Ride 'Em (A Giddyup Novel) Page 16

  Jameson snorted. “I’ll be on my way, Logan. Expect some correspondence from Derek Larch and my office in the next few weeks. You have a good night now.” Through some psychic power, or possibly just a business sense honed beyond anything Logan could have imagined possible, he craned his neck and nodded at Chet and Ethan. “Y’all can come have your talk with our boy here now. We’re all through.”

  He strolled off, smiling to the curious guests, and disappeared through the gap in the trees. Logan’s hope that he would trip in the dark was dashed when a flashlight gleamed into life, then bounced out of sight down the hill.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dallas was a nightmare.

  It had always kind of been a nightmare. But before, Mindy had always been able to push that to the background, excuse it away based on circumstances. Of course she hated it. She’d had to move there after her parents’ awful divorce, had to share a crappy apartment with her mom instead of moving into a dorm for college like she’d always expected she would. Then she’d had to work and study and worry ... until her financial worry had been wiped out and replaced with the fear that her mother had compromised herself for financial security with Bud Jameson.

  Dallas was the place she’d lost her illusions, and told herself that was progress. The place she’d learned to talk about her hometown with a thin veneer of fondness over a thick base of scorn. Oh, Bolero ... bless its heart.

  She’d texted her mother from her cabin at Hilltop, only to learn there was some sort of surprise in store for her. A surprise at work. She’d find out Monday, Mom had told her. The texts practically vibrated with ill-concealed excitement.

  Bud was so tickled about it before he left for that conference in Houston. He was really upset he couldn’t be there to tell you himself!

  She had started to reply that she’d just seen Bud. That he’d just viciously crushed the dreams of a good man, then told her to run along and roast a goddamn marshmallow. But she didn’t want to start saying things she’d regret, not when she was angry. Not when every fiber of her being wanted to march back up that hill and kick Bud Jameson in the nuts. She would find a way to broach the subject after she’d calmed down.

  Monday morning at the office, she’d walked in to learn she’d scored that promotion after all. Just as her newly assigned assistant was peeling the cute wrapping paper off the shiny new nameplate outside her shiny new office—no more cubicle for Mindy—Bud texted her.

  If I’d known how happy your mother would be about this, I’d have gone ahead and moved you up ages ago. This is for her.

  Her new job was basically Bud’s latest gift to her mom—just another tennis bracelet. He’d figured out a long time ago that his wife wasn’t that rewarded by diamonds, but she was incredibly gratified when her only child did well and got another step closer to the financial security that she, Amelia Smith Valek Jameson, had spent so many years without.

  It was diabolically clever. Mindy had to hand it to her stepfather. In order to decline the money, the job, the promotion, Mindy would have had to hurt her mother brutally. Bud knew she never would—and now she was caught in his web. A gilded cage.

  By Tuesday, she’d already called a friend and made a date. And Wednesday night found her at the kink club, half-wishing she’d chosen any other activity for the evening.

  “I’ll use the waxed leather on you, but nothing harder,” Miss Vixen had said once she saw Mindy naked.

  “V, please.”

  “No.” The petite Dom had shaken her head firmly, black curls bobbing around her chin as she leaned over to drop her favorite tawse back into her toy bag. “Somebody beat me to it, girl. I’m not layering over all that, you’ll end up with blood blisters or worse. You know that isn’t my jam. Use common sense.”

  “Ugh. Fine.”

  “Can I get some damn respect, please.”

  “Ma’am.” It just didn’t feel as good as sir at the moment. Especially not the sirs she’d laid on Logan when she was flying. “Sorry, Miss V. I’m just in a mood.”

  “You think? We could do a slapper. Lotta noise, at least. I have one other trick up my sleeve, too. I won’t leave you hanging. Now let’s . . . get you hanging.”

  So within a few minutes Mindy was naked under a scaffold, wrists cuffed and chained above her, body stretched so only her toes reached the ground. She did her best to let her mind float free as her partner laid into her with the flogger. Miss V tried to concentrate on the unmarked spots, but every so often she’d overlap one of the many lingering bruises and welts. Each time, Mindy winced with a flood of pain and accompanying emotions she didn’t want to examine.

  “Ten more,” Miss V finally snapped at her. “Count ’em off!”

  Mindy counted. It kept her in the pain, kept her from getting too spaced out, but she didn’t want to feel present. She wanted to forget. When she got to ten, Miss V patted her on the ass. “Good girl. You need to relax, Ariel. You aren’t singing for me tonight. You want to talk about it?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  What was there to say, really? That she’d found the perfect Dom, perfect lover, possibly also a boyfriend rolled in there somewhere . . . then everything that had happened in her life up to that point had conspired to make their relationship impossible and fuck it all up? That just when she’d found somebody amazing, she’d realized she was doomed to be the instrument of his destruction? Too much to convey, even to V—who was also her friend Jamila, with whom she enjoyed shopping for overpriced shoes and binge-watching Project Runway on the rare weekend when neither of them was working or at the club.

  V walked around in front of her, slapping the flogger into her free hand. “Is this about that dude ranch guy? What’s his name, Landon? Logan?”

  “V, come on.”

  “All right. Changing it up.” V walked out of sight again, to rummage in her toy bag.

  Whack! The slapper had more bark than bite, but Mindy would take it over conversation. She fell into the rhythm, sagging against the chains and closing her eyes, shutting out everything but the pain.

  A lull came, and she wasn’t expecting the next hit to be on the front. A sharp crack to the top of one thigh, forcing her eyes wide open. V chuckled. “That woke you up.”

  “Evil.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  V didn’t look evil. She looked kind of like Glinda the Good Witch some nights, but tonight it was more jewelry box ballerina. Pale pink tutu, pale pink brocade corset, pink toe shoe–inspired stilettos. Her dark skin and hair were a startling contrast to the outfit, as always— she favored icy pinks, blues, and pure whites, and she loved the attention her look earned her. Except when new Doms to the local scene mistook her for a submissive. Then her head exploded while she set them straight.

  She was the best kind of evil, though. The kind with a heart. She popped the slapper across one of Mindy’s nipples, then the other, alternated between them a few times, then smacked the noisy leather strap without warning against the still-flowering bite-mark bruise. Mindy cried out, needing more. V obliged with one more slap at the spot before disappearing again.

  This time, she came back with the evil stick. Concentrated doses of sting, carefully targeted to all the bare spots V could find. The outer thighs, a few safe zones on Mindy’s lower back and mid-torso.

  When V grazed the slender, springy rod over the bite mark, moving her other hand in preparation to pull it back for a strike, Mindy shook her head, surprising even herself. “No, don’t.”

  She kept aiming, pulling back on the stick.

  “Red.”

  V jerked her hand away, clearly startled, and caught herself on the chin with the edge of the stick. “Ow! Fuck!”

  “Oh no! Are you okay?” Mindy rattled the chains, but she didn’t have enough slack to get herself free without a lot of effort.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” V tossed the stick down next to her back and stepped to the side of the scaffold, grabbing a folding step stool. She propped it next to Mindy and climbed up
to unhook the safety clips. “Are you okay? You’ve never safed out on me before. Did I fuck up?”

  “Oh, God no.” Mindy hugged V, taking advantage of the stool while V was on it. Usually Mindy was taller, but she knew V enjoyed the illusion of height. “You were great. I’m just not in the right headspace today. I’m sorry, I should have suggested dumb movie night instead.”

  “I was worried I’d really hurt something on one of those overworked spots. I told you. You should listen to me, I’m a doctor.”

  “I know, I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Just glad you’re okay.”

  They cuddled for a minute, reassuring one another, then signed off the hug with “let’s wrap this up” pats.

  V wobbled off the stool. “To be honest, dumb movie night probably wouldn’t have gotten me out of the house. I think you need to talk, though. You wanna go out to the lounge?”

  The club wasn’t a huge space, and the lounge was even smaller. Bodies would be jostling together, many of them funky after vigorous scenes. Claustrophobic.

  “I wish we could go somewhere outside.”

  V zipped her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “Yeah, I wish that, too, but neither of us is dressed for it. I drove here in this. Your tits are hanging out of that shirt if anybody looks close.”

  Mindy fingered the light jersey of the sleeveless yoga shirt she liked to throw on after a scene. It was comfortable and didn’t press on any welts while she drove home, but without a sports bra under it, it was a public indecency citation waiting to happen. “What we need is a kink venue with a ton of open space, and a hotel right there so people can spend the night if they’re too loopy to drive home after a scene.”

  In her mind, a bell chimed, and an image sprang to life. Later, she would always recall that the idea literally came to her with the clear, sweet tone of a single church bell.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “V, I know what Logan can do to turn a quick profit at the ranch.”

  “What?” The bell chimed again, and V pulled her phone from the pocket of her bag and checked the screen. “Hang on, gotta look at this. I may need to call back.” She was already wending her way toward the door to the lounge. She couldn’t speak on the phone inside the playroom—though an exception would have probably been made for her, if she’d explained it was work-related. V was a clinical cardiologist, and she was almost never not in touch with her office staff.

  Mindy followed V at a more leisurely place, feeling better than she had since she’d seen her stepfather walk up to Logan at the fire pit over a week earlier. The fact that the bell had actually been V’s new message tone mattered not at all. Mindy’d had a vision, and she finally knew how to help Logan. Now all she had to do was convince him to trust her.

  Easy-peasy.

  * * *

  “Well, she’s fucking nuts.”

  Logan nodded sadly at his brother and continued typing in his listing information. “Should we start the description with the distance from San Antonio or Austin, do you think? Having both seems too wordy.”

  “San Antonio,” Ethan replied with a wave of his hand. “Sounds more old-time Texas-style. People coming from inside the state will know where it is, anyway. You’re just trying to pull Yankees.”

  Logan sighed and backspaced, changing the first sentence for the tenth time. He wanted to be done with this, so he could get some sleep, so he could have some sort of energy tomorrow when he talked to that weekend’s too-small group of guests. It was hard to razzle-dazzle folks when he was barely able to keep his eyes open. “Once we hit Send on this, we have maybe two weeks to clean out the main house. Assuming anybody wants to rent.”

  “Put in something like ideal writing retreat. Talk about the view.” Ethan stalked across the office, still staring at the email Logan had forwarded him. “Absolutely fucking psycho wacko nutballs.”

  “Gee, Ev, don’t hold back . . .” Logan hadn’t actually decided quite how to feel about Mindy. Or the fact that she’d emailed him—since he hadn’t accepted her calls. Or the idea she’d proposed in that email.

  “This is what happens when you put your dick in evil.”

  Logan stood, shoving the rolling chair back so hard it hit the far wall. “Dude.”

  His little brother’s eyes went wide. “Is that not where we were with this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Fuck.” Ethan slipped his phone back his pocket and laced his hands behind his neck. “Sorry, man. I thought that was—I’m really sorry.”

  Sighing, Logan retrieved his chair and flopped back into it. “You didn’t see her face when he talked to her. Or when she claimed she didn’t do it. I’m pissed as fucking hell and I’m sick about the whole situation, but I do not know what to believe about her right now. Whether she was reporting back to fucking Bud Jameson the whole time, or looking at my spreadsheets and distracting me while Bud figured out the bank thing, or called him out to close the deal or what.” And he couldn’t stand to hear anybody bashing her until he knew it was justified. Things had been so much simpler when his biggest frustration was that he couldn’t parade Mindy across the stable yard naked on a leash . . .

  Huh.

  “Do you want me to write the description thing, so you can get some sleep? You look wrecked.” Ethan leaned over the keyboard. Logan hardly noticed him.

  A sudden vision danced before his eyes with the strength of a hallucination. Mindy, in just a collar and a pain-face, suspended from the rafters in the old barn. Other subs disporting themselves around the hay bales. Doms strolling across the lawn, finding wide-open spaces to throw bullwhips. A pony derby . . . taking place in an actual corral. Kink rodeo.

  “We’d have to make the horse barn strictly off-limits . . .” he murmured. “And find some way to keep Lamar away.”

  “What? He’ll be up like usual to take care of the horses. Renting out the main house won’t change that. You’ll just be down in the cabins, you can police the horse barn during the day. Do we need to get you some better Wi-Fi down there, by the way?” Ethan started typing.

  “It wouldn’t even have to be every weekend, we could do it like a mini-convention once a month or something.” Logan sat up and tapped Ethan’s shoulder, trying to nudge him away from the computer. “Charge for the weekend or just the day, people could wear those wristbands. We already know the sheriff isn’t gonna raid the place, right? He’ll be up here playing as soon as he’s off-duty.”

  Ethan finally stepped aside, staring at him like he was spouting gibberish. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Logan was already typing, pulling up his profile on KinkBook, looking at his notifications. “People in my feed were complaining this week because some meet-up in San Antonio got cancelled. It was supposed to be two weekends from now. We’d have two full weeks to set up an alternative. If we started posting information now—”

  “Wait, what the hell? Are you talking about Mindy’s idea? Her batshit-crazy idea?”

  By way of response, Logan clicked the link to the original event, navigated to the registration page, and pointed to the fee. “That was a single-day event with a play party at night. Just out of people I knew from Houston, over a dozen people were planning to make the trip. Those were the ones I knew were actually going to go. They’d paid up-front. That fee doesn’t include the cost of the hotel room or meals.”

  Ethan made a skeptical noise then did a double-take at the screen, studied the page for a few seconds, obviously doing the math in his head. “It says the event is capped at a hundred fifty people. So that would mean . . . Holy shit. I’ve been to those but I never thought about . . . holy shit.”

  “Right? I mean we don’t have a place to put more than a dozen right now. Maybe twenty if we’re at full capacity and clear a few rooms in the main house, but—”

  “Camping. Kinky campout.”

  They looked at each other. Logan turned the idea over a few times. “We’d have to clear out the old site. Relight the walking t
rail and fill some potholes on the back road. Get the septic truck up there to deal with the johns. Ew, and probably an exterminator, I hate to think what—”

  “Maybe see if it’s cheaper to rent some Porta-Johns at first.”

  “Chet would know, he has to deal with all that crap when the bikers have the rally.”

  Ethan snickered. “All that crap.”

  “Heh. But seriously, even if we only got a few dozen people and charged the off-season rate, that would still be a full house in cabins plus the campers at, what . . . twenty bucks a head per night? For two nights. Plus that cover charge for the event. That’s . . . wow. Wow. We could get caught up on the bills, get a little ahead with the bank. Go in to the next regular weekend in the black instead of already in the red. We’d at least have some kind of bargaining position with Derek. Jesus, Ethan, this could work.”

  “I’m gonna call Chet.” Ethan took his phone out, then cursed. “Fuck, no, I’m gonna go to sleep, and so should you, because it’s already one o’clock on Sunday morning and you need to be Mister Chipper Host for your vanilla guests at breakfast. But after I wake up, I’ll call Chet and talk to Robert and Diego. Thank God you picked kinky friends to hire, that’s gonna make this so much easier. So, tomorrow you focus on making sure everybody gets fed and trail-ridden then packed and gone with smiles on their faces. And then you know what you need to do, right?”

  Logan groaned. He did know. That didn’t mean he had to look forward to it.

  Except that part of him did look forward to it. The part that never wanted to talk to her again and the part that wanted to see her right now were having a slap fight in his head. Feelings were hard. “I have to call Mindy.”

  * * *

  If this is some sort of trick . . .

  If you’re planning to set up some sort of scandal . . .

  If your intention is to get people here then threaten to doxx them . . .

  All valid concerns, and Mindy knew why Logan voiced them. But that didn’t mean they didn’t hurt. So much more than anything he’d ever done to her with a flogger, or a bullwhip, or a cane, or his perfect, perfect teeth.