Luckily making a run to Colorado to help find Kitten a Dom wasn’t a dangerous thing. Though he’d heard stories about that town. And there was that call he’d gotten earlier. He grinned. Yeah, setting that bundle of trouble on Ben had been fun. He had no idea what was coming for him.
Julian let it go. “We’ve had a problem at Danielle’s resort. Come, little one, sit down. Put your feet up. I’ll get you a bottle of water.”
Danielle Lodge-Taylor took her husband’s seat behind the desk without any hesitation. How fucking far she’d come. When Chase had met her she was sweet, but completely mousy, a true submissive who had found great strength in her relationship with Julian Lodge and Finn Taylor. She’d gone back to school, opened a business, and now was pregnant. Really pregnant.
“Spa or club?” Chase asked, relieved that this seemed to be about business and not him fucking the wrong chick. Because he often fucked the wrong chick. He had the scars to prove it.
The Willow Fork resort was two-pronged in Chase’s mind. There was the spa/dude ranch aspect. That was the “daytime” portion of the resort. Horseback riding. Massages. Touristy crap. But there was a section of the resort that came alive at night. The dungeon. Danielle’s resort catered to people in the lifestyle.
If something craptastic had happened, he hoped it was in the dungeon. He was bored. Life had ground to a nasty little circle that left him deeply unfulfilled. He woke up, usually long after the sun had risen. He ate some crap because he didn’t cook and Ben was usually still at someone else’s house doing the “domesticity for a day” thing he did so well. He played around on his computer, pretending he still mattered, and then he got dressed for the dungeon, found another meaningless girl, and started the cycle all over again.
A little excitement was just what the doctor ordered.
“Spa,” Julian replied.
Fuck. The last thing he needed was to deal with Dani’s accounting problems. Still, he wasn’t about to say no to her. “Tell me about it.”
He’d have to go to bum-fuck, back-ass nowhere and figure out who’d taken more than their fair share of tips.
“Do you remember the incident that brought Kitten to us?” Dani accepted the bottle of water Julian handed to her.
How could he forget? Kitten had been held in utter slavery by a psychotic asshole. She’d been held against her will at the beginning and then indoctrinated into a sort of Stockholm syndrome. The mindfuck the bastard had used on her had worked all too well. Her captor had taken her into all sorts of public situations without her running for help. He’d had two women he’d forced into slavery. When he’d tried taking a third, the bastard had finally gotten what he deserved. A nice knife to the gut. Natalie Buchanan. He’d read her file somewhere along the way. He hadn’t actually met her, but he liked a woman who could wield a knife.
He was fucked in the head. He wouldn’t get on a freaking plane, but he was thinking about screwing the girl with the knife.
“Well, the two women who were with Kitten currently work at the spa as massage therapists. She would really like to go see them. It’s been a while. Gretchen was up here a couple of months ago, but getting Natalie to travel is difficult.”
“So whatever I’m doing down there, I would also be responsible for Kitten?” How the hell was he supposed to handle an investigation when he was constantly worried that Kitten would follow something shiny and get lost? “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Kitten likes her leash. I can’t walk around the vanilla side of the resort with a hundred-pound woman on a leash.”
He could. He’d done it before, but it tended to hamper investigations.
There was a brisk knock at the door and then the puppy entered. Oh, the puppy was six foot three inches, pure muscled Colorado boy, but there was something about Logan Green that just reminded Chase of an overgrown puppy.
“Sorry. I just got the text,” Logan said.
Three months into his training with Leo, Logan was more confident. And he hit people less. Chase wasn’t sure that was a good thing. He liked a little tussle every now and then, and all his friends were getting married. It had turned them into whiny, pussy-whipped emo kings who no longer liked a good punch in the face.
“Thanks for joining us,” Julian said, his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “I was going to send Ben and Chase down to check out something for me at the resort. I would go myself, but Danielle is due any day now. She can’t travel.”
“She can barely move. She is bigger than a whale,” Dani grumbled. She gasped just a little. “But baby Chloe can move. That was a nice kick.”
Julian’s face practically lit up, his hand finding her round belly in an instant. “Come on, baby, kick for Papa.”
Dani had a tiny smile on her face as she looked at her husband. “He’ll sit like this for hours.”
Chase was surrounded by baby-minded alien transplants. He was sure of it. He believed in conspiracy, and though this one seemed to be a natural function of the biological imperative to breed that somehow led to every man he knew handing his balls over to some sub on a silver platter, it was still a conspiracy. Especially since it seemed to be catching. Good men were going down all the time.
Even Leo had transformed from good-time guy to someone Chase was a little afraid might break into song. If that happened, it was his duty to put his brother’s old SEAL teammate down.
Chase turned a little and saw Logan had no idea what the fuck was going on, either. They sent each other shrugs and a little grunt, the true communication of real men. It was something that said, “Dude, I do not get that and never will.”
Yeah, he could hang with Logan, maybe better than with Ben these days. Ben seemed on the edge of finally figuring out that he could do way better without Chase around.
The good news was Logan could take months to figure that out.
Julian laughed as his hand jumped. “That’s my girl.”
Chase cleared his throat, his universal sign for “someone better tell me why I’m still here.”
Julian laughed a little as though figuring out he’d really gone over the deep end. “Sorry. We’re getting close to the finish line. I get distracted. Now, I’ll send Ben along, too, when he returns, but I’m afraid this won’t wait. Finn is already in the air. Callum Reed is at the sheriff’s office, but Finn won’t pass this off. He feels he owes those women too much to let someone else handle it.”
One of Kitten’s friends got caught with her hands in the cookie jar? Damn. That was going to suck ass. He hated being the bearer of bad tidings. Scratch that. He hated being the bearer of bad tidings when he liked the person he had to disappoint. When he didn’t care about the person, he was perfectly fine telling them that their wife-husband-business partner was a complete douchebag and their life savings was gone.
He would have made a good Grim Reaper.
“What are we supposed to do?” Logan asked.
Dani leaned forward. “I was hoping you would take Kitten down to Willow Fork for a little visit. She’s worried about her friends. As we haven’t been able to find her a Dom, we really need someone to watch her.”
Kitten had proven to be picky when it came to Doms. And everyone was indulging her because she was finally using personal pronouns.
Logan shrugged. “Sure. I haven’t been out of Dallas in months. It might be nice. Does anyone know where her leash is?”
Julian sighed. “Let’s try to break her of the leash outside of the dungeon, Logan. How about just keeping an eye on her?”
A grimace crossed the puppy’s face. “Yeah, I don’t know about that. She can get away really fast.”
Julian stared him down.