He scratched the last possibility off his list. No one had ever proved that psychic powers existed. Those who had tried were often revealed to be second-rate magicians. There was money, good money, being offered to anyone who could prove the existence of psychic phenomena to trained researchers, and no one had collected the money yet. So that left uncannily lucky, or complicit.
“Have you seen anyone besides me, since you— I mean, since Mommy got lost?”
“No.” She looked as if she might cry again. “Nobody.”
They walked about a quarter of a mile together before Clara announced that she was tired. He picked her up. If the ground had been more open, he would have tried setting her on his shoulders the way he did with his nephews and his niece, but she’d get whapped by a low hanging branch every thirty feet.
Sixty seconds later, she was asleep. She felt warm and comfortable in his arms, and she was such a tiny thing she didn’t even slow him down. To serve and protect was what had got him involved in police work in the beginning, and no one needed protection more than Clara did at that moment. Someday maybe I’ll have a few kids of my own. I just have to find the right woman first. Marisa popped into his mind, and he frowned. Right woman and hot chick are not the same thing. Besides, I haven’t even seen her with her clothes on.
Chapter Two
Marisa sat at the computer, holding the steaming cup of tea near her cheek. The steam helped clear her nose, and she needed the caffeine to keep herself awake and focused on the task. The C++ code on the screen was as obfuscated as any she’d seen, and she suspected it’d been written that way on purpose. No one could be stupid enough to code it so badly on accident, with variable names that didn’t indicate what purpose they served, no comments to speak of, and convoluted subroutine calls. It could be a sort of job security, writing code that no one else could understand. Wiser programmers knew it could also make you impossible to promote. In this case, neither had happened; the man who had written the particular mess Marisa was supposed to clean up had gotten another job offer and moved on. Sooner or later, it was likely he’d find himself stuck maintaining his own code for the rest of his life, unable to get a good recommendation. Karmic retribution could be a bitch sometimes.
Her first task was to go through the code and add comments as she tried to unravel the puzzle. She was good at what she did, and a few months of work for hire each year paid for groceries and the mortgage. She sipped her tea thoughtfully.
She remembered the policeman’s threat from the night before. While she hadn’t had another vision, she was certain he’d found the girl right where she’d told him to look, which meant he’d be by with questions. The worst part about that was that she actually wanted to see him again. Why is it always the jerks who are so good-looking? But she’d felt the lust in his gaze, and her body had responded. There’s no way he’s going to sleep with me. He’s a cop, and he’s decided I’m a suspect. But that tight ass, those muscles. Yum. And he’s seen me naked. It seems unfair I didn’t get to see him naked too. She somehow doubted he’d be convinced by that line of argument.
For a moment the idea of a love spell passed through her mind. It would solve all sorts of problems, end any police inquiry, and get her some lovemaking at the same time. It had been a long time since she’d been with a man, and he fit her fantasies well. She believed in relationships of equality; it was the tug of dominance that made her wet. Nolan had an air of command to him, but the karmic backlash of bending someone to her will wouldn’t be worth it. Besides, it was wrong. Men weren’t usually worth the bother, anyway. They can’t all be jerks. I’m probably just unlucky or too strange.
She was on her feet, still holding the tea cup, fifteen feet from the computer. When did that happen? It wasn’t a horribly unusual occurrence, although once she got into something she could work for hours and not notice time flying by until her tummy rumbles got too loud to ignore. That was why the pizza delivery place in town was the one and only number on speed dial on her phone. They didn’t usually deliver this far out, but they knew Marisa would pay extra for their trouble.
She walked back to the computer, sat back down, and stared at the code some more. This subroutine doesn’t even do anything. What the fuck? She didn’t delete it, although she would eventually. Instead she turned the whole section into a comment, which wouldn’t execute, and did the same thing with the line that called the routine.
The doorbell rang, and Marisa jumped, sloshing tea on the keyboard. No one ever rang the bell, and she’d been expecting Nolan to want to ask her questions. Maybe he sent someone else. Maybe it’s the postman doing his rounds early.
But when she looked through the peep hole, she saw Nolan Coralone. Fine. She took a deep breath and opened the door. “Hello, Sergeant. Won’t you come in?”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said and walked in.
She loved the way a man looked in uniform. It wasn’t very witchy of her to have a fetish for a man in modern clothes, but she hadn’t conformed at any other point in her life, and she wasn’t going to be a stereotype now. She gestured to the various chairs and couches in the living room. Her computer was there too. Most of her house went unused, save for the living room, kitchen, and her bedroom. The place was too big for her, but the location was perfect. “Can I get you any tea? Soda? Water? Wine?”
“I can’t drink on duty, Ms. Clarke, but water would be fine.” He took a place on the couch where he had a good view of the kitchen, and she felt his gaze on her back as she poured a tall cup from the tap.
She brought it back. “Would you like hemlock with that? Or Yohimbe bark?”
“Isn’t hemlock poisonous?” He took the glass from her hand.
I should put a leash on my sense of humor. “Well, yes. But you seemed to be watching me rather closely, as if I might poison you, and I thought I’d offer in case I was a disappointment.”
The corner of his eye crinkled, the only indication that he understood it was a joke. “And what does Yohimbe bark do?”
She chuckled. “It’s good for erectile dysfunction.”
He laughed. “Okay, okay. Not an issue, I can assure you.”
“Good to know.” No. I am not going to flirt with him.
He waited for her to take a seat on the chair opposite him. “We found the little girl. She was exactly where you told me she would be. I talked to her for a while, and she didn’t remember seeing you. Neither did the mother. So the question remains, how did you know where she was? And don’t give me that nonsense about visions.”
She sipped her tea, biting back her first, angry reaction. There was no point in getting defensive. “You’ve rejected the most obvious hypothesis, Officer. So what is left? I’m just extraordinary lucky. A chance in a million that my random place happened to be the right one.”
He shook his head. “If psychic powers existed, we’d know by now.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
He frowned but seemed to take a moment to think it over.
“What was threatening her, Nolan?” She hadn’t meant to use his first name or show any sign that she remembered it even, but it had come out anyway. She had never been a formal person.
He raised his eyebrows. “Don’t your psychic powers tell you things like that?”
She shrugged. “I get to see what I get to see. That’s all. Before you told me it was a little girl that was missing…” She let her voice trail off. She didn’t see what good it would do to tell him the details of her vision.
“There was a coyote. It probably wouldn’t have dared attack her. They’re usually pretty wary of humans.”
She heard a but in his voice, so she pressed. “Usually.”
“Bad things have been known to happen. And coyotes crossbreed with dogs and wolves. There are very few purebred coyotes out there, if any. Those with a bit of dog in them are more likely to approach a human, and as a result, there have been a few attacks on small children.”
“But the little girl wasn’t hurt?
”
“Scared. But not hurt. And given the situation, she was actually very brave.”
“Good for her.” Marisa took a nice sip of hot tea, relieved.
He fixed her with a hard look. “You didn’t seem too worried about her when I came in.”
“Is that a statement or a question, Officer?”
“Make it a question.”
“I knew you’d take care of it. I knew she’d be okay the moment you left to search for her.” She remembered his actions the night before. “And thank you for avoiding my circle rather than barging through it. For someone who doesn’t believe in such things, you can be polite about it when you choose to be.”
“If you’re involved, Ms. Clarke, we’re going to find out.”
“And you can be very rude when you choose to be too. Thank you for the demonstration.” She stood, taking her tea cup with her. “I have work to do. On my computer, so I won’t offer to let you search through my hard drive unless you have a warrant. But you’re welcome to go through the rest of the house and do whatever detecting you feel you need to do. The grounds as well. Enjoy yourself. I know there’s not much crime out there, so maybe it’ll spare a few people some speeding tickets. I have nothing to hide.” She sat in front of the computer again, turning her back to him.
“That’s not wise,” he said, with none of the antagonism she’d heard before.
She shrugged.
“Everyone has something to hide,” he told her. “But since you’ve given me permission, I’ll search. I’ll try not to bother you.”
She ignored him and focused on the screen. My, what a wicked web you’ve woven, asshole programmer. But the worse it is, the more in it for me. Her fingers went clickety-clack, adding comments, changing the names of variables. She shut out the rest of the house, everything but her and the code. When his cell phone rang an hour later, she stopped only long enough to conclude that it wasn’t hers.
GOOD GOING, NOLAN. He hadn’t met a woman who interested him in the last year and a half in Breksville. He’d compiled a good record of success at his job, but it was almost impossible for him to find a date in a small town. Oh, women found him attractive enough. And as a dominant, figuring out if a woman was submissive wasn’t usually very hard. But just because a woman preferred to let the man take the lead didn’t necessarily mean she had a taste for kink. In a small community, gossip traveled fast. A lot of people were open-minded, but a lot of people weren’t.
Marisa, on the other hand, clearly didn’t care about fitting in. And she was smart, because whatever she was doing on the computer was way past anything he understood. Brains were at least as important to his libido as a sexy body; Marisa had both. Nice curves. He remembered the way her nipples stuck out in the cool midnight air, begging to be touched and teased. Or pinched with fingers or a clamp. Not unlike the one he’d found when he opened a drawer in her bedroom, connected to its mate with a silver chain. Reluctantly, he’d closed the drawer, because it had nothing in the way of evidence for him, but not before he’d noticed a glass dildo, anal beads, and a leather collar. Marisa obviously had a taste for kink, and he was pretty sure she wouldn’t appreciate how he’d found out.
She did tell me I could search the place.
He’d just received a call that exonerated Marisa beyond any reasonable doubt of complicity in Carla’s disappearance. The expert tracker they’d called in from Richmond had gone over where Carla had been found, and stated with complete certainty that no human had been there except a little girl and someone heavy wearing policeman’s boots. Nolan himself, in other words. The area where Carla had disappeared had been stomped on by too many people searching for her, but that didn’t matter. Carla had simply wandered off, as she had said and as her mother had said, exactly as the tracks they could find indicated. Open-and-shut. There was simply no other explanation that fit the facts.
Of course, there wasn’t any explanation for Marisa knowing where Carla could be found, either. Nolan was stuck with what Marisa had offered him, the idea that it was a one-chance-in-a-million lucky guess. He liked that better than psychic powers and magic. It was a big world. One-in-a-million things happened all the time. In any case, he’d pissed off the one woman within fifty miles who might be interested in what he could offer in the way of a relationship, and who happened to be as sexy as hell.
And sexy she certainly was. It wasn’t just that he’d seen her naked and checked out her curves, although her full breasts and round ass would be haunting his dreams for weeks to come. Or even that she was into kink. She’d carved out a life for herself, working independently. Even her religion was independent. He was attracted to that, in spite of the fact that his own work life as a cop was very structured. Or maybe because of it.
He walked downstairs. She didn’t turn around, although she surely heard him on her creaky staircase.
He cleared his throat. She tapped away on the keyboard.
“I apologize, Ms. Clarke.”
For a moment he thought she was going to ignore that too, because her fingers didn’t stop on the keyboard. But finally, she twisted in the chair. “There’s nothing to apologize for. You were doing your job. I have to admit that if I believed what you believe, I’d be pretty suspicious of me too. And I can’t offer any proof or anything to convince you to believe differently. I am who I am. My experience tells me one thing. Your experience tells you the other.”
“A tracker looked at the place Carla was found. You haven’t ever been near there, at least not recently.”
She smiled, which made his heart beat faster. It was nearly as nice as her laugh, and he wanted to see more of both. “Hopefully it won’t require any belief in magic on your part to accept that I already knew that I hadn’t been there.”
He chuckled. Smart, curvy, and a dry humor. He searched her eyes, trying to figure her out. Yeah, it wasn’t too hard to tell if someone was submissive at a BDSM club in the city or on a date for dinner. But this situation was something else entirely. Just as not every submissive woman necessarily had a taste for kink, not every kinky woman wanted a power exchange. Marisa was clearly independent and strong enough to forge her own way in life. He liked that in a woman. Even if she would enjoy giving up control in the bedroom, he didn’t think she would take kindly to him taking advantage of his position as a policeman, or respond well to any caveman tactics.
“Marisa. May I call you Marisa?” He felt stupid the moment the words left his mouth. This was hopeless. In other circumstances, maybe, but he’d ruined any chance he’d had with her.
“I wish you would, Nolan. No one calls me Ms. Clarke. Ms. Clarke was my mother.”
He nodded, trying not to show how relieved he was. “Thank you for your help yesterday. Lucky guess or not, it would have been hours until we searched that area, and that coyote—well, I don’t know what would have happened. I’d like to believe she would have been safe either way, hungrier and more frightened but safe.”
Marisa stood. She was half a head shorter than he was, and while he’d seen her naked, they’d never been so close. She smelled like roses, sweet and soft. “I’m very glad she’s safe. And that you believed me at least enough to look, for whatever reason, even if it was because you thought a witch might be up to mischief. Don’t sell your own role in rescuing her short, Nolan. I would have gone looking for her, although I wouldn’t have known exactly what I was looking for, but it would have taken me a good deal of time to get dressed and get my way through all the brush.”
He was touched by the fact that after the way he’d treated her as a suspect, she was still concerned about how he saw himself. If their positions had been reversed, he’d be throwing her out of his house. His gaze dropped to her T-shirt, which tightly hugged the breasts he’d thought about ever since he saw her naked. He’d had to jerk off before he could get to sleep, because he couldn’t get her body out of his head. There’s no place like 127.0.0.1, the shirt said and had a picture of two red shoes. He lifted his gaze to meet h
ers, and her eyebrows were arched.
I’ve been busted. And no, I wouldn’t be trying to throw her out of my house, under any conditions. I’d be trying to get into her pants, the way I am now. But if I want her, I’m going to have to bide my time. “Just reading your shirt, ma’am. What’s it mean?”
“So I’m ma’am now, am I?”
“Curious, I’ve never objected to being called sir.”
Her cheeks reddened. “I’d rather you called me Marisa.” She glanced down as if she didn’t know what shirt she had on, and then back up. “127.0.0.1 is an IP address that points back to whatever computer you’re using. Home, in other words.”
He chuckled. “Ah.”
“Those are ruby slippers,” she added unnecessarily. “Like in The Wizard of Oz.”
“Thank you very much for your time, Marisa.” At least she wasn’t a domme. He doubted any domme would correct him for saying ma’am. And her blush at his suggestion that he didn’t object to sir was a good sign too. “Again, my apologies for suspecting you.”
She smiled. “Don’t worry about it, Nolan. We all have our own paths to follow, and they aren’t all the same.” She walked him to the door to let him out. When he turned to look back, halfway down the path, she was still standing in the doorway. She waved and then backed up and closed the door.
What a beautiful sight that would be every morning when I go to work. He kicked himself mentally and walked to his patrol car. It was one thing to think about fucking her or tying her up or kissing those soft luscious lips. Thinking about setting up house was completely crazy.
He opened the car door and paused, looking back at the house. “I’ll be back,” he said to himself. “I’ll be back.”
Chapter Three
Marisa twirled the glass of red wine as she sat on the couch. She was wearing shorts and an oversize long-sleeved T-shirt that contained five lines of code you could find in a few dozen places on the Internet, but which somehow the government quixotically banned for export. This shirt is a munition, the shirt said. It was comfortable, and she wore it mostly at home because she didn’t figure people would get the joke.
Submissive by Moonlight Page 2
