Forgotten (70 page)

Lacy waved her
protests away. “Oh please, I got it on Groupon so it was way
cheaper than it would normally be. Besides, I was just getting it
done because I was hoping Doctor Sloan would ask me out.” She
sighed. “He didn’t though and the weekend is officially upon us. So
you might as well take the appointment—you’ll get more use out of
it than I would.”

“
He’ll ask you out
next
weekend,” Frankie said, squeezing her friend’s arm soothingly.
“And if he doesn’t, he’s just an idiot who can’t see how gorgeous
you are.” She finished her own drink. “And now I need to get going.
I’ve only got one more hour left on my shift and then I’m out of
here.

“
Good for you—some of us are working a double” Lacy sighed.
“Maybe I should go back with you to VS and see if I can find some
sexy underwear to cheer myself up before my dinner break is
over.
You
should get some too, you
know. To go with your new wax job.”

“
I’m not getting waxed
there,”
Frankie protested. “It hurts too much! I’d rather
shave.”

“
Shaving doesn’t get you nearly as smooth,” Lacy informed her.
“And the waxing might hurt but it only takes a second. You have no
idea how sexy you can feel until you have a fresh Brazilian and a
new pair of naughty panties to go with it.”

“
I’ll consider it,” Frankie promised, sliding off her stool
and pitching her plastic cup in the trash. “But for now, I really
do have to get back. I just hope Mrs. Hofstadter isn’t going to
show up at the end of my shift and want to talk my ear
off.”

“
Is that the one into all the super kinky BDSM?” Lacy asked
with interest.

Frankie nodded and
shivered.

“
I
swear the things she tells me she and her hubby get up
to—yuck!”

Lacy smothered a
smile. “Hey, give her a break! Personally, I’m inspired by her. I
think it’s amazing that a woman in her seventies is still getting
busy.”

“
I
have no problem with her getting busy,” Frankie said. “I just don’t
want to have to hear all the dirty—and I
do
mean dirty—details. Honestly, I wouldn’t want to hear
them if she was
twenty
-five.
It’s just too much information.”

“
Well just think, you’ll be out of there soon. TA-ing for the
sexy professor and teaching yoga like nobody’s business. You’re
going to be amazing.”

“
What I’m going to be is
tired.”
Frankie yawned. It had been a long day and she would be glad
to get home and take a hot bubble bath before crawling into
bed.

Lacy yawned too. “Me
too. You know, I think I’ll just head back to UCH, hon. I need to
conserve my strength if I’m going to get through the second half of
this double.”

“
Okay—talk soon,” Frankie said, giving her a hug.

“
All right and I’ll text you the details for that waxing
appointment.” Lacy hugged her back. “And you
better
go. Believe me, you’ll be thanking me later when
you want to get busy with the sexy professor.”

Frankie laughed and
shook her head. “All right, all right. I’ll tell you all about the
date tomorrow night after he goes.”

“
Unless he stays the night.” Lacy waggled her perfectly shaped
eyebrows expressively, making Frankie laugh again.

“
Yeah, right—whatever. Never gonna happen. I’m not letting any
man stay the night at my place.”

“
You might be surprised,” Lacy said mysteriously as she
left.

Frankie waved her friend’s words away and went back to her
job. Luckily Mrs. Hofstadter didn’t make her usual appearance and
so Frankie was able to get through the store closing routine fairly
quickly. At the end of the night, before the registers closed, she
even picked out a nice bra and panty set—a black lace one that
minimized her butt—well, as much as it
could
be minimized—and a sexy bra to match. Lacy was
right—who knew what might happen? She might end up with a man
staying the night at her place after all…

The ride home wasn’t
too long and Frankie was able to get her bubble bath and climb into
bed in fairly short order. Which was perfect—she needed a good
night’s sleep because she had a very busy weekend planned. Between
the waxing appointment, her yoga final exam, her “date” with
Professor Ramlow and the weekly family dinner where Carlos was sure
to put in an appearance, she was going to be running from sunup
‘til sundown all day Saturday and Sunday.

That’s all right though,
she told herself comfortingly as she snuggled down
into her worn but clean cotton sheets.
I can handle this. I’m ready for
anything…

Or so she thought.
But then she started to dream…

Chapter Two

It
was such a vivid dream Frankie almost thought it must be real. But
how could it be? She was in a subway station—at least, it
looked
kind of like a subway
station. There was a vast underground space hollowed out with
people rushing back and forth, all of them obviously in a hurry to
get where they were going. And she was walking along with them,
using a swift, purposeful stride as her boot heels clicked on the
hard, shiny black surface of the floor.

Wait—her
boot
heels?
Frankie
looked down at her feet, frowning. She didn’t own boots—there was
no point, living in Tampa where you could live in flip-flops almost
all year round. But sure enough, she had on black, shiny boots that
came up to her knees. They were kind of nice, actually—if a little
too masculine for Frankie’s taste. Only…why did her feet look so
big? And what else was she wearing?

Black trousers with
a red stripe up the side and a red uniform type shirt were what met
her eyes when she looked down. That was weird—Frankie didn’t
remember owning any outfits that looked like this! As she looked
around, she noticed that everyone else in the crowded subway was
wearing strange clothing too—all of them were in one kind of
uniform or another.

Here a group of blonde women in dull blue jumpsuits with red
sashes wrapped around their waists rushed to catch a train. And
passing on her right were a bunch of tall men wearing olive green
trousers and matching green uniform shirts. Like the women, they
had narrow shoulders and white-blond hair. Each had a large black
badge pinned to his right shoulder and some kind of weapon tucked
into his broad, black belt. Everywhere she looked it was the
same—people wearing clothing like she’d never seen before. And most
of them seemed to have white-blonde hair. Where
was
she anyway, Sweden?

And what was the
deal with this subway station? Instead of plain or tiled concrete
walls, it appeared to be lined with large, flat TV screens. Every
spare inch of wall space and some of the ceiling space too was
filled with a never ending stream of images and information.
Between the screens, the echoing sound of many feet, and the rush
and hiss of the trains which must be running somewhere in the
distance, Frankie could barely hear herself think. And yet, as she
looked around, she noticed that no one seemed to be talking to each
other very much. They all had serious, intent looks on their faces
as if they were in a hurry to go do something very important.

Apparently she was
in a hurry too. Her brisk strides carried her along through the
crowds until she came to a long row of turnstiles. They were
floor-to ceiling affairs with metal bars separating the crowded
underground tunnel into two parts. The more she looked at them, the
more Frankie thought they looked more like jail cells than
turnstiles. The fact that tall men in black uniforms were
patrolling back and forth on both sides of them only enforced the
image.

As Frankie watched,
someone at the front of the line apparently tried to cheat the
turnstile or get in when he wasn’t supposed to. It was a man in a
ragged brown outfit that looked like it hadn’t been washed in a
while. When he got up to the tall metal bars, instead of sliding
open for him, they stayed shut and a red light began blinking over
his head.

At once one of the
officers in black uniforms came around and dragged the man out of
the crowd, over to the side. He had some kind of weapon or
truncheon in his hand. Frankie saw it rise and fall and heard the
offender squealing in pain as the sudden, brutal punishment was
administered. She couldn’t stop staring but no one else in the
crowd even seemed to notice—apparently this kind of thing happened
all the time.

Frankie became
suddenly aware that she didn’t have a ticket or a card of any kind
and she was getting closer to the jail door-turnstiles all the
time. She began to panic but she was being pushed inexorably
forward by the crowd behind her which had now swelled to either
hundreds or thousands—it was very difficult to tell in the low,
underground space lit mainly by the glow of the large, flat
screens.

Up
until now, Frankie had been allowing herself to be carried along in
the momentum of the dream—because it
had
to be a dream, didn’t it? She had never been to a place like
this or seen people like these. When words scrolled by on the
bottom of the screens, she didn’t recognize the language or indeed,
even the alphabet. So she
had
to be dreaming all this, safe at home in her bed,
right?

But dream or no
dream, she didn’t wish to take a vicious beating just because she
couldn’t find her ticket. She began to fight against the crowd,
trying to get to the side, to get away from the turnstiles and
their guards.

To her surprise, she
was able to make some headway, even in the packed area. She
realized that she was taller than almost everyone here—taller and
stronger too. Which was crazy—she was always shorter than almost
everyone, not taller. And though she had worked a lot on her upper
body strength in order to do a lot of the inversions and head and
hand stands required in yoga, she still wasn’t strong enough to
muscle her way through a packed crowd. Yet, that was what she was
doing…only not fast enough.

Before she knew it,
Frankie had come to the end of the row of turnstiles with only one
person in line in front of her. She watched to see what that
person—a girl in a dull yellow uniform jumpsuit—would do. To her
surprise, the girl simply put her hand to a black pad on the side
of the turnstile. Her hand was briefly outlined in brilliant green
light and the barred door slid open for her. Then it closed again
and suddenly Frankie was next.

She stood there,
hesitating, wondering what would happen if she pressed her hand to
the pad. She didn’t belong here—would the mechanism inside the
turnstile sense that?

The crowd behind her
was shoving forward, clearly wondering what was happening and why
they weren’t moving forward. But Frankie was an interloper—what if
she got shocked? Or what if the black uniformed guard who was
standing to one side grabbed her and started beating her with the
long, silver metal baton she saw shoved into his belt. Or what
if—

“
Who are you?”

Frankie looked
around but the voice wasn’t coming from anyone around her—no one
she could see, anyway.

“
Who in the Seven Hells are you?”
the voice demanded again. It was deep and
masculine—a man’s voice.
“And what are you doing here?”

“
I
don’t know,” Frankie said aloud. “I don’t know where I
am.”

Several of the
people behind her were glaring at her now and the black uniformed
guard was beginning to take an interest in her—doubtless for
holding up the line.

“
You’re in the pubtrans station. But more to the point, you’re
in
me,
”
the voice told
her.
“What the
fuck are you doing in my body?”

And then Frankie
realized…the voice was coming from inside her head.

Look for the Brides of the Kindred 17, Switched, coming in
early 2016

And read on for the blurb and preorder link for Evangeline's
new book,
The Institute: Daddy
Issues
,
coming Valentine's Day 2016.

Can Kink heal a Broken Heart?

Detective Andi Sugarbaker is going to find
out…the hard way.

Searching for the source of
the deadly new date rape drug,
Please
, Andi and her partner,
Viktor Saltanov, must go
undercover at the infamous Age Play resort, called simply The
Institute.

Here at The
Institute, time is rolled back and Andi finds herself forced to
relive painful trauma from her past in order to pursue her case.
Meanwhile, her partner is showing a whole new side of himself that
Andi never dreamed existed.

Born and bred
in Mother Russia, Viktor Saltanov is 6’5, muscular, and as stoic as
they come. But now he has become Andi’s sole support, protector…and
disciplinarian. Letting her partner spank her and touch her in ways
she never dreamed of is slowly breaking down Andi’s defenses,
taking her to a vulnerable place inside she’s been trying to
suppress for years.

Can
the two of them navigate the traitorous maze of lies and deception
and find a deeper truth about themselves? Or will their experience
at
The
Institute
destroy
their relationship forever?