“I wish I had known you better,” she said stepping into an elevator. “Are you still there? I’m in the elevator.”
“You shouldn’t have any reception problems in the hospital—even in the elevators. The phone companies have us well covered because they know how important it is we have service.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the parking lot. I ran to Starbucks to get you some coffee.”
“Oh. Thank you, sir.”
“Do you know what I remember about you?” he asked, but continued without pausing. “I remember whenever our eyes met in the hall, your gaze dropped to the floor. Even then that turned me on.”
The doors open and Nyxie stepped out. “I could tell you were searching the crowds for me. I thought you were going to knock my books on the floor. When looking down kept me safe the first time, I always did it. I hope it doesn’t hurt your feelings that I thought that.”
“No. I saw it then as Yin to my Yang.”
A very soft gasp came from her end of the line. She cupped her hand over her mouth as she spoke because other people were nearby. “That’s why you liked me, because you thought I’d be submissive?”
“Not in those words, but kind of. At that age, I didn’t understand my urges. I knew they were outside the norm. It’s probably a good thing that we never got together then. I would hate to think what my teenage hormones would have done with those impulses.”
At that moment, the second elevator car opened up and Declan stepped out, leaving the car empty. He smiled at her and hung up the phone.
“Let me get Junior on the phone and then we’ll go in.” He handed her the coffee and took the heavy gym bag from her shoulder.
Seeing the look of fear, he understood she was worried she would get arrested for neglecting the people she loved most in the world. Declan wrapped his arm around her and did not release her until the lawyer was on the phone.
The tiny three sided room overflowed into the main ward and Declan suggested they move the interview into a nearby break room.
“I’m one of Cody’s doctors. You should know we’ve engaged an attorney to help fight CPS for custody. We have the attorney on the phone.”
“Hello, I’m Junior Vaughn. In the future, all interviews will be done by appointment with me or one of my associates present.”
“Uh,” Chief Vincent Hale said obviously surprised by the turn of events. “Actually, we’re not here about Cody’s accident, we’re here investigating Mandy Carmichael’s disappearance. We didn’t know it was a possibility she did not leave town of her own free will until CPS asked questions about Mandy.”
Nyxie’s body nearly sagged with relief.
“I can’t really add much to it, unless you want to hear all the graphic shit. If she’s dead, Daddy killed her and he’s dead now; so what’s the point?”
The chief of police shook his head. “Don’t you want to know for sure if your mother still alive?”
Her eyes closed for a few seconds. “When I was a teenager, it was easier to think she ran away than it was to think my father murdered her. Now it’s easier to think he murdered her, than she abandoned Cody and me with Daddy.”
The chief had the good grace to look uncomfortable knowing he, too, had left Nyxie and Cody in Jack Carmichael’s hands. “Do you remember when this was exactly?”
“Cody had just turned five. I remember because he was in pre-kinder. I was thirteen—the end of eighth grade.” She paused as she did the math in her head. “That would’ve been 2004, I think. In the spring, March or April. Maybe you can check the electric company records to find when the electricity was turned back on. That was the day.
“Daddy came home drunk around midnight and wanted to know where the money to turn on the electricity came from. At first, Mama said she’d been saving up for a car, but even I knew that wasn’t true. Then she said she found a truck driver’s wallet in the parking lot of the truck stop. But if that was true, why didn’t she say so to begin with? Daddy wasn’t drunk enough to believe her. It was no secret she sometimes turned tricks to earn extra money,” she said with her eyes fixed on the chief’s badge.
“Go on.”
“He dragged Cody and me from the closet where we slept, telling us to look at our whore mother. When he started hitting her and throwing her around the room, Cody and I got under the bed way in the corner so he couldn’t reach us.”
Nyxie took a deep breath in through her mouth and exhaled before she continued. “He raped her and choked her and smashed her head on the floor. I must’ve gone to sleep 'cause I don’t remember anything after that. The next day, Daddy told us she ran off with a truck driver.”
Declan knew instinctively, she didn’t go to sleep in the middle of the attack, but her brain went to that same place it went when CPS took Lotus and Reina.
“You never reported her missing?”
“If she ran off with a truck driver, she wasn’t exactly missing.”
The officer lowered his notebook as his eyes met hers.
“Do you think she’s dead?” he asked in his thick Southern accent.
Onyx stared at the man; his weathered expression showed compassion she never felt when he brought her drunken father home.
“Yes.” Her eyes burned as if someone had just thrown sand in her face and she shut the lids for several seconds until the burning stopped.
“Do you think your father killed her?”
She took a deep breath before she answered. “Yes.”
The second officer stepped forward with something that looked like a fishing tackle box. “We want to do a DNA test—see if any of the Jane Does might be your mother.”
Declan looked down at the phone. “Junior, is that all right?”
“Yeah, I think it can only help our case if Mom is proven dead. Nyxie and her sister would be Cody’s next closest kin. And from what she says, no one would give custody to her sister.”
“I really don’t think she’s going to be a Jane Doe. We didn’t have a car. He would have buried her nearby or tossed her in a dumpster.
Declan watched closely as the small-town cop did the DNA scraping from the inside of her cheek—watching to make sure he didn’t contaminate the sample.
“We want to know what you’ve discovered about Cody’s accident,” Declan demanded of the chief.
“All evidence points towards a tragic accident. The driver, Jonah Travis, seventeen, started working at the Pizza Palace delivering pizzas two days before. He was a little lost, looking for the address and didn’t see Cody until he was right in front of him.”
Declan folded his arms over his chest. His expression showed his dislike for the man’s answer. He wondered if the lack of investigation was laziness, incompetence or if the boy’s family had influence in the community. “If he couldn’t find the house, could he have been on his cell phone asking for directions?”
“He said he wasn’t.”
“Did you talk to Lotus or Reina,” Nyxie asked. “They wouldn’t have been far away. Cody took his responsibility of watching them seriously.”
“The girls saw it?” Declan asked. “Junior, can you see that the girls get counseling?”
“I will put in a request this afternoon,” the attorney said over the phone.
“So that’s it. The punk said I was looking for an address, runs over a kid on a bike and that’s it? Why is a seventeen-year-old delivering pizza? Did OSHA change the rules? A few years ago the minimum age for a pizza delivery driver was nineteen.”
“Look,” the chief said. “I get that it feels like we have to blame someone when a tragedy happens. But sometimes, it’s no one’s fault. It’s why they call it an accident.”
13
Nyxie spent twenty minutes with Cody assuring herself nothing changed while she slept, and it was unlikely anything would change while she went home for a few hours. She talked to him, held his hand and used her fingertips to kiss the cheek of the boy she barely recognized as her brother.
Declan grabbed her phone and charger and led her out to his Jeep. “If we weren’t expecting a very important call or two, I’d consider taking the top off.” He looked up at the sky and saw the orangey tint of dust in the distance. “Or maybe not.”
After he started the vehicle, turning the air conditioning on full blast, he plugged his phone into one of the USB ports and hers into the other. He synced her phone with the Jeep’s hands-free feature.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s so we can talk over the speakers—unless you don’t want me to hear your conversation.”
“Oh. That’s fine.”
They picked up fast food roast beef sandwiches and mocha shakes on the way out of town—not his usual fare when he wasn’t working, but he really didn’t want to take time to stop and eat. And unless she was going to feed him, even a fast food salad would be impossible to manage on the drive. Declan momentarily toyed with the idea of having her feed him, but decided he liked to control the balance of toppings in each bite too much.
He liked to control everything.
“We need to talk about limits,” he said without preamble. “I realize that you’ve never participated in the lifestyle and we’re going to have to set some limits as we figure them out.”
Onyx looked down at her sandwich, her appetite suddenly gone. She had been dreading this conversation. Once they set limits, it would be as if she’d given him permission to begin hurting her.
“Sir, if you are my Dom and I am your sub, shouldn’t I submit to you the power to do what you want?”
“Never do that. A Dom, even the best Dom, needs limits. By nature we want to push you to the edge of your endurance. I’m sure subs have occasionally been injured by overzealous masters.”
A sigh of resignation escaped her lips as she forced herself to take the last bite before she wadded up her empty wrapper and put it back in the bag. “I don’t even know enough about sex to know what limits to set, sir.”
He glanced over his left shoulder as they entered the highway. “I’m sorry your past experiences have been less than satisfying. But if you can orgasm by your own hand, you can during intercourse.”
“I think you’re going to be disappointed in me. I don’t think I’m like other women.”
He turned and peeked at her. His eyes took in her apprehensive look then made a show of raking her body before returning to the road. “How so? I haven’t seen any body parts that weren’t supposed to be there,” he said with amusement.
She turned and looked out the window, watching the tumbleweeds and trash blow across the cotton fields. It was too early for the bolls to open up so it just looked like rows and rows of knee-high green plants.
“The women at work are always panting over cute customers or famous actors—it’s like they’re always in a state of arousal looking for a man. I used to wonder if I was gay, but I’m not attracted to women at all.”
He stared straight out in front of the steering wheel as he tried to analyze why. If her weight had stopped her period, it could certainly affect her libido. But he suspected, like a married couple with children, she just had no time or energy to devote to her sex life. She worked sixty hours a week he found out when CPS interviewed her and took on all the adult responsibilities in her home. Sex would have been a low priority.
“You must get horny sometimes if you masturbate.”
Her cheeks burned scarlet as she continued to stare out the window. “I don’t touch myself because I’m horny. I do it to relieve stress.”
He chuckled lightly. “Do you? Then I bet you’re dying to get off right now.”
“I’m too stressed now. I’d rub myself raw trying,” she said flatly. “God, I can’t believe we’re discussing this like it’s the most normal thing in the world.”
He took his eyes off the road as long as he dared to take in her blush of embarrassment, knowing they would have few secrets in a very short period of time, that the sweet innocent young woman would soon be a thing of the past. He picked up his phone and took a quick picture of her. He then took a second one when she turned at the sound of the shutter.
“I know a better way to relieve your stress.”
“I don’t drink or do drugs and I’m not going to for you and your little sex games either.”
“Nyxie, lose the fucking attitude or you’re going to learn about my way of stress relief sooner than later.”
She defiantly looked at him in the eye before dropping her gaze. “I’m sorry, sir. Having grown up with alcoholic parents, I feel very strongly about it.”
“I know, Nyxie. I wasn’t talking about that. I want to spank you hard and let you have a good cry afterwards. Many subs I’ve been with feel the relief of tension afterwards. Not to get too technical, but pain releases chemicals in your brain just like an orgasm does.”
“Is that why they want it?”
He reached out his right hand and interlaced his fingers with hers. “There is pleasure in pain, Nyxie. It’s even talked about in the Kama Sutra. People think it started with the Marquis de Sade, but he was just the first prominent European to write about it. I’m sure it’s been around since Sodom and Gomorrah at least.”
She looked out the window at the never-ending flatness and the dirty sky filled with dust.
“Well,” he said. “At least you set your second hard limit; no touching your throat and no drugs or alcohol.”
“For you either. You can’t touch me with liquor on your breath.”
“You can’t be serious.”
The hard expression she wore surprised him. “I can’t smell that odor without instantly thinking about Daddy. I want you in control of your faculties when you’re hurting me. I need to know you aren’t going to go into a drunken rampage and kill me ‘cause you’re mad the Cowboys lost the game.”
“It’s not like that, Nyxie. I wish I had recorded this conversation so I could play it back to you a year from now. You are building this up in your mind as an abusive relationship where I’m going to get drunk and fly off the handle and blacken both your eyes.”
She pulled her hand out of his and crossed her arms over her chest. “You need to exit here so I can get my purse at the truck stop.”
He took the off ramp to the access road and crossed under the highway to the diner where she worked. The tires of the Jeep crunched on the caliche of the parking lot and slid slightly as he pulled to a stop.
“Jimbo’s here. I need to…. Oh, God, where’s his credit card?”
“I’ve got it, Nyxie. It was in the pocket of your uniform and I put it in my wallet for safekeeping,” he said. “Did you charge anything besides that pizza?”
“No.”
“Good. I’ll give him some money to cover it, so you won’t have to worry about paying him back.”
She unbuckled her seatbelt and reached for the door handle. “I’ve got money in my purse. I can pay him back.”
“I’ll get your door and give him the money. I want to make sure he understands you are paid in full.”
Nyxie understood then, it was not about the money, but about the possessive nature of a Dom/sub relationship.
This was going to be so embarrassing. Everyone knew she never had a boyfriend before—they teased her about it enough. Sometimes they called her Virgin Mary Mary Mary because she had three children and her virginity.
Worse yet, what would they think of her knowing Cody had spent days in a coma and she’d been picking up men at the hospital?
“You can stay here if you want. I won’t be long.”
He gave her a look of irritation and opened his door. While she waited for him to come around, she pulled her phone off the charger.
“Behave,” he murmured as he helped her out of the Jeep.
“Me? You’re the one who’s planning on going in there and making fools of both of us.”
He gave her a hard look as he released her arm. “How am I going to embarrass us?”
“You’re going to go
in there, hovering over me and acting all alpha male. You’re going to be rude to Jimbo because you think he wants to sleep with me. He doesn’t deserve that. He’s been a customer for years and he’s never once made a pass at me. If he wanted to, he would have by now.”
“That shows how little you know about men. He’ll see this as an opening—because you’re indebted to him now. He’s your knight in shining armor. I bet he does something he’s never done before—kiss you, hug you, hold your hand—some kind of physical contact.”
She made a scoffing sound. “That shows what you know. I was going to go in there and give him a big hug for what he did for me.”
“Don’t you dare,” he said low and slow.
She gave him a saucy smile and darted for the entrance completely forgetting his edict about opening doors.
He caught up with her inside where one of the other waitresses held her in an embrace. It seemed to take her off guard. She looked rigid and uncomfortable.
“Nyxie, introduce me to your friend.” He said the only thing he could think of to break the contact. Was she like that when he embraced her? Surely, he would’ve noticed. He had noticed her reaction when Joseph patted her back. When she had said she didn’t like being touched by people she didn’t know well, he thought she just said it to cover his rudeness.
Nyxie pushed her away and moved closer to Declan. How odd that she felt more comfortable around him than one of her coworkers. People, customers and employees alike, crowded around her eager to hear news of Cody.
“How is he, Nyxie? How’s Cody.”
“He still critical,” Declan answered when she hesitated. “We’re keeping him in a coma a little longer, but the pressure on his brain is going down.”
“Y’all remember Declan Stryker, don’t you?” Nyxie said trying to make everyone feel as if they already knew him. “Coach Stryker’s son…. He nearly led us to state his senior year.”
There was a collective acknowledgment by the locals. It didn’t matter if they had kids in the high school, nearly every family in town turned out on Fridays for the home games. “He’s one of Cody’s doctors. He saved his life.”
The Love She Craves: Selling Her Soul to Declan Page 11
