Free Keepsake by Linda Barlow Page A

the most tender skin.
    “Are you okay?” Charlie’s gray eyes studied her. “Are you worried about something?”
    “I’m fine. Let’s play.”
    He shrugged. He was only an average submissive, she thought. Giving up power was something that didn’t come naturally to him.
    Perhaps she had been too indulgent with Charlie. The best dominants were control freaks. Type A personalities. They wanted—indeed
     they needed—to control every detail of the scene. The power this gave them was the turn-on.
    Isobelle liked having control, yes, but she was not interested in the fine level of detail that some dommes obsessed about.
     No, for her it was more a matter of power. She loved the rush of having a man—or even better, several men—kneeling at her
     feet.
    Removing a pair of fur-lined leather cuffs from her toy-bag, she indicated to Charlie to hold out his hands. She felt the
     familiar surge go through her as she buckled the cuffs around his wrists.
    As she led Charlie toward the back room—toward the pillory and the whipping post—Isobelle closed her eyes against the image
     of Rina, lying broken and silent on the convention center floor.

Chapter Six
    “Okay, we fucked up,” said Blackthorn to Carla Murphy.
    He had his feet up on his desk in his suite of fancy offices on Seventh Avenue just a couple of blocks away from Central Park.
     “There’s no way to undo it, but we’re going to have to engage in a little damage control. Hell. A lot of damage control.”
    “You have a personal stake in this, I know,” Carla said.
    “True. But right now I’m thinking more about the business than about my personal relationship to the de Sevigny family.” That
     had better be true, he told himself. Besides Carla, he had three other people working for him. He was responsible for putting
     food on their tables every night at suppertime. If he went under, so would they.
    “It doesn’t look good, does it, a celebrity like Rina de Sevigny being assassinated right under our noses. This kind of thing
     is not likely to bring new clients pounding on our doors.”
    “Yeah,” Carla said morosely.
    “We’ve already lost a couple possible contracts, and both the Saudi gentlemen Jonas is supposed to be baby-sitting in Washington
     during next week’s oil trade negotiations have telephoned to ask for our assurances regarding their safety.”
    “You reassured them, I hope?”
    “I bowed and scraped, yeah. We’ve guarded them before and they’ve been happy. Jonas speaks Arabic and knows where to take
     them to get them laid, so I don’t think they’ll cancel.” Jonas was a good man, and Blackthorn trusted him. He was young and
     sometimes a little over-eager, but he was smart and good with foreign languages. Jonas was also Blackthorn’s computer expert.
     He could electronically hack his way into any system.
    “Even so, we could sure use a little positive public relations,” he went on. “Best way I can see to achieve that is to outrun
     the police and the FBI and figure out who killed Rina ourselves.”
    “Look,” said Carla. “I know you used to be an FBI agent. And that World Systems Security started out as a detective agency.
     But it’s been a long time since we’ve been so much as peripherally involved in a murder investigation. And besides, it happened
     in California, and this is New York.”
    “I have friends,” Blackthorn said. “A few of them have already filled me in.” He dropped a folder on the desk between them.
     “Here’s what we know so far. The killer was a professional shooter. He didn’t get close enough to Rina to transfer any physical
     evidence to her body. He escaped with his weapon, a .22-caliber pistol. Anaheim PD interviewed lots of witnesses who claimed
     to have seen the guy, but no two descriptions are the same. We know he was in the room with her, but so were over a hundredother people. It was a nightmare for the crime scene folks, who got enough irrelevant hairs, fibers,