DutyBoundARe

by Sidney Bristol

  “What’s up with the serious face?” she asked, glancing at him as she moved both their sandwiches to the skillet.

  “I’ll wait till you’re done,” he replied.

  “Okay.” She shrugged and kept her attention on the skillet.

  “Gator been out lately?”

  “I took him out about half an hour ago.” He’d mentioned that he came home during lunch to walk Gator and eat, but with the impending rain she’d taken the chance when it presented itself to get the dog out for a while.

  Mathieu lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment. She didn’t know what he made working as a detective, but she’d expected someplace a little nicer than the third floor walk-up in an old, refurbished brick building with shutters tacked on outside the windows and a balcony about to fall off the wall. It wasn’t so much the place he lived as the feel of being with him that had unnerved her.

  It was nice. Pleasant even.

  Mathieu might give her the silent treatment, but there was something else, something unspoken that gave her the sense of safety, of being wrapped in a warm blanket.

  She’d slept in his bed last night, surrounded by his scent and his things. For the first time in weeks she hadn’t started awake, certain that whatever sounds she heard were Seth coming to get her.

  Lisette pulled the sandwiches out of the skillet as the cheese began to puddle on the bottom of the pan. She plopped them down on the finest of paper plates. The man really was living the bachelor life, it would seem.

  “Here we go.” She handed him the bigger sandwich with a smile and flipped the burner off.

  Mathieu’s gaze flicked over hers, and for the fraction of a second it felt as if the earth stopped spinning. He rocked her world and didn’t even know it.

  Lisette gave herself a little shake and gathered her sandwich and a glass of tea before joining him on the sofa. There wasn’t even room for a dinette set in the apartment, which was a crying shame.

  She settled in on the worn sofa, folding her legs underneath her. Gator stared up at her with sad, brown eyes.

  “Stop begging, you hog,” Mathieu snapped, but there was no heat in his voice.

  Gator trotted to the other end of the couch and repeated his begging attempt with another audience. Mathieu grumbled and pulled a tidbit of ham from his sandwich, covered in cheese and pesto.

  Big softie.

  She bit into her sandwich before she said it.

  “Did you sleep alright?” Mathieu nudged Gator toward his bed.

  “I did.” She’d almost slept through Mathieu’s alarm. Instead, she’d woken as he opened the bedroom door, tip-toeing across the squeaky floorboards in nothing but his boxers. She’d watched him through narrowed eyes. There were scars where he’d once had smooth flesh, signs of a life lived on the edge.

  “Good.” He tapped his foot and still refused to look at her.

  “What’s going on with the nervous act?”

  Mathieu slashed his gaze toward her, brows drawing down. He wasn’t the only one who used his powers of observation.

  He sighed and placed the sandwich back on his plate. “I dug around in the recent cases at the station. How long have you been in New Orleans?”

  “A week and a few days. Why?” She nibbled on the corner of her sandwich without tasting it. No. No. No.

  “Nothing for sure, just keeping my eyes open.” And yet he still wouldn’t look at her. It was getting damn annoying.

  “Okay, what did you find?”

  His mouth twisted up and he stared at the coffee table. “Just an assault case. Woman didn’t know the man and the guy got scared off by a pair of college students. Nothing that sounds like what Seth did to you.”

  Her gut screamed, It’s him!

  Did she know that for sure?

  She couldn’t. There was no way of telling if Seth had followed her to The Crescent City or not. Except she felt it. He was there, waiting for her.

  Lisette shook her head, aware that Mathieu was watching her.

  “He can’t find you here,” Mathieu said, his voice low.

  “You’re right. He can’t.” She smiled, more for him than her.

  Now, if she could just believe Mathieu.

  “If you don’t have internet, any idea where I could go to use it?” Lisette had been away from New Orleans for so long her old haunts were gone, destroyed in the wake of Katrina.

  “Don’t most cafés offer it now?”

  “You seriously don’t use the internet?” Lisette was a complete social media junkie. She’d pulled the plug after Chicago on everything except her website, where she was the anonymous owner of Kinky Girl Blogs. Even the other bloggers didn’t know her identity. Considering the nature of what they all blogged about, it was safer that way.

  “Why would I need to? I’ve got an email at work. If anyone needs to talk to me, they can just call me.” Mathieu continued to munch on his sandwich.

  Lisette shook her head.

  Unbelievable.

  She hadn’t met anyone under about fifty who didn’t have at least an email and Facebook account. The entire concept was a little strange to her, but she had to remember she was a transient in Mathieu’s life. He didn’t want her there for long.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Lisette shifted to face him, bobbing her foot off the couch. Gator took it as an invitation and leaned over to lick the soles of her feet. The muscles in her calves constricted at the alien feel of dog tongue.

  Mathieu glanced at her from the corner of his eye. He wanted to tell her no, it was written all over his face. She bet that if it was possible, she’d be gagged and in the closet, but he wasn’t that kind of person. Too bad.

  “You’re going to ask me no matter what I say, so get it over with.”

  “True, but I thought I’d at least ask your permission.”

  “Go ahead.”

  She bit her lip for a moment. Did she want to know? Being near Mathieu had brought all the unresolved tension back up, as if they’d split yesterday, not eight years ago.

  “Why did you break up with me?” Lisette shoved her sandwich in her mouth despite the churning in her stomach.

  Chapter two

  Memories

  Mathieu turned to face her. He should have seen this one coming a mile away. Those memories were better left under lock and key. He’d been at the beginning of a journey back then, and Lisette had stumbled into his path. They should have never been, but he’d wanted her. Time hadn’t changed it, but maybe explaining it to her would help get his head where it needed to be. Off her sweet little ass and back on the case.

  “Because my sister told me to.”

  Lisette blinked at him. She set her sandwich on the plate in her lap and pushed Gator away before he could steal the remains.

  “Let me get this straight.” She cleared her throat and her gaze narrowed. “You broke up with me in college because Lola told you to?”

  “Yes.” It sounded ridiculous, but Lola had been spot on. She always was.

  “Do you care to explain why?” Lines marred her brow and her voice rose.

  Mathieu estimated he was about five seconds from an angry woman melt down. It might be easier to deal with Lisette angry at him, not making his bed and fixing lunch. Except she could call Lola for the rest of the story, so either she heard it from him or her.

  “Not really, but I guess I don’t have a choice. On the surface, I’m a black man from a lower middle class family. You’re a white woman from a well-to-do family. I seriously doubt your parents would be okay with you dating me.”

  “I never cared about that,” she said vehemently. Color rose on her cheeks and Gator reacted to her rising anger by pushing up and searching for an offender.

  Damn dog already thought she was his.

  “I never said you did. I said your family did. I didn’t break up with you for that reason, but it did occur to me that I did us both a favor.”

  “Then what
’s the real reason?”

  Mathieu studied Lisette. There was a fire inside her that hadn’t been there before. Oh, he’d felt the embers, but she hadn’t been quite so spunky at nineteen. Or had she been twenty? He couldn’t remember.

  “You were a good girl and I was a bad boy. I cared about you, but I didn’t care what being with me would do to you. Lola saw where I was headed and she didn’t want to see you hurt.” Truth be told, Mathieu would be hard-pressed to like himself if he’d taken her down that path with him.

  The woman he dated before Lisette had introduced him to kink in the manner of restraints and breath play. It had all been so new he hadn’t known how to talk to Lisette about it, and he had no business experimenting with someone so innocent and sweet. BDSM was a rough world, and he doubted she was cut out for that. For him.

  “That is a load of utter bullshit.” Lisette pushed to her feet, taking her plate and, therefore, Gator with her to the kitchen.

  It was what he’d give her. The truth was too much to trust to anyone now.

  “I’ve got to run. Try one of the cafés for internet. I’ll be back late tonight.” His phone buzzed right on time.

  Mathieu slipped out of the door and locked it behind him. He didn’t like leaving Lisette angry with him, but he wouldn’t begrudge the wedge keeping them apart.

  He jogged down the stairs, the chilly, humid air seeping into his clothing and weighing him down.

  In the parking lot beside the building, his old partner sat in a cruiser, engine idling. He slipped into the passenger side seat, folding his large frame in around the computer equipment mounted to the dash.

  “You look chipper,” he said to his driver.

  “Shut it, you,” Odalia growled as she pulled out onto the street.

  “Late night?” The tension in his chest eased. Odalia might as well have been the little sister he never had.

  “Maybe,” she groused.

  Mathieu chuckled and shook his head. Odalia had hooked up with a local bounty hunter and Dominant on a whim and the two had tipped over the edge into a committed relationship within days. It was the kind of whirlwind romance he knew the feel of.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Odalia said after a few moments.

  “Just thinking.”

  “Got any plans for tonight?”

  “You work till two in the morning.”

  “So? Dungeon’s open till four. You should come. Everyone asks about you.”

  Any other cop asking him about attending a dungeon would be ludicrous, but Mathieu had introduced Odalia to the public kink scene and she’d flourished into a dynamic young woman. He’d hated leaving patrol because it meant giving her up as a partner.

  “Yeah, probably not tonight. Maybe another time.”

  “Don’t say that, man. You’ve been divorced over a year. You haven’t been around the scene for over two. People miss you.”

  Odalia pulled the cruiser into a spot at the station and he got out. It was the only way to end the conversation. She killed the engine and hurried after him.

  “That’s how you’re going to handle this?” Odalia asked as they stepped aside for two people leaving the building.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about, rookie.” He opened the glass door and held it.

  Odalia stared at him hard for a moment, her gaze narrowed. He didn’t doubt she had an earful to give him, but the presence of so many prying ears silenced her. Odalia had her own demons to keep at bay here.

  At New Year’s, a fellow cop had stolen compromising photographs of Odalia her new beau had taken of her all kinked up. While the pictures and the electronic source had been destroyed, it hadn’t silenced the thief, and she’d had to hold her head up high and ignore the snide comments and assumptions made about her.

  “Be safe out there,” Mathieu said as he split off from Odalia and headed to his desk.

  He moved through the building all the way to his department. The phone on his desk blinked orange. A good omen, if it was what he hoped.

  Mathieu jabbed in his voicemail and listened to the voice on the other end.

  “Hello Detective Mouton, I got your message about the assault case. I’m faxing the statement over. Not sure if it’s what you’re looking for.”

  Mathieu saved the message and headed over to the fax machine. There it was. The victim’s statement along with the two college students. It wasn’t a lot—potentially, it wasn’t even related—but he wasn’t going to take a chance.

  Lisette groped under the bed for her precious backpack. In her flurry of cleaning after lunch, she’d pushed it under the bed to vacuum. Not that Mathieu owned a vacuum, but his neighbor was nice enough to let her borrow one, so long as she cleaned the bag out before she returned it.

  Cleaning and baking were her two go-tos if a good flogging wasn’t on the table for working out her frustrations. Before Seth, getting that flogging hadn’t been a problem, but it had been so long, almost a year, since she’d played with anyone. One of the liberating things about leaving Seth was the immediate opportunity to play platonically with others. Her little subbie heart wanted that so bad.

  Where was the damn bag?

  Lisette reached farther under the four-poster and grasped…something. It felt like nylon stretched over…something. She pulled the object out and laid it at her knees.

  It looked like…

  It couldn’t be.

  There was just no way.

  Lisette grasped the hard end of the object encased in the leg of a pair of nylon pantyhose and lifted it.

  A flogger.

  Mathieu had an honest-to-god flogger, and it was even put away properly. Sort of. She’d never leave a good leather flogger under a bed, but that was her.

  Typically a person owned several floggers with various intended uses. Some were purposefully more thuddy and felt like a massage. Then there were those that stung or outright hurt. Those who really got into flogging had several, and since the leather strips, or tails, could get tangled, one of the cheap ways of preventing a huge mess was to slide the flogger into the leg of a pair of pantyhose. It was breathable and kept the tails from tangling.

  Lisette picked the knot apart and slid the well-crafted toy out into her lap. She’d seen her fair share of floggers and this one was handmade by someone who knew their shit.

  The handle was stained and sealed black wood, almost dildo shaped. She could easily see someone putting a condom over it and using the handle as an insertable toy. Had Mathieu used it like that? She gulped and flicked her glance to the rest of the toy. There were easily fifty strips of black rawhide falling from the wooden handle.

  If she had to guess, this was a thuddy flogger. The kind she liked.

  Lisette licked her lips and a shiver stole down her spine, straight to her pussy. Her channel clenched.

  Could Mathieu be kinky? Like her? Or was this a leftover from an old girlfriend?

  The possibilities were endless.

  She laid the toy out on the bed and stared at it for a moment. There were too many questions. She shook her head and bent to search for her bag. It was not by the side of the bed, instead, it was down by the foot. But that wasn’t what interested her. There were several large, plastic containers with opaque sides. Were there more toys?

  She itched to peel back the secrets, find answers, an explanation, but that wasn’t how one thanked their host for his hospitality she’d pretty much forced from him. With a deep breath, she grabbed the backpack and left the bedroom and apartment in a hurry.

  Lisette hopped on a bus without an idea of where it was going and slid into a seat, content to watch New Orleans pass her by. It was her way of learning a city, or in this case, re-learning. But her mind wasn’t in a state to take in the Katrina-wrought changes to her beloved city. No, she was still thinking about what was under that bed.

  Was kink why he’d broken up with her?

  She’d always thought of Mathieu as su
ch a rule follower, a strict adherent to black and white. He said earlier that he’d been a bad boy and she a good girl in college. That wasn’t how she’d seen him at all, but maybe she’d known even then what she was at her core—a submissive who wanted to love and adore her Dominant. Granted, she hadn’t fallen into that lifestyle until after Mathieu dumped her.

  There were so many questions swirling in her head, and no possibility of answers until later tonight, whenever Mathieu got home.

  Lisette felt an instant pang of guilt for not taking Gator with her. The poor dog might be used to staying in his crate, but this was a perfect opportunity for him to get out, despite the drizzling rain. She promised herself to think of him next time.

  The bus slowed to a stop, and for the first time since she got on, she took notice of where she was. Not that she had any idea of what district she was in, but a café sat on the corner. She gathered her bag and piled out the back door, taking a chance that this place had what she needed.

  A small placard in the window next to the door had the blessed words: WiFi Available.

  She stepped into the café that could have been on any classic New Orleans street corner with its black and white checkered floor, wooden four-top tables and jazzy decor. For some reason it made her breathe easier. The city hadn’t been home for years, but it called to her.

  Lisette ordered coffee and took over a table next to an outlet, careful to put her back to a wall to prevent some poor soul from seeing her Kinky Girl Blogs’ site. The ad placements on the side of the site alone came with an advisory warning, and that was before you got to the content.

  No kinky topic was safe. Lisette had a team of ten regular bloggers who rotated posting. Some specialized in certain topics. There was one pro-Domme who provided her services for a fee, two women who identified as Dominant in relationships, several people who lived a polygamous lifestyle, three switches, one slave, and a handful of submissives. Lisette was always on the lookout for more people to add to the mix.

  Five years ago she’d started the site to have an outlet to talk about her journey into BDSM. By that time she’d been into it for a year and had two short but successful relationships. She’d also been halfway through her Master’s in psychology. Ultimately, her experience since the blog exploded was the driving reason behind why she’d switched to focusing on sexuality and psychology. It was a narrow field; she still needed to get her damn internship done, but she loved that she helped people in tangible ways.