Have Gun, Will Travel (The Bare Bones MC Book 5) (13 page)

“I…doubt it.” I wasn’t certain, though. Word of something that huge would be sure to get around. That was the
point
, really, wasn’t it? We welcomed even more bounty hunters—in fact there was word that the famed Lock Singer of our brother club, The Bent Zealots, might have time to track down Tormenta. Lock actually had a bounty hunting business that tracked fugitives, bail jumpers, over in Lake Havasu City.

“Are you sure? Could there have been
anyone
, even someone you thought was trustworthy, outside your circle of sweetbutt—”

“
Harte
.” It struck me like a wooden dagger to the heart. “When I was waiting for you at The Drawing Board, when you went out to Winona. A few other sweetbutts were still hanging around, although Brenda had gone to Harte’s. We just started…” I shrugged. “Talking. Harte’s always been our friend, Sax. He’s always been on our side. We couldn’t
not
tell him about the bounty. He was the only one who came running when Cassie got slashed. He was the one who thought of hiring Lock Singer.”

Sax even straightened out the lower hem on my shirt. He brushed it off as though it had cookie crumbs. “Never mind. Don’t worry yourselves about it. We should’ve made a better plan for covering our asses, maybe just kept it between us and Slayer. But listen, before we go back out there. We need a safe word.”

“A…what?”

Sax almost rolled his eyes, as though it was typical I would have no clue what he referred to. He patiently explained. “A safe word. A word you—or I—can use when we want the scene to stop, when it gets too intense for us.”

I thought I’d heard of that idea before. It was a good one. “Oh. Okay. Although I doubt we’ll have need for anything like that.” I grinned. “You seem to have everything under control.”

He seemed pleased by my observation. “That’s the general idea. All right, how about ‘postulant’ for our safe word?”

My mouth opened before my cheeks colored. I must’ve looked a stupid sight standing there like a damned child, my tangled auburn hair all mussed, my butt burning bright red, and Sax teasing me like I was born yesterday. “Postulant?” I managed to utter. “What made you think of—”

He squeezed my ass, but it was much gentler, more affectionate, and his hand didn’t linger. “I suspected about as much about you, Sister Colette. You thought you could hide a thing like that? We’ll discuss it later. Right now I’ve got to get back out, find out what’s going on with Brenda. But I’m glad to see you’re not wearing that stupid collar. You deserve a much better one. One with a much better intent behind it.”

What did he mean? My hand went to my throat. “Oh, that? It just fell off. The buckle broke.”

He grinned. “It was symbolic. Meant to be. Now, I’ll tell you something that would please me very much. Would you like to please me?”

It was embarrassing, how eagerly I reacted. “Oh, yes, very much! What would you like?”

“I’d like it if you’d call that twatwaffle fake ‘Sir’ of yours and tell him it’s over between you. Makes me uncomfortable, sharing you with someone else. Also makes me uncomfortable the way he beats you. That’s not true S and M. That’s plain old sadism, unleashed, with no holds barred. I’ll teach you the real thing. See what we’re doing here? I didn’t just dump you and leave you on the floor. It’s called ‘aftercare.’ And you probably need a sugary drink.” He was so supremely confident that I would just dump Roscoe without so much as a bye your leave!

“Well, I’d have to have a face-to-face conversation with him about it.”

“Not going to happen. Not until Tormenta is found. Just give him an ol’ heads up about your intentions over the phone. Until then, you’re staying either here with June, or in P and E with Maddy.”

“Whichever one’s closest to you.” Again, I was falling all over myself to be with him, to please him! I needed to slap myself. Too bad my former order didn’t stress self-flagellation, for that’s what I felt I needed. “I heard you were buying some guy’s rock shop in P and E, down on Bargain Boulevard. You plan on hanging around here awhile?”

Now I had caught him unawares. It was nice to see him squirm, for once. He cleared his throat and frowned at me. “Maybe. You just call that so-called ‘Master’ of yours and we’ll see how things go.”

And he left the room.

Why should
I
break things off with Roscoe when Sax wasn’t offering me any hope of stability? He said I needed a better collar. Did that mean he intended on buying me one? Here was a guy who rode around the States for a living. Literally a nomad, he drove from show to show selling his gems. Just because he’d purchased a shop in Pure and Easy didn’t mean he intended to stick around! I hadn’t even gotten a chance to tell Sax what I’d done at the nail salon.

I knew Spanish from the abbey. Aside from Latin, it was one of their standard languages. Of course I didn’t have time to get an actual manicure, but I’d made appointments for both Maddy and myself. I had boldly made an assertion to Carla Madrona, the matron who ran the place. Slyly, I told her, “
Le diré a Tony Tormenta que hiciste un buen trabajo.”
I’ll tell Tony Tormenta what a good job you did
.

Carla Madrona had turned as white as Santiago Slayer’s vinyl belt. “
Mi Dios. Te ha enviado
?”
My God. Has he sent you?

I’d smiled enigmatically, and left then. I was already late for dinner at Lytton’s. But I’d felt I’d gained a confirmation of what Sax suspected. And yeah, there were slimy foot spas, people reusing tools on different customers, workers dropping things, then putting them back unsanitized.

I wandered toward the back deck, where everyone seemed to be conglomerated, but I stopped short of opening the sliding glass door. Sax wanted me to break it off with Roscoe. I was certainly willing to, but only if I knew Sax could provide me with more assurance. I knew he had submissives in every town. Brenda had told me. I may not have much self-esteem after the life I’d led—certainly giving up all your worldly possessions and wearing a habit didn’t lend itself to a giant ego—but I knew enough of the secular world to know one didn’t make rash decisions based on a lot of air, such as Sax was offering me.

But there was a voicemail from Roscoe! He’d finally called me back after over a week. “Hey, Slave. Got your texts and voicemails. You don’t need to leave me so many—I know you’re into me. Listen, I’m going to be doing a different scene for another week. Some relatives are coming into town from out of state. So don’t call me, I’ll call you, all right? Bye.”

That was it. “Bye.” I wound up staring at the phone as though the instrument itself had offended me. Roscoe had
always
spoken brusquely to me like that. If a Dom couldn’t speak that way, who could, right?

So I was about to saunter out onto the back deck when I saw June’s face collapse. She clapped her palms to her face and moaned an unearthly sound. Lytton was talking to her, his phone in his hand. I froze in place. June fled for the slider, slamming it open so hard it banged loudly.

“June!” I reached out to grab her arm as she ran past. “What happened?”

“Bee!” She looked at me wide-eyed, as though she hadn’t seen me standing there. Lytton came inside now, hovering with uncertainty around his wife. She took her hands from her mouth, her mouth in the shape of a wail. “
Brenda’s dead
!”

It took a while to sink in. I struggled to recall what Sax had told me about her being slashed. “Tony Tormenta?”

“Yes!” She made a bloodcurdling howl. “Tony Fucking Tormenta! He grabbed her when she was in Harte’s driveway, so he knows all about your plan, and I fucking think if we don’t all go into hiding in Niagara Falls he’s going to fucking come to get us, too!”

And she ran down the hall.

I looked at Lytton. He rarely looked helpless, but he did now.

Sax stood behind Lytton. He didn’t look helpless. He looked determined, his jaw grim.

And
he
was the man who gave me reassurance. Not Lytton, or the other two defenseless, powerless guys standing on the deck.

Sax was a wall, an immobile wall, and
he
was the one I wanted to hitch my wagon to.

SAX

“D
id we bring anything to eat other than those Doritos?”

Sax stupidly started to answer Wolf Glaser’s question. “I’ve got some trail—”

But of course Tobiah Weingarten beat him to it. “What would you do if you were in astronaut training school? I’ll bet you wouldn’t want to eat the dehydrated beef stew with carrots they give you up in space.”

Wolf, in the back of the surveillance van with Tobiah, sighed heavily. “Yeah, but we’re not
in
some fucking astronaut training school. We’re five thousand feet out of Payson. And I always have pancakes with pecan syrup around about this time.”

Tobiah snorted. “At four AM? You must get up awful early for your important career in the parts shed at The Citadel.”

“Construction guys start early!” yelled Wolf.

“Cool it,” said Sax in a loud warning tone, much as one would use on dogs. He was in the passenger seat of the van, there not being any reason for him to be in back with the surveillance equipment Tobiah had installed. The van was one of Tobiah’s pet projects, as it turned out. Sax thought this was its maiden voyage.

Tobiah had gleaned from metadata in the Facebook photo of Brenda Ridings that Tormenta had posted it from his luxury hideaway home above Payson. The white-powdered peaks of the Mogollon Rim ringed the valley when they had driven up last night, Sax riding point, the van following, getting as far as they dared before the sun set. Sax had parked his scoot in a wash and covered it with branches as best as he could before grudgingly joining the other two in the van.

Predictably, it was just one jab and snipe after the other with those two. Was Ford in on Leo’s vendetta against him, too? Is that why Ford had stuck him with these two buffoons? Sax had already taken one walk over the ridge above them with night vision goggles in the nearly full moon to view the midcentury ranch house, but he didn’t see any activity, and no vehicles. He thought he might take another walk up there now, or he’d have to start knocking heads together.

Tobiah kept on. “When I took that astronaut training program at MIT, I had to eat a can of Russian jellied beef tongue from the seventies. Man, that was some harsh stuff. Real brutal training.”

Wolf said, “But without gravity wouldn’t the aromas just waft away? You wouldn’t be able to smell the food beforehand, which could be a good thing.”

This appeared to confuse Tobiah. His face glowed with irritation in the lights from his GPS screen. “Well, you can’t really taste it, either. In zero gravity, we had constantly stuffy noses because the fluid rises to the top half of your body.”

“Great,” scoffed Wolf. “I
feel
like I’m in a space capsule with you guys.”

Tobiah grumbled, “Sure wish I had some biocide to spray on
you
.” He was fiddling with his quadcopter, a remote-controlled drone with four props that would help them spy on Tormenta, if indeed Tormenta was even up there, without putting themselves at grave bodily risk. When Tormenta emerged from the house to enter his car, Sax and Wolf could easily jog up and pop off him and his possible compatriots. Of course, at four AM, there wasn’t much to see on Tobiah’s computer screen, so he was still charging the aerial vehicle.

“I’m talking a walk,” Sax informed his men. Relief washed over him as he exited the van. At this time of the still, crisp morning, the Ponderosa pine scent imbued his nostrils, and he breathed deeply. He remembered most of the pathway up the rise behind the van and the moon was still high, so he didn’t have to put on the night vision goggles until he neared the top. He clambered up a dry creek bed. A hundred years ago, heavy metals had been found near here. Sax wondered how many gold, copper, and silver traces he was gouging under his fingernails as he climbed.

Then he wondered about Beatrix Hellman—otherwise known as Sister Colette. That spanking scene had just about undone him. He didn’t figure her for an experienced submissive, but the way she deftly handled him, leaving him perpetually on the verge of shooting his load inside his jeans, had him wondering.

She’d been superb, the way she had protested, just the perfect combination for a Force-Me Queen. She was no novice, that was for sure, and Sax doubted that this Roscoe assmuncher had done much to train her. By the time he’d pulled her panties down to her knees, she was knowingly parting those lily-white thighs, and his slaps turned to caresses when his fingers had strayed lower, to her tight and surprisingly damp curls.

He was hooked. He’d only dumped her off his lap because he was truly, sincerely afraid he was going to go off in his pants like some fucking inexperienced kid. Playing the Daddy Dom game was always a turn-on, but once he realized that his “father” role could be interpreted more than one way, he’d just about lost his rocks. Oh, yes. She would look fine bound in some kinbaku hemp, those tiny titties of hers bursting from between the bindings.

Sax nearly lost track of what he was doing. That was inexcusable, so he placed the night vision goggles into position on his head. His last thought of Bee was that she had no clue what a safe word was. That told him all he needed to know about that abusive nozzle, that sorry excuse for a Dom.