Sierra Cartwright - Doms of Dark Haven

“Questions?”

Mira and Torin exchanged glances. They both shook their heads.

“Your first assignment together,” Inamorata said. “With luck, it will be an uneventful evening.”

“You have reason to believe it won't be,” Torin said.

“Rumors are Alberto Leone is in the city.” Inamorata showed them recent pictures of the man. “Bad shots, from a newspaper, I'm afraid.” She spread out a few more pictures on the stainless-steel table. “Other family members. Known associates.”

Mira and Torin studied the snapshots.

“I'm attending as a guest, like you two,” she said. “Cocktails are in fifteen minutes. Here's your official invitation. Our guys are manning the doors.”

She handed over the card to Mira, and without another word, Inamorata moved off.

“Suppose she's wearing a butt plug?”

Mira gasped.

“Let's go prepare to meet the man of the hour.”

For the first time, Torin struggled with an assignment. He wanted to make sure Mira was safe. Yet he knew she was fully capable of taking care of herself.

Hawkeye, Inc. had made sure of that. And Torin himself had had a hand in her training. She was strong, smart, resourceful. She didn't need him to look after her.

He was the problem.

He wanted her wrapped in cotton wool somewhere safe. The Leones were a tight-knit family who took care of their own. He didn't want Mira within a hundred miles of them.

She followed him to the lobby. He made eye contact with Trace before placing his fingers intimately in the small of Mira's back and guiding her toward the hotel's elegant ballroom.

A live band played forties music, and champagne flowed freely. Obviously no amount of money had been spared.

They went through the formality of having Hawkeye operatives check their invitation. He noticed that Inamorata was already in place. Outside of Fort Knox, this was one of the tightest places in the United States tonight.

He and Mira mingled. This was the nature of their jobs. Often twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes of boredom interrupted by five minutes of “oh, shit!”

And occasionally nothing happened to interrupt the boredom. Ideally that would be the case.

“We should separate,” Mira said.

When hell froze over.

From their vantage near the bar, he kept a watchful eye on the door and on the guests arriving.

The night showed no signs of getting interesting, which was fine by him. He was ready to bury his cock inside Mira's willing body.

There was a buzz of activity near the door, and he kept his gaze there.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the evening's emcee announced, “your next senator, Nathaniel Sinclair!”

Shouts of approval and loud claps filled the ballroom. The media magnate came in with a wave, Aimee at his side.

Sinclair made his way to the stage and said a few words of thanks. He seemed completely at ease, without a care in the world.

In a security nightmare, he left the stage and started glad-handing all the attendees. People queued up to meet him, and they blocked a smooth exit. Torin figured Aimee would unobtrusively move Sinclair toward safety and keep her body between him and the guests as much as possible.

“I'll be back,” Mira told him.

“Mira…”

“I want to meet him.”

She walked off.

Since he could scan almost the entire crowd and see the door at the same time, he remained in the same general vicinity.

He kept a surreptitious eye on Mira.

She stood in the line with several other women, and she appeared to join in the conversation.

He noticed that she took one of the women by the arm as if they were old friends. Mira started talking loudly. If he hadn't been so in tune with her expressions and reactions, he might have missed the subtle look she shot him.

As it was, he keyed his mic to alert the others and headed her direction.

“I'm sure I've seen your picture before,” Mira was saying.

The woman's stiff smile, obviously surgically enhanced, started to fade. “You're mistaken,” the blonde said.

“Are you a movie star? Can I have your autograph?”

Torin moved in, cutting off the woman from her other friends. “Everything okay, honey?” he asked Mira.

“I think this woman is a movie star!”

Torin shrugged like a helpless male. “I'm sorry. She's an autograph hound. If you'll humor her…”

 The woman had a sheen of sweat on her upper lip.

“Here, I have a pen right here,” Mira said. She opened her purse. “Oh. No!”

She got louder and more animated. “I don't have a pen. What am I going to do? Do you have one?” she asked the woman. “Can I borrow yours?”

She was drawing the attention of a lot of people, and Aimee whispered something in Sinclair's ear, then kissed him on the cheek, looking like a lover who was anxious to have her man all to herself. He shrugged, as if unable to resist the womanly wiles.

Inamorata moved toward Sinclair.

“Darling, I'm so excited! She's going to sign an autograph!” Mira gushed at Torin.

The blonde snapped. “I don't have a pen.”

“Just look,” Mira implored. “Please?”

Her expression more a snarl than even a politely civil smile, the woman made a show of opening her pocketbook.

Mira acted. She jostled into the woman, forcing her to loosen her grip on the purse.

Crap!

Mira's instinct had been completely correct. He keyed his mic. “Gun!”

The woman reached into her purse and grabbed the revolver then pointed it straight at Mira.

Pandemonium erupted in screams of hysteria.

Mira, gaze determined, leaned over and surged forward.

The gun discharged. The roar deafened him.

Pain shredded Mira's upper arm. It seared and burned. But she was focused.

She rammed her body full force into the blonde's painfully thin frame.

She knocked the woman over, and Torin moved into action, pinning her to the ground.

Trace Romero was there in seconds, securing the assailant's wrists while Torin hustled over to Mira.

“She winged me, Torin,” she said. “The bitch winged me.”

“Saw that. I made sure she is staying down.”

“My hero.” Her body refused to support her weight, and she couldn't stand up.

“You mad? I wasn't sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing.” She struggled to keep him in focus. Then the world went black.

When she opened her eyes again, she was on a stretcher in the hotel ballroom.

An IV drip ran into a vein, and Torin stood next to her, his jaw set in an uncompromising line.

She hurt like hell. And there was no one she wanted to see more than him.

A paramedic strapped her to a stretcher, and she struggled for the control she always had. “My dry-cleaning bill's going to rival the national debt,” she said. “I like this dress.”

He shook his head. “I'll buy you ten more.”

“And go shopping with me for them?”

“You're pushing it, Araceli.”

She tried to grin, to keep it light, but she couldn't. They seriously needed a talk. If it had been him who had been injured, how would she have reacted? How did they keep their jobs separate from their real lives? One thing was sure: she wouldn't give up her job, her freedom, or her independence for him or any man, no matter how good the sex was, no matter how much she wanted to experience his lash. She cared about him—loved him.

That thought made her light-headed again.

She didn't love Torin Carter. The man was strong and dominant, demanding.

His world operated by his rules, and he offered no compromise, especially when it came to her and their BDSM games.

“I'm riding in the ambulance,” he told one of the paramedics.

“Sir—”

“I'd save my breath if I were you,” she told the young woman. “In an argument with him, you can't win.”

“At least your brain didn't get damaged,” Torin said with a slight smile.

Inamorata efficiently walked over. “Nice work, Araceli.”

“Except for the part where she got shot,” Torin said.

“Grazed,” Mira corrected. “The slug just took a chunk out of my arm.”

His blue eyes reminded her once again of a glacier. Cold. Determined. The concern she'd seen earlier had vanished. He'd blazed past anger. Now his temper was on a shortened leash. The sweat on her back chilled.

“You,” Inamorata said, pointing at Torin, “can shut up.”

Mira couldn't have said it better herself.

Mira exhaled.

The last week had sucked. She hadn't required surgery. The doctors had just stabilized her and used some fancy new glue to put her back together. Treated and released.

Clearly Torin didn't see it that way.

He was still behaving as if she needed to be protected, and she'd already resumed weight training.

He hadn't spanked her, hadn't touched her, hadn't kissed her, hadn't made love to her. He'd slept in his own bedroom to be sure he didn't bump her arm at night. He'd fed her, kept her in coffee and food and ibuprofen, and he made sure she didn't overexert herself. And she was tired of it.

She joined him in the office.

He was obviously pretending to work. But she'd seen the hint of an online poker game before he hit a key to switch back to a spreadsheet.

“We need to talk.”