Francesca gave the rope a narrow-eyed look as they stepped out onto the cracked sidewalk. She couldn’t deny that she enjoyed it when Luis tied her up, but it seemed like overkill to extend it past the bounds of their bedroom.
“This is ridiculous,” she muttered, watching him open the passenger door of his fancy black car for her. Francesca slid into the leather seat, holding her wrist out so she didn’t drag him in with her.
Taking the opportunity to kiss her knuckles, he murmured, “Humor me.”
She had no idea what magic he used on the knot, because whenshetried undoing it, nothing happened, but all it took was a swift tug for him. His end of the rope unraveled from his wrist. Gently placing the excess in her lap, he closed the door and rounded the car to load her suitcase into the trunk.
Her fingers found the length of it. They traced the finely braided bumps and silky material. The muscles of her stomach clenched as she recalled the feeling of it wrapped around her wrists. It made her helpless, but in a strange sense it also freed her. She couldn’t go anywhere or do anything besides lay there and feel whatever it was Luis wanted her to.
The driver’s side door opening startled her out of her reverie. Francesca looked up at Luis as he climbed into the car, her cheeks heating like she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t.
If asked, Francesca wouldn’t have said she was particularly sexually expressive nor repressed. She fell somewhere in the middle, where the average person with too many worries and not enough time in the day found themselves. Sex was nice and she’d had a good time with it once or twice, but in general it was anextracurricular activity she didn’t have the luxury of exploring as often as she might’ve liked.
But with Luis she felt… unburdened, maybe. Like that weight that pressed down on her every second of every day lifted, allowing her to take a breath. To justbe.
A warm hand settled on her knee.
She glanced away from the spot she’d been staring blankly at in the middle distance to find Luis watching the road, the lines of his face softened with contentment.
“How are you feeling?”
Francesca nearly shrugged and offered her standard avoidant answer, but one swift, cutting look from him changed her course. “I’m a little overwhelmed,” she admitted, finding his hand with her own. “My brain and body haven’t had a chance to really catch up with everything, I think.”
He made a knowing sound in the back of his throat. “When have they ever? You need to rest, Frankie. Really rest.”
She could only nod. He was right. A terminal sort of exhaustion had been settling into her bones for a long time, maybe even before she did the most selfish thing she’d ever done and moved to United Washington. She’d worked since she was sixteen to help support her parents. She’d worked all through college, too, and lived at home to help out even more.
And then one day she just… couldn’t do that anymore. Thoughts of Billie had plagued her for years — nightmares about horrible things that could’ve happened to her, passing daydreams about what she’d say if she were around, and the ever-present guilt over being adopted before her — but one day she’d simply decided it was time.
Looking at it from a distance, she realized that she had been running in the only way she could allow herself. But it hadn’t fixed anything.
Francesca eased back into her seat with a heavy exhale. “I don’t think I know how to do that,” she admitted.
He gave her thigh a gentle squeeze. “That’s why you have me. What you don’t have, I do. And what I don’t have, you do. We fit.”
The light in the car changed when they pulled into the parking garage below Luis’s apartment building. She gazed at him thoughtfully, watching the overhead light flash over his proud features.
In a soft voice she replied, “We do, don’t we?”
Luis pulled into his parking spot and cut the engine. Leaning over the console to give her a slow kiss, he whispered, “Now you’re getting it, kitten.”
She could feel the smile forming on his lips a moment before he pulled back. Butterflies filled her stomach when he gestured for her to wait in the car. Luis hopped out and circled around to open her door for her.
Offering her his hand, he helped her out. “I know you don’t like the penthouse, but if you give me a week, I can find us?—”
The high-pitched whine of a bolt gun was all the warning they had before a hole melted in the passenger window.
The squeal of tires echoing off the concrete walls was shockingly loud. A dark van skidded to a halt next to them, partially blocking their car in.
Luis shoved her down to the gritty concrete floor. She dropped to her hands and knees between the car and the opened door as he whipped a gun she hadn’t even known he carried out from behind his back.
He took aim at the van just as a man sprang from the back and began to fire wildly. Luis cursed, ducking to avoid a wide shot, and fired back.
Francesca huddled on the floor, unconsciously clutching the white rope. The smell of ozone, melted rubber, and metal filledthe air. She wanted to close her eyes, but she couldn’t bear to look away from Luis’s feet — her only indication of where he was and if he remained unharmed.
She watched him stalk forward, his gun whining with every white-hot pulse of plasma, and so completely missed the other pair of feet heading her way.
While Luis chased the shooter around the van, another man grabbed her shoulders and wrenched her backward. Francesca screamed. She kicked backward blindly, her fingers clutching at whatever she could grab of the car door. The brushed concrete floor scraped her knees and elbows as she was wrenched backward.