Her voice was so low he strained to hear her. He was afraid to breathe, lest the sound of it in his own ears swallow her words.
“And this man, he’s even more twisted than you are, and instead of turning away from you in disgust, he says he loves you, not in
spite
of what you are, but
because
of what you are . . .”
He felt a tremble run through her, just once, and then it was gone.
“That,”
she said finally, sighing deeply, “is what’s more complicated than love.”
He thought again about how he’d taken her by force, and enjoyed it. Yes, that was certainly more complicated than love.
When he was certain she was done, he dared to ask.
“That’s what Quinn is for you?”
She took a moment before she responded.
“What he was, maybe, for a time. You have to understand the nature of the submissive heart.”
“I still don’t see you as submissive. You’re a hardcore bitch.”
She laughed softly and rolled back into his arms again. She kissed his chin.
“That’s because I fought against it all my life. I protected myself like crazy from anybody that got too close. I was afraid that if I fell, I’d fall damned hard. And I was right.”
He pressed his lips against her eyelid, liking the soft, vulnerable flesh there.
“A submissive has this . . . I don’t know . . . this tremendous capacity for devotion that borders on obsessive. You want nothing more in this world than to belong to someone who knows you in the most intimate detail. You don’t just want to love someone, you want to worship someone.
“When I met Quinn, I’d read all the books. I knew all the theory behind dominance and submission. I thought he was my soul mate, my true Master. I thought I’d really grabbed the brass ring that all good little submissives hope and pray for. There was a time when I literally could not refuse him anything.
“I let him do things to me . . . Things that I could never have imagined letting anyone do to me . . .”
She fell silent, and he waited for her to continue. But she didn’t.
“What changed?”
“One day I got a glimpse of the man behind the curtain. What had been an earth-shattering event for me was, after all, just a game for him. I was only one in a long, long line of ‘true slaves’ for Quinn . . .”
He felt warm wetness on his chest and realized, too late, that she was crying.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to tear down all of your walls, to stand completely naked in front of someone begging them to love you? Surrendering absolutely everything in your heart and soul, only to find it was all smoke and mirrors? A mind-fuck?”
He gathered her to him, felt her chest heave as hot tears slid across his chest.
“I hate the bastard,” she whispered between hitches of breath. “I hate him for making me feel all those things, for making all of my fantasies come true, then ripping them all away from me.”
“I’m sorry, Gee,” he whispered, kissing her on the forehead. “I’m so sorry . . .”
“And those pictures. Goddamn him!” She gripped his shoulder hard enough to hurt, as if he were a life preserver in a desperate ocean. “He sold me for thirty fucking pieces of silver . . .”
“Sssh,” he whispered.
And he kept whispering until her crying became sniffles and she fell asleep in his arms.
He looked down at her tear-streaked face, and thought of what Quinn Lee had done to her.
He hated the bastard, too.
Chapter 24
Rhett Butler is definitely a dominant. If you don’t believe me, read that chapter where he carries her up the stairs. That’s hot stuff.
—F
ELICITY
S
PARKS
,
S&M in Modern Culture
“W
here the fuck have you been?” Griggs’s voice on the phone was impatient. “I’ve been leaving messages for two solid hours. Where are you?”
He was still in bed with Gina. He was disoriented to wake in this strange and yet familiar place, to the odd slant of the sun through the windows.
“What time is it?”
“It’s almost noon. You’re with Gee, aren’t you? Goddamn it!”
“What do ya want, Griggs?”
He looked down at Gina, who was just beginning to stir. She opened one eye and smiled as she reached for his cock.
“We found Paul. You think you can make some time between fuck-fests to help me question him?”
“Where is he?”
“Dirt-bag is in Shelby at some cheapo water park.”
“That’s a two-hour drive there, and two hours back.”
“Which means get your ass out of bed pronto, if you can walk.”
“Gimme half an hour.”
Hanson flipped the phone shut and relayed the information to Gina.
“Shit.” Gina sighed, letting go of his half-erect cock and rising from the bed.
“You coming?” he asked.
“I’d like to, but I really can’t. I have another job, remember?”
He watched her naked ass sway to the bathroom. He stared at the large bruise on her hip and the finger marks on her shoulder. His finger marks. It took him a moment to realize what he was feeling. Not guilty, not ashamed. Satisfied.
He had marked her as
his
.
It was nearly five before they got to the hotel, and they waited another half hour for Paul and family to return from a day of fun. They saw a light blue Kia Sorento pull into the lot, and then a man matching Paul Carlson’s description climbing out of the driver’s seat. He went around to the back of the car, taking out a cooler, as a woman and two small wet boys tumbled out.
“How you wanna play this?” Griggs asked, getting out of the car as they watched the Carlson family climb the metal stairs to the second floor. “Cheating Husband Cover Story Number Two?”
Paul’s hair was a fine, pale brown, just beginning to recede, but he had a trim build in swim trunks and a blue plaid shirt unbuttoned down the front. He was probably considered attractive, Hanson thought, by women who didn’t mind that he had the small, shifty eyes of a weasel.
“Why cover for him?” Hanson asked as they closed the distance.
“Because she looks like one of them soccer moms that does some kinda cardio-boxing shit,” Griggs replied. “I don’t wanna have to pull her off him.”
Joanna Carlson, a wet-haired and sunburned woman wrapped in a terrycloth beach cover-up, looked thin but wiry, in a sort of Linda Hamilton
Terminator 2
kind of way. That, and an unmistakable aggressiveness about her, made Hanson think she did indeed wear the pants in the family.
She looked Hanson and Griggs over with sharp eyes as they showed their badges and introduced themselves.
“What’s this about?”
“We’re investigating a hit-and-run involving a car matching the description of your husband’s Forte Koup,” Hanson said.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “He didn’t hit anything. His car is at home without a scratch on it.”
“Honey, I’m sure this is nothing,” Paul said. “They’re just doing their jobs.”
“Unless,” she said, her face tightening even further, “you’re saying his car was stolen out of our driveway?”
“Our car was stolen?” one of the boys asked. “Was it, Mom?”
“We don’t know that anything has happened to your dad’s car,” Griggs told the boy. He looked at Paul. “But we need to talk to your dad about it.”
“I have to pee,” announced the younger boy.
“Why don’t you and the kids clean up,” Paul said to his wife, running his card key through the door and holding it open. “I’ll be in as soon as I can.”
With a hostile glare, Joanna herded the two boys into the room.
“Is this going to take long?” Joanna squinted. “We have reservations for dinner.”
“We’ll try to make it as quick as we can, ma’am,” Hanson said.
The door slammed shut and Hanson heard Joanna yelling at the kids not to lie on the beds in their wet swimsuits.
“You’ve been a bad boy,” Griggs said to Paul. “Let’s talk down in the lobby. It’s hotter than hell out here.”
“I swear to God, I didn’t hurt her—”
“But you’re into all that, aren’t you?” Griggs interrupted. “Spanky, spanky?”
“You know what I mean!” Paul lowered his voice to a frantic whisper. “I mean I didn’t kill her!”
Paul’s weasel eyes darted from one face to the other, but even that eye contact was fleeting. He might not be guilty of murder, Hanson thought, but the man sure as hell felt guilty about
something.
“We don’t think you killed her,” Hanson said.
“What’s this ‘we’ shit?” Griggs asked. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
“But you were the last person to see Robyn alive,” Hanson continued. “Why’d you run? This wasn’t a scheduled vacation, was it?”
“I saw it on the news,” Paul said, sitting on the edge of the lobby’s rock-hard sofa and chewing a cuticle. “It scared the hell out of me—”
“I’ll bet,” Hanson said.
“Kitty—Robyn, I mean—was fine when I left,” Paul insisted. “She was getting dressed—”
“Maybe the game was over,” Griggs said. “Ya’ll ate your cookies, she packed her little Kitty bag . . . and then she said something that pissed you off? Is that what happened ?”
“No! Kitty and I were friends! I’m sorry as hell that she’s dead, I really am!”
“I can see you’re all torn up about it,” Griggs said. He turned to Hanson with a shrug. “Poor guy, up here drowning his troubles in water slides and cotton candy.”
“Don’t you get it?” Paul whispered urgently, leaning forward. “It must have happened right after I left. If I hadn’t left when I did, I coulda been killed, too!”
“That’s possible,” Hanson said. “Of course, maybe if you’d stuck around long enough to walk Robyn to her car, she’d have been as lucky as you.”
“Damnit.” Paul wiped a hand over his mouth, and his small eyes disappeared into crescents as his face screwed up. Hanson wondered if the man was going to cry. “Don’t you think I’ve thought about that, too? Don’t you think I already feel like shit?”
Paul said he’d left Kitty in the room around 6:15. He was sure about the time because he knew he had to pick his oldest son up from soccer practice by 6:30, and meet his wife for dinner by 7.
“Your wife and kid can verify this?”
“Oh, shit.” Paul’s shoulders slumped, and he collapsed back on the sofa like a rag doll. “You can’t tell her about this. She’ll divorce me, if she doesn’t kill me first—”
“Guess you should have thought of that sooner,” Griggs said.
“Look, I’ll do anything I can to help, but please,
please
don’t tell my wife.”
“She must be one mean bitch,” Griggs said with a glance at Hanson. “He’s about to pee his pants.”
“You didn’t see anybody hanging around?” Hanson asked. “No one paying a little too much attention when you checked in or when you left?”
Paul’s face went blank, as if he were thinking hard, and then he shook his head.
“I didn’t see anybody special. There were some cars in the lot, sure—”
“What’s that mean, you didn’t see anybody ‘special’?”
“I dunno! There was a black couple going into a room down on the other end, I think. A woman and a kid getting into a car, and some maintenance guy—”
The Madison didn’t seem like the kind of place to have a regular maintenance crew. Patel ran the office, and his wife and daughters did the housekeeping.
“He was wearing one of those coverall jumpsuits, you know? Like a mechanic or house painter. But he didn’t even look at me, he was messing around with a broken window or something, like twenty or thirty feet away.”
“What did he look like?”
“You mean besides the coveralls?” Paul squirmed. “I dunno! Average, I guess. Just a guy, all right? He was wearing a ball cap and carrying a toolbox.”
“Was he white or black? How tall?”
“White, far as I could tell.” Paul was beginning to whine. “Average height, I guess. He mighta had a mustache, I don’t remember for sure.”
“What color were the coveralls?”
“Dark. Blue, I think.”
“Was there any kind of writing or name on them?”
“Not that I can remember.”
Eyewitnesses were a pain in the ass, Hanson thought. Mr. Coveralls could be their perp, or he could be nobody. They’d have to go back to the Madison.
“Was Robyn seeing anybody else?” he asked. “Maybe someone she met online?”
“Robyn was always meeting people online. But as far as I know, she wasn’t playing with anyone else. Hadn’t been for a while.”
“Why not?”
“She was just getting over a breakup with this dom about three months ago. She was bitching and moaning about having to FedEx the collar back to him in Canada—”
“You sure he dumped her? Not the other way around?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.” Paul rolled his eyes. “She never even met him, it was strictly an online LDR.”
“LDR?” Griggs asked.
“Long distance relationship,” Paul explained.
“How in the hell can you do this stuff online?” Griggs asked. “Or long distance?”
Paul simply stared at Griggs with disdain. But when they questioned him about Lady Cassandra’s death, he snickered.
“I didn’t know you could kill the devil,” he said. “I stayed as far away from that crazy bitch as possible.”
“So you didn’t like her?”
“No, but I sure as hell didn’t kill her! I’ve never had that much to do with her, you know?”
“You know anybody named Cherry?”
“Yeah . . .” Paul looked confused and even more anxious. “I know Cherry. Why? Did something happen to her?”
“Someone raped her about a month ago.”
“Oh, I know about
that.
But, she’s okay now, right? She’s not, you know . . . The guy who killed Kitty, he didn’t hurt her, too?”
“No, she’s all right,” Hanson said. “For now.”
“Shit, you scared me. I thought . . . shit!” Paul wiped a hand across his mouth and took a deep breath. “I’m glad she’s okay.”
“You knew about what happened to her before?” Hanson asked.
“About her and that crazy fuck from Collarme? Yeah, she told me about it. Me and Cherry are friends, have been for almost a year.”
“You have any ideas about who this Kerberos is?”
“No. If I did, I’d tell you, because that crazy fuck needs to be locked up for what he did to her. It really messed her up. Not just physically. Mentally, too.”
“Messed her up mentally, how exactly?”
“Last time we tried to play, she freaked out, started crying and shaking.”
“When was this?”
“The same day—” Paul’s mouth fell open. “Oh, shit, it was the same day I played with Kitty.”
“The same day?” Griggs rolled his eyes and looked at Hanson. “Can you believe this guy?”
“A regular Don Juan,” Hanson said.
“I took the room at the Madison for me and Cherry. But then she got upset and just wanted to go home. After she left, I called Kitty—”
“No sense letting a cheesy motel room go to waste, right?” Griggs asked with a smirk.
“It was already paid for, for Christ’s sake!”
Griggs and Hanson exchanged glances over Paul’s head.
“The perp mighta been following Cherry,” Hanson said.
“And was pissed that he missed her, so he killed Robyn instead,” Griggs said, nodding.
“Aw, shit!” Paul turned pale even under his sunburned cheeks. “I thought it was just some random thing. You think they were looking for us specifically?”
“It’s possible,” Hanson said. “We need to give you some police protection, just in case—”
“Oh, man! Oh, no, this can’t be happening,” Paul moaned. “Can’t I just stay here until you catch this guy?”
“You’re a shit, Paul.” Hanson sighed. “I shouldn’t just tell your wife, I should hold you down while she beats the crap out of you.”