Free Beneath the Burn by Pam Godwin Page B

cleared. “You belong to me, beautiful girl. I retain what is mine, even if I have to retrieve it from hell myself.”
    As he flipped her to her back, she wasn’t sure if his response reassured her or terrified her. Knowing her death might bring about his was an option to consider, but if one were to believe in afterlife, would she never escape him?
    He moved over her and entered her in one urgent stroke, hammering his hips and slamming her head into the headboard. “Not even death will separate us.” He reached beneath her ass and shoved a dry finger into her rectum.
    The pressure was horrible and wonderful. She bit her tongue and bottled the cry bubbling in her chest, her hands wringing the bed sheets.
    “I own you.” His hot breath curled around her ear. “Now come for me.”
    Two months of training pushed her over. He’d mastered his strokes, knew how to balance the pleasure and pain to perfection. As with all the orgasms before it, her body shook and her tears flowed.
    His attempts at humiliation had bounced right off her, but the manner in which he’d degraded her sexually might’ve been beyond repair. What kind of person climaxed while being raped? She wept, limp beneath the weight of his body, as he grunted and thrust his way to his own finish.
    When he caught his breath, his tongue roved over her cheeks, collecting her tears. “I’m meeting with my security staff in the dining room tonight. You’ll be joining us for dinner.”
    A dinner party. Her stomach bottomed.

11
    Jay strode out of the airport terminal and choked on the humid Missouri air.
    “Damn, dude. Seriously.” Laz zigzagged behind him, veering around the flow of pedestrians. “Slow it down a notch. Or ten.”
    “Didn’t ask you to come.” He whistled at an approaching taxi, and it stopped at the curb.
    “And miss watching you try to romance the girl who’s turned you into a faggot?” Laz held the cab door open and waved Jay inside, smiling like an asshole.
    “Fuck off.” Jesus, he was wound tight, but he hadn’t seen Charlee in two months. How would she react to him seeing him? After all the unanswered voicemail messages, he could guess.
    They slid into the cab, and Jay directed the driver to Kilroy Tattoo.
    “I’m just here for the tat.” Christ, he needed to see her. “We’ll barely have enough time to finish it and fly back to L.A. for tonight’s show.” The ink on his back tingled. For the first time in twenty years, he
looked
at his scars when he took his shirt off. Not only that, sometimes he took his shirt off
just
to look.
    “You flew eighteen hundred miles on a redeye to get a tat?” Laz’s eyes danced. “Come on, man. Just admit you’re a lovestruck chump.”
    Jay stared out the window but could only see her pearlescent blue eyes. He wasn’t lovestruck. It went so much deeper than that. Somehow she’d managed to dig her needles into his scarred up mind and leave them there where he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Maybe it was infatuation that first night, but all the nights since had burned into a heartsick, soul-saving kind of love. The kind of love chumps like him wrote songs about.
    “Listen.” Laz shifted in the seat beside him. “The guys and I have been talking.”
    He groaned. It was his preface for the lay-off-the-drugs speech. “Save your breath. I’ve been clean for over two months.”
    Two months without his unhealthy coping strategies. Two months without setting off emotional triggers. Two months living clean, normal, and deserving of Charlee. And along the way, he’d decided she wasn’t just a cure. She was the secret fucking ingredient to happiness.
    “That’s just it,” Laz said. “The smack, the self-loathing lyrics, the angsty sex…don’t look at me like that. The girls talk. The point is it’s all mellowed since you met Miss St. Louis. Since you won’t let me see the tat, I got to know. Was it her soul-piercing artwork or her brain-sucking pussy—”
    “Jesus. I