“My family hates me thanks to that stupid video. The whole town is—”
“A bunch of inbred dimwits who wouldn’t know beauty if it stared them in the face.” Vehemence thickened his accent, cracks showing in the chiseled facade of the Southern gentleman Malcolm pretended to be. “I knew they would judge you. I wanted you to see it for yourself—how small-minded, how
limited
they all are. You didn’t belong there.”
Hazel snorted, far from amused. “Do I make a better waitress?”
“You make a better submissive,” Malcolm replied. “Thanks to me.” He reached up to cup her cheek, his palm soft and sickly-hot on her skin.
Every muscle in Hazel’s body tensed, but she didn’t bolt. “Prove it.”
The crease between Malcolm’s blond eyebrows spelled out confusion.
It was a beautiful day, sun shining, the city gleaming like a jewel at their feet. They were virtually alone on that dusty outcropping, poised between the still-churning engine of the Volvo and the sleek BMW.
Somewhere out of sight, down the scraggly rock face, a crow emitted a loud, scratchy cackle.
“Teach me a lesson,” Hazel gritted out. “If you’re the man I’m supposed to be with, show me you’ve got what it takes. Like you showed Sadie.”
Ward, Dylan… I’m sorry.
She barely had time to brace herself before an open-handed slap caught her square across the face. Shock mitigated the sting in her cheek. Dazed by the blow, Hazel reeled back a pace.
She had to recover fast.
Hair in her eyes, she flashed Malcolm a private smirk. “That’s all you’ve got?”
Another slap, this time with the full force of Malcolm’s strong, corn-fed genes behind it. Hazel’s head snapped to the side, her balance shot to hell.
“Penny’s no challenge for you, is she?” she taunted. “You’re a little rusty.”
The vast swell of difference between the pain she’d suffered—often and willingly—at Ward or Dylan’s hands and this parody of love was the breadth of the Grand Canyon. Hazel staggered to her feet only to receive a punch to the kidneys. This time, she landed in the dust with the air knocked out of her.
Malcolm’s voice reached her as though from far away.
“Is this what you want? Is this proof enough?”
Hazel brought her knees up, one shoe slipping off her foot. Her palms ached when she pressed them to the ground. For the space of a heartbeat, she was a supplicant before him, albeit blinking back tears of pain rather than devotion, then she looked up at him.
“More.”
Unleashing Malcolm’s tight-laced violence was a tricky, perilous experiment. Hazel undertook it with shaky confidence and the certitude that she had no other choice. The first kick was a benediction. Pain raced up her spine, whitening out her vision. Her lungs burned for breath, but Malcolm wouldn’t let her get any.
The fissures in his carefully constructed persona had blown open and out streamed all the fury and the hurt of the past years.
Only the sound of sirens in the distance made him pause. In the winded, agony-filled reprieve, Hazel burst out laughing.
“What’re—what you doing?” Malcolm panted.
He had worked up a sweat pummeling her with his fists. Hazel watched a bead of perspiration glide down his perfect, tall brow as she grabbed hold of the hood of the BMW and hauled herself up.
The red, white and blue of patrol cars winked in and out of sight around the mountain.
“Who do you think…they’re here…for?” Hazel wheezed choppily.
“What?” Chest heaving, Malcolm couldn’t seem to decide where to look—at Hazel, or the patrol cars.
Hazel leaned against the sunbaked BMW. “I called them.”
Betrayal slackened Malcolm’s features, but not for long. “To say what? That you attacked
me?
That I defended myself? It will be your word against mine.” He snickered. “And we know what that’s worth. You’re going to regret this, just like the hotel, you ungrateful little—”
“Not this time.” Hazel slowly hoisted her gaze to the windshield of the Volvo. Her smartphone lay propped against the glass, viewfinder trained on Malcolm and Hazel, and the scene of their recent spat. “Remember how much you liked home movies? Here’s one for the collection.”
Gravel crunching underfoot, Malcolm lunged for the door of the Volvo.
“Don’t bother! It’s already aired.” Hazel flashed him a blood-stained grin. “Lesson learned.”
“You stupid cunt!”
He came at her hard, fury blazing in his eyes.
Skidding in the gritty dirt. Hazel tried to dart out of the way, but the pull of blossoming bruises was too much. She choked out a cry as he fisted a hand in her unbound hair, the sting in her scalp arresting all momentum. The world spun.
Hazel lost her footing and, aided by Malcolm’s fist in her hair, smacked her cheek against the hood of the BMW. A bloody streak smeared onto the shiny paint job.
Malcolm pulled her up again, snarling in her ear. Hazel almost welcomed the slick of his spittle on her skin. The dry heat was making her dizzy. Yet just as he made to dent the metal with her forehead, a blunt object slammed into him. He landed in the dirt with a gasp.
Her ears ringing, Hazel registered shouting, then the sound of her name. She had to blink a few times to clear the cobwebs from her vision. Someone reached for her. She started to flinch away before his features settled.
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” Ward’s eyes swam with tears. “Everything’s going to be all right. You’re safe now. Paramedics are on their way—”
Relief and exhaustion warring in her bloodstream, Hazel clasped his hands. “You saw?”
Ward nodded shakily. It wasn’t enough.
“You saw the whole thing?” Hazel rasped. “My phone—”
“Sir, that’s enough!” Uniformed officers darted past Hazel and Ward, their guns mercifully still holstered.
Hazel tracked them, confused until she saw Dylan and Malcolm scrabbling in the dirt.
Crimson bloomed on Dylan’s knuckles when they pulled him off. There could be no mistaking the animal frenzy that twisted at his features. This was the man Ward had told her about—the single-minded kid who would never back down from a fight.
Malcolm, for his part, didn’t stir. He was out for the count.
As Ward fussed over her wounds with trembling hands and soft, needless words of comfort, Hazel sucked her busted lip between her teeth. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that she was laughing and not, as she was supposed to, weeping.
Freedom tasted like spilled blood.
Epilogue
Seven months later
Penelope chewed meditatively. “Hmm, the entrée is good, but I still don’t know how I feel about the canapés…”
“A little too rich?”
The suggestion elicited a contemplative shake of the head. “Yes. Perhaps…” She grimaced. “I’m being difficult, aren’t I? It’s just that I want this wedding to be
perfect
.”
It wasn’t the first time Penelope made the point.
The venue had already been changed six times, the theme a scant four. The wedding planners she was working with had quit after the last batch of alterations, so Penelope had taken the reins herself. Whether the burden on her shoulders brought out her softer side or that was a consequence of falling in love in record time with a—conveniently wealthy—businessman, she had yet to lose her temper once.
Hazel nodded patiently. “I understand. I’ll have the chef take another stab at the hors d’oeuvres. We’ll have something for you to taste next time we meet…” She tapped the calendar app on her tablet. “Next week?” Between then and now, she had a long list of tasks involving both the wedding spread and table settings. But this wasn’t her first rodeo. The challenges of the job didn’t frighten her. “Friday would be easiest for me, but if you can’t make it—”
“Oh, no. That’s
perfect
.” Penelope flashed her a smile. “I’m so thrilled you agreed to do this for me.”
“It’s my pleasure.”
You’re paying me a truckload of money.
Or, more specifically, the company Hazel worked for. Her salary was more than generous since the end of her trial period and if she kept bringing in clients, she was sure to get a bonus at the end of the year.
Her manager seemed pleased with her work so far—at least enough to switch her to full-time right when Hazel needed to pick up the slack at home.
“See you next week, then.”
All sweetness, Penelope buffed her cheeks with air kisses.
“Bye, darling… Oh, Hazel?”
Halfway up the flagstone path, Hazel spun around. The smell of gardenias was thick in the air. “Change your mind about the date?” she guessed. This business of teasing each other like old friends was new. Sometimes it came naturally, a throwback to days gone by viewed through a rose-tinted filter. Other times, Hazel couldn’t shake the feeling that she was playing a part.
Penelope shook her head. “I’ve been meaning to ask—”
“We do charge by the hour.”
Hurry it up.
“Do you think it’s odd?” Penelope wondered, picking at the blossoms that climbed the nearby trellis. “Marrying as soon as the divorce is finalized… Do you think I’m rushing into it?”
Hazel propped the bottom edge of her tablet against her ribcage. “Probably. But you’ve made worse calls.”
Take your first husband, for instance.
Penelope pursed her rouged lips. “You can’t hold me responsible for
him.
”
Since the divorce, Malcolm’s name had been erased from Penelope’s vocabulary. She had refused to visit him in prison, let alone aid in his legal defense. The court fees alone had set back their joint account more than any sum Penelope could want to get out of the settlement, but the civil suit had been the final nail in the coffin. Ward’s lawyers had commanded a similarly high price from their clients, but the expense was worth it just to see Malcolm put away.
“I don’t,” Hazel replied. “How were you to know what he was capable of?”
Except all those times you helped him, did his bidding, stalked me at his request…
“You don’t blame me?” The news seemed to perplex Penelope.
Hazel dropped her voice. “Most days, no.” A bee buzzed somewhere above the flower beds, lending a cheerful hint of summer to the early March evening. “Then I remember that he would’ve been nothing without the two of us and I want to run you over with my car… But like I said,” Hazel added, “most days, I think we were in the same leaky boat. Too bad I couldn’t take you with me when I left.”
Penelope had built most of her adult life on being Malcolm Pryce’s wife. With him gone, she’d had to reinvent herself fast. She couldn’t keep singing the praises of a convict when all of their friends had already renounced him and all their money was gone.
“Did you ever love him?” she asked Hazel. “I think… I think he loved you. Genuinely.”
“Of course.”
Penelope staggered back a step. “You did?”
Hazel nodded.
Like no one else.
“I was his first.” It was worth telling Penelope just to watch the blood drain from her face. “You should try to forget about him, if you can. Better odds for your next marriage. I’ll see you Friday.”
She turned away before Penelope could lure her in with more questions.
Throughout the trial, Malcolm’s defense had been to saddle Hazel with the blame. His freedom depended on the judge agreeing that she was a lunatic obsessed with a man she’d dated for a few months back in college. His conviction ultimately relied on the likes of Sadie and Penelope testifying against him. That video Malcolm and Hazel had shot together once upon a time didn’t hurt, either.
Love was a negligible tug on the heartstrings by comparison.
* * * *
An hour after she’d left Penelope in the private gardens of the Beverly Hills mansion where she would, barring any surprises, be married in two weeks’ time, Hazel recanted that opinion.
“Earth to Hazel… You with us, babe?”
Dylan pulled out of her so fast that Hazel whimpered into her gag. “Seems we’re boring her.”
Her cunt clenched around thin air, already bereft of his hard length. With clothespins parting her labia, every sensation was heightened, every breath forced another surge of sweet agony to her core.
A knuckle slid under her chin. It took Hazel a moment to realize that it was Ward’s hand.
“Is that so? Are we going too easy on you?”
Hazel shook her head as best she could. The rope lines strung up from the ceiling still made her hesitate, but she had decided soon after Malcolm’s arrest that she wasn’t going to let him affect her life from now on. Flashbacks still threatened—sometimes when she was gagged or blindfolded, routinely when they did suspension play—but they didn’t stick around for long.
She didn’t want to miss the show by dwelling on the past.
As though reading her mind, Dylan slid a hand into Ward’s hair and tilted his head just right for a kiss. Hazel’s breath fled her lungs on a startled sigh.
Dylan heard it. He pulled back a moment later, snickering. “Mm, she likes
that.
”
“So do I,” Ward confessed. “My turn?”
Hazel dropped her head, shoulders burning as Ward and Dylan exchanged places. With the ball gag in place, there was no pressure to suck Dylan off when he slid a hand into her hair and cupped the back of her head. She breathed in the scent of his skin, distantly aware of him stroking his cock with a lazy grip. Time and time again, he’d showed her that his patience was limitless. He could wait her out through orgasm after orgasm before he sought his own release.
More recently, he’d started playing with Ward in the same way. He seemed to like having them both squirm and sob in his bed.
Sadist.
Ward touched a hand to her hip and Hazel clutched at the ropes that secured her arms to the rigging in anticipation. She had asked Dylan to lay her down horizontally, her legs in the air and ropes laddering up her torso and pelvis like the cords of a hammock. The only difference was that with her wrists and ankles secured with twine, she couldn’t flip out without breaking something. Not that Dylan and Ward would ever let that happen.
They took good care of her.