Trouble in Sudden Falls: A Sudden Falls Romance (34 page)

She should have said it.

He deserved to hear it.

Eventually, he rolled over, pulling her with him until she nestled against his chest. “Feel better?”

She found herself grinning for the first time all day. “Much, thank you. You?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.” He stroked his hand down her back, over her hip and back up her side. “So what happened today?”

She explained about everything that happened at the store.

“What did Chief Gibson say?”

“They’ll keep an eye on the store and keep their ear out and if they find out who did it, they’ll be arrested. Same thing they said after the brick and the letters.”

“Oh, babe. You totally don’t deserve this. It’s not fair.”

“Since when is life fair? Is what you found out about Rogan fair?”

“That’s the height of unfair.”

“Have you decided if you’re going to tell him?”

“I don’t think I should. I love him, Maddie. I really do. I want him to stay here as long as he wants. Becca is such a lousy influence—
clearly
—and he seems happy—or at least
happier
—and he’s settling in and he has things here he loves now. What really makes a father and what makes a son? Is it blood? I don’t think so. It would absolutely devastate Rogan to find out… so why do it? Who would it benefit?”

Maddie felt her heart expand to fill her chest. “You are a great dad, you know it?”

“I don’t know about that. All I know is that he’s been shuffled from place to place for so long. He thinks of this as
home.
The other night at the hospital he didn’t say ‘I want to go back to the house or I wanted to go back to
your
house,’ he said, ‘I want to go home’ and it broke my heart. I’d be willing to bet this is the only place that he’s ever called home. He’s going to be eighteen in less than a year. There’s no reason he can’t have a real home until then. There’s no reason he ever has to know.”

“Did you notice he started calling you
Dad
that night?”

Eli nodded and smiled softly. “Yeah. And I think that was the first night I really felt like his dad and not an imposter. Ironic, huh?”

“Not a bit. I think you may have really become his dad that night.”

“So you think I’m doing the right thing in not telling him?”

“I think you’re making a beautiful decision.”

“Thanks.” Eli leaned over and kissed the end of her nose, and then moved a little lower to drop a soft series of kisses on her lips.

Right then, the phone rang and Eli reached one arm out and hit the speakerphone button.

“H’lo.” Maddie grinned. He actually sounded like he was exactly where he was. Naked, well-sated and in bed at a scandalously early hour.

“Eli? This is Donna Goodman.”

He hesitated for a long moment before sitting up. “What can I do for you, Donna?”

“Amy’s missing. She was supposed to be at her friend, Darlene’s, but I called and she’s not there. Darlene won’t tell me anything and I’m extremely worried. If she were going to sneak out to meet anyone, it would be Rogan. Is he there by chance?”

“No. He went on a camping trip with a buddy.”

Maddie’s eyes went wide. “Hit the mute button,” she whispered almost silently.

“Donna, hold on a second, okay?” He hit the button.

“Umm. Does Rogan even have any
buddies
?” Maddie asked already suspecting where this was going.

He rolled his eyes and shook his head with a sigh. “I’ve been had, haven’t I?”

“Looks like it.”

He un-muted the phone. “Donna, Rogan said he was going to the campground at Sudden Falls Creek. They’ve got a ranger station down there. I’ll call and see if we can’t track them down. Hold on a minute and we’ll call you back as soon as we hear something.”

He disconnected, grabbed the handset and dialed information. Moments later he was talking with the Ranger Station. Maddie could tell he wasn’t finding out what he wanted to by his end of the conversation.

“They log all of the license plates that come in the campground. Rogan’s wasn’t one of them,” he said once he disconnected. “Dammit! What was he thinking?”

“Don’t panic,” Maddie said. “I’m sure they’re fine. How else can we find out where they went?”

He closed his eyes for a long moment. “If I can get into his computer I can probably get to his email and check out the sites he visited lately. If not that, I can check to see if he called any campgrounds from the house phone.”

They tugged their clothes on almost as quickly as they’d pulled them off.

If the situation hadn’t been so serious, Maddie would have found it almost fun to watch Eli hack into Rogan’s system. Initial attempts to gain access through Rogan’s terminal met with little success. “At least his machine is on,” Eli said. “I probably can take a backdoor in from the server.”

Maddie followed him downstairs to his den. He signed into the computer on his desk before running through several administration programs Maddie wasn’t familiar with.

After a few minutes of intense clicking on his keyboard, he managed to make it into Rogan’s machine. “He cleared his cache,” he said. “And doesn’t store his email password. If I weren’t so angry at the little cuss, I’d be almost proud of him. He definitely isn’t making this easy for me.”

He opened up several long text files which Maddie recognized as log files from her own techie days. “He hit three different campground sites in the last week,” he said. “Good thing I have the firewall logging everything, eh?”

Eli shut down the computer. “All we have to do is call the three campgrounds and we should be able to find him.”

Chapter Eighteen

Rob whistled as he dried off. The kids going to Grandma’s house and a “surprise” probably indicated that Emma had taken a trip to Victoria’s Secret and he was in for an evening of marital bliss. For once, he didn’t even care that it would be ultra-vanilla marital bliss. Between his work, Emma’s new job, the stress of the possibility of getting outed to his wife and the rest of the town and everything else going on lately, they hadn’t been doing much of the marital wild thing lately and he was more than due a conjugal visit.

He checked his reflection in the mirror, then picked up his electric razor to rid himself of his afternoon beard, knowing that Emma would appreciate the gesture. He slipped into a fresh pair of boxers then tossed his wet towel over the shower curtain rod. Clean, shaven, more relaxed and in a mood of great anticipation, he opened the bathroom door with a grin on his face.

It fell off as soon as he saw his wife.

Wherever the hell she’d been shopping, it hadn’t been at Victoria’s Secret…

All brain function stopped as he caught sight of her black leather corset, black stockings and thigh high boots. He wasn’t sure but his heart might have stopped as well.

“Emma?” he choked past tight vocal chords.

She fidgeted with the leather riding crop in her hand, slightly ill-at-ease.

“Oh, my God.” Several possibilities about what this could mean streaked through his mind with lightning speed. “Maddie told.” Humiliation filled him. What must she think?

Surely that he was a perv. In a moment, she would undoubtedly turn and leave him. And he deserved nothing less. He never should have pursued his interests. And he certainly shouldn’t have lied to her.

She slapped the crop against the palm of her hand and the sound startled him into a small jump. He looked at her again.
Really
looked at her. This was an entirely different person than the accommodating woman he’d been living with. “Maddie told me nothing,” she said with a husky, stern voice he’d never heard before. “I heard about you straight from your own lips.” She stepped toward him with a defiant look on her face. “I was at the store the night you broke in.”

Oh, hell.

His embarrassment began to fade pretty quickly as she continued to move toward him, her expression wild and a little wicked. It occurred to him that if she’d been horrified by what he was, she wouldn’t be standing there in black leather looking like the answer to his every fantasy. Could it really have been as easy as being honest with her?

“Emma,” he began.

She slapped the crop against her boot with a loud thwack. “No more talking now.” Her tone dripped with authority. With her long, honey blonde hair in a tight knot on top of her head, and her wicked black costume, she looked like the best combination of stern librarian and aberrant dominatrix.

It worked for her.

It
definitely
worked for him.

She stepped back to scoop something off the hope chest at the end of the bed, then moved toward him while he could do little but stand there and goggle at her, speechless. With an extreme economy of movement, she slipped a sheer scarf over his eyes.

“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” he asked in a choked voice.

“Do you want me to gag you as well?”

Oh.

My.

God.

That was so unbelievably
hot.

“No,” he whispered.

She grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him toward their four poster bed. “Hold on to this.” She placed one of his hands on the tall poster.

He complied, wondering what she had in store for him. It didn’t really matter at this point. He was so turned on, he didn’t know which end was up.

“Your safeword is ‘Red’,” she advised him.

“Red” was the universal codeword for “Stop!” It would appear that his wife had been doing some research.

She slid one of his fur-lined leather cuffs around his wrist and buckled it quickly. His other wrist was secured with equal efficiency, and then she somehow fastened them to the finial of the bed, though because he couldn’t see very well, he had no idea how she’d done it.

“I was prepared to be very angry with you,” she said, causing nervous tension to build in him. “You’ve lied to me for so long. You haven’t trusted me.”

She was so right. He
should
have trusted her.

“You subjected me to eight
years
of very proper, missionary-style sex.”

“Subjected? You never seemed to mind.” Did she find him inadequate? Suddenly, he wasn’t so certain about this.

She slid her fingers into the waistband of his boxers and dragged them down his legs, helping him step out of them. “I said, no talking!” She slapped his butt with the flat of her palm sending a spike of pleasure that barely bordered on pain through him.

“I want you to consider that if you’d been honest, if you’d
trusted
me—” she slapped him again—” that we could have avoided what has turned into a rather bland pattern in the bedroom.”

Rob wanted to discuss this with her—fully intended to at the first opportunity—but for now, he’d let her run this show.

There certainly wasn’t anything
bland
about this.

She stepped away from him and his heart beat faster in anticipation of what she had in store for him next. He could hear the clicking of her heels against the hardwood as she walked back and forth across the floor, and he could catch a long stretch of leg from under the scarf over his eyes when she was close, but for a long time, she didn’t touch him.

What she was doing was messing with his mind, and it terrified part of him, and sent the rest of him into a dizzying level of overdrive. He heard her come to stand directly behind him and he waited. His breath hitched.

It was the ultimate in trust to completely give up your power to another person. To have faith that they’d give it back to you again when you were done. Even as she hovered behind him, making him wait to see what she had in store for him, he offered her that trust, bending his head down to show her that he was hers to do with what she would.

She gently scored her fingernails down the tender flesh of his back and buttocks and he shivered. He could feel her breath on his skin as she leaned into him, then nipped his shoulder. Still, she said nothing.

Rob took a ragged breath, waiting… still waiting.

Finally, the wait was over and he felt a single slap of the leather crop against his left buttock, the light sting making him exhale with pleasure. She tapped him repeatedly in rapid succession, each landing of the crop ever so slightly sharper than the last, until she’d worked up a powerful tingle before moving to his other side and repeating.

She seemed to know exactly how hard to hit, how to slowly build up and when to stop after she’d gotten his endorphins flowing, but before she truly hurt him.

“Did you think I couldn’t handle this?”

“No.” How could he possibly have imagined that she could be like this? “For what it’s worth, I’m more than willing to admit I was wrong.”

She moved around to his front, her fingernails marking her progress along his ribs. She reached down and grabbed him in her hand, cupping him in her palm, purring when she found him hard. “Who are you? And what have you done with my sweet little wife?”

She gave him a firm squeeze and he gasped.

“Sweet?” she said, as if the word were ugly. “You are never again to confuse me with
sweet
. I’m not some insipid little miss that you need to hide your baser inclinations from.”

She tugged gently on him. “Do we have an understanding?”

He nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good.” She let go of him and returned to stand behind him. “I’m glad we got that settled.”

After a final spank on each cheek with the crop, she stepped away from him again, leaving him wanting more. When she returned a few moments later to trail his light leather flogger over his shoulder, building anticipation, he realized that by the time she finished, he wouldn’t be wanting for anything.