What About Love (Club Decadence Book 6) Read online

  What About Love

  Club Decadence, Book Six

  By

  Maddie Taylor

  ©2015 by Blushing Books® and Maddie Taylor

  All rights reserved.

  No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Taylor, Maddie

  What About Love

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-68259-134-5

  Cover Design by ABCD Graphics & Design

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as Blushing Books' or the Author's advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

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  Table of Contents:

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Epilogue

  About Maddie Taylor

  Ebook Offer

  Blushing Books Newsletter

  About Blushing Books

  Prologue

  A mewling cry like that of a wounded animal startled him out of a light sleep. Instantly alert, his weary eyes shifted to the pretty brunette in the bed. Usually radiant, her skin glowing a healthy golden brown from the kiss of the Texas sun, she was ashen, nearing the stark whiteness of the pillow beneath her head. Her perfectly arched brows were gathered in a frown as her dry, colorless lips parted on another soft whimper. Clearly, she was in pain. He pressed the call light for the nurse and waited, wishing fervently he could do more.

  In frustration, T’s hands rose, fingers splayed as he readied to spear them through his hair as was his habit, but the bloodstains on his cuffs—her blood—made him pause. Once saturated, the material had dried hard and rough, stained to a rust color. As he stared at it, he remembered the hopelessness he felt as he pressed his hands over the seeping wound left by the knife in her chest. Unable to staunch the flow, he’d been powerless to do more than pray for her survival as Angie Hixson’s life essence leached out, oozing up through his fingers.

  His hands curled into fists, wanting to hurt the man who’d done this to her. As Richard Stapleton’s image appeared in his mind’s eye, the stains on his hands changed from Angie’s to her attacker’s as he beat him to a bloody pulp. Antonio Minelli, more often known as Lil T to his teammates, simply T to friends, was more than capable of snapping the worm’s neck. A decade in the Special Forces had trained him to kill, hardened him and taught him to be ruthless, yet the sight of the helpless woman in the bed made all of that unnecessary. Combined with a need for retribution on her behalf, he had sufficient rage and an instinctive carnality, to make it happen effortlessly. Stapleton was going to pay for this.

  An alarm went off, jerking him out of his bloodthirsty plotting of revenge and putting him on instant alert. It was the heart monitor above Angie’s bed, screeching in warning that her pulse rate had spiked to one-eighty. A nurse ran in, her attention immediately zeroed in on the flashing display. Without hesitation, she rushed to the bedside, checked the pulse at Angie’s throat for several seconds, and then proceeded to punch her in the middle of her chest with the side of her fist.

  “What the fuck?” T roared, surging to his feet.

  “Procedure, sir. She was in V-tach.”

  “The hell with procedure. You hit her!”

  “And it worked,” she replied, calmly nodding to the monitor, her other hand taking Angie’s pulse again. “Normal sinus rhythm, she converted.” The nurse checked her pupils with a penlight and listened to her lungs. She took a few moments to scrutinize the screen and print out an EKG strip while jotting notes on her paper. In a hurry, she murmur
ed, “I need to page her doctor. I’ll be back.”

  “Not if you’re going to beat the shit out of her, woman,” he called after her as she rushed passed Sean and Mara who were standing just inside the doorway watching.

  “Did you see that shit?” T demanded of Sean.

  “She saved her from going into cardiac arrest, bud. She’s right. It’s standard procedure.”

  He regarded Sean, his unit’s medic for over ten years, he would know. T flopped back into the chair that he’d been camped out in for forty-eight hours, his worried gaze locked on Angie’s pale face. Despite the hearty blow the nurse had given her, she hadn’t flinched.

  “Why isn’t she waking up? That punch to her chest should have done the trick if she were able.”

  “She lost a lot of blood, T.” Sean jerked his chin to indicate the IV where the fifth or sixth unit of blood, at least, was slowly infusing. “They’re still transfusing so she’s not where she should be quite yet. This coma isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. It allows her traumatized body to regenerate and heal.”

  Mara walked to his side and placed her hand on his shoulder, giving it a squeeze. “We’ll stay with her for a while, T. Why don’t you go home, shower and try to get a little rest.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. What if she wakes up or—”

  “There isn’t going to be an “or,” Mara assured him, glancing toward Sean with concern. “How about some coffee or something to eat?”

  “Coffee would be good, darlin’,” he said raggedly, dead tired. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” As she prepared to go, he heard her whisper to her husband. “I’ll go, Lucky, you stay with him.” She then stood on her toes and gave him a soft kiss on the lips.

  His friend’s sweet subbie wife was back, and T was glad for it. They’d both been through hell, her especially, and they deserved some happiness. As did the rest of his team who had one after another found their ‘one’ since coming home from war. Regrettably, he also had to watch as each man and his woman had suffered some unspeakable tragedy before finding their happiness. For Cap, it had come when Megan had been kidnapped and held for almost a day, tied to a chair so tightly that she had lingering nerve damage affecting her hands. The sensation had come back, though not all the way, but there continued to be slow improvement.

  Rick’s situation had been similar, when Regan had taken up residence over a drug dealer’s operation. She’d also been held at gunpoint, her street smarts saving her and another innocent target. Elena’s case had been worse, with two cartel dealers coming after her in revenge. Dex and the team had taken them out, but not before the leader had gotten one lash in, leaving Elena cut and bleeding.

  Jonas’ fiancée Lexie had almost bought it when in the wrong place at the wrong time, she’d been shot and left to bleed to death. He’d been on his way back from Laredo with Jonas when they’d gotten word of the shooting at her clinic. Jonas had nearly lost it, trapped in a car two hours away while the woman he loved battled for her life. It had been a very near thing. Mara had also been there that day, taking two bullets, one shattering a bone in her leg, the other in her gut with her losing a lot of blood. That made five out of five owners whose women had been taken or harmed by the cartel. Thank God they had been shut down. Victor Mendoza was no longer a threat, thanks to Sean’s well-placed bullet between his eyes. That was two days ago and they thought it was over. Now Angie hung onto life by her fingernails.

  The difference in this case, Angie wasn’t T’s woman.

  He shifted, his attention returning to the feisty police detective who had, in a very short time, gotten under his skin. He wasn’t sure why. She swore she wasn’t submissive, but as vanilla as they come, yet he saw shades of something else buried deep. Tall and curvy, which he liked, beyond that she wasn’t his usual type at all. He liked sexually adventurous yet submissive women, willing to try whatever he wanted: toys, bondage, erotic pain, ménage, or group play. The running joke at the club among the submissives—although none would dare say it to his face—was that he was a try-sexual, willing to try anything. He saw nothing wrong with that, always pleasing his partner, or partners, and making it clear from the beginning that he was in it for the play, nothing more. Though he’d turned thirty-one last month, he was still young and busily sowing his wild oats.

  His friends, all older than him, used to be the same way. Topping a bevy of different subs, pushing the limits of BDSM play, especially in the daring clubs in Europe when they’d been on leave. In the past few years, however, they’d all settled down into monogamous—or what he called monotonous—relationships, ready to kick the ass of another Dom that dared look their sub’s way. He got that. If he had a steady woman, he’d be protective too. That’s why he usually limited one-on-one encounters to a single night, or engaged in threesomes and group play. There was no risk of attachment that way, no commitment, no strings or ties, no matter how silken they might be. He planned to keep it that way, too.

  A soft groan from the bed drew him instantly to her side.

  Hazy green flecked brown eyes blinked up at him. Her voice was a dry rasp and reedy thin as she managed one shaky word. “Hurts.”

  “I know, darlin’,” T murmured as he leaned over her, stroking her hair back. He wanted to take the pain away and see her back to her usual vibrant self. “Try to lie still. The nurse will be back in a minute and we’ll ask her about something for pain.”

  Clearly puzzled, her brows knitted together and she glanced around. “Where?” she croaked. “How?”

  “You’re in the hospital. You were injured.”

  Her eyes flew wide and shifted to him. “T. My god! It was Stapleton at the courthouse. He stabbed me.” She tried to sit up, but fell back, hissing as her hand pressed against the bulky bandage over the knife wound in her side.

  “Easy, darlin’. Lie still or you’ll hurt yourself further.” He turned to Sean and demanded, “Go see what’s keeping the nurse.”

  His friend nodded and at once, was on the move and out the door.

  The few words she uttered and the movement, or maybe it was the pain, seemed too much for her as she slowly lapsed into unconsciousness once more. Right before she drifted away, she murmured in words almost too soft to make out, “You and Sean, you saved me. I remember…”

  T would never forget holding her hand in the ambulance when her heart stopped, pressing the wad of blood soaked gauze to her gushing wound as Sean started CPR, or being pushed aside as the emergency room personnel took over, listening to Sean, who was still giving compressions, recap her status as they wheeled her into a trauma room. The images, sounds and smells of that awful time were all imprinted in his permanent memory.

  There was something else etched in his mind and emblazoned on his heart from that day.

  “Now I’ll never know what it would have been like to love you.”

  To hear the heartfelt regret murmured in what she surely thought were her last words on this earth, expressing feelings for him that were so profound, she felt the need to share them as her life slipped away yanked at his icy heart. It was worse that she was right. She wouldn’t ever get a chance to know, even when she recovered because he couldn’t go there with her.

  Angie Hixson and Antonio Minelli would never work. She wanted more than he could ever give. She’d told him once that she was interested in more than merely playing with him. She wanted the whole package: a husband, 2.5 kids, a big dog, a house with a huge grassy yard, and the requisite white picket fence. That was for Angie and his friends, not him. Not after…

  He shook off the bitter memories that gnawed at his psyche like a festering wound. The past would stay in the past, and Angie would need to stay at arm’s length. He couldn’t ever go there again. It had nearly destroyed him the first time, and he’d sworn to never let anyone get that close again.

  Leaning forward, he pressed his lips to her forehead. “I’m sorry, baby. You deserve your dream, but it will have to come from someone that can lov
e you better than me.”

  With one last caress—the backs of his fingers brushing down her cheek, his forefinger tracing along her jawline and over the fullness of her lips—and one final lingering look, he said goodbye, ignoring Sean’s call and the pain in his gut as he walked away.

  Chapter One

  Three months later…

  Movement and gunshots off to her left had her twisting and returning fire. She lined up a shot as one of the gunmen ran toward the alley across the street. She fired again. Wide left, another miss—dammit! She ducked, running quickly to the brick half-wall up ahead. Crouching low, she took a deep breath, preparing to fire over the top. Tires squealed as a car took the nearby corner on two wheels and came racing down the street toward her.

  Her heart pounded in her ears as she waited. On one, she planned silently, three—two—one. She popped up and fired again.

  The tires, take out the tires, her trainer’s voice seemed to scream in her head.

  Moving objects always kicked her ass. So, when she took aim, she prayed that of the four bullets left in her clip at least one of them would find rubber and take out the car.

  A quartet of reverberating shots later, she reached for her second clip right as a buzzer blared and lights came on overhead. She watched in frustration as the hologram flickered and disappeared. Shit! Not getting to the second clip meant she’d failed, again.

  Licking her lips nervously, she peered up at the control room where she knew she’d find Dan Ogilvie, her instructor. She grimaced seeing he wasn’t alone at the wide window. Side-by-side he stood with Cap Rossi, owner of Rossi Security, Inc., her new boss. Crap! Both big men stood with their arms crossed, staring down at her. Not a good sign.