She shook her head vigorously. If there was one thing she knew, it was that Ben and Chase Dawson wouldn’t hurt her. God. How did she know that? Why did she know she was safe with them? Because Julian said so? Because Gaby did? Because she’d slept like a baby for the first time in years knowing they were watching over her? “No.” She should tell Georgia it wasn’t her business. “I was kidnapped. I was, uhm, hurt.”
Georgia flushed. “I’m so sorry. But Chase will help you. Chase can find him. Chase can take him down.”
Odd. She should want to run, but she simply smiled because those two men wouldn’t flinch from what she’d done. They would just wish she’d made Hawk hurt more. “I took care of him. He’s dead.”
A ruthless smile crossed Georgia’s face. “Good. Look, if you handled that shit, you can handle my brothers. Keep them happy and we’ll be cool. Fuck with them and you’ll find out that I’m way more nasty than I seem to be. I’m going to get us some more ‘orange juice.’” She used air quotes. “I’ll have to get around Logan. He’s superhot but so obnoxious he makes me want to die.”
Georgia walked to the door and into the suite.
Nat looked over the grounds. She needed to get out of here. She needed to see what she had left. Ben had told her to stay put. Chase had remained silent, but she’d felt the weight of his stare. But neither Dawson was her Dom and no matter what Georgia said, they weren’t going to be. Chase had put her in a terrible position and one he’d apparently never forced another woman into.
She peeked into the room. The dude named Logan was following Georgia into the kitchen, his eyes narrowed in suspicion.
She wanted to see her place. It was her apartment. They were her things. Her books. Her clothes. Her life. What right did they really have to keep her out?
The minute the door swung closed behind Logan’s massive form, she slid inside.
She caught Kitten’s eye. Gretchen looked up, too. Gretchen’s eyes were red from crying, her face blotchy. Gretchen seemed to take everything hard lately. She’d just reached her thirty-fifth birthday, the oldest of any of them, but she still seemed so lost at times.
“I’m going to my place,” Nat said quietly.
“Hey, that’s mine!” Georgia’s voice wasn’t quiet at all. It threatened to shake the walls.
Logan said something, but it came out in a low rumble that had Georgia threatening the Dom with what she called a “de-balling” if he didn’t give her back her vodka.
“They told you to stay here,” Gretchen said, sniffling a little. She sat up. “Natalie, why do you always have to disobey?”
Nat just managed to not roll her eyes. “They aren’t my Doms.”
“But you slept with them, Nat.” Kitten stood up, crossing the space between them. “I know the Masters. They want to protect you.”
“I don’t want to be protected.” Not when she would have to choose. It was time to make her stand with them. Whatever she’d had with them had been blown out of the water by Chase’s demand. “Are you going to tell Logan?”
Logan seemed like the kind of Dom who took his shit seriously. If Chase and Ben had told him to keep her here, he might tie her up if he caught her sneaking out, and she couldn’t risk that.
A loud crash blasted out, and Georgia proved she knew a lot of cuss words.
“I believe Master Logan has enough to deal with.” Kitten’s lips curled up. “Besides, he has a truly devious mind. I enjoy his punishments.”
Gretchen nodded. “I won’t say anything. But, Nat, you need to be careful. I don’t know what you did, but you really pissed someone off. I’m afraid for you.”
Nat slipped out the door. It was time to figure out exactly what was going on.
Chapter Nine
Chase didn’t like the looks of the place. Not a single inch of it. And it wasn’t just the overwrought destruction that bugged him. He almost understood that. The woman who’d taken apart Natalie’s home was bat-shit crazy. And she hated Natalie. No. It wasn’t the debris that had his heart twisting.
It was the complete lack of joy in the place.
In his mind’s eyes he pulled the chaos back, placing the items where they would have gone. The chaos righted itself in his head and he was left with a view of Natalie’s private world. Her books. No fiction. Just texts about massage therapy and history books and therapeutic tomes about posttraumatic stress. No frilly romances or high-tech thrillers. Her TV was old. Well, it had been, so she wasn’t crazy about movies.
She did seem to love sporting goods. There were three different baseball bats. And he knew they were hers because he saw the grooves in the floor from where she kept them by the front door, the door to her bedroom, and one had been left in her bathroom, tucked away beside the sink. She was pretty much ready to clock the shit out of anyone in any room of her very small house.
Her house was neat, well organized, and utterly devoid of passion. So unlike the woman he’d held in his arms that morning.
“How long has she lived here?” Ben asked.
“She’s been here for almost two years,” Chris replied. “I’m going to step out for a minute and call maintenance. I’ll get them up here and see what they can fix. I don’t know how fast I can have it livable again.”
“Don’t worry about it. She’s staying with us,” Chase replied. He wasn’t about to allow her to stay here again, alone with her baseball bats. He wondered what Mrs. Stanley Furniture King had been doing last night.
Chris’s eyebrows rose. “Does Nat know she’s moving?”
“She should.” If she didn’t, she would soon. He didn’t actually intend to ask her. She’d requested his services as a Dom the night before. He was going to take her seriously. Likely far too seriously.
Ben stepped up. “I think we can all agree that someone isn’t happy with Natalie. She needs protection. First her client was murdered, and in a way almost certain to bring suspicions on her, then this happens? She can’t be foolish enough to think she should be alone.”
Foolish? No. Stubborn was another story entirely. Her apartment told the story. Two years here and she hadn’t personalized anything. Even her now-broken dishes were a plain white ceramic he would bet she’d bought at a big box store. “She didn’t bring anything from her old life with her, did she?”
Chris stopped, his phone in hand. “Excuse me?”
Ben’s face fell. “Damn. What my brother is asking is how much stuff did Natalie bring with her when she moved in here? Like the pictures on the walls. Did she bring those?”
Chase could answer that. “No. She either got them from storage or they were already here. I noticed they come from the same artist who did the prints in the hallways to the guest rooms.”
The paintings were bland, the kind of thing that wouldn’t put anyone off and seemed rather soothing if emotionless. It wasn’t the kind of thing an artist would choose for herself.
“Uhm, Gaby brought them up. We had a few left over and Gaby couldn’t stand how Nat didn’t have anything on the walls. Come to think of it, Gaby took both her and Gretchen out to shop for stuff. They just had their suitcases. No furniture or kitchenware. All the books and the TV were bought after she got here. And that TV was secondhand. I think she got it at a garage sale.” He nodded grimly and stepped outside, putting the phone to his ear.
“I read through her file again last night. And I called Finn.” Ben sighed, crossing his arms over his chest. “She was missing for a while. Her parents were forced to pack up her apartment. Why wouldn’t she get her stuff out of storage?”
“She left it all behind. I wonder if it’s still in storage or if she got rid of it all.” She hadn’t been ready to face her old life. She’d gotten a degree in art and the fact that there wasn’t a single sketch pad or canvas in the whole place made Chase ache in a way he would never have thought he could. He frowned. “I don’t know that I like having feelings.”