Clint stared back at her, hiding the shock he could feel racing through his system as he watched her. She was speaking of the Fuentes Cartel as though they were your regular, run-of-the-mill drug runners.
They were killers. And the thought of them targeting Morganna had the blood freezing in Clint’s veins.
“Do you have idea what you’re getting into here?” he ground out. “Any idea just how fucking dangerous the Fuentes people could be?”
She stared back at him calmly. “This drug has to be destroyed, Clint.”
“Not by you.” God, she had no idea what she was getting into. “Not if Fuentes is involved.”
“Fuentes’ survival or lack thereof isn’t the problem. The supplier and the source are. We can get the suppliers if we get a strong enough Dom in to appear determined to tame the shrew no matter the cost or moral objection.” Joe cast a smug look toward Morganna. “So far, we haven’t found one. Morganna isn’t the easiest woman to work with.”
Clint watched her expression closely. Of course she wasn’t, and he would have killed any of the four men if they had convinced her to do what would have been required. If he didn’t kill them anyway for involving her.
“Are you aware of what they’re asking you to do?” he asked her furiously.
She shrugged mockingly. “I’m just waiting on them to present a viable candidate.”
The challenge she was presenting to the Dominants within the club was bad enough. Some of them had fewer scruples than an alley cat. But even worse, she was daring some bastard to attempt to drug her, to force her into submission.
Clint had followed the news reports of the women who had been drugged. Those found dead as well as those who’d survived. They had presented a challenge. Women who didn’t bow to the submissive lifestyle but who enjoyed watching from the sidelines and socializing within the fringe clubs such as Masters provided.
And Morganna was just waiting for Joe to find a viable candidate to push the bastards into drugging her?
Clint’s outraged anger edged higher.
“And you think you could handle working with a full Dom?” He shook his head. “You can’t keep from arguing over a damned grocery list. There’s no way in hell you can pull it off.”
“Of course I can.” She waved the furious retort away with a graceful flip of her hand. “I can be a very good actress when I need to be.”
“You’ve lost your ever-lovin’ mind.” He stared back at her. His southern drawl had slowly eased over the years of learning other languages, being in other nations, but at times of stress it slipped out. And his stress level was nearing stroke stage.
“For God’s sake, Morganna, the private rooms are just for the more extreme acts. I know you’re not blind.” And that wasn’t even counting the underground club—the sexual extremities there had been known to make even him uncomfortable.
“Stop acting like an outraged father.” She stared back at him defiantly. “I don’t have to ask your permission to do this.”
His fists clenched in an effort to control himself, to hold back the lust and the anger and the driving need to protect her. Even if that protection was from herself. Or him.
“Most of our agency Doms won’t fool with her past the first hour,” Merino snickered as he sat down. “Morganna has a bad habit of trying to tell them how to do their jobs. I believe she even informed one of them that her vibrator was more fun to play with.”
Clint watched her face flush as she lifted her eyes, staring at the ceiling rather than the five men now currently discussing her sex life.
“A woman can’t fake walking with a plug up her ass,” Clint snapped then, seeing the shock as her eyes flew back to his. “Just as she can’t fake her demeanor after leaving one of those rooms with a real Dom. Half the time, I’ve never used the room.” He watched her closely as he delivered his next piece of information. “Have you ever fucked in the middle of a crowd, Morganna? Sat on your Dom’s lap and had his cock slide up your pussy? That’s what we’re talking here. Not playtime, dammit.”
He saw her flinch, then watched the heat that filled those dark stormy gray eyes. It turned her on, almost as much as it turned him on.
The agents watching them weren’t unaffected.
Clint turned to Merino and glimpsed the lust in several of the agents’ eyes. Some Doms shared their women easily and with pleasure. Clint wasn’t willing to share this woman, but would Morganna’s sexuality allow her to let another man touch her?
The need to know consumed Clint, even as the knowledge that he would kill the bastard who took her in front of him filled his mind.
Clint’s gaze flew back to Morganna. She was watching him with dazed lust, the kind that filled a woman’s eyes when her sexuality was at its peak, the need to be touched, taken, filling every particle of her mind.
And she needed. He knew she needed.
“Fine, you want to be my sub?” He narrowed his eyes as he watched her. “Let’s see how submissive you can be. Come here.” He lifted his hand, waving his fingers back toward himself in invitation.
Morganna arched her brow mockingly even as fluttering warnings of danger vibrated in her stomach. Clint was not a man to be played with when he had that look in his eyes. Cold ice-blue, like Alaskan waters, freezing her to the pit of her soul with trepidation.
He wouldn’t hurt her . . . well, not without pleasure being involved. But that look meant she was not going to like what was coming.
“I don’t think so.” She stood her ground, and so help her, if he got out of that chair and came after her, she was going to throw something at him.
Joe snorted from where he sat. “See what I mean? She’s too confrontational to be a sub.”
“Says who?”
“That would have earned you a ball gag,” Clint said.
“You’d have to be willing to die to put it there first.” She smiled with chilling politeness as he paced to the other side of the room, one hand rubbing at his neck as he glared back at her.
“You guys are taking this way too seriously.” She shook her head as she stared back at them. “We’ve caught three of the dealers. Craig will score as soon as we get another Dom in.”
“Until you get to the part where we can’t find a Dom willing to work with you,” Joe reminded her. “We haven’t been able to find a suitable couple familiar to the scene, either. And whoever is supplying this shit seems to smell damned agents. Which leaves us where we are. We have two more months left to find a break in the case before we’re going to be forced to abandon it.”