“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” Alex panted in frustration. She was so close . . .
And her mother would be so pissed if she let the call go to voice mail. Mary Rogers knew her schedule as well as she did. Jerking Thumper out of her frustrated sex, Alex switched the vibe off and tossed it aside. Scooping up her cell, she swiped a thumb across its screen, cutting off Paul McCartney in mid-be. “Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, baby!” Mary said, her voice sounding so loving it was hard to be pissed even under the circumstances. “Hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”
Alex managed not to grind her teeth. Her mother could detect emotional nuances better than a homicide cop grilling a suspect. “Nah, just killing time. What’s up?”
“Nothing, dear. I couldn’t help noticing you weren’t in church yesterday. Remember, I told you I wanted to introduce you to that nice boy I told you about. The electrician?” Anybody under forty was a boy to her mother.
“Yeah, sorry. Rough night.”
“I really think you’d like him. He’s so cute, and such a nice man!”
I don’t want a nice man, Ma. I want a man who will beat my ass with a riding crop. Which was not something she could say to her mother. Ever. “I’m not looking for anything serious right now, Mom. I don’t think it’s fair to start a relationship I don’t intend to pursue.”
“You need to get back on the horse, honey. I know Gary hurt you . . .”
You have no idea. She hadn’t told her mother what her ex-lover had done that last brutal night, explaining the bruises away as being the result of a fight with a drunk. Which had been perfectly true. She just hadn’t told her mother who the drunk was. If she had, the sheriff would have had to charge her dad, her three brothers—and probably Mary herself—with first-degree lynching.
Hell, it had been all Alex could do to keep Cap and Ted from beating the fuck out of Gary, not that she hadn’t been tempted to let them go to it.
Apparently he’d had that effect on somebody else. Someone who’d actually done it.
So now she said only, with perfect honesty, “I’m over Gary. I’ve been over Gary.” Since he stopped using a flogger and started using his fists.
Though he still didn’t deserve to die that way. She didn’t grieve for Gary, but she did pity him.
“Good. You should be. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but your father and I never liked that man. I do not understand what you saw in him.”
“In retrospect, neither do I.”
Her mother, of course, pounced on the opening like SIG on a catnip mouse. “That’s why I think you’ll really like Jimmy. He really is a perfect gentleman. Why don’t you come to prayer meeting Wednesday, and I’ll introduce you?”
Oh, God, no. Trouble was, she hated disappointing her mother.
A flamethrower blast of guilt made Alex mentally writhe. If her mom knew what she’d done last night, where she’d been, what she’d been doing for years . . . Imagining the shock and horror on her parents’ faces, she shuddered.
“Alexis?” Mary prompted. “Do you think you can make it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got work that night.”
“Alexis Eleanor Rogers, your shift starts at midnight,” her mother said, exasperated. “You could be home from church in plenty of time to get ready, even if you and Jimmy go out for coffee afterward.”
“I’ll see, Mom. Look, I’ve got to go. If I don’t get in my five miles now, I’m not going to get them in at all.”
Her mother had been married to a high school coach too long not to understand the importance of working out. “Well, all right, dear. Love you!”
“Love you, too, Mom.” Alex swiped her thumb over the screen’s end button and slumped back against the pile of pillows, flinging one arm over her eyes.
When she was younger, she’d tried dating the kind of man her mother was always pushing on her. It had ended in disaster every single time. Perfect gentlemen bored the hell out of her.
Or worse.
She’d been seventeen when she’d lost her virginity to Bruce, the first of Mom’s matchmaking efforts. Just as it had every single time she’d attempted a relationship with someone Mary fixed her up with in the years since, the sex had sucked, and the relationship had gone down in a bigger ball of flame than the Hindenburg.
Alex had expected so much more. In the romances she’d devoured as a teen, sex had been described as an intense, transcendent experience, a union of hearts and souls.
Unfortunately, Bruce had been every bit the virgin she was. His idea of immortal passion had been to suck her nipples just long enough to get her halfway interested, then climb on and start thrusting. Alex hadn’t even been wet, and it had hurt. She’d told him to stop, but he’d kept on, apparently determined to come no matter what she said. So she’d punched him in the mouth, tossed his ass on the floor, and stormed out.
Alex wasn’t Ken Rogers’s little girl for nothing.
That hadn’t quite been the end for them. Two days later, Bruce’s life had gone Chernobyl in a spectacularly ugly tragedy that left both his parents dead. Alex had comforted him in his loss, and they’d made up. The sex still hadn’t gotten any better, though, and her relationship with the grieving young man had been stormy. In the end, he’d been the one to leave. He’d enlisted in the Army and shipped off to Iraq, and that was that.
Alex had made other attempts to find a “gentleman.” Had even had sex with one or two of them in college. Both had been a little better than poor Bruce, but she’d always felt something was missing.
Then soon after getting a job with the sheriff’s office, she’d discovered BDSM romances. And realized what she wanted. No, what she needed, in the sense that no other kind of relationship was going to work.
She needed a Dom.
Google had led Alex to Fetlife, kinkdom’s answer to Facebook, where she’d started looking for one of the bondage clubs she’d read about. She’d settled on an Atlanta group without even considering the one in Charlotte, North Carolina. Charlotte was two hours closer, but if she played that close to home, there was too great a chance her family would find out about it.
Her mother had pitched a huge fit when she’d decided to go into law enforcement. To Mary, it was bad enough that Alex’s older brother, Tim, had become a cop in nearby Spartanburg. Alex was female, and as far as Mary was concerned, she had no business wearing a badge.
She’d been a deputy for five years now, but Mom had only recently given up on persuading her to quit. If her family found out she was kinky on top of that . . .
God, they’d disown her. She couldn’t risk it.
Most of the moral values her parents had taught her formed the bedrock of her character. She believed in God, but she also thought He was a lot more interested in whether you hurt people than in your bedroom activities. Assuming, that is, those activities were consensual and didn’t destroy somebody else’s life or marriage.
But though God might not blame her for her sexual needs, she knew her parents would. The concept that pain could be a route to pleasure would be totally alien to them. That their precious little girl would think otherwise would horrify them.
Yet Alex needed what she needed. It wasn’t just that a good spanking made her hot. For her, it was the way she was wired, and nothing else was going to work for her.
She just had to make damn sure she stayed deeper in the closet than her mother’s tie-dyed bell bottoms.
Hell, the whole reason she’d stayed with Gary as long as she had was the mortal fear he’d out her to her parents. She was frankly surprised he hadn’t. It had probably been the Fear of Ted that kept him quiet, at least until that fatal encounter with the blunt instrument.
Sickened, Alex thrust that thought out of her mind. She’d hated Gary in the end, but he hadn’t deserved such a death.
No longer in the mood for either Thumper or a nap, Alex dressed in sweatpants, a tee, and her cross trainers, then slipped her cell and keys into her pocket. After domesticating her ferocious bedhea
d with a hairbrush, she gathered the copper length into a ponytail and secured it with a black scrunchie.
Five minutes later Alex stepped out on the house’s screened front porch, pushed open the creaking door, and cleared the three cinder-block steps in one long bounce. Breaking into a run down the cracked sidewalk, she headed for the street. It was October, Alex’s favorite time of year, with trees burning yellow and red with the shades of fall. Her mother always said the splashes of vivid color made it seem God had been at work with a paintbrush.
Falling into an easy, long-legged lope she could keep up for miles, Alex let her mind float. She’d always found there was no better way to deal with stress than a good hard run. Being more than a little ADHD, she was happiest in motion.
After passing the sprawling four-story redbrick husk of the abandoned mill, Alex paused at a stop sign to scan for traffic, then turned right on Elm and began her usual route. The two-lane road wound past the Whiteside Hospital complex, a number of doctors’ offices, and the Myers-Rhodin Funeral Home. A mile farther on lay Elmwood Cemetery, an expanse of green broken by gray headstones, brass markers, and dutiful flower arrangements.
She’d make a stop at the Gas-Up convenience store at the top of the hill for a bottle of water, and then head back along the same route.
Alex had started running five miles a day when she’d made the Harrison High track team as a freshman. After the tragedy with Bruce, running had become a way to deal with her grief and guilt.
Now she had professional reasons for her routine. Being able to run some asshat into the ground was a definite advantage for a cop. She might not be the biggest and baddest deputy on the force, but she was universally considered the fastest. It was the rare drug dealer, convenience store robber, or shoplifter who could outpace her. And once she brought a perp down, three or four other cops could catch up and make sure he stayed there. Assuming she couldn’t do the job herself. Most of the time, she could, thanks to Ted’s training.
Making the turn, she headed back, breathing harder now, beginning to sweat a little in the brisk fall air. Nothing like the miserable soaking perspiration of July and August, when the South got hotter than hell’s armpit.
Her mind slid back to Frank again, but this time she found herself frowning. Was an affair with the big former SEAL really a good idea? What if he turned out to be another Gary? Yeah, Cap liked him, but as Ted had pointed out, Cap wasn’t sleeping with him.
Just as well. Alex had no desire to share.
CHAPTER FOUR
Some people preferred watermelons for this purpose, but Bruce liked tomatoes. More of a challenge.
Besides, he needed the practice if he was to put his plans in motion.
He lined the vegetables up on the cardboard boxes he’d stacked at varying heights—approximating the level of someone’s head when lying down, standing, or sitting—until he had twelve targets.
Soon enough he’d take out the first of his human targets. But his revenge was intricate, and he had more dominoes to put into place before he could start knocking them down.
He still needed evidence of Ted’s perversion. Otherwise the public would see him as nothing more than a cop killer—and that wasn’t the point at all. They had to know why this was necessary if they were to understand why he’d had no choice. Ted was a liar, and Gary Ames, Alex’s former “master,” had said he’d been the one to lead her into deviance. For that, he had to pay.
Unfortunately, Bruce’s revenge would have to wait until Ted condemned himself.
It had been a week since he’d replaced the smoke detector in Arlington’s bedroom with the dummy containing a camera. Ever since then, the little device had been piggybacking on the house WiFi to send him video files.
The system’s password was PASSWORD, for God’s sake. Sloppy, Ted.
He knew that sooner or later Arlington and his little fruit boyfriend would do something usable. Until then, he’d have to be patient.
Bruce walked back the length of the range, picked up his rifle, and lay down on his belly. Sighting on the first of the tomatoes, he counted his heartbeats and breathed deeply, waiting for his body to calm, to slow, as his father had taught him when he was a boy.
Then, breath held, between one heartbeat and the next, he fired. The first tomato exploded in a rain of red juice and splattering scarlet. Smiling in grim satisfaction, Bruce took aim on the next target.
Soon, Dad.
* * *
The Morgan County Sheriff’s Office occupied the former corporate offices of Harris Chemical, which had moved to better digs and sold the building to the MCSO for much less than it was worth. It was a surprisingly large complex—it needed to be, since the department had over three hundred sworn officers, along with numerous divisions. Unfortunately, the building was also ugly, a cluster of three-story blocky brick structures in a shade Ted called “baby shit brown.” Which may have been the whole reason Harris Chemical moved downtown. Ugly was not a good corporate statement.
Since it was only 5:20 p.m. and Alex was technically off-duty—the sheriff’s birthday party being more social gathering than anything else—she’d dressed casually in jeans and a MCSO tee. She found a space near the granite memorial to a deputy murdered in 1978, got out, and started across the parking lot.
The lobby was surprisingly empty; there were usually a few people occupying the uncomfortably utilitarian chairs, waiting to file reports or talk to detectives. The door’s metal detector pinged at the off-duty weapon Alex wore in a pancake holster. The desk officer looked up from behind his bulletproof barrier, but relaxed when he recognized Alex. He hit a button, unlocking the department’s inner door with a click and a buzz. Alex waved in thanks and sauntered in.
The MCSO was a labyrinth of narrow beige corridors that led to offices for senior officers and civilian admin workers. Divisions like Violent Crimes and Narcotics had big bullpens full of detective cubicles, while Crime Scene Investigation and Forensic Chemistry had multiroom labs. A carefully secured warehouse in the heart of the building was occupied by racks of evidence in boxes and brown paper bags.
Ted often said the judicial system was like a giant python. You put suspects and evidence in at one end and got something, presumably justice, out of the other. “The trip from point A to point B, however, ain’t fun for anybody.”
Alex turned one corner, then another, then a third before she found a door labeled TRAINING. It was crammed ass-to-elbow with cops standing around holding plastic cups of soda. Long gray laminate tables faced a Plexiglas podium decorated with a logo of a gold sheriff’s star.
As Alex wound her way inside, she caught snatches of stories about a fishing expedition, somebody’s kid’s Little League adventures, and an incredibly stupid convenience store robber who’d thought blackface would make a dandy disguise.
Spotting Ted wearing an unusually grim expression, Alex wound her way through the crowd to join him. “Who shot your dog?”
If anything, his expression tightened even more when he saw her. “Just checking out the new deputy.” He nodded toward the front of the room.
Alex really should have noticed him the minute she walked in: he was inches taller than every other cop in the room, and looked twice as broad in his black patrol uniform. “Shit,” she breathed, astonished. “Frank.”
“Frank Murphy, the department’s newest deputy. Come on.” He jerked his head toward the door, and they ducked out into the hallway, where they could talk a bit more privately. “I am going to kick Cap’s ass,” Ted said once the door closed behind them. “He damned well knew this and didn’t tell us.”
Alex felt dazed, blindsided. And maybe a little betrayed. It took an effort to keep her voice low. “Why didn’t we know this?”
Ted popped his knuckles, glowering. “You know how it works. He’d have spent the last few months either at the Academy in Columbia or working his field training rotation on Able shift.” They were on Charlie.
“So neither of us ever ran into him.
” Which meant he was probably as ignorant about her working for the MCSO as she’d been about him. Alex relaxed, feeling a little less pissed. A memory surfaced, and she threw up her hands in self-disgust. “Oh, hell. I heard something a couple months ago about the department hiring a former SEAL, but I’d forgotten it until just now.”
“How are you going to handle it? Could get sticky.”
“I don’t see why. The sheriff’s office doesn’t have any rules about deputies dating as long as there’s no sexual harassment. And since I’m not in Frank’s chain of command, that’s not an issue. Besides, I’ve been working with Bruce for two years now, and I’ve had no problems. You want to talk potentially sticky . . .”
“Yeah, okay, point.” Ted grimaced. He knew more about her sex life than he probably wanted to, self-appointed daddy that he was. “Still, the thing with Bruce was almost a decade ago, and the thing with Frank was last night. When it comes to potential stickiness, that’s like the difference between a Post-it on your thumb and having your hand superglued to your dick.”
“Maybe, but Frank and I aren’t even on the same shift. We never even saw him until now. Anyway, you’re assuming we’re going to get involved in some kind of long-term—”
“Hey, y’all,” a familiar voice said. “What’s going on?”
Alex looked and thought better of what she’d been about to say. “Oh, hi, Bruce. Just . . . gossiping.” You didn’t discuss your Rocky Road lifestyle in front of the terminally vanilla. Especially not when this particular vanilla bean was your ex-boyfriend.
Bruce Greer was no longer the seventeen-year-old innocent who’d been her disastrous first love. At twenty-six, he was a tall, powerfully built Iraqi war veteran with handsome features, thick sable hair, and eyes that were Brad Pitt blue. He also had the patrol area adjoining the two Alex and Ted worked, and the three of them often answered the more dangerous calls together. A good man in a fight, Bruce had a cynical sense of humor that made him an entertaining companion.
He also knew nothing about his coworkers’ kinky proclivities, and they wanted to keep it that way.
Without Restraint Page 5