Ethan’s NaughtySubmissive: Silver Creek Resort Book Three

by Barron, Melinda

“If it was, then it would be in the file,” Cecily said. “The cops would have talked to whoever she was meeting here, and it would be in the file.” She sighed deeply. “I hate to admit when this happens, but you’re right. We shouldn’t be here. We should be back at the tree house.”

  “Always listen to your older brother,” Marcus said with a laugh. “As long as we’re here, maybe we should go outside and walk that way to the parking garage. You can look at the area in a whole different light.”

  “You’ve got that right,” she said.

  Marcus took a few steps, but Cecily stayed in the middle of the room.

  “Now that I’m here, I don’t think I want to see it,” she said. “When we checked in, we didn’t go through the front door, we went through the side. I feel… weird.”

  Marcus moved back to her side. “Sis, I understand you’re a little freaked out by all this.”

  “A little?”

  “If you don’t go out there and look around, you’re going to kick yourself in the ass when we get back to the tree house.”

  “You’re right, you’re right.”

  “Damn I love hearing those words come from your mouth,” Marcus said. He stepped behind her and pushed on her shoulder. “Move it.”

  They stepped out of the lobby into the bright sunlight. Cecily shielded her eyes, and then glanced at the sidewalk. Since she hadn’t looked at the report, she wasn’t exactly sure where the murder had taken place. She knew Leah got hit by a car, and then shot moments later. But what part of the sidewalk had she been on when it had happened. There were no bloodstains. Why wasn’t there a sign that said, ‘A murder took place here’?

  It had all seemed so clinical when they were talking about it, but now that she was here, where Leah Pratt had taken her last breath, she wanted to do nothing more than leave.

  “Marcus, let’s go,” she said. Cecily glanced around her, and panic started to take hold when she didn’t see her brother. But then she caught sight of his blue shirt. He stood near the sidewalk, people milling about, sidestepping him as he stared down. She walked toward him, ready to let him know she was ready to leave. Now.

  “You won’t always have your minders,” a voice behind her said.

  “What?” Cecily turned, just as someone pushed her. If someone hadn’t stepped in front of her there was every chance she would have fallen into the street. As it was, she stumbled right into the people who had tried to move around her.

  “Hey!” a man yelled.

  “Watch it!” a woman cried out.

  Cecily hit the ground on her knees, pain shooting up into her hip. A woman landed next to her and cried out in pain.

  “Hey, stop that woman!” Marcus yelled.

  Cecily looked up in time to see a woman running toward the parking structure. Cecily tried to stand, but she fell back down when her knee gave way.

  “Stay down.”

  “Oh crap,” she said. She looked up to see Ethan standing above her. “This isn’t going to be good.” She sat down on the sidewalk and Ethan knelt beside her. He put his hand on her knee and gently rubbed it.

  “You’ll need to have this looked at.”

  “You’re right about that,” she said. She sat up and winced. “I don’t think it’s broken, though.”

  “I hope not,” Ethan said.

  Seconds later Marcus was back, repeating numbers and over and over.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Write it down, write it down,” Marcus said as he pulled out his cell phone. His fingers flew over the keyboard. His chest heaved and finally he nodded. “Got it.”

  “Got what?” Ethan asked.

  “Another guy and I chased the woman who pushed you,” Marcus said. “I got the license number of the car she got into.”

  “Good job,” Ethan said as he pulled out his own cell phone. “Now, let’s call Chase so he can yell at us.”

  * * *

  Cecily had expected to hear I told you so from the detective when he showed up on the scene. Instead he just shook his head. While they’d waited on him, someone had called for an ambulance. The woman who had gone to the ground at the same time as Cecily was older than her, well into her sixties. The paramedic convinced her to go to the hospital to make sure nothing was broken.

  “You need to go, too,” Chase said to Cecily.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’ll be bruised, but I’m fine.”

  “So you say,” Ethan said.

  “So it was a woman,” Chase said. “Who were you seeing right before you married Leah? Obviously, it was someone who loved you, and still loves you.”

  “There was no one specific,” Ethan said. “I had a few casual relationships, but nothing serious. In fact, most of them come to Silver Creek with their husbands, or lovers. We’re still friends. Nothing that would cause someone to want to murder my wife, and then try and murder the woman I love.”

  Cecily saw him wince.

  “That sounded bad,” he said. “I loved Leah, and I’m in love with Cecily now. I swear to you, Chase, that I have no idea who is doing this.”

  “You hire any women at Silver Creek lately?”

  “No,” Ethan said. “We didn’t have any female applicants when we put out the notice on the BDSM boards.”

  Cecily took in the scene around them. Uniform officers were taking statements from people, at least those who had stuck around to talk to them. She wondered how many people had left, how many people didn’t want to say what they saw?

  “Marcus, did you get a good look at this woman?” Chase asked.

  “Just the back of her head,” Marcus said. “She was average height, with short dark hair.”

  “That could have been a wig,” Chase said. “I’m going inside to look at the security cameras. You guys go back to Dylan’s, if you’re not going to go to the hospital. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Ethan helped Cecily to her feet.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked.

  “I’m going to be bruised,” she said. “Of course I suppose I’m going to be bruised in another way, too.”

  “No,” he said. “I understand why you did what you did. I don’t like it, but I understand it. No punishment for this.”

  Cecily was shocked, so she didn’t respond.

  “Let’s go,” Marcus said. “My Chinese food has worn off. I’ll drive your car and stop and get some fast food. Do you want anything?”

  Cecily and Ethan both shook their heads. All three of them headed toward the parking garage. Cecily felt as if the world was spinning. She must have hit the pavement harder than she’d thought.

  Chapter 10

  “Ouch, ouch, ouch!” Cecily tried to move her knee away from whatever medicine Amanda was applying to Cecily’s skin.

  “You can take a whipping with a single-tail, but you can’t take a scraped knee?” Amanda asked. “You’re a true wimp, aren’t you?”

  “She’s milking it for all she can get,” Marcus said. She did that when we were kids, too. I remember one time when she—”

  “Shut up.” Cecily glared at her brother. “No one wants to hear your stories.”

  “I do, but now’s not the time,” Ethan said. “We’ll schedule a date later.”

  Everyone chuckled, except for Cecily. “You and I had a deal to keep stuff like that quiet, Marcus.”

  Marcus winked at her. “I’m sorry, did you say something?”

  “Up yours,” she said.

  “Not my type of activity,” Marcus said.

  “All right, cut it out,” Ethan said. “We have things that need to be done.”

  “Like what?” Cecily asked. “Chase is trying to figure out what the woman looked like. When he runs down the license plate that Marcus gave them, maybe we’ll have a name. Good job, Marcus. Wait, I don’t think I’ve ever said that.”

  “Will you two please cut it out?” Ethan said sharply.

  “Just trying to break the tension,” Marcus said.

&nbs
p; “Thanksgiving is going to be fun at your house,” Dylan said with a laugh.

  “Thanksgiving. House.” Cecily gasped and put her hand over her mouth. “I haven’t called Mom back. She’s going to be very unhappy with me.”

  “You’ve been busy,” Ethan said.

  “Yeah, I’m going to tell my Mom that I didn’t call back because someone wrote bitch on my front door, and then tried to push me into traffic.” Cecily threw up her hands. “That’s gonna work really well.”

  “We’ll worry about that later,” Ethan said. “I think we need to figure out how they knew where to find us.”

  Cecily bent her knee, winced and bent it again. “If this were a TV show we could use the car’s GPS system to track it, right? I mean doesn’t it work that way?”

  “GPS,” Marcus said thoughtfully. “Or a tracking device that you can buy at pretty much any store and put on a car.”

  “Son of a…” Ethan sprinted toward the front of the house with Dylan hot on his heels. Cecily started to stand, but her brother held up his hand.

  “Stay where you are,” he said.

  “It’s just a scraped knee,” she said. But she knew he was right. Ethan would be very angry with her if she got up and followed them out of the house. The best thing to do was to stay in place and wait for them to return with the evidence.

  Dylan showed up first, and the look on his face showed Marcus had been right. Ethan came back with his phone at his ear. “Just look,” he said. “And while you’re at it, check all the resort vehicles. I don’t know how to check the date on these things.” There was a pause before he said, “No, don’t take it off, Randy. We left the one on my car in place. I don’t want them to know we found it. Okay. Okay.” Another pause and then, “Call me back.”

  He sat down next to Cecily and she put her hand on his thigh.

  “So she knows we’re here,” Cecily said.

  “We’ve put you in danger,” Ethan said.

  “No, she’s after your lovers,” Dylan said. “I still think this is the safest place for you to be.”

  “How do these things work?” Ethan said. “If we call Dawson and ask him to delve into it, I wonder what he could find out.” He pulled out his phone again and then walked into the other room.

  “So there will be one more for dinner,” Amanda said. “We were thinking Italian tonight.”

  “I’ll have food delivered from Capp’s,” Marcus said. “Tonight’s fare is, interestingly enough, Italian. Of course we are offering Tex/Mex, too, if anyone is interested.”

  “I think we should go get it,” Cecily said. “The fewer people who show up here the better.”

  “Agreed,” Marcus said, just as Ethan came back into the room.

  “Dawson is on his way over,” he said. “Something tells me he’ll be able to get to the bottom of the tracker before we can say boo.”

  “Dylan is going after food,” Cecily said, just as Chase called out from the front door.

  “I’m coming in,” he said.

  “We’re in the kitchen,” Amanda called back.

  The look on Chase’s face made Cecily happy she wasn’t a cop and didn’t have to face these types of problems every day like he did.

  “What did you find out?” Ethan asked.

  “The car is used in a ride-share program,” Chase said.

  “Great!” Cecily sat up straighter. “That means you have her address and credit card information.”

  “I wish that were true,” Chase said. “This driver had just dropped off a rider at Tate’s when our female suspect came up to her car and asked her to wait for a moment, that she needed a ride to the bank. The driver decided to take one off the books. The woman told her she had to take care of one thing, and she’d be back. She gave her thirty dollars to wait. When the driver dropped her off at the bank, she told her to keep the change.”

  “Working off the books,” Ethan said.

  “I asked the bank manager if we could see his security film, and he agreed,” Chase said. “The only problem is our female kept her head down, so there’s no way we could get an identity.”

  “What about other cameras in the area?” Ethan asked. “She had to have slipped up at some point.”

  “We don’t have the time or manpower to do something like that,” Chase said. “The car is filled with prints, but we still took them, and are running them. It will take a while, though.”

  Cecily wanted to tell him that Dawson was on his way over, but she wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. Of course if he were still here when Dawson arrived, it might be good to give him a heads up.

  Before she could say anything, though, Ethan told him about the tracker they’d found on the car. “I’m still waiting for word from Silver Creek to see if there are trackers on vehicles there, too.”

  “There will be,” Chase said. “Did you take the tracker off?” When Ethan answered him, Chase nodded. “I don’t know the technical part of it, but I’m sure you know someone who does.”

  Cecily’s mouth dropped open. She was shocked that he’d just basically given them the go ahead for Dawson to do his thing and help them.

  “Are you not going to yell at us for going to Tate’s?” Cecily asked.

  “You’re adults,” Chase said.

  “Stay for dinner,” Amanda offered.

  “Can’t,” he said. “I have other plans. But I will be by tomorrow to have coffee, and I might even bring doughnuts.”

  “Try scones,” Cecily said. “They are better.”

  “To you.” Chase held up one finger, and then turned and left the room.

  “He wanted to leave before Dawson got here,” Ethan said. “Then he’ll come by in the morning so we can tell him what we found out.”

  “I’m going to get some alcohol. Lots of it. I think we need a drink or two,” Marcus said. “I’ll be back in an hour or so. Make margaritas.”

  “Bring an ID,” Cecily yelled after him. “We don’t serve minors here.”

  “I’m older than you,” Marcus yelled back.

  “We’re talking mental, not physical,” Cecily yelled back.

  “Cut it out or I’ll take you both over my knee,” Ethan said.

  Cecily laughed. She tried to respond but laughed harder.

  “Oh baby, be prepared to follow through on your threat,” Marcus said, and they all laughed. The front door slammed, and Cecily took Ethan’s hand.

  “One thing you should know about Marcus.” She looked at them all.

  “He does not allow anyone to get the final word in a conversation. And I do mean anyone.”

  “That’s a frightening thought,” Ethan said. “Let’s change the subject, shall we? Babe, you should call your parents. Set up lunch for tomorrow. We’ll be careful not to let them know what is happening. And then let’s set up a meeting with that real estate agent.”

  “Are we going to tell my parents we’re engaged, or are we going to wait for a while?” she asked.

  Before he could answer, someone knocked on the front door.

  “That should be your friend Dawson,” Dylan said. He started for the front door, and then he stopped. “You have met him, haven’t you?”

  “Nope,” Ethan said. He pulled out his phone and pressed a few buttons. Cecily watched as Randy’s face filled the screen.

  “We’re still checking, but we’ve found two so far, one on a Silver Creek truck, the other on Cecily’s car,” Randy said.

  “Fantastic,” Ethan said, sarcastically. “We’re about to let in your friend Dawson. Since I’ve never met him, I want you to confirm that it’s him.”

  Dylan came back, followed by a thirtyish man with close-cropped dark hair. He wore jeans and a t-shirt, and his glasses gave him a very nerdy look.

  “Is this him?” Ethan asked. He turned the phone toward the newcomer.

  Cecily saw Dawson wave, and Randy said, “Hey man, good to see you again.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” Ethan said. “Thanks. Let me know what els
e you find.”

  Dawson flashed a brilliant smile. “I need a place to set up my laptops. Someplace quiet, preferably where I won’t be disturbed. And access to your Wi-Fi. It’s secured, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Dylan said. “I’ll set you up in the library. It has a desk, and I’ll get you the password.”

  “We’re having dinner in about an hour and a half,” Cecily said. “Shall we call you out for it?”

  “Nope,” Dawson said. “If I haven’t come out yet I would appreciate a plate, though. But something tells me I will be out before dinner. Now, where’s the tracking device, and which security cameras need to be viewed?”

  Dylan indicated he should follow him. Dawson stopped at the doorway to the kitchen. “I would appreciate a great deal of iced tea, though. Lemon. No sugar.”

  “I’m on it,” Amanda said.

  “I want to go take a shower,” Cecily said as she stood on a wobbly knee.

  “I’ll go with you,” Ethan said. “Just to check the closets and make sure you don’t fall down in the shower. We’ll be back in time for dinner.”

  “Don’t forget to check under the bed,” Amanda said.

  Cecily chuckled as they headed out the door.

  “You feeling okay?” Ethan asked.

  “My knee is very sore,” she said. “And I’m not looking forward to the spanking I’m about to get.” She stopped. “I can’t believe those words just came out of my mouth.”

  “Like I said, no spanking for you tonight,” he said. He took both her hands in his and looked her in the eye. “But if you put yourself in danger again you won’t taste the single tail for the rest of the year.”

  The deep tone of his voice told her he was very serious.

  “I promise, Master,” she said. “I just hated the idea of being left behind.”

  “I understand that,” he kissed the tip of her nose. “Now, let’s go take that shower while I figure out some fun for tonight that won’t involve you getting on your knees. It sounds to me like it’s a bend over and take what I give you night.”

  Cecily smiled. She liked the sound of that.

  * * *

  Ethan wasn’t sure if he trusted Dawson, despite the fact that Randy knew him well, and said he could be trusted with anything. Someone who could break into anyone’s computer and find things that weren’t meant to be seen could be good for some people, but not for others.