It was a waiting game with PD. While I waited to find out when they wanted me back and what I was going to be doing, I might as well continue to beat down the addiction..
That's what I told myself. Carefully avoiding considering my use of the term "beat down" rather than simply "beat."
Cole St. Martin obviously lived in Las Vegas. That's where I'd first been taken. After that I didn't know. I could find his principal residences – all seven of them, and not all in the U.S. – but I couldn't find out where he was now. I could contact his staff at his pharmaceutical company, but I absolutely couldn't get my call put through, and I was not going to leave a message.
I could put a PI on him but I didn't have that much money and most PIs actually know and work with the police and they're not that reticent. It would get out. I had no idea if Cole had a reputation for what he did and I didn't want to find out when it came back to bite me in the ass.
I’d joined PD after two years of junior college and finished the rest of my degree as a hybrid online and on campus student who was also a patrol cop and who never slept. I never regretted it. By the age of 20 I was wearing the uniform. By 23 I was back out of it and going undercover. Now as 24 was getting long in the tooth, I was back out of deep cover and wondering if I'd ever get to go back in.
But the whole time I'd been working my way up, I'd had to put up with the good old boy network, same as any woman who pushes her way into a non-traditional career. I hadn't been wanted in my tae kwon-do class until I proved myself by never lusting after or dating any of the men who fit so easily into the do chang. I wasn't wanted at the gym in the heavy weights section where I was once told to leave after a businessman using 30 pound dumbbells to do concentration curls became angry that I was using 45s. I definitely wasn't wanted on the force when I came in as a twenty-something recruit. Big boobs. Big eyes. Not enough testosterone.
I wasn't going to blow that work, the work I'd put in to not be one of the guys laughing at guy humor and making dick jokes. It was work I'd put in to show that I had their backs the same as they, hopefully, maybe theoretically, had mine. I didn't want to be seen as kinky or even sexual, or as a gold digger looking for her way out of the job, or as a woman pining for the man she'd met on "vacation" when she needed some of her saved up downtime to take care of "family matters." I didn't need to remind anyone that my father was facing charges of impropriety on any of his cases.
So I searched on my own. I still had a week. It wasn't much time. It would have to do.
I had no idea what I meant to do if and when I found him. Leave Mark a note? Gone to find the man who beats me and might save my life and might be my lover. XXOO Don't wait up.
Would I lie and tell him I was back on the job? One phone call and he could disprove that and I didn't want to lie.
Just disappear? He deserved way better than that. I was starting to think Mark deserved way better than me.
This – searching for someone, trying to find where they'd gone to ground – I was supposed to be good at. But Cole hadn't broken any laws. Well, not any anyone knew about. He was a private citizen with the ability to pay whatever necessary to keep his whereabouts private.
And he was. He could be anywhere in the world, but where he'd taken me was close to home. He spent most of his time in Las Vegas and that's where we'd been to start with. If the second location had actually been a separate location, it was close to where we'd started despite the ride by blindfold in the car that had taken hours. I thought that was misdirection.
A man of his proclivities and having the money he had could go anywhere he wanted to pursue his pleasures. For all I knew, he only needed someone to beat and "fix" once a month. Once a quarter. Once a year. Maybe that had done it for him. Maybe the erections were chemically enhanced and all he really wanted was the sadism.
Maybe I shouldn't be looking for him.
That thought made me search that much harder.
San Francisco had a lot of dungeons. I had to start somewhere. If he didn't pay to have a girl delivered to his door every time he needed one and if he needed one more often than once every blue moon, maybe his name or at least his general description would be evident in the clubs.
The dungeons.
It was a stupid idea. There were probably as many dungeons in Seattle as San Francisco so why was I thinking San Francisco? It was twice as far from Seattle to Vegas as San Francisco to Vegas. For that matter, Vegas probably had plenty of dungeons, as did any major city. So why was I going to San Francisco?
"Because it's famous for sex," I said aloud. "And he lives in Vegas. He may not want to play there." Not because a billionaire needed to be shy about his sexual preferences, though money wouldn't shield him from being shy. But because lawsuits would be a lot easier from someone in the same city who woke up with a morning after case of regret.
Just like that I had a plan.
I'd heard from my father that morning. He was stuck in the hospital and when they released him, he'd be going to rehab. "Since you seem to think it's a good idea," he said, letting me know he now blamed me.
Fine with me. Whatever got him healthy. The case was waiting. I think he'd realized that as long as he was still a patient he didn't have to be a defendant. That was good. It gave us both some time.
Once I knew he was okay, I booked a flight, packed a bag, and drove to the airport.
It wasn't until I was showing my boarding pass that I realized I hadn't left Mark any word at all.
6
Cole
Mystery dinner party. The things you can do when you have money and a certain bent to your personality as well as the ability to satisfy it.
One of the rooms Annie never saw, having stayed only twenty days, was the formal dining room. Or the most formal dining room. The compound actually consists of five different houses set into a pentagon shape, with underground tunnels leading from one to the other, as well as paths between the foliage. In the Southern Nevada desert, that's a lot of sage and cactus and we're high enough for there to be some pines. The development is new, built on the coattails of a national park because money means more to some people than beauty and they don't understand that once a place is built up, the beauty they advertised isn't there anymore. Just people.
And they call me a philanthropist.
The dinner parties happened once or twice a month. In the beautiful mirrored room with white marble floors and chandeliers dripping with crystals, I'd entertain anywhere from five to twenty beautiful women, carefully … sourced, is a good word. There were gentlemen all over the world finding these beauties for me.
It was like my own version of The Bachelor. The women came for dinner, dressed exquisitely and each believing she was the only one, only to find there was competition every bit as beautiful and glittering.
Dinner was pleasant, with delicious and healthy food as befits bodies as toned and graceful as those at the table. It was served by men who could have been Chippendales dancers, wearing black tuxedo pants and nothing else, and sometimes mid dinner I ordered not even that. The reaction of the women was informative. There were those who wouldn't look, those who couldn't look away, those who flushed with pleasure or shame or embarrassment, or because they were becoming hotter and wetter and slicker and more anxious.