Stranger Mine: a Base Branch novel Read Free Page A

she didn’t have big boobs. She’d have been hard pressed to craft a makeshift bra. The scrap of fabric holding the end of her ponytail and the pile of shirts she’d stuffed into another for a pillow stretched the limits of her crafting abilities.
    When her count reached five hundred, Piper leaped out of the arch like she played Double Dutch with her sisters, Sparrow and Ivy. Only in this game, she turned one-hundred-eighty degrees, grabbed the links with both hands, and tugged, shifting all her weight to her left leg. The metal cuff bit into her right wrist. Blood seeped from the scabs ringing her upper hand, but the crimson didn’t pour like it had when they were fresh. Ten feet of quarter-inch torus links swirled and danced in the air. The dull metal finally shuddered to a uniform line from her hands to the U-bolt protruding from the cinderblock wall.
    She walked toward the wall, allowing the chain to bow low then pool. Pitching forward, she let gravity take her face first to the gritty slab and caught herself, palms flat, in the plank position. If she ever made it back home, she could always open a gym. She could cater to a specific niche—people with ten feet or less of workout space. She needed a job. And she mastered the ten-foot workouts six weeks ago. Welcome to Master Vega’s ten-foot gym. The mortgage on the place would be bearable, even for California real estate.
    Her arms burned at one hundred. By two hundred they seared. But what the hell else did she have to do until Gabrone returned? Not a damn thing. At three hundred and fifty-four, she froze and kicked an ear toward the thick metal door across the room.
    Pop. Pop. Pop.
    She shouldn’t be able to hear in the soundproofed room. Yet, her senses had honed over time. When she was the lone occupant and when she wasn’t singing at the top of her lungs or rattling chains like an old haunt, she could hear the gravel outside the door crunch under approaching boots, and more times than she liked to remember, she’d heard gun shots.
    The number of shots usually coincided with the number of men who tried to feel her up or fuck her. If they were stupid enough to get close, she made sure they left the guesthouse—as she liked to call it—with a broken bone. A nose. An arm. Finger. She’d have loved to bite the cock off of the big son of a bitch that threatened to shove it between her lips earlier, but his compadres had convinced him to stick to the job. Damn it.
    Maybe Gabrone came back early and caught wind of it? If she went by the shots, three of them got tapped between the eyes. For some extremely incomprehensible reason, Émile Gabrone had claimed her as his own without actually claiming her body. Which wasn’t something she’d looked forward to by any means, but it was something she’d mentally prepared for…as much as a person could. Aside from the chain and seclusion, the man treated her like a queen. He wanted her to love him. He wanted them to grow old together. So, he wooed her. Captive style. Every night he arranged for a bath and fresh clothes to be brought in for her and privacy for the task. Every day brought three meals. Nothing fancy, but she wouldn’t complain. She didn’t have to cook the food or clean up after. Except for the whole no-coming-and-going thing, she had it made.

4
    R yan didn’t even like surprise birthday parties. He sure as shit didn’t like surprise goons. Five extra men stood between him and mission success. Double the number he and the planning team had expected. Sweat rolled down his face, trickled the length of his torso, and tickled his inner thigh. Killing was hard work, especially when the targets were trained killers themselves.
    Holstering his sidearm, Ryan grimaced at the three bodies littering the hallway, then stepped back into the office. He slipped the knife from the body slumped across the paper-strewn desk and truly hoped the clerk was the last of them. His forearm quivered with exhaustion and his