Savages Recruit Read online

  Savage was usually a man of honor, a man who did what he thought was right. He didn’t like what he was doing with Zora. She’d never asked for what was happening to her, she’d never asked to be used as a tool in a war that was almost impossible to win. She deserved to know what was really going on. As he paced he admitted to himself that he wasn’t keeping the truth from her because she wasn’t ready to know, he was keeping the truth from her because he was loathing the prospect of dealing with the fallout when she realized what was really going on. For some bizarre reason, he cared about what she thought about him. When she knew the truth and realized the full ramifications of what he’d done, he would become a monster in her eyes.

  “This is not the time to get sentimental, Brett,” he lectured himself. It was time to do what he should have done days ago. The window of opportunity for the mission was closing by the day. It was time to get Zora on board - one way or another.

  Steeling himself, he sat down at his desk and sent for her. She turned up fairly quickly in the company of a soldier. Since her bout of illicit drinking she’d been confined to detox as a precaution. As a result she was once more wearing the white scrubs that made her look shapeless and left her rear end so very vulnerable.

  “Ms Matthews,” he greeted her cordially.

  “Captain Savage,” she replied, looking around his office with curious eyes. She had not been here before, but she was already looking for something of use to her. He knew the way her mind worked. She was an opportunist. No matter the situation, the intelligent look never left her eyes. She knew something was up and sooner or later she was going to figure it out. Better that she was told today than left to work things out on her own.

  He took a moment to look her over. As a result of being unable to imbibe alcohol as she saw fit she’d lost some weight and her skin and hair both looked a great deal healthier and more attractive. As his gaze traveled over her body, he was aware that she was staring straight back at him, sizing him up in return. It was an interesting response. He was used to his subordinates avoiding his gaze in confrontational situations like this. Zora only resorted to that behavior when her pants were around her ankles.

  “Ms Matthews, we will be taking a trip for a couple of weeks. It’s clear that you’re mentally more than able to handle the rigors of the job, but you need some physical training.”

  Zora screwed her face up. “Physical training? Why?”

  “It’s standard procedure,” he said, brushing the question off.

  That was all it took for her to launch into a tirade. “Standard procedure? There’s a standard procedure for kidnapping people and forcing them to work for you? Good to know. I’d hate to think anything that’s been going on has been non standard. That would make shit really fucked up.”

  Savage looked at her, somewhat stunned at her nerve. This was a woman who was in all probability still nursing welts on her backside. When would she learn a sense of respect?

  “It is also,” he said as he stood up and walked around the table towards her, “a chance to instill further discipline.” She stood in place, looking defiant and he took the opportunity to deliver a hard slap to her backside. “That’s for the foul language.”

  “Ow fuck!” Zora squealed and turned away from him, protecting her bottom with her hands. “Don’t hit me!” Savage watched as if in slow motion as she lifted her right leg off the ground, swung it behind her and brought the pointed tip of her shoe crashing into his shin.

  The shoes were soft and she’d managed to kick him with the part of her foot least likely to inflict damage, so it didn’t hurt terribly, but the fact that she’d had the nerve to do it at all was astounding. Without another word he grasped the fabric at the back of her shirt and lifted her over his desk. The nearest thing to hand with any real punitive power was a rubber backed slipper used for martial arts training. He brought it down across her clothed cheeks with a mighty wallop and was promptly forced to dodge a powerful kick directed at his groin.

  “Girl, what do you think you are doing?” He growled, tightening his hold on her shirt. It wasn’t a question she needed to answer, she wasn’t squirming the way she usually did when she was spanked, as ludicrous as it seemed, she was actually fighting him.

  “Get the hell off me!” She screamed. “Don’t fucking hit me again!”

  It would have been amusing, the idea that she could intimidate him into doing what she wanted, if it wasn’t so dangerous and disrespectful. He redoubled his efforts with the slipper, but not before taking her pants down and baring her bottom. As he’d surmised, it still showed signs of welts, but he couldn’t afford to take pity on her. She’d challenged him and he had to meet that challenge head on. What had started off as a cordial briefing turned into a thrashing in mere moments. He brought the slipper down hard across both her cheeks, aiming low to catch the fullest part. She shrieked as it made contact and scissored her legs, treating Savage to a display of her feminine nether regions.

  He was a red blooded male and the sight was distracting, but as on previous occasions, he did not allow himself to become side tracked. It would not do at all to start seeing her in that desirable light. He brought the slipper down several more times, slapping her bottom until she stopped trying to resist and fell into a tearfully submissive state. In the time it took to physically convince her of the folly of her ways, her bottom had turned an angry red color with some darker patches that he feared would probably bruise.

  “Get up,” he snapped curtly. She pushed off the table, her hair tangled around her face and matted in tears. He took her by the chin and forced her to look at him.“Don’t you ever try to hit me, you understand?” He spoke in a low, threatening growl. “You do that again and you won’t sit again for a long time.”

  She nodded, but that wasn’t enough for him. “Speak,” he snapped at her.

  “I won’t do it again,” she promised, her voice cracking with tears.

  “No you won’t. You’re not done paying for that little stunt either,” he informed her. “Go get packed up.”

  Zora didn’t need telling twice, she yanked up her pants and rushed out of the room as quickly as her legs would carry her.

  ***

  “Fucking asshole,” Zora muttered to herself as she packed some things into the black bag she’d been given for the purpose. Savage’s threat of making it so she couldn’t sit had been made a reality. That damn slipper hurt even more than the tawse thing. It wasn’t just her bottom that was bruised either, her ego had taken a pounding over Savage’s desk too. She’d been so sure she’d found a way out of his punishments, but her plan for avoiding more spankings by fighting back when he tried giving her one had failed miserably.

  She didn’t have time to lick her wounds however, not ten minutes later Savage was in the doorway. “Ready?” He snapped the question at her, he was clearly back into hard ass mode. There was not the slightest bit of warmth in his expression, his face was like granite as he glowered at her.

  He took her down to the transport bay where she was loaded into a windowless van with bench seats flanking the sides of it. It rather reminded her of a prison van, but it was slightly more well appointed with a desk in the middle. Savage got into the back with her and another man, the one she recognized from the day Savage had accosted her at her apartment got in the front to drive. To her embarrassment, she was forced to try to sit with Savage watching her. She tried to do so as gingerly as possible, but putting pressure on her bottom was unpleasant in the extreme. The moment she put her full weight on the seat she let out an involuntary yelp of pain. She didn’t look at Savage but she knew he probably had a look of satisfaction on his face. He enjoyed beating her, she was sure of it.

  “Lay down if you want,” he said gruffly. “This will be a long trip.”

  Zora didn’t want to lay down, but she also didn’t want to sit on her sore ass the whole time. When the van started moving, jolting her backside as it went over increasingly bumpy ground she quickly elected to s
pread out on the vinyl seat on her stomach. Savage sat near the front of the van, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his arms folded across his chest. He nodded when he saw her taking the common sense approach to avoiding more pain. “Better?”

  “I guess,” she said. It was a lot better actually, but she wasn’t going to tell him how much he’d managed to unsettle her with his spanking, it would only encourage him.

  “You’ve taken a hell of a hiding lately. Your rear looks like a war zone,” Savage said conversationally, as if there was nothing strange at all about discussing the state of her bottom.

  She frowned at his matter of fact description. “Of course it hurts. You hit me with a shoe.”

  There wasn’t so much as a scrap of guilt on his face. “You deserved it. Tell me. What were you thinking?”

  Growling to herself, Zora wished there was some way of escaping the conversation, but she was locked in a small, fast moving box with the man and there was no way out. “I was thinking I didn’t want you to hit me anymore.”

  “So you thought you’d kick me?” Savage smirked at what he clearly considered a laughable plan. “Not the brightest idea you’ve ever had.”

  Fuck it, Zora thought to herself. She may as well tell him what she thought of him. “You’re a bully,” she said. “You only hit me because you can.”

  “No,” he shook his head. “I hit you because you need it.”

  “That’s insane,” Zora argued. “Nobody needs to be hit.”

  “You do. You don’t understand that you can’t always get your way. You don’t understand how important it is you do what you’re told when you’re told. There won’t always be time to argue. In some matters, hesitation means death.”

  “Not for me though,” Zora persisted. “I just do math. Who cares how I behave?”

  “I do,” Savage said heavily.

  “And we’re back to square one. You hit me because you like hitting me.”

  “If I hit you because I liked hitting you, I’d be spanking you right now,” Savage said, his voice low.

  Zora caught the hint of a warning, but it only served to confuse her. She couldn’t work out what she was doing wrong, if anything. She fell into silence as they traveled along fresh roads. Her bottom stung and twinged periodically, reminding her over and over again what he had done to her. “I just don’t understand,” she said softly.

  “You don’t need to understand, you just need to obey.” The sentence sounded like a line right out of the hard ass training manual, and Zora wasn’t buying it for a moment.

  “When are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  Savage sighed, his voice strained like that of a parent who has been asked a myriad of times if they were there yet. “Soon.”

  “Not fair,” Zora pouted, burying her head in her crossed arms. He wanted her for something. He wanted her for something so bad he’d broken laws to get her and now he was telling her she had no right to know what it was. She didn’t believe his promises to tell her at some point in the future. He was keeping secrets, and those secrets couldn’t be good.

  She closed her eyes, but even with her eyes closed she could feel his presence close by. He was solid, unyielding. A total mystery in many respects. She knew very little about him. He wasn’t married, she could deduce that from the fact that he didn’t wear a wedding ring. Did he have a partner? It seemed unlikely given the amount of time he spent working. Surely he was too handsome to be single though, women usually swooned for the military type, especially one who could be courteous and charming when he wanted to be. Catching herself at the beginning of a dangerously soppy spiral of thought, Zora berated herself silently. It didn’t matter how attractive he was, he certainly wasn’t interested in her. He’d seen her half naked more often than her last boyfriend had and he was completely indifferent to her apart from when she displeased him in some way.

  Her mind drifted back to the evening he’d used the tawse on her, when she had been too upset to stand or speak he had held her gently and spoken to her with some small trace of affection. The mere memory of the moment made her feel warm all over. It had been such a fleeting moment though, and he had left her to her fear and misery afterward as usual. No, she couldn’t start to think he cared, it was too obvious that he did not. She had no-one. She was utterly alone. Thinking that Savage was interested in her in any way other than a useful tool was just wishful dreaming.

  “I know this is confusing and frightening.” His voice broke into her mental tirade. “But I’m going to do my damnedest to keep you safe, do you understand? Even from yourself.”

  Zora’s eyes fluttered open. “Keep me safe? Am I in danger?”

  The look on Savage’s face was conflicted. “I was going to wait to tell you this until you’d learned to trust me more, but it doesn’t change anything one way or another and at this rate I’ll be thrashing you until kingdom come.”

  “Okay,” Zora said, scrambling up into a half sitting position. “Tell me.”

  His eyes were dark and serious as he looked at her. “We need you for your math skills, Zora, that much is true, but you won’t be working at the compound. You’ll be in the field.”

  “In the…” Zora’s mouth dropped open as she realized what he meant. “You mean getting shot at?”

  “Hopefully not, but it is a possibility,” Savage nodded.

  “No. Fucking. Way,” Zora said, emphasizing each word. “You’ve got the wrong person.”

  “I don’t think so,” he shook his head.

  “Yes, you do. I can’t go out and do things like that. I’m a fucking accountant! I watch television! You need some G.I Jane lady.”

  Savage smiled slightly. “You watch too many movies.”

  “No, I watch enough movies,” Zora disagreed. “I watch just enough movies to keep me safe inside and not out in the middle of nowhere getting shot at.” She sat back, then yelped as her sore backside made full contact with the seat. “This is why you’ve been thrashing me? Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Watch your language, Ms Matthews,” Savage said sternly.

  “Fuck off. My language is the least of your worries.”

  “I will take your pants down in this van,” he warned.

  “God, I don’t care,” Zora frowned. She’d been sitting there wondering if he liked her and the whole time he was planning to get her shot at. “Fuck, I am such an idiot,” she exclaimed.

  Savage’s demeanor was swiftly returning to that of the no nonsense disciplinarian. “One more time and you’ll be back over my knee.”

  “Stop it,” Zora insisted. “Stop fucking….”

  She did not get much further. True to his word, Savage reached for her and manhandled her across the small space between them. “No!” Zora shrieked, suddenly aware of the very real threat to her bottom. “Please!” She was pressed up against his body, mere inches from being over his knee. She tried to resist, but his muscles were like bands of iron. She was helpless when he wanted to enforce his will and in short order she ended up face down, balancing over one of his thighs like a see saw.

  “Now listen,” Savage said firmly, placing his hand on her bottom. “I know you’re afraid. But trust me, I am not going to let anything happen to this,” he patted her rear gently. “And once we’re done training, you’ll be ready for whatever the world has to throw at you, okay?”

  His hand was large and warm, and the feeling of it against her sore bottom was strangely comforting. The same strength that had frightened her moments before was now being presented in a different light, as a sheltering force. “Why would you do that? Why would you care what happened to me?”

  “Because underneath it all you’re an innocent woman who doesn’t deserve what’s happening to her,” Savage said. “That’s the way of the world. Bad things happen to good people. I joined the military because I wanted to stop some of those things. You’re not going to be harmed on my watch as long as you do as you’re told.”

  She couldn’t
see his face, all she could see was the carpet on the van floor, but there was a note of very real sincerity in his voice. Instinctively she trusted him. He was not denying the danger, but he was offering her some measure of protection from it. “Thank you for telling me what’s going on at least,” she said, finding some measure of gratitude.

  “You’re welcome,” he replied, letting her up. “When we get to the camp I’ll get you some lotion for your behind,” he said, glancing towards her rear as she kneeled on the seat, keeping her hind quarters out of contact.

  “That’s awfully kind of you,” she mumbled. She did not move back to the side of the van she’d been on. Instead she perched where he’d let her up, close enough to him that they were almost touching.

  “You’ll be briefed on the exact details closer to the time,” he informed her. “But I can tell you this, it should be a clean and simple operation, no casualties, no fire.”

  Zora nodded and picked at a spot on the desk with her index finger. Her nerves were all too clear and he reached out and clasped her shoulder. “You’ll be fine.”

  “What if I can’t do this?” She echoed the question he had refused to answer days before.

  “You can do it,” Savage said confidently.

  She looked at him sidelong. “What makes you so sure of that?”

  “Well,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning back on the seat. “For starters, it took almost twelve hours to pick you up because you did a Houdini out the window at the first sign of trouble.” He gave her a stern look and Zora smiled a little at the memory. “Secondly, just this morning you took it into your head to try to fight with someone much larger than you who had already shown he was prepared to cause you pain. You may not make the best decisions all the time, but you’re more than brave enough to deal with this mission.”