Bind and Keep Me, Book 2 Read Free Page A

curled on the floor with handcuffs around her wrists and rope on her ankles, was a young woman, naked except for white underwear and bra, with her hair, black as oil, tumbling across her shoulders.
    But…her words…
    I swung my gaze back to the dead woman, reached, and brushed aside the hair over her face. “My God.” An unfamiliar face was beneath—her mouth open as if straining for air.
    “It’s not—” she began again.
    “Jodie,” I finished, slumping a little in shock. “Where is she then? Where is she! Is she alive?”
    “Last I saw of her. Yes. She’s in the next bedroom down.”
    As I tore out the door, I heard her cry, “Let me go. Please? He might wake up! Maybe he’s not dead!”
    The next bedroom was dark. When I turned on the light, there she was on the floor, also naked and bound, at ankle and wrist, but looking back with big scared eyes that seemed riveted to me. A scarf was tied across her mouth. I did a quick scan as I strode forward. No one else was here.
    I knelt and cupped her face and kissed her while saying softly, over and over, in deliberate reassurance, “It’s okay. I’m here. I’m here.” Then I drew back and stared at her for a moment to fix in my mind it was really her, alive. My pulse was harder to convince and kept pounding away.
    I applied myself to freeing her—undoing the scarf and the ropes. Some sort of stiff nylon rope. Maybe he used it for his yacht, the one he’d never see again. Whatever it was, it was stupid stuff and hard to unknot.
    She sniffed and kissed my upper arm as I worked. Her words slurred. “I knew you’d come. Knew it, Klaus.” While I wrestled some more with the knots, she closed her eyes as if too tired to keep them open. Drugged?
    “Of course I have. I’m yours forever, remember? Just like you’re mine.” The last loop came off her wrists.
    Her eyes opened, blinking, clearing with each second, or so it seemed. “I do. I do remember.” There were tears in her words and that squeezed my chest, hard.
    “Good. Don’t you ever forget. I had
yours forever
tattooed on my heart and it’s really bloody hard to get tattoos off of there.”
    Her hands were cold and trembling. Mine were almost as bad, fucking shaking. Crapitty-crap. Now was
not
the time to lose it. I clamped down on my feelings and drew her hands to her front, kissed them once, and checked them for color and capillary refill.
    With my arm over her back and my forehead snuggled against hers, I settled for merely holding her for a while. Just for a few minutes longer, I would be her cocoon, keeping away the outside world. In here, all was warm and safe. I breathed with her and stroked her and made myself calm down too. Nobody in the next room was going anywhere by themselves, or going to come to further harm. Unless…unless… All on its ownsome, my mind started sifting facts and going down pathways. I was in so much trouble. I veered away from that minefield.
First, make sure we’re safe
.
    “Jodie, I need to know if there is anyone in the house apart from us and the guy in the bedroom and the two women? Are we in danger from anyone I don’t know about?”
    Again, the tears made her words wobbly, but I was relieved at how clear her thinking seemed. “No. No one else.” She shook her head. “But I can’t remember exactly what happened to me. I can’t. Things are all confused.”
    Shit. “You were drugged? I’m just wanting to be sure we don’t have some guy apart from this Leon who might have done all this.”
    “I…I don’t know. I think it was him. I guess. He seemed so confident and yet something was off about him.”
    “Okay. Maybe I can ask…” The woman in the room next door. I knew what she was, what the police would call her—a witness to murder.
    I’d made a big huge enormous life-changing mistake. No. Now wasn’t the time to wallow in that. I mentally took myself by the scruff, and shook myself. Being selfish here was not happening. I focused on