Submissive by Moonlight (3 page)

“Scared. But not hurt. And given the situation, she was actually very brave.”

“Good for her.” Marisa took a nice sip of hot tea, relieved.

He fixed her with a hard look. “You didn’t seem too worried about her when I came in.”

“Is that a statement or a question, Officer?”

“Make it a question.”

“I knew you’d take care of it. I knew she’d be okay the moment you left to search for her.” She remembered his actions the night before. “And thank you for avoiding my circle rather than barging through it. For someone who doesn’t believe in such things, you can be polite about it when you choose to be.”

“If you’re involved, Ms. Clarke, we’re going to find out.”

“And you can be very rude when you choose to be too. Thank you for the demonstration.” She stood, taking her tea cup with her. “I have work to do. On my computer, so I won’t offer to let you search through my hard drive unless you have a warrant. But you’re welcome to go through the rest of the house and do whatever detecting you feel you need to do. The grounds as well. Enjoy yourself. I know there’s not much crime out there, so maybe it’ll spare a few people some speeding tickets. I have nothing to hide.” She sat in front of the computer again, turning her back to him.

“That’s not wise,” he said, with none of the antagonism she’d heard before.

She shrugged.

“Everyone has something to hide,” he told her. “But since you’ve given me permission, I’ll search. I’ll try not to bother you.”

She ignored him and focused on the screen.
My, what a wicked web you’ve woven, asshole programmer. But the worse it is, the more in it for me
. Her fingers went
clickety-clack
, adding comments, changing the names of variables. She shut out the rest of the house, everything but her and the code. When his cell phone rang an hour later, she stopped only long enough to conclude that it wasn’t hers.

GOOD GOING, NOLAN
. He hadn’t met a woman who interested him in the last year and a half in Breksville. He’d compiled a good record of success at his job, but it was almost impossible for him to find a date in a small town. Oh, women found him attractive enough. And as a dominant, figuring out if a woman was submissive wasn’t usually very hard. But just because a woman preferred to let the man take the lead didn’t necessarily mean she had a taste for kink. In a small community, gossip traveled fast. A lot of people were open-minded, but a lot of people weren’t.

Marisa, on the other hand, clearly didn’t care about fitting in. And she was smart, because whatever she was doing on the computer was way past anything he understood. Brains were at least as important to his libido as a sexy body; Marisa had both. Nice curves. He remembered the way her nipples stuck out in the cool midnight air, begging to be touched and teased. Or pinched with fingers or a clamp. Not unlike the one he’d found when he opened a drawer in her bedroom, connected to its mate with a silver chain. Reluctantly, he’d closed the drawer, because it had nothing in the way of evidence for him, but not before he’d noticed a glass dildo, anal beads, and a leather collar. Marisa obviously had a taste for kink, and he was pretty sure she wouldn’t appreciate how he’d found out.

She did tell me I could search the place.

He’d just received a call that exonerated Marisa beyond any reasonable doubt of complicity in Carla’s disappearance. The expert tracker they’d called in from Richmond had gone over where Carla had been found, and stated with complete certainty that no human had been there except a little girl and someone heavy wearing policeman’s boots. Nolan himself, in other words. The area where Carla had disappeared had been stomped on by too many people searching for her, but that didn’t matter. Carla had simply wandered off, as she had said and as her mother had said, exactly as the tracks they could find indicated. Open-and-shut. There was simply no other explanation that fit the facts.

Of course, there wasn’t any explanation for Marisa knowing where Carla could be found, either. Nolan was stuck with what Marisa had offered him, the idea that it was a one-chance-in-a-million lucky guess. He liked that better than psychic powers and magic. It was a big world. One-in-a-million things happened all the time. In any case, he’d pissed off the one woman within fifty miles who might be interested in what he could offer in the way of a relationship, and who happened to be as sexy as hell.

And sexy she certainly was. It wasn’t just that he’d seen her naked and checked out her curves, although her full breasts and round ass would be haunting his dreams for weeks to come. Or even that she was into kink. She’d carved out a life for herself, working independently. Even her religion was independent. He was attracted to that, in spite of the fact that his own work life as a cop was very structured. Or maybe because of it.

He walked downstairs. She didn’t turn around, although she surely heard him on her creaky staircase.

He cleared his throat. She tapped away on the keyboard.

“I apologize, Ms. Clarke.”

For a moment he thought she was going to ignore that too, because her fingers didn’t stop on the keyboard. But finally, she twisted in the chair. “There’s nothing to apologize for. You were doing your job. I have to admit that if I believed what you believe, I’d be pretty suspicious of me too. And I can’t offer any proof or anything to convince you to believe differently. I am who I am. My experience tells me one thing. Your experience tells you the other.”

“A tracker looked at the place Carla was found. You haven’t ever been near there, at least not recently.”

She smiled, which made his heart beat faster. It was nearly as nice as her laugh, and he wanted to see more of both. “Hopefully it won’t require any belief in magic on your part to accept that I already knew that I hadn’t been there.”

He chuckled. Smart, curvy, and a dry humor. He searched her eyes, trying to figure her out. Yeah, it wasn’t too hard to tell if someone was submissive at a BDSM club in the city or on a date for dinner. But this situation was something else entirely. Just as not every submissive woman necessarily had a taste for kink, not every kinky woman wanted a power exchange. Marisa was clearly independent and strong enough to forge her own way in life. He liked that in a woman. Even if she would enjoy giving up control in the bedroom, he didn’t think she would take kindly to him taking advantage of his position as a policeman, or respond well to any caveman tactics.

“Marisa. May I call you Marisa?” He felt stupid the moment the words left his mouth. This was hopeless. In other circumstances, maybe, but he’d ruined any chance he’d had with her.

“I wish you would, Nolan. No one calls me Ms. Clarke. Ms. Clarke was my mother.”

He nodded, trying not to show how relieved he was. “Thank you for your help yesterday. Lucky guess or not, it would have been hours until we searched that area, and that coyote—well, I don’t know what would have happened. I’d like to believe she would have been safe either way, hungrier and more frightened but safe.”

Marisa stood. She was half a head shorter than he was, and while he’d seen her naked, they’d never been so close. She smelled like roses, sweet and soft. “I’m very glad she’s safe. And that you believed me at least enough to look, for whatever reason, even if it was because you thought a witch might be up to mischief. Don’t sell your own role in rescuing her short, Nolan. I would have gone looking for her, although I wouldn’t have known exactly what I was looking for, but it would have taken me a good deal of time to get dressed and get my way through all the brush.”

He was touched by the fact that after the way he’d treated her as a suspect, she was still concerned about how he saw himself. If their positions had been reversed, he’d be throwing her out of his house. His gaze dropped to her T-shirt, which tightly hugged the breasts he’d thought about ever since he saw her naked. He’d had to jerk off before he could get to sleep, because he couldn’t get her body out of his head.
There’s no place like 127.0.0.1
, the shirt said and had a picture of two red shoes. He lifted his gaze to meet hers, and her eyebrows were arched.

I’ve been busted. And no, I wouldn’t be trying to throw her out of my house, under any conditions. I’d be trying to get into her pants, the way I am now. But if I want her, I’m going to have to bide my time
. “Just reading your shirt, ma’am. What’s it mean?”

“So I’m ma’am now, am I?”

“Curious, I’ve never objected to being called sir.”

Her cheeks reddened. “I’d rather you called me Marisa.” She glanced down as if she didn’t know what shirt she had on, and then back up. “127.0.0.1 is an IP address that points back to whatever computer you’re using. Home, in other words.”

He chuckled. “Ah.”

“Those are ruby slippers,” she added unnecessarily. “Like in
The Wizard of Oz
.”

“Thank you very much for your time, Marisa.” At least she wasn’t a domme. He doubted any domme would correct him for saying ma’am. And her blush at his suggestion that he didn’t object to sir was a good sign too. “Again, my apologies for suspecting you.”

She smiled. “Don’t worry about it, Nolan. We all have our own paths to follow, and they aren’t all the same.” She walked him to the door to let him out. When he turned to look back, halfway down the path, she was still standing in the doorway. She waved and then backed up and closed the door.

What a beautiful sight that would be every morning when I go to work
. He kicked himself mentally and walked to his patrol car. It was one thing to think about fucking her or tying her up or kissing those soft luscious lips. Thinking about setting up house was completely crazy.

He opened the car door and paused, looking back at the house. “I’ll be back,” he said to himself. “I’ll be back.”

Marisa twirled the glass of red wine as she sat on the couch. She was wearing shorts and an oversize long-sleeved T-shirt that contained five lines of code you could find in a few dozen places on the Internet, but which somehow the government quixotically banned for export.
This shirt is a munition
, the shirt said. It was comfortable, and she wore it mostly at home because she didn’t figure people would get the joke.

The remote lay at her side. She’d finished flicking through channels; even with a satellite dish and 206 of them, there still wasn’t anything she wanted to watch. She’d left it on a channel that showed England playing Pakistan in cricket. She didn’t know what the heck was going on, and the Urdu-speaking announcers weren’t helpful to her, but it left her free to muse. Somehow, having turned the television on, she was reluctant to give up on it entirely for the evening, and she was determined not to watch one of the shopping channels.

She sipped softly. The last two days she’d thrown herself at her work, spending all her time fixing ugly code. She thought she found the bug that had gotten her called in on this one in the first place. Just once she wanted to see a company that recognized that unreadable code was unmaintainable before the code broke.

She knew what she was doing because she’d done it before. She was avoiding thinking about Nolan. When he’d stared at her, something in her turned to jelly. And when he said he didn’t mind being called sir, that had stirred loose a whole slew of repressed fantasies. He hadn’t meant what she was thinking, of course. Cops were used to being called sir, and she supposed a sergeant had people under him who called him sir all the time. It was a harmless comment. It wasn’t his fault that Nolan was built like her fantasy dom.
Would you like to use those handcuffs on me, Sir?
She almost wished he’d arrested her.

The batter, if that was what they were called in cricket, was banging his bat on the ground rather loudly. She looked up but not in time to catch him in the act. The match had been going on for an hour, and as far as she could tell, England hadn’t gotten a chance to swing at anything yet. The cricket bat looked like a paddle but was way too heavy for any sort of sensible play. She wondered how it would feel to bend over the sofa with her skirt hiked up and be struck by a wooden paddle. It was one of those things she couldn’t do to herself, not effectively, but the idea of it made her squirm and rub her legs together.
I am
not
going to get wet watching cricket
. She picked up the remote and flicked through channels again, without really seeing what she was looking at.

She’d made a profile on a BDSM social network site, but she hadn’t done much with it, so not surprisingly, it hadn’t attracted any potential partners. A couple of “Doms” had IM’d with her, but one was even more inexperienced than her, and the other one had creeped her out. Maybe she was too picky or unwilling to take chances, but she’d learned to trust her hunches. Turning her fantasies into reality was not worth any cost. It seemed pretty unlikely that she’d be experiencing any paddling soon or even a spanking.
I might not like it even if I did. There’s lots of things that are hot to think about but that I don’t want to do. Maybe that should be one of them. But still, I want to try.

She was pretty sure she’d like it if Nolan was doing the spanking, though. Why couldn’t she get the man out of her mind? Maybe it was because she’d been naked in front of him. She had a fantasy about that—being naked in front of a clothed man, kneeling at his feet. But being naked for ritual wasn’t supposed to be about her sexual fantasies.
Although all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals
. It might be easier to have a faith that put sex in a completely different box than religion.

The cricket batsman was pounding on the ground again, and she focused back on the screen. But no one was pounding anything; the pretty English chef was making a soufflé and talking about it in sinful tones.
Someone’s knocking on my door. Who would knock on my door at this hour?

No one ever knocked on her door late at night. She had friends, but even the ones she knew mostly from online were fifty miles away by car. Her neighbors ignored her. She wasn’t sure when or why it leaked out that she was a witch, but everyone seemed to know it. That was fine. She was by nature pretty solitary. Small, isolated houses didn’t make for a lot of incidental contact, and people would rather drive into town than borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbor anyway.