Perfect for Richard, whose favorite color on a woman was black.
Nikki had never dressed to please a man before. This was the first time, and she wasn’t altogether certain how she felt about it. The independent part of herself said to grow up and quit acting like a little girl—a woman should dress for herself! But the other part of her, the part that became aroused by images of sexually submitting her body to a man, rather liked it.
Still, she didn’t want to place too much mental importance on this meeting. If things worked out—great. But if they didn’t, she wouldn’t be crushed. Disappointed, but hardly crushed.
Over the passage of the last month she had grown to care for Richard, or, rather, for the man he presented himself as being. If he turned out to be that man in real life . . .
She blushed. She could easily envision herself falling fast and hard for such a lover as Richard.
But if he didn’t turn out to be that man in real life . . .
She would survive. She’d be a bit down for a day or two, but she would rebound.
Nikki smiled at herself in the mirror as she raised a manicured hand to the back of her neck and let her hair loose of its confining bun. She was Nikki tonight, she reminded herself, as she shook out her light brown hair and left the curls to flow to the middle of her back. Nikki—not Dr. Nicole Adenike.
“Well,” she murmured to her image in the mirror. “It’s time to go meet your fallen angel.”
She frowned, something about that name causing some bizarre sense of déjà vu, triggering some . . .
something
. Her forehead wrinkling, she tried to figure out what that something might be.
Almost all of the handles and their corresponding email addresses used in ads at
Dom4me.com
were dark and a bit devilish. She supposed it helped create a certain aura of forbidden mystery. There had been other similar names, such as DarkKnight, DarkMaster, FallenMaster, DevilishDom, etcetera.
Nikki inelegantly snorted at her reflection. “Always the cynic,” she muttered. She shook her head once, then turned on her heel and headed for the door.
Tonight, she told herself with a grin, could very well be a major turning point. It had taken a month for her to work up the nerve to meet Richard, but the night was finally here.
This meeting held the possibility of changing her life forever.
Thomas felt like a damn fool.
He’d gotten together a team of ten police officers he trusted with his life, ten overworked and underpaid men, to work a weeklong stakeout based on the premonition of some weird rich chick from Snootyville who believed herself to be a psychic. Worse yet, he couldn’t get the image of the kooky lady’s best friend (and her well-rounded rump) out of his mind.
Goddamn, he was losing it.
His men had been in place every night the past seven nights from 6:00 P.M. until closing time. They were stationed in various points around the Cleveland Flats—that, after he’d given it some thought, being the most logical place in Cleveland to look, mostly because of the bridge and the dock in Dr. Cox’s dreams.
All of the officers were in undercover clothes, their well-trained gazes on the lookout for a woman with long, flowing hair who may or may not be accompanied by a man wearing a black leather jacket.
Thomas frowned as he glanced at his watch. 9:57 P.M. It was a Tuesday night. Most places in the Flats would be closing within the next few minutes.
“Hey, buddy, I hate to be the negative one here, but it doesn’t look like our boy is gonna show.”
Thomas sighed as he ran a palm over his stubbly face. “Shit. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
James Merdino clapped him on the back. “You’ve got nothing to feel ashamed about, man. Don’t do that to yourself.”
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “I just want that son of a bitch so bad,” he murmured. Thomas opened his eyes, staring at nothing. “I’m letting my personal obsession cloud my judgment.”
“Hey,” James said. “Given your history with the bastard, any one of us would have felt the same.”
“It’s no excuse—”
“It’s plenty of an excuse.” James nudged him in the shoulder with his elbow. “Hell, even Ben O’Rourke gave up his night off to come out here and help. You know you are a respected cop when a bad-ass bastard like that lets you come between him and getting laid.”
Thomas snorted at that. “Getting laid. Now there’s what I should be doing.”
“You still seeing Lucy?”
“Nope.” He slid his gun into the holster, and then turned to James. “Get on the radio and call it off,” he growled, changing the subject. Thomas had never been real big on discussing his dating life. Not even with the man he called partner and best friend. “This is useless.”
James stared at him for a suspended moment before inclining his head. “Will do.” He turned to walk away.
“Hey, James,” Thomas said, recalling something he’d forgotten to ask him about. “Remember Vincent Pinoza?”
James stilled. He cocked his head, glancing back at Thomas. “Yeah. Lisa Pinoza’s husband, right?”
“Yeah. Something strange . . .”
James lifted an eyebrow.
“I can’t find your original paperwork on the interview. Did you file it somewhere?”
James narrowed his eyes in thought. “It’s hard to say. That’s four years ago now. It should be there, though.”
Thomas slowly nodded. “I must have missed something. Thanks, buddy. Sleep good tonight.”
He watched James walk away, the wheels in his mind racing. His partner was right: The paperwork had to be at the station somewhere.
There was no point in asking him about Lisa Pinoza’s affair until he found it.
Black stiletto heels clicked on the pavement as she
walked into the alleyway to retrieve her car. She was a bit sad, a lot disappointed, yet somehow not surprised that her dream lover had failed to materialize.
It was so black out tonight, so dark and eerie. She should have left the café earlier rather than waiting for him to show up clear until closing time . . . .
She stilled. Something didn’t feel quite right out here tonight, she thought, her heart inexplicably pounding. Something was making the tiny hairs on her arms stand on end.
She felt watched. Trapped.
Hunted.
She picked up her pace, the stiletto heels sounding loud to her ears in an otherwise deserted alleyway. She walked faster and faster—
faster!
—she was almost to the car. Just a few more steps and—
“Nikki.”
She spun around, frightened. Her eyes were wide, her heartbeat thumping. She saw no one.
This felt like something out of a nightmare.
“Nikki. My love . . .”
She backed up slowly, terrified. She couldn’t see him, could only hear him. She’d never heard that voice before, so she knew he was a stranger, and yet his love for her was real, a tangible emotion transmitted in the way he spoke to her that was so thick with need and longing you could cut through it with a knife.
Oh God! Oh please someone help me!
she mentally wailed. She tried to scream, tried so damn hard to scream, but she felt like a deer caught in headlights. Her voice was frozen.
Someone help me!
The attack came swiftly, without notice. She had been expecting him to be in front of her, yet two strong hands seized her from behind, pulling her roughly up against a solid chest.
She screamed long and loud, a piercing sound that carried into the night. Finally—
finally!
—she could scream.
A heavy hand roughly slapped over her mouth, her scream cut off as she struggled with her attacker.
Him? Her dream lover? Oh please no—
no!
One moment she had been struggling with him in a darkened alley and—she blinked—where was she now? Frightened, she looked around. She felt groggy and disoriented. She was in pain . . .
oh God oh God it hurts so much!
He was going to rape her. Oh no—
noooo!
She was naked, tied up, her body obscenely splayed out. Hemp rope held her outstretched hands bound to two slabs of wood shaped like a cross. He stood before her broken body, his penis stiff, the knife in his hand gleaming.
“I love you so much, Nikki. Your heart will belong to me. Forever.”
He rasped out those words as he plunged his erection into her, the knife in his hand promising that something even more horrific than this brutal rape was still to come.
She wanted to scream—
oh please someone save me!
—but she was gagged. In that moment she knew she was going to die. She was only thirty-four and she was going to die.
Oh God
—
noooo!
Kim gasped as she bolted upright in bed, sweat pouring
off her soaked forehead in rivulets as she abruptly awoke from the worst, most intense vision she’d had yet. Her breasts heaved from under the drenched cotton of her nightgown, her nipples hard against the saturated material as the chilled AC hit them.
It took her a long moment to orient herself, to realize where she was and to come to terms with the fact that she was nowhere close to where she needed to be. “Nikki,” she breathed out, her blue eyes wide. “Oh God . . .!”
Kim threw the blankets off of her body and raced toward her closet to throw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. The police didn’t believe her, she knew. There was no sense in going to them now, no time to grow angry over their lack of intervention.
Saving her best friend would be up to her, she realized, horror stabbing her in the gut. She raced down the back stairs of the colonial brick mansion, stopping only long enough to grab a butcher knife from the kitchen.
Nikki.
Oh God
. . .
“Last call. We’re closing in fifteen minutes.”
Nikki sighed as she glanced around the eatery a final time, the bartender’s words reminding her of the hour. It was 10:15 P.M. and Richard still hadn’t showed. By now she knew that he wouldn’t.
The café was supposed to have closed fifteen minutes ago, but due to some cocktail party in honor of one of the people running in an upcoming election, it was staying open a half hour past its scheduled time. She took a deep breath, attempting to quell the pang of disappointment lancing through her.
Either Richard wasn’t real or he had shown up earlier, saw her, and decided he wasn’t interested. Either way, nothing was going to come of the month she had spent getting to know her fantasy D/s lover.
Nikki smiled a bit sadly. Then she motioned for the waiter, ready to pay her tab.
Thomas paced back and forth in the kitchen of his
apartment, his muscles taut, his instincts screaming. Something was not right. Something was not as it should be.
He glanced at his watch. 10:29 P.M.
He had made it home in just under ten minutes. He could make it back to the Flats in just under five if he raced.
But it wasn’t like the Flats was a small area. There was a ton of ground to cover. Several bridges, the docks . . .
A building by the docks. A building with an alleyway on one side of it.
He kept trying to assure himself that he was being obsessive, that nothing out of the ordinary was going down in Cleveland tonight, but it wasn’t working. That schoolteacher kept creeping back into his mind. She had seemed so sincere, so troubled by the fact that she had these “visions” rather than embracing them as proof of some unseen ability.
Thomas based most of his better decisions on instinct—was it too much to believe that maybe the schoolteacher had that same ability, only on a different, possibly even advanced level? And so what if she was wrong. Would it hurt to go back one last time and do a security check over the Flats?
“Shit!”
Thomas swore under his breath as he grabbed his keys and stomped out the front door. His mind wouldn’t rest until he’d done a final check. Might as well get it over and done with.
Chapter 9
Tuesday, July 15 10:31 P·M·
Nikki rubbed her hands up and down her arms to ward
off the chill bumps as she slowly walked toward the alley. “Quit freaking yourself out,” she muttered to herself.
Okay, so she hadn’t remembered where she’d parked the Mercedes. Worse things have happened to better people, she decided.
Still, it was weird. She could have sworn she’d parked her car behind the bistro, but when she’d come outside it hadn’t been there. At first she’d been angry, assuming it had been stolen, but then she’d spotted it in the little alleyway separating the eatery from another establishment.
The tiny parking lot had been jammed full when she’d arrived, cars spilling over into the adjacent alley. She’d been nervous when she’d arrived, her mind preoccupied with thoughts of Richard.
It was possible she’d parked her car in the alleyway and simply hadn’t been paying much attention. Lord knows she’d done that at the mall a time or two—thinking she’d parked in one spot, only to find it five aisles over.
Conceding that she was freaking herself out over nothing, she walked faster toward the Mercedes, her stiletto heels clicking against the pavement. The car was there. The keys were in her hand. What thief would steal her car, then chance being caught by bringing it back? Get real Dr. Moron!
Still, Nikki had always valued gut instinct, and hers was telling her to stay alert. Her heartbeat racing, she kept her eyes wide open and her ears in tune with her surroundings as she clutched her keys so tightly her knuckles turned white.
She walked quickly toward the car, faster and faster, her breasts bobbing up and down as she moved. Almost there . . . almost—
“Nikki.”
She stopped abruptly, whirling around to face the direction her name had been spoken from. She swallowed against the invisible lump in her throat, her heart beating so hard it felt like a rock in her chest.