Masters of the Castle: Witness Protection Program Read online

  “Stand down, boy, it’s okay.” Nick patted his head, but it didn’t calm the canine in the slightest. Concerned, Nick looked around, but nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. “Champ, lie down,” he ordered.

  “What do you think is up with him?” Terri asked as he reluctantly lay at her feet with a loud unamused groan.

  “He just isn’t used to being this casual on a job, I’m sure.”

  Terri nodded, but kept on high alert, her posture was rigid and she scanned the space over and over with her eyes. She was trained to trust Champ’s instincts. He had never failed them before.

  Their number was called, and Nick went to grab their meal, deciding at the last minute that they would be much better off eating in their room.

  “Can we get this to go?”

  “Yes, sir, no problem,” the cashier responded, grabbing a bag from under the counter and gently putting the boxes inside. Nick nodded, thanked him, and took the bag and the two coffees back to the table.

  “Let’s eat upstairs, we have reports to send in, and Champ needs to be in a space where he can relax a bit.”

  As they left, a chill ran up Nick’s spine. He turned back and caught the other customer watching them. The man lifted his cup toward them before taking a drink. That was odd. Nick made a mental note to keep an eye out for him.

  Chapter 6

  Champ had relaxed as soon as they left the café, which made Terri wish she had paid more attention to the lone diner dressed in the red cape.

  Then again, maybe it was nothing. It might just be that Nick was right, and Champ wasn’t used to this casual a job. While Champ was her constant companion, his on the job time was pretty much get in, get the job done, get out. Undercover wasn’t really his gig. It wasn’t any of their gigs.

  Terri was glad Nick had a map, and knew how to get back to their room, because she would have easily gotten lost. She couldn’t help but gaze in awe at the artwork and details as they made their way down the long castle corridors, and she really had no idea where they were going or where they had been, at this point.

  When Nick stopped in front of a door and pulled open his wallet to retrieve their key card, Terri looked up in surprise. Champ barked happily, jaunting ahead of them both to make his rounds before they entered. They watched from the doorway as he shuffled around the room, sniffing each and every corner, as well as their open suitcases to make sure everything was as it had been when they left. When he finally stopped and settled into the bed Master Marshall had provided for him, they entered the room, closing the door behind them.

  Terri all but threw herself onto the king-size bed, while Nick moved to the small table in the corner of the room that he had already turned into a makeshift work station for the two of them. He preferred neat and organized work spaces, where, in reality, she would probably end up typing her reports in bed, sitting cross-legged while sipping her coffee.

  Nick shuffled around a bit, first feeding Champ and then handing her a wrapped sandwich and a small iced coffee.

  Her stomach growled at the sight of food, and she sat up on the bed with a sheepish smile. “Thanks. I guess I’m hungrier than I realized.”

  “You get stressed and forget to eat. I remind you. That’s how we do,” Nick said with a wink, turning to set up his own food on the small table near his computer.

  Her eyes were on him, and she absentmindedly bit into her sandwich. Her taste buds were immediately assaulted by a strange texture and an unfamiliar taste. She spat the bite into her hand with a grimace of disgust.

  “Dammit! They gave me the wrong sandwich,” she complained, staring down at the blob of chewed up bread and dark brown meat in her hand. “Nick, you should have checked the order before we left the café.”

  Nick didn’t turn or acknowledge her distress in any way until she jumped off the bed, discarded the soggy half eaten lump of bread and meat, and began to march toward the door, fully intending to find her way back down to the café somehow and give them a piece of her mind, and return with a sandwich that was edible.

  Before she made it to the door, Nick stopped her. “Where are you going, brat?”

  “Ugh!” she exclaimed, fighting the urge to stomp her foot at his obtuseness. “Haven’t you been listening? The café gave me the wrong sandwich. I’m going down to get a new one.”

  “The café did no such thing. I gave you the sandwich I ordered for you. Now sit down and eat it.” His voice was calm, but firm.

  Her forehead wrinkled in confusion. “Why would you order me roast beef? You know I only like turkey.”

  “I do,” Nick agreed jovially. “I also know that it won’t kill you to try something new every once in a while. You get so stuck in your habits that you sometimes miss out on really good stuff. Open your mind, Terri. I promise it won’t kill you.”

  Her nose wrinkled as she eyeballed him doubtfully, still lingering near the door.

  “If you look at your sandwich more closely, brat, you’ll see that only half is roast beef. The other half is your turkey. My own sandwich is the same.”

  “You hate turkey,” she sputtered in surprise.

  “I don’t hate it,” he corrected. “I just don’t prefer it. But it’s not going to kill me to try something different either. If you really can’t stomach it, we can trade halves. Now sit your butt down, eat your sandwich, and help me get these reports done.”

  Terri munched on her sandwich as she robotically filled in her preliminary reports. If she was being honest, the roast beef wasn’t awful, it was just different. She supposed that had been the point Nick was trying to make with the sandwich switcheroo. Just because something wasn’t for her, it didn’t make it wrong or bad. A lesson she could stand to keep in mind during their time here at the Castle, she supposed. Not that her forced change of heart meant anything other than she would relax a little and try to be less judgmental toward the other guests. Just because they enjoyed something she wasn’t even interested in trying, didn’t mean there was anything wrong with them. It would be like her judging them for not wanting to be cops. The weight of her convictions wore heavy on her heart and she sighed. Nick did that sometimes, found sneaky little ways to make her look at things from a different angle. It was annoying as hell, but he was usually right, and his little life lessons had a way of changing her for the better. She still wasn’t going to let him spank her though. If that was his endgame, he had another think coming.

  Across the room, Nick closed his laptop, and turned to her. “How’s that report coming?”

  “Are you finished already?” she asked, sighing when he nodded. Her own blinking cursor had been stuck in the same spot for the last twenty minutes. Between the whole sandwich epiphany, and the fact that she could still feel the warmth of Nick’s kisses tingling on her neck, she had no focus. Staring at him, she could no longer find the hilarity of the penguin costume. Instead she focused on the perfect way it hugged his body, accentuating his muscles instead of hiding them. She thought about how much she looked forward to later in the evening when he took it off. Oblivious to her roaming eyes, Nick got up and walked over to her spot on the bed, bending at the waist to squint at her screen. Giggling, she shook her head before getting up and retrieving his glasses. They were a recent acquisition, and he constantly forgot he owned them. Hell, he hadn’t even packed them himself. Terri had grabbed them off his coffee table at the last minute and thrown them into her own luggage.

  “Here, old man,” she teased, sliding them onto his face from behind.

  “Old, huh?” Without missing a beat, he grabbed her arms and pulled them both down onto the bed, knocking her laptop to the ground.

  She struggled to sit up, but he pinned her with one arm and attacked her most ticklish spots on her tummy and sides with his free hand.

  “Let me go!” she forced out through her laughter.

  “I’m only a few years older than you,” he reminded her, as he continued his tickle torture, attacking the sides of her neck. “Take it back,
brat.”

  “I caaan’t.” She forced her response through breathless laughter. “Lying is a bad habit!”

  Nick sped up his ministrations and dug deeper, robbing her of any chance to speak. Forget speaking, she could barely breathe.

  Going into fight mode, she wrenched up as far as she could and bit down, hard, on his forearm.

  “Ow, you little piranha!” he exclaimed, finally stopping. “You want to play hardball, is that it?”

  Still catching her breath, she was unable to respond verbally, and he ignored her shaking head. “Okay, we can do that.”

  Before she could even begin to guess what he meant by that, he scooped her up and flipped her onto her stomach over his knees. All of the air was forced from her gut but she fought as hard as she could, bucking and kicking.

  Oh, hell no. Scrambling, she flung her body away from him, but he caught her and lifted her again, hefting her forward and wrapping his leg around both of hers. She could still kick, but not as effectively as she would like.

  “Champ! Where are you? Aren’t you supposed to protect me?”

  Champ lifted his head and groaned, but he didn’t give any indication that he cared about what was happening between the two of them.

  “You lazy jerk!” she yelled at him, before turning her attention back to Nick. “I swear to God, if you don’t let me go in three seconds I’m going to shave your eyebrows while you sleep!”

  “Let me count out those seconds for you, sweetie. One…” His hand cracked hard against her ass, and she froze in shock. It hurt, but it was a strange kind of pain. The sting was immediate and followed by a warmth that spread slowly across her left cheek where he had struck. She sucked in a breath, but before she could scream at him, he spanked her again!

  “Two.” His hand fell harder on the opposite cheek and she reached back to cover herself.

  Catching her wrist and pinning it against the middle of her back, he laid down the last swat. “Three.”

  “You son of a bitch!” she cursed, finally catching her breath as she punched his leg with her free hand “Don’t you dare hit me again!”

  “I’m not hitting you,” Nick explained calmly. She could hear the hint of amusement in his voice and it infuriated her. “I’m spanking your ass for biting me. Also, did you just call my mom a bitch?”

  “Arrgh,” she growled, rearing up as far as she was able to under his constraining hold. “Nicholas Caruso, don’t you dare spank me again, or I’ll… I’ll…”

  He didn’t wait for her to finish her threat, nor did he pay it any heed. Instead, he lifted her skirt and rained down five swats to the peak of each of her southern cheeks. She screamed the entire time, even though the pain was not entirely unpleasant. It was not like she was going to let him know she didn’t hate it. She still hated the idea of it.

  “You ready to apologize yet?” She could sense Nick’s hand still poised in the air above her exposed ass.

  Freeing the hand, he had caught behind her back, she reached up, grabbed him by the wrist, and used the leverage to propel herself off his lap.

  Glaring daggers at him, she stomped across the room, righting her skirt, and smoothing her now wrinkled uniform as she stared him down.

  Nick met her gaze and shrugged. “You started it.”

  “Bite me.”

  She was never leaving this bed. Between the crazed mafia assassin on the loose and her partner who had apparently caught leave of all of his senses, it was the only place in this godforsaken fuck fortress where she and her ass were safe.

  Though she was turned and staring at the wall, as she had been for several hours, Terri could feel Nick’s movement as he rushed around the room, getting ready for dinner. Hmph. If he thought she was going anywhere with him, he had another think coming. She wasn’t even speaking to him at the moment.

  His footsteps approached the bed, and she lifted the blanket over her head, pulling the covers tightly around her. He plucked the blanket off her head with two fingers, and she covered her face with her hands. He knew she was angry, and he would apologize. “Terri, I’m sorry. We were playing. I didn’t think it would upset you that badly. I should have known better. You told me how you felt about this place and that you didn’t want to participate. I should have listened.”

  Tears pricked her eyes as he delivered his sincere apology. She was angry, that was true, but more at herself than at him. She was also embarrassed and confused, and most frustrating of all, she was horny as hell and wanted to feel his hands on her ass again. Not that she would ever admit that to him.

  Nick sighed and dropped onto the bed, pushing her body over to make room as he sat.

  “I would let you stay here for the rest of the night, brat, but we have to go down to the dining hall for the dinner rush and let Champ do some sniffing around.”

  Terri groaned and pulled the blanket back over her head. Work was the last thing on her mind. “I don’t wanna. We can do it tomorrow.”

  Champ jumped up, joining them on the bed, and barked. Damn traitor.

  She flipped the covers down and sat up, leveling the dog with a glare. “You’re a workaholic, you know that?”

  Seeing that she was, indeed, just fine, Nick tossed his head back and laughed.

  “Champ is right, don’t argue. We’re here because we have a job to do. Anything else is just icing on the cake.”

  Icing on the cake, huh? Her jaw tightened in anger at the stupid little cliché. Before he could see her reaction, she rolled to the opposite side of the bed and flopped off, shuffling to the bathroom, where she locked the door behind her. It was such a stupid line, and she knew well enough to know he didn’t mean anything by it, but in her anger and lust-filled brain, it brought them back to the crux of the problem. She would never be enough for him. She didn’t want to be his icing. She wanted to be his whole damn cake.

  Taking stock of herself in the mirror because she knew she was fighting a losing battle on this dining hall thing, she patted cheeks that were still flushed. Her eyes were a little puffy from the tears she had cried, and the ones she had held back, but a little concealer would fix that. She quickly applied the necessary makeup that would make her feel less like death warmed over and more mingle-ready. Concealer, blush, lip gloss, mascara. Boom. She was ready to mingle. With everyone but Nick.

  They were best friends, but they had been down this road before, minus the spanking, of course. It didn’t work. They didn’t work. Not to mention the fact that they were currently on a job. Giving in to urges, kinky or otherwise, would only muddle their brains, potentially putting themselves and everyone else in grave danger if the criminal they were waiting for really had followed Grace to the Castle. She was going to have to make Nick realize he couldn’t just go around spanking her every time she got sassy because it was the thing to do here. Sass was her middle name, for fuck’s sake.

  Besides that, she was a spanking virgin. A grand total of thirteen swats he had given her, and she swore she could still feel it hours later. Curiosity got the better of her and she spun around, flipping up her skirt, and peeking at her backside in the mirror over her shoulder. To her absolute shock and horror, the skin on her cheeks was tinged the lightest pink and… was that a handprint? He hadn’t hit her that hard… had he?

  Great. Just great. It was going to be kind of hard to forget about that moment of weakness and move on if she was branded by way of his handprint embedded on her ass all weekend.

  “Terri?” Nick rapped on the door with his knuckles, and she flipped her skirt down as quickly as she could, as if he would somehow know what she had been doing or thinking. “Are you almost ready?” His voice was even and professional. His on-the-job voice. She opened her mouth to answer, and then remembered she wasn’t speaking to him yet. Instead she unlocked the door and swung it open. His balled-up fist almost connected with her face. With a smirk, she sidestepped him. “Ready when you are.”

  Nick led the way downstairs deep in thought. Terri had barely spoken to
him since he had flipped her over his knee. A small spanking, and all it had done was make him hungry for more and perma-hard. Oh, and it had pissed off his best friend and partner to the point where she would barely look at him. All of her walls were up and she was on auto-pilot, hyper-focused on the job at hand. She was a stubborn little shit too. She could keep it up all weekend if she wanted to. He knew that from experience. And then where would he be? He had really messed up, jumping the gun like that. This place and that damn outfit had gotten the best of him, but he had to step back and keep his mind on the endgame.

  The endgame was finally letting Terri in on the truth about who he was and what he liked. No more secrets and no more lies. The dream was opening her mind enough to not only accept him, but experiment with the lifestyle herself.

  Tonight, he had taken a step backward on that. He was trying not to beat himself up over it. Tomorrow was a new day, and one that would allow them to be surrounded by and immersed in the Castle culture, even if it was simply for the sake of doing a job. He wasn’t giving up hope yet. Tonight, Terri needed space. And he would give it to her. To tell the truth, he needed it too. Space, and a cold shower.

  He let Terri enter the dining hall ahead of him, with Champ in the lead. The dining hall was bustling, and Terri allowed herself to be led off by a curious Champ almost immediately. She was doing her best to lose Nick, and he was letting her. The large room was full of people, but empty enough he could still have an eye on her at all times. Champ would keep her safe. The dog’s nose was going a mile a minute as he investigated every passing stranger. Nothing seemed to be triggering him, and he earned a lot of love from the ladies. Especially the ones in the Littles program. Girls dressed in little dresses with ruffled panties pulled their ‘mommies’ and ‘daddies’ over to ask if they could ‘pet the puppy.’

  Terri nodded, but he could see her inner struggle and how hard she was working to keep her face free of judgement. He would be lying if he said he understood every single kink represented here at the Castle. He smiled thinking about how much more she would be exposed to as the time passed. With no timeline, they could be at the Castle for days to come. No one knew for sure when or if the threat on Grace’s life was going to come to fruition.