Mastered By The Mavericks (31 page)

And then there was the matter of the beautiful redhead sleeping across the house.
The way he saw her haunting Rebel’s eyes, the same way she dogged so many of his own
thoughts and longings. There was so much more to uncover about her…and so few bricks
remaining that could be loosened from her walls, if at all. The woman who’d tumbled
away from them this morning had been spurred by one motivation alone. Fear. Her remaining
barriers would take patience and strategy and time, lots of it, to scale.

Time they didn’t have.

He said as much to Rebel by widening his stance and squaring his jaw. Added a twist
of his lips before venturing, “So what do we tell her we know?”

Translation:
How pissed do we risk the woman being, about prying into her sister’s personal shit
and using it to analyze her issues about submissiveness?

Rebel started with the human metronome thing in the doorway again. Pretty much expected.

“All of it,” the guy gritted.

Okay,
not
expected. At all.

“All of—wait—whoa—Moon?” But he could’ve been stammering stanzas of
Three Little Pigs
, since his friend wasn’t listening. Clearly, the decision had been made—for what
reason he couldn’t fathom, but Reb blowing a gasket of common sense seemed like a
damn good option right now—especially now that Reb squeaked the floor from his bare-footed
turn, then started toward the bedroom wing with determined steps.

“All of it,” he repeated along the way. “This girl needs to learn she can trust us—with
everything.”

Rhett felt himself cut loose a grin. “Well, damn. That actually makes sense.”

Rebel chuckled. “You sound surprised.”

“I am. I didn’t think either one of us was thinking straight about her right now.”

“Still not quite sure I am, brother.” Reb paused at the door to the guest bedroom
she was using. “But putting
her
needs first seems like a good place to start.”

Temptation or not, Rhett refused to let that go unanswered. He reached over, delivering
a sturdy clap to his friend’s shoulder. “I agree, man.”

Just like that, thank fuck, it was over. He’d gotten through it without wanting to
go too much further with the affection.

Too
much further…

Stow it, asshole. Deep.

Rhett twisted the doorknob then quietly swung in the bedroom’s door. “Sweet peach?”
he called softly. “You awake?”

Rebel rolled his eyes while striding past him. Once the guy got to the bed, he hitched
up on it, curling one knee in. “Brynna.” He tenderized the charge at once. “
Minette,
Rhett and I would like to speak with you.”

There was no response from the woman beneath the covers.

Low blow though it was, Rhett let a chuckle fly.

“Brynna?
Mon chou
?”

Still not a move. Not a groan, a sigh, or a rustle.

Rhett moved to the foot of the bed, laughing a little harder.

With a glare over his shoulder, Rebel slid farther up the mattress. Rolled over and
curled around Brynn, completing the sensual spoon by slinking his arms around her
waist.

Before his whole body seized and jerked.

“Moon?” Rhett scowled. “What the—”

Shock choked back the rest. As Rebel swept the coverlet high then hurled it off the
bed—exposing the pillows mounded together to create the effect of a slumbering body.
On the pillow where Brynna’s head should have been, there was a note scrawled on the
back of a crumpled rehearsal schedule, probably yanked from her purse—which, along
with her cosmetics and hair products, was also gone.

She wasted no time getting to the point—escalating Reb’s low growl to an enraged bellow.

She’s my best friend.

I had to do something.

I’m sorry.

Rhett added his own snarl to that—but did it while whirling out the door and back
down the hall to the office. He plummeted back into a chair and jammed on his headset
before issuing a furious vow beneath his breath. “She has no idea what sorry is yet.”

By the time Rebel joined him again, he’d hailed El, who answered from Vegas like a
fairy flying on Ecstasy. “Howdy, Texas! What’s up?”

“Cut the crap, El.” Rebel glowered at the note in his hand that might as well have
been the thorn in his paw. “She did this with your help, damn it. Unless you want
to consider two best friends chained in Adler’s magic lab of wonders, you’ll spill.”

A long pause. El’s pissy huff. “She told me you’d do this. That you’d be impossible
bullies, and try to intimidate me into—”

“
Everything
, El.
Now.
”

‡

B
rynn’s cell buzzed
on the SUV’s passenger seat. Again.

It was El. Again.

She ignored it. Again.

She jolted as the air vibrated with a heavy
thwop-thwop-thwop
. Forced herself to breathe deep, telling herself it was only another media helicopter,
not Rhett and Rebel about to fast-rope from a Blackhawk and torch through the rental
car’s roof. But the fact that the scenario was in the realm of possibility for those
two? Another shiver was fully justified—as well as a glance up at the sky, just to
confirm the media chopper theory.

She’d just tucked her head back inside the car when the phone buzzed again. Cockroach-crawled
across the cushion at her. A new shudder. Damn if she didn’t wish for the thing to
just turn into a real roach.

Did she want to know what the auto redialing was about?

Rhetorical question. The way things were going today, she wouldn’t flinch if El was
calling about a flash flood on the river, or even a swarm of locusts on its way to
munch down on Austin. But not answering meant the thing was going to buzz through
every mile between here and the old Verge building.

With a dreading huff, she scooped up the phone. “What?”

El whooshed out a breath. “Damn it. You picked up.”

“Excuse me? You’ve been calling like Crazy Cory.”

Surely that would loosen El a little. Cory had been a charming fan who’d talked El
into a few fun dates, only to turn semi-stalker and earn his name on a restraining
order. Their Crazy Cory jokes had stuck even after the guy decided to move to Florida,
suddenly switching his obsession to a new Latina pop star who lived there.

But El’s tension only notched higher. “Where are you? Damn it. You can’t be done yet—unless
Adler and Royce didn’t buy your act, and left you out at the gate.”

“Not in these hose, they won’t.” She ran a hand up her calves, just to be sure the
seams still extended up the back, to the point where they clipped into garters against
her thighs. When packing this “nice girl with the secret naughty side” outfit back
at home, she’d gone for the garters and stockings out of ruthless instinct, thinking
only about what might capture Adler’s attention if she had to resort to this tactic.
Now that push had come to shove, she wished the demure stockings had gone in, too.
She felt obscenely exposed, despite the boy short panties still covering every inch
of her privates beneath her pinstriped pencil skirt. Maybe that had something to do
with her white button-front shirt, open down to the fourth button, giving an ample
peek at the white lace of her cami-bra beneath—and the flesh filling it out.

“What does that mean?” El pressed. “And where the hell
are
you?”

She lifted her head and looked around, almost laughing from bemusement. “Just leaving
the motel.”

“
What
?”

She yanked the phone away from her ear. “El, I get enough screeching from your cat.”

The line filled with a girl growl that was just as bad. “How are you still there?
Why
are you still there?”

“Well, I wasn’t sitting here redoing my nails.” She couldn’t help the defensive burst.
“The traffic was bumper-to-bumper on the road for at least an hour after I checked
in.” Then transformed into the slinky-heeled, va-va-voom-haired vixen who was going
to charm anything she wanted from Homer Adler—including access to the room where he
was keeping her best friend. “I think I heard someone say that they’re screening the
new Tarantino film this afternoon.”

“The new—” A sharp
smack
cracked through the line, confirming her friend still excelled at the fine art of
face-palming. “I can’t freaking believe this.”

“The next time Zo gets herself kidnapped, I’ll just ask her to steer clear of the
SXSW dates, okay?” Out of convenience, she used the acronym for South by Southwest,
the monster-sized alternative film and cultural festival that took over Austin every
March. Her view across the motel parking lot alone included a pink-mohawked woman
walking a trio of similarly-coifed wolfhounds, a guy dressed as Dracula on top and
Wolfman on the bottom, and a dreadlocked couple toting a pair of mobile keyboards,
singing
Wrecking Ball
in perfect harmony.

“Just confirm you’re able to get out of there now. As in,
right
now.” At first, El’s tone just seemed irritable. But after three major dance show
tours with the woman, Brynn knew the nuances of irritation in her friend. This wasn’t
one of them.

She trembled again. Hard. Then finally muttered, “Shit.”

“Ummm, yep. That about hits the nail on the head.”

“So they just found out?” She cut to the chase. The particulars of how Rhett and Rebel
had grilled El didn’t matter. She hadn’t even asked her friend to keep any confidences,
knowing the guys would use any means they could—probably even a threat to El’s screechy
cat—to make her spill about Brynn’s logistics. Putting El in that position wasn’t
fair. She’d only asked El to buy her some time by scrambling the tracking chips on
her phone and the SUV. Her mistake had been misjudging how much time that would take,
figuring the guys would’ve let her “sleep” for at least three hours before bothering
her in the guest room.

“That’s the million-dollar question.” El’s confession wasn’t the thumbs-up Brynn was
looking for. “Especially because I don’t really know the answer.”

Brynn frowned while powering up the car. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that those men are devious sonofabitches.”

Tell me something I don’t know
. Only by yanking a page out of that very book had she’d been able to get out of that
ranch without them knowing: a stunt she’d regretted
and
validated as soon as concocting it. Did she like sneaking off to pour herself into
this get-up, knowing she would walk into the lion’s den by herself in it? Had she
enjoyed deceiving the men who’d been brave enough to show her
their
truth, despite the terrifying new ground it had been for them? And had she wanted
to slip out that door, away from them—and the place where they’d made her feel so
good, so right, so complete about herself?

No. No. And
hell,
no
.

But as they said in Mother’s world, traitors only got one kiss goodbye. Brynn had
pressed hers into a note, laid atop a mound of pillows, in a bed she’d left as cold
as the ache in her heart. She’d left it there with a prayer, too—a plea that Rhett
and Rebel might, by some sliver of possibility, understand that she’d done this for
them as much as Zoe. That if she’d stayed, she would have pulled unfair shit on them,
begging them to take her to bed again. To open her up again. To lead them on into
giving her just one more hit of that amazing shit called submissiveness…

Wasn’t going to happen.

She was still in control, damn it. She wasn’t like Enya. She sure as
hell
wasn’t like Mom. She wasn’t going to run away from her life by giving it over to
men, whether they wielded whips or Bibles…or just the power of their kisses and touches.
She was going to make something of her life. Make it matter. Make it connected. And
yes, that meant making hard decisions. It meant walking out the door, getting in a
car, making a good plan and sticking to it—especially when that plan involved saving
the friend who meant so damn much to her.

At the moment, it also meant finding a way out of the motel’s parking lot.

Though San Jacinto Boulevard was moving again, it was still a snail crawl. The backup
into the motel’s lot was five cars deep. She pulled out of line, praying this place
had a back way out. On the way toward the rear of the property, she maneuvered around
a ninja banjo player, as well as a couple who wouldn’t stop making out, while urging
more details out of El.

“I’m all ears,” she told her friend. “Though I’m not sure I want to be.”

El whooshed out a breath. “Why do you have to be so smart?”

Her lips quirked. “And why do you always know exactly what I need to hear?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Just…thanks.” All the reflection about life, purpose, and friendship made her suddenly
mushy. It had
nothing
to do with having her soul bared as naked as her body less than half a day ago. “Thanks,”
she repeated with more conviction. “For being you. For being there. Even right now.”