Read Online Ink Me by Anna J. Evans - Free Book Online

untied and in possession of his weapon. Not to mention it might be nice for
them both to have some clothes on in case this wasn’t an intruder but one of
her employees.
    If Robbie were using his key to sneak into Ink Me after hours, she was going to have his head on a platter. He’d asked twice if
it would be okay to crash on the futon on nights when he had to work his second
job early in the a.m., but she’d said no both times. She liked Robbie, but she’d
learned the hard way that you couldn’t give an inch with your staff or they’d
take a mile. Besides, she paid him enough that he could get his own apartment
in town. He didn’t have to keep living with his brother somewhere out in the
middle of the goddamn desert.
    “Aidan, wake up!” she hissed again. He was too heavy for her
to move without his cooperation and she couldn’t reach the knots unless he
rolled over.
    “What’s up?” he asked in a full-volume, rather sleepy,
voice. God, the man had been a cop, couldn’t he take a hint with the
whispering? At least he responded to her urging and rolled onto his side
without asking any questions.
    “There’s someone in the studio, I heard footsteps,” she
said, starting to tug at the knots that bound him.
    “Are you sure?” he asked in a quiet voice, his eyes
immediately sharp and alert.
    “Pretty damn sure,” she said, getting a little frantic as
the rope refused to give.
    Damn it, they were certainly a lot harder to untie than they
had been to knot up in the first place. Her stupid, fake, fuck-me nails didn’t
help anything either. Summer vowed to get the things removed tomorrow. They’d
already served their purpose and as a person who made a living with her hands,
she really couldn’t afford to have her motor skills impaired.
    “Forget the knots, go get my gun.”
    “No way, I’m not leaving you tied up and I’d probably just—”
    “Summer, go get the goddamn gun. We might not have time to—”
    “There! I got the first one, now just let me—”
    “You know how to use the weapon. Quit being stubborn and go
get it before—”
    Just then, the door to the staff room swung open. Summer
screamed before she even had time to look to see who was there, she couldn’t
seem to help herself. If it was Robbie, he’d just caught her and Aidan, naked,
playing kinky with Shibari rope, and she would die of shame. If it was an
intruder, he or she had just caught her and Aidan, naked, playing kinky with
Shibari rope, and they probably wanted to empty the safe or steal all her tools
or something worse and she and Aidan might really die of things more painful
than shame.
    Either way, the situation at the moment was not looking very
good.
    “Well, well. Kelly, honey, looks like we’ve got company.”
    “Jake, I’m sorry, I didn’t think she’d be here, I didn’t—”
    “You never think, but don’t you worry. These two don’t look
like they’ll be hard to handle. Hell, one of them’s already tied up and ready
to go.” The man’s voice was deeper than anything Summer had ever heard in real
life. He sounded like one of those movie announcers who specialize in horror
previews and looked scary enough to be the wielder of a chainsaw in some
massacre film.
    He wasn’t particularly tall, or bulky, or physically
imposing, but what he lacked in size he more than made up for in pure menace.
His dark, greasy black hair was pulled back into a ponytail at the nape of his
neck, clearing revealing his ruined face. Or partially ruined face. One side of
Jake was fairly average-looking, thirty-something, hard-living biker dude, the
other side was a mass of scar tissue. It looked as if something acidic had
eaten away at the skin, leaving only ripples of ruined flesh behind. The area
around his right eye was particularly hard hit, the sagging tissue revealing
far more of a living person’s eye socket than Summer ever wanted to see. Or a
dead person’s eye socket for that matter.
    Don’t think about dead people,