Evelyn didn’t hear Suzanne’s answer, but she made a grab for the phone. Logan shook his finger at her as he sidestepped her attempt to take the phone.
“She told you about the incident, right?”
“Don’t, please.” She held out her hand. “Logan.”
His chuckle told him that Suzanne had said no, she never had.
“Two months after Evie moved in,” Logan said, “she thought there was a bear outside. Never mind that it was January, and the bears were all sleeping.”
“I heard a noise,” she yelled, hoping Suzanne would hear her.
“What did she hear, you asked?” Logan laughed, and Evelyn wanted to crawl under the couch. “She went outside to investigate, without any means of protecting herself, and found a porcupine rooting around in her trash, which she’d forgotten to lock up.”
“To make a long story short, she had to make an emergency visit to the doctor to have some quills removed, and to get a few shots.”
“I can’t believe you just told her that.” She tried to glare at him, but in truth, she wanted to laugh.
Logan chuckled. “Yeah, I’ll tell her.” He pushed the End button. “She wants you to call her back when I’m gone. Now, forget about the porcupines, and let’s talk about my dick. How much do you want it, Evelyn? Show me.”
Evelyn put her hands behind her back and bowed her head.
“Such a good girl,” he said. She thought it showed progress that the term girl didn’t piss her off. She mentally counted to thirty in her head. She knew she’d made it when she heard the sound of Logan’s zipper going down.
“On your knees.” She obeyed, waiting for the invitation to take him in her mouth.
He praised her again, then said, “You have thirty seconds exactly. You’d better be counting in your mind while you play.”
It was hard to count while she licked and sucked, but she managed it to the very last second. The salty taste of him almost drove her over the edge at the end, as a small amount of fluid leaked from the tip and filled her mouth.
She sucked it down like it was ice cream on a hot day. When she pulled away, she bowed her head.
“As a reward, you can watch me jerk off. I can’t go to work with a hard-on. Go and get me a few towels.”
Evelyn rushed to the bathroom. When she came back, Logan already had his pants down. He was sitting on the couch, his hand wrapped around his hard shaft. Evelyn placed the towels on his legs, then draped one between them.
“Go sit in the other chair,” he ordered. “Watch carefully, Evelyn. Be a good girl and stay in your seat.”
Evelyn squirmed in her seat as he stroked his dick. He moved slowly at first, picking up the pace for a few, long fantastic moments before he slowed back down.
“Think about this hard dick in your mouth, Inky, then in your pussy, then in your ass. Not all at the same time, of course. We have to…make it last.”
He slowed his rhythm, his eyes closed. “Right now, I’m imagining you on all fours so I can mount you, or in the cage, where I can stick my dick through the holes and allow you to lick.”
He groaned, and when he spoke again, she could tell it was getting harder for him to make complete sentences. In halting words, he told her how he was going to hang her upside down, fill her pussy and ass with dildos, then take a riding crop to her ass.
The last words were barely out of his mouth when his cum shot into the air.
It was all she could do to stay in her seat, such was the urge to go and savor every bit that had come out.
She watched as he cleaned himself up. He dropped the towels on the floor before he righted his clothes.
When he crossed to her, Evelyn was near tears.
“You want to come so much, don’t you, Inky?”
“Yes, Sir Logan.”
“It’s only one more day. You do as I say and string my clothespins. I might—and I stress the word might—let you suck me off tonight.”
She wanted to remind him that his orgasm didn’t mean she’d get one. Instead she lowered her gaze and nodded.
“Good girl. Now get back to work.”
When he was gone, she once again dialed Suzanne.
“What in the hell is going on over there?” her friend asked.
Before she could stop herself, Evelyn replied, “He’s bringing presents for the dungeon. I mean—”
“Dungeon? A Dom doesn’t build a dungeon unless he intends to use it. Those toys cost money. Big money. You guys are not just playing; no matter what you think.”
“There’s not going to be a collar in the gifts,” Evelyn said, as if that explained everything. “We’ve already talked about it. He and I, we…I.”
“Sweetie, he will collar you,” Suzanne said. “I’m happy for you. You deserve it after the jerk you had before.”
“I’m nervous,” she admitted.
“I’d be worried if you weren’t. I would take it slow, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards for you two.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Evelyn said. “I think…I don’t know what I think.”
“Make sure you talk to him,” Suzanne said. “You know my policy, open and honest.”
Evelyn said yes, she knew. She and Suzanne were very much alike. Another sound at the door made Evelyn laugh. “He’s back.”
“Let me talk to him,” Suzanne said. “I want to ask why he thought Jesse and I would make a good pair.”
Evelyn got up, surprised when Logan didn’t just come inside. She opened the door, taking a step back to avoid the baseball bat that swung at her head. She dropped the phone, running for the living room as Madeline Rusin screamed, “Give me my fucking pictures, bitch.”
Evelyn tripped over the sofa. She sprawled on the floor, then scrambled to put the furniture between herself and the mayor’s baseball-bat-wielding wife. It was as if the pieces of a puzzle were now fitting together.
“Madeline, what the hell?”
The older woman advanced in the room, the bat gripped in front of her. “I know you have them. Give them to me.”
Evelyn wanted to stall for time, so she could try and get herself out of this situation. “You killed that man in Benson.”
“The lying, blackmailing bastard deserved it. But before he died, he did tell me he sent a set of the pictures of him fucking me to you. He was laughing about it. He’s not laughing now. Give them to me, Evelyn, and I’ll make it quick. I’ve had to hide out for a week, and I don’t intend to do it anymore.”
Evelyn stared at the woman who had served on PTA committees and did bake sales for accident victims. “How did this happen?” she asked.
Madeline’s chest looked like it had deflated. “Boredom,” she finally said. “Charlie and I were good at first, but he was no longer interested in trying new things and I had to go elsewhere. But I made a bad choice, and he paid for it. Now you’re going to too. Please, Evelyn, just give them to me.”
“Why do you want them, Madeline? The cops know about them, and they have already connected you to the dead man.”
“They’re the only real evidence I knew him,” she said, as if Evelyn were dumb. “I have the memory cards, the computers they were stored on, everything except the copies you have. Give them to me, and I’ll leave. Well, after you’re dead. Collateral damage, so to speak.”
“They’ll find some way to connect you to my death.”
“I doubt that.” Madeline twirled her bat. “They think I’m long gone. I’m not going to ask again.”
Evelyn knew Madeline wasn’t thinking straight. In her mind, there was no way she would be caught. She was invincible. Every time Evelyn read a mystery, or saw a cop show on television, Evelyn told herself she wouldn’t be the person who tried to get the murderer to talk until the cops showed up to save the day. She would be the one to take a stand. She balled her hands into fists.
“Screw you, Madeline. I’m not giving you anything. Take your best shot, and we’ll see who comes out on top.”
* * * *
Logan hated funeral duty. He’d much rather be back at Evelyn’s place, helping her unpack dungeon equipment. He had two more packages for her to open. The one he’d just given her, the larger one, wouldn’t be opened for a while, he was sure, unless she’d overcome her aversion to the cage under the bed.
He wanted this gift to sit in the dungeon, wrapped, as a reminder that there were other things for the two of them to discover together. That he wasn’t done with her yet.
She would bug him to find out what it was, and he would use those opportunities to make marks on the whiteboard. Having Evelyn as his sub was going to be perfect.
He was just about to make the turn to go onto the main road when his phone rang. The police station’s number came up on the screen.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Lieutenant, I have a Suzanne Jenkins on the line. She says it’s an emergency, and she needs to talk to you.”
He pulled the truck over. He hoped the woman wasn’t calling to cancel their dinner on Saturday. Jesse was really looking forward to meeting her. “Put her through.”
“Get back there! Get back there now!” Suzanne screamed into his ear as soon as they were connected. “Some woman is attacking Evelyn.”
“Shit!” He turned the truck onto the thankfully empty highway. “Call the station. Tell them to get Penn and Jesse up there, now!”
He threw the phone down. The car seemed to fly down the highway as Logan pressed the pedal to the floor. It had to be Madeline, looking for the pictures. They’d worked to find the mayor’s wife all week, but had not been able to find one scrap of evidence that she’d been in Clearwater, or any of the neighboring towns.
He’d only been gone from the house about ten minutes. Madeline must have been waiting for him to leave and not come back. He now wished he’d turned around to deliver the other two boxes.
He took a corner at sixty that was meant to be taken at forty, and almost lost control of the truck. By the time he turned onto the dirt road up to Evelyn’s house, he could hear sirens wailing in the background and knew Suzanne had done as he’d asked.
There was a strange car parked near the front door. Logan almost slammed into it as the truck skidded to a halt. He exited the vehicle, leaving the door open. He vaulted up the steps, two at a time, before he ran through the open door. One of the chairs had been overturned, and what he saw made him stop dead in his tracks.
Madeline Rusin was flat on her back, with Evelyn on top of her. His Inky held a baseball bat pressed against Madeline’s chest, and she was screaming obscenities that he’d never thought he’d ever hear her use.
“Evie,” he yelled. She didn’t take her gaze away from Madeline, so he tried one more time. This time she turned her head toward him.
Her look of absolute fury was startling. “She killed him,” she said, and then she jumped off Madeline and dropped the bat. “She killed that man in Benson.”
He took a step toward her, but Madeline flailed out her arm. She caught Inky in the knee, and his woman fell on her back, crying out as she dropped. There was a loud crack as she hit the hardwood floor. Her scream of pain echoed in his brain as he looked at Madeline. She was on her knees now, reaching for the bat.
It was then that Logan did something he never thought he’d do. He balled up his fist, and hit a woman square in the jaw.
* * * *
“Would you stop fussing over me?” Evelyn pushed at Logan’s hands. She didn’t need another pillow. What she needed was a good, hard fuck.
“Evelyn, you had a concussion,” he countered. “And you dislocated your shoulder.”
“Three weeks ago,” she said, trying to calm her voice a little.
“Two and a half,” he countered.
“Logan, I’m fine. The doctor says I’m fine. Yes, I hit my head on the floor, hard, but there was no permanent damage. Unlike Madeline, you broke her jaw.”
“She killed a man,” he said. “And she was attacking my woman.”
Evelyn nestled against him. They were lying in her bed, with the moonlight shining in through the windows. She loved hearing him call her his woman. She would love it even more if he flattened her on her back and put his dick inside her. She told him so, using those very words.
“Too soon,” he said.
“It’s my pussy I want you to fuck, not my brain.” She pouted.
“Inky, you were unconscious, for almost ten minutes. I thought you were going to die.”
Suzanne had told Evelyn the story while she was in the hospital, of how Jesse and Penn had come in the house to find Madeline cuffed and on her stomach, with Logan kneeling over Evelyn, begging her to open her eyes.
“How do you know what happened?”
Evelyn had asked her. It was simple, Suzanne answered; Jesse had told her.
The setup hadn’t happened, but Suzanne had met Jesse at the hospital. The couple had been talking,
“Quite a bit,”
Suzanne had said, although she was quick to point out nothing sexual had happened yet.
“But we’re working toward it.”
Evelyn traced her finger down Logan’s bare chest. Since she’d been injured he’d been wearing shorts to bed. She put her fingers in the elastic and tried to slip past it. He grabbed her hand.
“No.”
“Not even a handjob?”
“It will only make you want it more,” he said. “Evelyn…it’s only a few more weeks. It’s not the end of the world.”
“I’ve never been good at waiting,” she said. “This sure ruined our plans for the dungeon, didn’t it?”
She sat up. Logan stroked her back. “It will keep.”
“Will it?” She was pouting again. Logan got up from the bed, and she hoped that he was going to order her to the bench, which was by the window. Surely a few swats wouldn’t hurt.
Instead he left the room, and Evelyn lay back down. Her shoulder did hurt at times, but it wasn’t that bad. The doctor had said she was lucky, that the concussion, although not a mild one, could have been much worse. She’d cracked her head fairly hard.
She had trouble believing sweet Madeline was a killer, but she’d confessed to it all, and blamed her husband for everything.
Logan was back, carrying a long white box.
“More flowers?”
He placed it on the bed, then sat next to her. “Sit up.”
She did as he asked.
“On the…whatever day this is of dungeon building, my Master gave to me, a collar that only he will see.”
Evelyn’s breath caught in her throat. “Really?”
“You think I spent all this money, and waited all this time, for someone I didn’t want to collar? Open it.”