Missing Ink

by E J Frost

  “It’s nothing,” I say, sketching with more determination.

  “Real talk, Bren.”

  Oh, fuck. Now I’m in for it.

  “We don’t need real talk, Sir. It’s not what you told me this afternoon. I’m grateful you told me why your marriage ended because if your ex had blindsided me with it, it would have fucking hurt. Now I’m prepared. So, I appreciate that. And it really is nothing. If you must know, it’s something someone said to me after class. It’s not a big deal. I’ll be more perky. See?” I give him a huge, fake grin over my shoulder. “Perky.”

  He snorts and takes off his glasses to look closely at me. “Who was it and what did they say?”

  I sigh. He’s not going to let it go. Of course, he’s not. He’s a Dom. Why did I want one of my own again?

  “The really tall lady at the gym? We call her Scary Manda because she has this utterly terrifying reach. She asked me if we were together and when I said we were, she said you were kind of old for me.”

  “I see. What’d you say?” He shifts so I have to look at him or make it really obvious that I’m avoiding his gaze.

  “That I like older guys because they’re better in bed.”

  Mac chuckles and thumbs my chin gently, keeping my eyes on him. “I’m staying out of the experience versus enthusiasm debate, but I want to say one thing, girl. No one gets a vote in what’s between us other than you and me. If I’m too old and boring for you, tell me. Otherwise, I’m not interested in what anyone else has to say about us.”

  His words spread over me like T-Relief on a bruise. “You’re definitely not too old or too boring for me, Sir. I’m really . . . comfortable with you.”

  And that’s the truth, despite whatever doubts are chewing on me.

  He shifts me back around and puts his glasses back on. Heat shoots straight up through my belly. He looks like a stern professor in those glasses. Why is that so hot?

  “Makes me sound like an old pair of shoes,” he says, nuzzling my temple.

  “I’ve had a pair of Docs since I was seventeen that are my favorite thing in the world, Sir. I’d kill for those boots.”

  He chuckles. “Do I rank above or below your old shit-kickers, girl?”

  I balance my stylus between my fingers as I hold them up to pinch the air. “Little bit below. I mean, it’s close. They’ve never given me multiple orgasms. But they are my favorite thing in the world.”

  Mac’s chest rumbles with laughter against my back. “Guess I’ll have to work a little harder on those orgasms. I don’t know if my ego can handle ranking below ten-year-old leather.”

  I twist my neck until I can nip his firm, bristly jaw. “You don’t seem to have a lot of ego, Sir. Particularly for a guy. And a Dom.”

  He shrugs against my back and adjusts his arm around me. “Navy taught me humility the hard way. Egotistical assholes don’t last long in the service.” He snorts. “Unless they’re officers. Then they just get promoted quickly.”

  “Weren’t you an officer?”

  With that cloak of authority, he must have been. And I’m sure Emily said Logan worked for him.

  “Nope, I never went to college or officer training school. Officers need a degree. I enlisted as soon as I finished high school and worked my way up as a gunner’s mate.”

  “Is that what it sounds like? Making things go boom?” I ask.

  “Yes, girl. Just what it sounds like.”

  “Emily said Logan worked on submarines. Did you?”

  “Mm-hmm. Subs when I was stationed in the Atlantic and a cruiser when I was stationed in the Gulf of Aden.”

  “Where’s that, Sir?”

  “Off Africa.”

  I mull that over.

  “Why did you move from the Atlantic to Africa? Seems like a long way.”

  Mac grumbles. “I was tapped for the Gulf because I had previous experience with pirates.”

  “Pirates? Like Jack Sparrow-pirates?”

  “Definitely not like Jack Sparrow. The pirates I tangled with in the Caribbean were hijacking passenger ships, ransoming the men back to their families and selling the women and children to human traffickers. Not at all fun pirates.”

  I twist around in his lap so I can look into his eyes, because his voice has gone low and hollow. When he was talking about his ex, he sounded sad and remorseful, but not like this. His marriage may have broken his heart, but losing his men ripped up Mac’s soul.

  “Is that how you lost your men, fighting pirates?”

  “Nine of them, yes.”

  “But you stopped them, the pirates?”

  “We did.”

  “That seems pretty heroic to me, Sir.”

  “Ah.” Mac reels me in and kisses me on the forehead. “Is that what you’re thinking, girl? That your Dom’s a hero? I’m not. I was just doing my job. Following orders.”

  “Pretty sure that’s ninety percent of being a hero.” I say, pushing my tablet aside so I can curl into him and slide my arms around his neck.

  “Yeah? What’s the other ten percent?”

  “Giving a shit.”

  Mac takes off his glasses and folds them into his book to mark his place. Then he crushes me to his chest and drowns me in kisses.

  Chapter 12

  There are times when Brenna’s an open book. With large type. And then there are times when I feel like I need the audiobook version, because I can’t read her at all. Her reaction to the debacle of my marriage falls into the latter category.

  She was understanding and supportive while I was telling her the sad tale. She was grateful afterwards that I gave her the head’s up before dropping her into the chop with Amy. But this morning, a little shadow has crept back into her eyes, and I’m sure that’s what’s caused it.

  I can’t blame her for being wary now that she knows the whole sorry story. And there’s nothing I can say to fix it. All I can do is show her that I’m not that stupid, cruel, power-drunk kid anymore. I’m not even the bewildered, wounded man I was when Amy kicked me out. In part, that’s because of time and distance. But in part it’s because of Brenna herself. Seeing the growth of her trust, feeling her settle into my control, has knitted together those parts of me that were shredded after signing the damn divorce papers.

  Bren makes me happy. Something I haven’t been able to say about the women in my life for a long, long time.

  Liking the sound of that thought inside my head, I repeat it aloud to Logan. “Bren makes me happy.”

  He pulls another sheaf of leaflets off his printer and adds them to the stack on his desk. We papered the neighborhood with “Have You Seen This Tattoo?” flyers before I took Bren on the Rolling Blue charity ride. Disappointingly, no one’s called to turn in the skinhead. I hope that’s because he’s running scared and not because he’s tied into Aryan Nation and they’re frightening the locals. But, for the sake of thoroughness, Logan and I are doing another round with the flyers this morning. Emily’s dragged Brenna off to Blunts for some girl-time at the spa. I’m planning on convincing Logan we should join them for lunch and a scene once we’ve done the leaflets. After Bren called me and my men heroes last night, we made out for an hour, until she fell asleep on my chest in the middle of giving me a huge hickey. I didn’t fuck her either last night or this morning, though. I wanted to give her time to recover. What’s more, I like sending her off a little needy. The idea of her thinking about me for the hours we’re apart absolutely does it for me.

  “I’m happy for you, Mac,” Lo says. “The ride went well, then?”

  I nod. “She was a trooper. Never complained once. Sweet as pie to everyone we met.”

  “Sweet as pie?” Logan repeats incredulously. “DirtyGurl? Did you lobotomize her or something?”

  I chuckle. “You ass.”

  “Mac.” Logan taps his fingers on the pile of flyers. “Seriously, Brenna may have a heart of gold, but it’s wrapped in pure sass. I can’t see her being so sweet unless she was changing herself to please you. You
’re not trying to turn her into something she’s not, are you? Because that never works.”

  “What are you trying to say, Lo?” I ask. “Spit it out.”

  “I know you feel you failed with Amy, sir—”

  “You think I’m trying to fix my failures with Bren?” A thought grabs me. Does Brenna think I’m looking for a do-over? Is that the source of the new shadow in her eyes? “She’s my second chance, Lo, but not that way. I’m not trying to remake her into a sweet submissive. I’m letting her be who she is, letting her show all her natural sweetness, without the misery of going it alone all the time. And, hopefully, without dimming any of her sass, because it turns me the fuck on.”

  Logan snorts. “I have no idea how you stand it.”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit. Emily challenges you in little ways all the time. I’ve watched her do it. She’s not as mouthy as Bren, but it’s there. She wants to know she can count on you to enforce the boundaries you’ve given her. Bren needs that reassurance, too, but she doesn’t need boundaries. She just needs to know I’ll always have her back. That girl’s been swinging at the world on her own for far too long.”

  Logan blinks at me, startled, before he puts his hands flat on the desk. “That’s why you’re a better Dom than I am. I didn’t see that. And even if I had, I couldn’t have given it to her. She annoys me too fucking much.”

  “I can’t think of a single thing about her that annoys me. Except that she has about a hundred loose socks in her underwear drawer. That, I am going to have to change.”

  Logan shakes his head, grinning, probably with the memory of my oh-five-hundred inspections and insistence that my men’s socks were rolled so the folds made a happy-face in each pair.

  “For real now, Lo. If I move in upstairs.” I gesture with a finger to where there are faint banging noises. Logan hasn’t wasted any time starting on the renovations once I approved the blueprints. “Are you going to have a problem with her being around all the time?”

  “Nope. I’ll have enough to worry about in the next few months to care about Miss Sassypants. And Emily will be over the moon to have a live-in bestie.”

  Logan might think I’m a better Dom than he is, but he’s a damn fine daddy. “If that changes, you’ll let me know. I don’t want to impose.”

  “Can’t impose in your own home, sir.”

  I catch myself and reverse course.

  “Sorry, son. You’re right. I’m still thinking like a guest. I’ll try to get a handle on that.”

  Logan nods before he pushes the flyers into two large envelopes and holds out one to me. “We’d better get going if we’re going to meet the girls for lunch.”

  I clap him on the shoulder as he rounds his desk. “You read my mind.”

  He laughs. “That’s not hard to do these days, sir.”

  “Ah, gauntlet thrown. What am I thinking about as a scene after lunch, then, Kreskin?”

  “Kreskin?” Logan asks.

  “Famous mentalist in the seventies. Probably before your time, whippersnapper.”

  Logan leads me out into the hallway, shaking his head. “Well before my time. And I can’t guess what you’re thinking in terms of a scene, but I can tell you that this weekend’s the festival of the October Horse at the club, so if you wanted to try pony play with Bren, this is a good opportunity. Club’s all set up for it.”

  I slap the thick envelope against my thigh to discourage the tentpole starting there. “Perfect. How do you feel about putting our pony girls through their paces?”

  Logan grins as he pulls on his shoes. “I can’t think of a better way to spend the afternoon than breeding two, horny, little mares.”

  I can’t either, which does nothing to help with the tentpole.

  We make a long loop up to East Eleventh Street with the flyers so I can check out the guy who can’t spell respect. Shameless Studios is a tiny shop in a walk-down off the street, dark and dingy despite the bright, fall day. There’s no sign of Mad Bob, just a bored teenaged girl sitting at the counter, cracking her gum and flipping through a magazine with a lot of pictures of very tall, very skinny women wearing animal prints. “Go Primal!” screams the article’s headline in dripping red letters, and while I wholeheartedly endorse the sentiment, I’m fairly sure my definition of primal is very different from the magazine’s.

  I look around the shop, pretending to be interested in the designs taped haphazardly to the walls. Compared to what’s on the walls of Bren’s shop, Mad Bob’s designs look crude and half-finished. Maybe that’s why the wolf catches my eye. It’s head and shoulders above any of the other designs. The wolf’s face dissolves into a full moon over a landscape of pine trees. The fur is richly detailed and fades into artistically swirled shadows at the edges the same way the fins and water of my mermaid do. Instead of the usual man on the moon, there’s a woman’s face in the moon’s subtle shading. It’s when I see the feathers trailing off the moon and realize it’s a dreamcatcher as well that I’m sure. That would scream Brenna to me, even if I hadn’t seen a similar moon dreamcatcher in her sample book.

  I lean in, pretending to examine it closely, and pull away the edge of another design that’s overlapping the bottom of the sketch. All of the designs in Bren’s book are signed, and, sure enough, worked into the wolf’s ruff are her initials: BT.

  I fold down the overlapping paper, take out my phone, and snap a picture of the pilfered sketch. It has to be stolen. I can’t see Brenna donating a design to Mad Bob.

  Once I tuck my phone away in my pocket, I smooth out the sketches and approach the desk. “Mad Bob not around today?” I ask the gum-cracking girl.

  She shakes her head. “Not until this afternoon. He had a meeting this morning. Wanna make an appointment?”

  “Not right now. Mind if I take a card and give him a call later?”

  She looks around aimlessly as though a box of cards will materialize on the cluttered desk. “Don’t think we have any.”

  I wait to see if she’ll offer any other way to contact the shop, but she doesn’t, so I tell her goodbye before escaping back up to the street where Logan’s waiting for me. I show him the picture of the stolen sketch and his mouth tightens.

  “Not the kind of proof a cop would want,” he says. “But I don’t like that he’s got one of her designs right up on his wall. Anything else? I’m guessing there’s no skinhead with ‘Move On’ tattooed on his knuckles in there?”

  “No, just a girl with no sales skills. Mad Bob’s out until this afternoon. I didn’t see any swastikas, but there were a couple of those spread-winged eagles and a bulldog wearing a spiked helmet. Pops would be rolling in his grave.”

  “Mmm. I think it’s time Max started keeping an eye on Mad Bob.” Logan pulls out his phone as we walk back towards his place. Our place.

  “No argument from me. Tell him I’ll cover the cost.”

  Logan shoots me a look that would cow a lesser man. “You’re not paying for us to help you protect her, sir.”

  “Try and stop me, son. There are things you can control and things you can’t. This is one of those you can’t. Make your peace with it.”

  Logan blows out a breath and goes back to texting Max. “Did I say I missed you, sir?”

  “Every day, son. Every day.”

  *****

  Brenna always looks beautiful to me, even when she’s puffy from crying or mussed from fucking. But when the girls meet us in the club’s restaurant for lunch, I have to appreciate the buffed and polished, glowing gold of her skin. With many, many kisses.

  Grinning and pink-cheeked, she finally bats me away and escapes into the buffet line. I gather the restaurant doesn’t do table-service during festival weekends, and without having done more than walked through the entrance hall, I can understand why. The club’s packed. The usually quiet halls are filled with kinksters. Every pedestal in the hallway has a submissive mounted on display. There’s a line of ponies and their trainers waiting to go through the door into the St
ables. There are three furries in full costume going at it on the central staircase. And this is only Thursday. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like by Saturday when Logan says the festival will be in full roar.

  The restaurant itself is busy, with tables having been moved to make way for a double-sided buffet down the center of the main dining room. Despite the crowd, Logan manages to get his favorite table in the big glass greenhouse addition to the restaurant. I suspect the pretty maître d’ has a thing for Emily’s daddy, although she’s not obvious about it.

  The table’s set for six. Shortly after I make a few selections from the overwhelming cornucopia on the buffet and take my seat next to Bren, Harry and the pretty, black-haired submissive who was manning the upstairs desk the night I was an ass to Bren join us. While the sub hugs everyone around the table, Harry claps a hand on my shoulder and pulls me a step away.

  “Glad I caught up with you,” he says. “I figured you’d be here at some point today after I saw DirtyGurl and Emily at the spa.”

  He combs his hand over his beard, which looks freshly trimmed and waxed, so I’m guessing he bumped into the girls in the spa.

  “Things didn’t work out with Rolling Blue,” I offer. “You’ve probably heard.”

  He nods. “Walt called me. I’m sorry, Mac, and for the record, I think they’re making a mistake.”

  “I wasn’t happy about having to move to Jersey, either. I didn’t realize you live there.”

  “I rent one of the rooms at the clubhouse so I can keep my place in the City. They’re pretty relaxed about it as long as I’m there for meetings and events. I’m sorry I missed the charity ride, but it couldn’t be helped.” Harry shrugs a burly shoulder. “That’s not why I wanted to catch up with you. I’ve got a guest coming this afternoon. He organizes the thing upstate we talked about. He’d like to meet you.”

  “Sure. Lo and I were going to do a pony scene with the girls this afternoon, but there’s no rush.”

  “He’s bringing his sub. I bet he’d love to join in if you’ll have them.”