate accelerated but only a little. I had no doubt he knew I hadn't taken care of a single cut or bruise when I got back to the room. His fingers on my skin were gentle. This was the doctor at work.
The water in the tub was full of essential oils. I sank into it with a moan of pleasure as the bite of new cuts subsided into the pleasure of the warmth. Cole shucked his clothes, leaving them in an uncharacteristic heap on the floor as he climbed in behind me.
For a while I just sat between his legs, his cock hard against my spine, my head on his chest. He scooped water and gently washed my face but the custom tub was deep enough that I was up to my neck. He didn't have to scoop water to keep me warm. Eventually he drained a little of the water and I leaned forward and turned on the hot until the tub was full again and almost too warm.
Then he pulled me back against him, lazily making small circles on my inner thighs. "Tell me what's going on that was so important you were willing to risk what happened to you to reach out to this Tad Charles person."
"There's a new gang on the street in Seattle," I said without pause. He'd asked me directly and he'd asked me in a way that sounded like it was outside the construct of him owning me. "They're rivals of the gang I was undercover with. They're not affiliated in any way. They're bad news." I considered for a minute, then agreed with myself. "Yeah. I mean, they're all bad news. But these guys? They thrill kill. They don't seem to get that killing off your clientele is a stupid way to do business. They act like there's an eleven year old born every minute and – what?" Because he'd gone utterly still behind me.
"Eleven?" he asked.
Confused, I said, "That's the youngest DOA I've ever seen. There could be younger but younger kids don't have money and they seriously don't seem to understand the drugs. Plus they talk. It's not worth it."
I'd lost him somewhere. That totally wasn't what he'd been asking me.
But that seemed to be all right. He'd asked and I'd answered and he'd listened.
For some reason, that seemed important. For some reason, I kept thinking, It's a good start.
Not that I could have said what I thought had started.
My afternoon nap meant I didn't sleep well that night. When the alarm went off at 5a.m. so we could head out for a run, it was all I could do not to beg off and tell him I was sick.
I didn't because I could think of all sorts of horrifying activities he'd think up if he thought I needed medical attention. And even more if he thought I was faking it.
We hiked that day, in low, Las Vegas foothills, then went back to the compound for weights workouts but he skipped the yoga, the meditation and the massage.
I was fine with all of that.
He was distracted over breakfast, reading through documents on his phone and eating absently. After I watched him inhale a second croissant, I thought it would be safe to add sugar to my coffee. If he noticed, he didn't say.
In my real life, a leisurely breakfast had to either include someone to talk to or something to watch or something to read. I never just sat and listened to birds outside the windows. Probably I could have fetched the constitutional law book and gone on studying, but there was a chance this was a time I should just be decorative and think my own thoughts.
That was actually more boring than meditation until he looked up and said abruptly, "How are you at crowd control?" His blue eyes bore into mine.
Living with Cole was making me much more decisive. Where once I would have asked whoever had just said that at least half a dozen questions before responding, mostly in the hope of not looking foolish if I answered a question he or she hadn't asked, now I simply started with information and waited for him to impatiently direct me in the real direction he was heading.
It helped that most of the time this seemed to be the result of a mind even more impatient than mine and not a trap.
"If you're talking about a witness or suspect being transported, there's specific protocol to follow whether or not that person is considered a risk. If you mean at a large event, that's usually handled by security for the venue, though I did some moonlighting on that sort of thing in the beginning of my career."
I'd have gone on, but he interrupted then, like I'd expected him to, and let me know what he was looking for was someone who would be armed and deadly and have his back if he were to have a meeting with a company working illegally in Brazil.
"That doesn't sound hypothetical," I said, and when he just watched me, expressionlessly, I went on to outline the scenario. How many people I'd want on each person being guarded, what kind of weapons, what kind of transportation, when the routes to and from the meeting place would be set and no, what he'd started to suggest would not happen, the meeting would not take place at his hotel. We'd run scenarios beforehand to see what the conditions were like in real life, outside the theoretical. At least one of those dry run scenarios would include the person being protected. That was non-negotiable. It wasn't just that the bodyguards and security team needed to know how to react.