To Trust Her Heart Read online

  To Trust Her Heart

  By

  Carolyn Faulkner

  ©2012 by Blushing Books® and Carolyn Faulkner

  Copyright © 2012 by Blushing Books® and Carolyn Faulkner

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Blushing Books®,

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  Faulkner, Carolyn

  To Trust Her Heart

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-60968-626-0

  Cover Design by EDH Graphics

  Cover Photo from RomanceNovelCovers.com

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as Blushing Books' or the author's advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

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  Chapter One:

  Maddie awoke with a start when a hand that was much too big and beefy to be her own suddenly covered her mouth. She opened her eyes blearily to stare down at the alarmingly familiar, offending appendage. It was large enough to cover most of her face. The palm was slightly rough against her skin, but the nails on the end of those impossibly long, thick fingers were flat and neatly trimmed.

  What’s more, his fingers smelled of where they’d been last night, bringing a flaming blush to the cheeks they covered. Dear God, he certainly hadn’t forgotten how to use them. He’d always known exactly how to get her to melt in his arms. Even after twenty years he still hadn’t lost his touch, not one iota. Her body always had been and always would be his. All he would ever have to do is crook his finger . . . which judging from the scent he’d apparently done last night. Not that she had a particularly clear image of most that had happened last night after she set foot in the casino.

  For some reason, when she drank, which was rare, she almost always ended up in the company of this particular man. The memories that remained with her from these occasions were always of the triple “x” variety. She closed her eyes in an effort to blot out the smutty images and tried to swallow. That proved difficult however because some evil person had scotch taped her tongue to the roof of her mouth after dragging it over the carpet until it was good and fuzzy. Maddie then opened her eyes again, hoping against hope that she was wrong about where she was.

  Turned out she was deadly accurate, and her blush turned to one of pure mortification.

  Well, at least the all too intimate smell of herself was something she could do something about. With her fingers wrapped gingerly around his bough-like wrist, as if it was a snake she expected to spring to life at any given moment, she divested herself of that atrocious reminder of last night’s folly by depositing it over its owner’s hip.

  Moving her head any one direction too quickly was definitely out, too, she discovered when the room began to spin around her after she tried to try to lift it off the pillow while levering that heavy arm away from herself. That small movement felt as if it had zapped all of the strength she would be able to gather for the rest of the day, but Maddie knew that that could not, would not, be true. She needed to get out of here, immediately! There could be no possibility of a repeat of whatever. She gulped hard as steamy, real-life videos played behind her eyelids about what had unquestionably happened last night. Obviously, she’d completely lost her sanity somewhere along the line and had ended up in the one place she was least likely to go voluntarily when sober.

  Maddie suffered no illusions about how hard it would be to escape. A quick personal inventory revealed that she was, as she’d worried, completely naked. She quickly made a plan. She’d make a dash, a stealthy, quiet dash, but a dash nonetheless, for the bathroom and grab a towel if she had to, but hopefully this was a swanky enough establishment to offer its guests robes. Either way, she was going to beat a hasty, cowardly retreat, and hopefully never set eyes on him again.

  Somehow it seemed that her exits from him didn’t seem to want to stick, but she didn’t have time to think about this now. Instead, she worried about how she was going to slip away from the spy who had loved her, once upon a time, more years ago than she cared to remember. He was damned good at what he did, and she couldn’t imagine that even Mata Hari could get out of a room without him knowing, and him being damned good and ready to let her go.

  Still, she had to give it a try.

  She began to ease away from him with excruciating care because she was afraid of alerting him to her escape. Her head was demanding that she move as if it was perched precariously on the tip of a spike, and she wasn’t at all sure that that wasn’t its exact position. It took her an abnormally long time but it was worth it once she was standing next to the bed almost free of him.

  For a long while Maddie stood staring down at him unable to move away from him. He had this affect on her as long as she could remember. The white bed sheets framed every inch of his six foot four tanned frame. Even asleep as he was, he still managed exude both raw sex appeal and infinite power. In more than twenty years, she’d never known him to have a moment’s doubt about himself or his decisions. He said what he meant and meant what he said. He was a true throwback, a John Wayne without the funny walk, and with the real combat experience the Duke had distinctly lacked.

  Before she knew it, she was shaking her head and smiling that frighteningly familiar soft, stupid smile down at him, until she wrenched herself back to her senses and crept to the bathroom. She walked backwards staring at him prepared at any moment to throw herself onto the floor to avoid detection just in case he should wake up. Maddie didn’t dare to close the door, fearing the soft click might awaken him, so she settled for just shy of closed and huddled in on herself in front of obscenely huge wrap around mirror that sent her scrambling f
or a towel Luckily there were several large, luxuriously plush towels in an étagère above the commode, one of which she proceeded to wrap around herself, covering all of her decidedly lumpy, forty-something-year old areas. Unfortunately, her quick sweep of the bedroom floor hadn’t revealed anything in the way of her clothing.

  She was quietly thankful to the designers of that bathroom. The sight of herself from all sorts of appalling angles cleared her head in a way that nothing else could have. That man in there, who was still snoring softly from the depths of the king sized bed, was dangerous. One might say, pure evil incarnate. Hell, he was asleep and she’d been practically drooling down on him like some teenager in heat. She had to get out of here before the giant stirred or she’d be lost forever as she’d done so many time sin the past.

  The idea of having to go into a public hallway with just a towel on was giving her pause, though. A quick scouring of the room yielded none of the coveted robes she had been hoping for. Maddie was no Cindy Crawford, and was naturally shy about her body. She took a few minutes to breathe deeply and gather her gumption, reminding herself vehemently that he was not what she wanted and if she wanted to escape undetected the time was now.

  When she thought she’d convinced herself, or come as close as she was likely to get, Maddie turned and reached for the doorknob. Just as she swung the door open, she realized one excruciatingly fact, there was no longer any masculine snoring coming from the bed.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked in his perpetually firm but more gravelly than usual morning voice, leaning his forearm against the doorjamb. He was so damned big that he occupied every inch of the doorway, effectively crushing Maddie’s hopes of ever getting by him.

  She was stuck. Should she brave his ire and tell it to him straight? Or try to play up to him and disarm him, as much as that was possible, until she could spot another chance to get away? Deciding that she didn’t want to have to play up to him, since there was no telling where that might lead, she replied to his naked feet, which was where her gaze had settled, “Home. Now kindly move out of my way.” She put her hand out, but kept it well away from his skin. Touching him could have very detrimental effects, after all, just standing in his presence was making her senses riot almost uncontrollably.

  The big lunk stood exactly where he was, not budging a millimeter. She knew he was staring down at her as if she was a particularly interesting bug he’d discovered, taking all of her in, she knew, not missing a single detail. She had never been able to get away with anything when she was with him. He was too damned observant!

  “You’re not going home, Maddie. I told you that last night.”

  She wasn’t about to admit to him that she had only a few, vague but embarrassingly sensual memories about last night. Maddie let her gaze wander up from those huge feet up his heavy, lightly hairy calves to those huge, muscular thighs, skipping demurely over the very outside of his hips to that flat, rippled stomach and broad, strong chest. The arm that was bulging against the door was practically the size of one of her legs.

  One would think that someone who was as brawny has he was would be slow and cumbersome in his movements, but not him. His appearance at the door was proof enough of his stealthy capabilities. He had been a Navy Seal in one of his many incarnations, and was as tough as they come, slick and sly and silent as a cat when he wanted to be, strong as an ox or two when the call arose, and deadlier than a King cobra.

  But Maddie had rarely seen those parts of his personality, although she knew they always lurked just under the surface, they were always an undertone, but never showed to her expressly. Even when she’d managed to anger him, which surprisingly wasn’t that easy for her unless she’d screwed up majorly, he’d always been excruciatingly careful of her while creating abstract art with his blazing red palm print on the fair skin of her upturned rear.

  Embarrassed by the turn her thoughts were taking, the visions of her younger self lying over his lap one of those multiple times getting her bottom roasted for whatever infraction she’d committed against the rules according to Ty Everett Scanlon, Maddie decided to try to make a break for it, despite how badly the odds of success were stacked against her.

  She pushed forwards, into him, and it was like trying to move a brick wall. He wasn’t going anywhere, certainly not at her behest. There were very few things or people that could move him if he didn’t want to move. Maddie stole a look up at him, and saw him staring down at her. He wasn’t smiling, he rarely did, but she knew him well enough to note the humor about his eyes. He was having fun watching her try to physically persuade him to move.

  “Excuse me,” she said loudly, knowing full well that even appealing to manners and courtesy were going to get her anywhere with him.

  Annnoyed, and sick of him staring at her as if he could see into her soul, Maddie crossed her arms over her breasts in a self-defense maneuver, and sighed in exasperation.

  His only response was to bring his free hand up to her chin to tilt it up. She watched, mesmerized like a rabbit by a snake, as his lips descended confidently towards hers.

  But Maddie moved back several steps, away from him and his roving hands and lips. “Oh, no, you’re not.”

  His thick eyebrows rose. “I’m not what, little girl?”

  He’d called her that since she could remember, but his use of it now just didn’t seem to fit. She was no longer his little girl, his girlfriend, his wife, his anything. All of that was over quite a long time ago, and she had the divorce papers to prove it. He couldn’t just come waltzing back into her life any time he wanted to and expect that she would fall down at his feet, legs spread in welcome.

  It wasn’t going to happen.

  The problem was that it apparently already had.

  “We’re not going down that road is what. I want you to get the hell out of my way so that I can go home.” He hadn’t moved an inch. “Alone,” she felt it was vitally necessary to add.

  Ty took a deep breath and leaned further against the door frame. “We’ve already been down that road two or three times last night,” he rumbled, “if I recall correctly,” watching first a high pink then a cherry red splash across her fair face, “and no.”

  It was his very calmness, his refusal to meet her very righteous anger that had always driven her insane. Ty didn’t get mad. He got even and he did so very slowly and methodically. When she was in trouble, she always felt it on her bottom, and then in other very sensitive places on her person. He never spanked her without turning her onto her back and loving her with a devastating thoroughness afterward. It was as if he wanted to impress upon her that although he’d hurt her with his palm, he could also bring her to unbelievable heights with the very same hand.

  “No?”

  “You’re not going anywhere.”

  Maddie had had about enough, and she knew from long experience that talking to him when he’d made up his mind about something was a waste of breath. So she stepped back from him, watching him subtly brace himself, expecting her to make another run at him. She always knew that the few times she’d confronted him physically, all of which she’d lost, that she had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting through him. However, she also knew that no matter how wildly she struggled, he would make sure that she remained entirely unhurt. She’d scratched him with her nails and drawn blood, kicked those rock hard thighs and shins hard, and once tried unsuccessfully to sink her pearly whites into his bicep, although she almost got lock jaw trying to open her mouth far enough to bite. At times she knew she’d succeeded in hurting him at least a little because he’d grunted occasionally from her efforts. But regardless of what she’d done to him, he’d always brushed it aside like she was some sort of annoying mosquito.

  Instead, she’d always found herself subdued in an embarrassingly short amount of time and with almost no effort on his part. He’d always made sure that he’d accomplished it in a way that would cause her absolutely no harm too. She’d never so much as get a broken
a nail when she was with him.

  So, having no other outlet for her frustrations and no other avenue of escape, she fell back on old reliable, she threw her head back and screamed bloody murder at the top of her not inconsiderable lungs.

  Maddie felt a split second of pure satisfaction when she saw the absolutely stunned look on his face, but it was a short lived spark of glory, since he snapped out of it almost immediately and came after her with that familiar evil glint in his eye that meant she was in deep, deep trouble.

  She was just drawing in her second breath in order to start screaming again when the paw that had awakened her this morning secured itself over her mouth again as he lifted her against him, carrying her to the bed as if she weighed no more than a feather. He laid her carefully down on her back and followed her down, positioning himself atop her as if he had every right to be there, even going so far as to use his bulk and weight to insinuate his legs between hers. There was no denying him. He sank down onto her from stem to stern as if he had every right to do so.

  If looks could kill, the eyes above his hand would have struck him dead right then and there. Ty looked down at her, those deep black eyes revealing nothing, and stated in his most placating tone, “No more screaming unless you’d like me to give you something to scream about.” No lie, just fact.

  Maddie knew that if she so much as opened her mouth again he would flip her onto her stomach and bare her already nearly bare bottom for a spanking. So she merely nodded, and he removed his hand.

  She was surprised to see a trace of laughter about his eyes when he said, “I’d forgotten that you play dirty.”

  “Learnt from the best,” she quipped without a thought.

  He nodded, not immodestly but merely acknowledging the truth of her statement, just as a loud knock came from the door. All remnants of good humor left his face at that sound and that wary aloofness that was never far below the surface came to the fore as he levered himself off the bed and dragged a pair of jeans up his legs before going to the door. Without opening it, he asked, “Who is it?”