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woman wrapped in a blanket in his lap.
    “No. At my cabin. Get your stuff.”
    “No!” I say indignantly.
    “Fine. You don’t need anything anyway. I’ll bring you back tomorrow.”
    He half drags me over to the front desk, where a different man I haven’t seen before is working. “Tell Dominic that Ariana left with me. We’re going to my cabin for the night.”
    I open my mouth to protest, but Marcus stops me with a warning glance. “Be quiet,” he says softly so that only I can hear, “unless you’d like to find out what a gag feels like.”
    I clamp my lips together.
    The man retrieves Marcus’ coat, and Marcus wraps it around my shoulders.
    “I’m not going to your cabin with you,” I protest under my breath.
    “There’s no way we can talk here,” he says flatly. “And I’m not going to have you spending the next ten years thinking I didn’t want you.” The hard planes of his face soften slightly. “I’ve spent more nights than you can imagine dreaming of the feel of your skin and the taste of your lips.”
    “Then why…” I begin before I’m cut off by a giggling trio of girls racing through the lobby, a burly pirate in hot pursuit.
    “Not here. My cabin’s just a few miles away and will give us some privacy so we can talk. Now you can come willingly, or I can tie you up, throw you over my shoulder, and drag you there. Your choice.” There’s a ghost of a smile on his sensuous lips. “Some women get off on the whole kidnap fantasy.”
    I would literally run fifteen miles barefoot in the snow before I’d admit to him that the thought of that is more than a little appealing.
    “On second thought, what’s pirate night without capturing the girl?” he says with a grin.
    And with that he scoops me up and carries me out into the snowy night.

 
 

Chapter Three
Marcus
     
    “Where’s my gun?”
    Ariana McKnight is the last person I ever expected to see standing in the kitchen of my cabin. She looks delectably rumpled and utterly fuckable wearing nothing but my t-shirt and a tiny frown that makes me want to kiss her senseless. But I know better. Even last night after she goaded me into flogging her in the club, when her lips were inches from mine—so close that I could feel her breath—I knew better than to kiss her. I still have some small vestige of self-preservation left.
    “I’ll hang on to your gun until I’m sure you’re not going to shoot me in the balls,” I say with a small smile. She’d fallen asleep in the car, waking up enough to groggily threaten my manhood when I undressed her, taking off the uncomfortable-looking shirtdress and replacing it with one of my old t-shirts. If she’d known the thoughts that went through my head at the sight of her in nothing but her sorry excuse for a thong, no doubt she would have followed through on her threats.
    Instead she’d instantly fallen back asleep. Not surprisingly. A scene like the one we did would have made even an experienced sub exhausted, both physically and emotionally. I’d tucked her into my bed and then spent a restless night on the couch, my dreams filled with images of the woman in the next room under me.
    “Do you always carry?” I ask with a hint of amusement.
    “Yes. Don’t you?”
    “Yes,” I admit. “Even though I’m not a SEAL anymore.”
    “You’re not?” she says, shocked. “But you loved your job.”
    “Sometimes you have to let go of the things you love, even when you don’t want to,” I say softly. “I got a medical discharge. I’m an attorney now.”
    Her eyes widen more, and then she cocks her head to the side with a faint smile. “Criminal?”
    I laugh. Even after all these years, she still knows me well. Criminal law has always appealed to my uncompromising sense of justice and my innate need to protect and save people. “I started out doing criminal, yes, and I still do a good bit of it. But my practice is full service. We do criminal, business, civil, and more recently, a lot