Free Red by Kate Kinsey Page B

unfocused, feeling unreal. Then her mouth was on his. He felt her lips open, her tongue forcing its way in, and a warm unfamiliar taste flooding his mouth.
    “Do you like the taste of your own cum,” she whispered, “as much as I do?”
     
    Hanson opened his eyes to early morning sunlight. There were no candles, no cuffs . . . and no Gina. Just a dream from memory, and a wet spot on the mattress. Yet he still had a hard-on and needed to piss like a mother-fucker.
    He was loosing a stream of urine into the toilet when realization destroyed his aim.
    Fuck! That was why that symbol had looked so familiar.
    Suddenly a piece of the puzzle clicked into place. Roger and Marla’s little afternoon delight; Robyn Macy and her rope . . .
    He looked down and saw that his cock, having wilted just enough to take a piss, was standing at attention again.
    He grabbed the hand lotion and a sock off the bathroom floor, and headed back to the bed. The day could wait another ten minutes.

Chapter 14
    Haven’t I always been honest with you? Haven’t I warned you more than once? Didn’t I love you with all my heart, even passionately, and did I conceal the fact from you, that it was dangerous to give yourself into my power, to abase yourself before me, and that I want to be dominated?
    —L EOPOLD V ON S ACHER -M ASOCH , Venus in Furs
     
     
     
     
    G ina Larsen had been his partner for seven years, his lover for three of those, and his best friend for all of them. He thought he knew her completely—until the night she was led from a downtown hotel in handcuffs.
    Vice hadn’t been after her; they hadn’t even known her name until it was too late. She was just a minnow caught in a net cast for a much bigger fish: a whale named Howard Tunney, Republican candidate for governor.
    The governor’s race that year was a mud-spattered cluster-fuck. Tunney accused the incumbent of awarding DOT contracts to friends, and he had leaked documents to the press.
    Then, two weeks before the election, when polls were showing the incumbent behind, the vice squad got an anonymous tip about an escort ring operating outcalls in the very upscale Union Hotel. The source even supplied a room number.
    The anonymous source was probably the Honorable William R. Denton, incumbent governor, but no one was ever able or willing to prove that. Insiders also knew that Milton Daubs, chief of police, was deeply in Denton’s pockets, as only the son-in-law of Denton’s sole daughter could be. Daubs had personal and professional reasons to give this anonymous tip his full attention via his pet vice squad.
    Daubs had been appointed after a campaign of heated rhetoric about corruption and immorality, endorsed by the most powerful coalition in any Bible-Belt Southern state: the Christian Right. In a city like theirs, with a church on every corner and many with membership in the thousands, morality was still in the majority, at least in public.
    As soon as Daubs had taken office, he began a righteous crackdown on every strip club, massage spa, adult bookstore, and nightclub in town. Even cops were taking their bachelor parties over the county line for fear of getting caught up in some sting.
    Daubs must have been tickled pink at catching Howard Tunney not just with a call girl, but a genuine leather-clad dominatrix.
    That is, until the dominatrix turned out to be an off-duty homicide detective named Gina Larsen.
    All charges were dismissed the next morning. No one cared about Gina since the primary objective, the political ruin of Howard Tunney, had been satisfactorily accomplished as soon as the press had a photo of him being led away in handcuffs.
    But that photo ruined Gina’s life. That photo changed everything.
    One side of Tunney’s face was barely visible; he had both hands up and appeared to be hiding behind the woman between him and the photographer. The woman, also in cuffs, was good-looking with a mane of reddish curls. She stared coldly and unapologetically