was terrified of that same fate. It was all making sense to him. It hurt that she would think that of him, but if her own father would do such a thing, why would he think she should trust a complete stranger, one she’d first seen at a sex club?
“He put me out of the house when I was seven because he wanted my room. He had several rooms for his women but it wasn’t enough and he wanted me out of the way. What was the difference between taking their passports and forcing them to work for nothing, and making them think they had to have sex and do whatever was asked of them? Because he did that. He never beat them and he always treated them the same, paid for educations, got them started in business, that sort of thing. If anything, he might have been slower to help the ones sleeping with him. But many of the women still felt as if they had no choice.”
“Did they tell you that?”
“After his death, not when I was a child.”
“Did you ever talk to him about it?”
“I tried once when I was talking about my mother and her medical history. He got very angry with me and denied that he ever forced any woman to sleep with him. He said he and my mother agreed to an open marriage and the arrangement wasn’t my business. That’s when he told me the clotting shots wouldn’t work and I wasn’t going to live long. He also told me to stop rescuing, that with the cameras now it was making things impossible to get in and out of countries without the poachers knowing we were coming. It was one long terrible argument. He died a couple of days later.”
“But you continue to insist on rescuing as many shifters as possible.” Sevastyan kept his voice very mild. He wanted to shift the conversation to what she was really doing, because something was going on that had nothing to do with what her father had been doing. He thought her father’s rescue operation had been used as a cover for her real operation.
“I can’t bring that many shifters in,” she denied. “Not if I want them legal.”
She wasn’t going to volunteer any information. She was too closed off. He was going to have to nudge her harder. Sevastyan sighed and shook his head. He draped himself casually against the opposite wall and let the silence stretch out between them. He knew each minute that went by, her anxiety rose. He let a good ten minutes pass.
“The problem with being tied to a man like me, baby, is you get it from both parts of me. The man raised in a lair with father who was a vor. That interrogator, trained to read everything around him. I had to pay attention to every detail so that nothing ever escaped me in Rolan’s territory as well as the territories in the surrounding lairs. You also have the dominant, who enjoys rope art. I have to be able to read every subtle nuance of my partner’s body. Every little tell of her body, her expression, her temperature, anything at all that changes. And then there’s Shturm. He’s Flamme’s mate. Animals, unlike humans, don’t lie to or deceive their mates. Put that all together and that makes it very difficult for you to hide anything from me for any length of time.”
She began to look alarmed. She was getting it. He went to her again and tipped up her face and took her mouth. His kiss was very gentle. Trying to keep it gentle was difficult when she was like kissing a flashfire, but he managed, because his woman deserved gentle. He trailed the pad of his thumb over her lower lip just once.
“Tell me what you’re doing, Flambé. I’m in a position to help you. I have resources all over the world. I won’t take over, I’ll just give you whatever you need. At some point, you’re going to have to trust someone. I want that someone to be me.”
He saw the very real struggle on her face. She wanted to believe him, but she had so much to lose if he wasn’t the man he had tried to show her he was.
She took a deep breath. “Get me out of the ropes, please, Sevastyan. If I’m going to take this chance, I’m going to have the courage myself without a crutch.”