Free Beg Me by Lisa Lawrence Page A

said, “and you’ve got to do something for me.”
    “If I can.”
    He looked down at the floor a moment, weighing his request. “You solve murders. That’s what they pay you for, right?”
    “Sometimes,” I said carefully. “Most of the time I get lucky, Oliver. It’s not always murder. It’s theft sometimes, extortion. It turns into murder more times than I’d like.”
    “My father was murdered. They never found out who did it. If you want to call it the price of my help, okay, that’s it.”
    I was still naked. “You mind if I get my clothes on before I answer?”
    He smiled. I walked over to him, and we kissed again, long and hard. Suddenly, he pulled back. I didn’t understand what was wrong. It was like he was fighting his own impulses.
    “I can look into your father’s murder,” I said, “but I don’t know if I’ll find anything.”
    “I’m not talking about reading a file, Teresa. I need a real investigator, you know?”
    I dressed in record time. “Okay, tell me when it happened. What’s the background?”
    “Later,” he said. “I just want a sincere commitment right now. Halfway through your training, I’ll let you go check into it, and when you find results, you’ll come back here and I’ll finish working with you for what you need with the group—the cult. I have to admit it to myself: They are a cult.”
    “But your father’s murder: You expect me to give you a blind answer? I don’t even know what’s involved—”
    “
Later.
I’m going to ask things of you that are a lot tougher than that.”
    I relented, nodding. Perhaps it wasn’t so much to ask. Perhaps it could be quickly wrapped up. For now, it was good enough to convey to him that I would try. He had given me a name, and that was progress.
    The Sarcophacan Temple of Nubian Princes. And a guy named Isaac.
    “Okay, okay. What time do you want me to come over tomorrow?”
    He looked at me as if I was being foolish. “You’re not taking a Learning Annex class. This is all the way. Go and get your things from the hotel. You’re staying here—for the week.”
    I looked around, not understanding what on earth he could mean. We were in a bookshop. Where was I going to sleep?
    “What do you mean
here
?”
    “Basement,” he said.
    It turned out to be a basement, all right. It was his personal dungeon, back behind the shop’s stockroom.

3
    S uspended, naked, hanging like a child’s mobile four feet above the ground, wrists and ankles in leather cuffs. Not enough slack that I could bring my hands together to effect an escape, and that’s not what I was after anyway. I was here for insight. I pulled, and there was slack in the ropes, but it just meant I flailed about and bobbed and swayed like a fish on a hook. He left me like that for hours at a time. At first I thought: This is bloody dull. And then he got down to it.
    He came in and slowly undressed. I watched the unveiling of firm pecs and a six-pack of hard brown muscle, and it was clear that whatever ordeal he had been through with this group, it had confirmed him as a fanatic in the gym. When he pulled down his pants, he took his underwear with them, and he was already hard. Seven inches of thick cock, and if you’re one of those who think penises have their own personalities, then his was a dick that was rude and angry and insistent, a dark brown pole, his large testicles with their skin taut like folds over large eggs. The head of his penis was a red bulb, and I swore I could see a bead of semen glistening there. He was close to coming just thinking about me, up in his shop. Now he moved toward me with his erection like it was to be a punishment.
    And I was completely vulnerable.
    His fingertips touched my pussy, and he said in a harsh voice, “You should be wetter for me.”
    “I’m plenty wet,” I said.
    There was a kind of harness to cradle my neck and my head, but I was hung in an almost fully horizontal position. I could see him when he walked in but