LOVING HER SOUL MATE (3 page)

Shay was, at first, taken aback by his
sternness.
 
Who did he think he was
talking to her that way?
   
He didn’t
know her like that.
 
But her umbrage gave
way to the reality of what he’d said.
 
Because he was right.
 
She had nothing to be ashamed of.
 
She didn’t do this to herself.
 
This was done to her.
  

She turned around.

John had been in law enforcement since getting out
of college and he’d seen it all in his fifteen-year career.
 
Viewing bruises on backsides was nothing new
to him.
 
But the fact that he was
suddenly nervous about viewing her particular bruises was something entirely
new to him.
 

“Where did he bruise you?” he asked her.
 
“Right, left, or both?”

Shay closed her eyes.
 
“Right,” she said.

“I’m going to need to see it for myself.
 
Do you give me permission to take a look?”

She exhaled.
 
At least it was John Malone.
 
At
least she knew
of
him, even if she didn’t know him personally at
all.
 
But he had a rep as an honest cop,
no smears or
corruption anywhere near
his name.
 
Besides, if he didn’t take a look then some
pimpled-faced evidence tech would, and those types loved to gawk.
 
She preferred the captain.
 
“Yes,” she said.

John reached over the waist band of her shorts and
panties and carefully slid them both down over the mounds of her naked
butt.
 
His cock began to throb as soon as
he saw the fullness of her tight ass, and the velvety smoothness of her brown
skin.
 
She was so small and round and
plump that he now knew why he felt as if this was not going to be an ordinary
viewing.
 
He was getting a severe hard-on
just looking at the upper end of her ass.

But when he pulled her shorts and panties down
further and looked at the deeply-ingrained, belt buckled bruises that littered
her small right cheek, his jaw tightened.
 
There were three of them in a row, all beginning to show signs of
welting up, as if this young woman had been branded.
 

Then John couldn’t hold back.
 
“That bastard
!,
” he
said, and as soon as he did tears appeared in Shay’s eyes.
 

John felt her tremble and was suddenly so concerned
that he turned her around.
 
When he saw
the tears in her eyes, his heart pounded against his chest.
 
It felt so odd to him, as if this was his
woman that asshole had beaten, and this was his woman crying in front of
him.
 
It wasn’t, he knew it wasn’t, but
it was affecting him as if it was.
 
And
he did something he’d never done with a victim before in all of his years in
law enforcement: he pulled her into his arms.

Shay should have been startled when this cop
embraced her.
 
Especially
a cop with a rep like John Malone.
 
She should have been downright shocked.
 
But she wasn’t.
 
Because she needed a friendly hug.
 
And that was all it was, she decided, a
fellow human being showing a little compassion.
 
And that would have been all it was, had it ended there.
 
But it didn’t end there.

When Shay stopped sobbing, and they stopped
embracing, John turned her back around.
 
And his heart pounded again.
 
If
Resden was still here John would probably strangle him lifeless with his bare
hands.
 
How dare he do this to her!
 
He felt angry and he felt frustrated.
 
But he felt disheartened, too, at just the
thought of what this young woman had gone through.
 
He’d always been known to be adroitly
empathetic to victims of crime.
 
That
might explain why he was thirty-seven and already burned out.
 
But his response to Shay and her injuries was
beyond empathy.
 
It felt personal to
him.
 
And he was stumped to know why.

He pulled back up her shorts, kept his hands on her
slim hips.
 
For a moment they just stood
there.
 
And then John spoke softly.
 
“What happened here, Shay?” he asked her.

Shay paused again, and then walked back to her
chair, where she sat back down in that sideways slant.
 
It was obvious she didn’t want to talk about
it.
 
It was also obvious that she had to
talk about it.
 

“Lonnie lives in Birmingham,” she said.
 
“That’s where I met him.
 
Since I moved here to Brady a couple weeks
ago, we hadn’t seen each other.
 
He
decided to come down and spend the weekend with me.
 
When he got here he wanted to have sex.
 
We were in a committed relationship so I
didn’t see where that was a problem.
 
But
then he started talking about how he wanted to be a
dom
one day and he wanted me to be his submissive and I’m going whoa, back it
up.
 
Since when have you been into shit
like that?
 
I’d only been gone two weeks.
 
He said it’s no big deal and that he thought
we should try something new, something he’d just learned himself.
 
I was
game,
I
thought it would be fun.
 
I don’t have a
problem with a little variety in the bedroom.”
 

John’s penis began throbbing at the thought of her,
variety, and a bedroom.
 

“So we played around with different things.
 
When he started tying my hands and my feet, I
mean, I thought it would be something different.
 
I wouldn’t let any stranger do it to me, no,
of course not.
 
But I knew
Lonnie,
I’d known him for years.
 
He was going to be my . . .” She cleared her
throat.
 
“But when he pulled out this
weird strap and started beating my behind, that’s when the fun ended for me.”

“You don’t enjoy sex spankings?” John asked
her.
 
And as soon as he asked it he began
to redden.
 
Why in the world did he ask
her that?
 
Those bruises weren’t some sex
spanking and he knew it.
 
He couldn’t
believe he asked her that!

But Shay, to John’s relief, didn’t blink.
 
“What he was doing to me wasn’t a spanking,
Captain,” she said.
 
“That’s what he
tried to call it, too.
 
But I felt like
he was brutalizing me.”

John nodded his head.
 
“Understood,” he said.

Shay paused, as if the thought of what Resden had
actually done to her was still a bitter taste in her mouth, and then she folded
her arms.
 
“I was so angry at that joker
that all I saw was red.
 
I wanted to hurt
him back.
 
But I knew I had to play it
right.
 
My daddy always taught me to
never fly off the handle because you may need that handle.
 
So I told him to wait, that I had a better
way for us to do it.
 
I encouraged him to
untie me so I could show him.
 
He had the
upper hand as long as I was tied down.
 
But once I was freed, I grabbed the first thing I could get my hands on,
that lamp, and tried to knock the shit out of him.”

John frowned.
 
“You guys were in the bedroom?”

“That’s right.”

“Then how did the lamp end up in here?”

“Because he ran up front and I chased him with it,
that’s how.
 
I wanted to kill his crazy
ass.
 
Nobody was going to beat on me with
some buckled strap like I wasn’t a person anymore but an object!
 
He didn’t explain how that shit worked to
me.
 
He just started doing it.”

 
John
understood fully what she was saying, but he also remembered what she had
said.
 
“Why did you tell me it was about
other women?” he asked her.
 
He didn’t
figure her to be a liar, but you could never tell these days.

“Because it’s true.
 
It was about other women.
 
He admitted it.
 
He said some woman introduced him to it, and
then he met this other woman who was into it, too.
 
Which was fine, to each his
own.
 
But Lonnie and I were
supposed to be in a committed relationship.
 
What the hell was he out chasing tail after I’d been gone for only a
couple weeks?
 
Come on, now.
 
Those were the kind of questions I was asking
him.
 
Then he got bold about it and told
me the truth.”

“That he’d been fooling around with those women far
longer than a couple weeks?”

Shay looked at John.
 
“Right,” she said.
 
“He was proud of it, too,” she went on.
 
“He said it wasn’t a big deal, that he even
wanted me to meet one of them, the one he called his submissive.
 
‘She wouldn’t mind,’ he said.
 
I cussed his ass out, that’s how I felt about
such a meeting.
 
And because I wouldn’t
leave it the hell alone and wouldn’t shut up, he slapped me.
 
And that’s when I did the real damage to that
lamp.”

John almost smiled, but he was still too invested
in her emotions to minimize it.
 
“So when
I showed up you decided to keep the first part of this sordid episode private?”

Shay hated that she wasn’t completely honest with
him.
 
“Yes,” she said.

John stared at her.
 
She looked so vulnerable to him.
 
“Do you still want to keep it private?”

Shay looked into his tired blue eyes.
 
She didn’t think she’d have a choice.
 
“Yes,” she said.
 
“I consented to being tied up and maybe to being
spanked too.
 
But what he did to me
crossed the line.
 
Some people may get
off on bruising, but I don’t.
 
And he
should have known that.
 
But . . .”

John could just feel her anguish.
 
“But what, Shay?”

“But I don’t know what to do about it.”
 
She looked at John with troubled eyes.
 
“He slapped me, but I knocked the shit out of
him, too.
 
And as for that beating in the
bedroom, I had consented to trying it.
 
He went too far, but he stopped when I told him he was going too
far.
 
So I don’t know.
 
I’m
more angry
at
him for cheating on me than anything else.
 
But I’m angry at him for bruising me, too, and I don’t want to give him
a pass on that, either.”
 
She shook her
head.
 
And looked at
John.
 

John smiled.
 
“After what you did to him, my darling,” he said, “trust me: the last
thing you gave him was a pass.”

Shay actually smiled too.
 

“So,” John said, closing his notebook, “I don’t see
how the bedroom part is relevant.”

Shay stared at him.
 
He saw the hopefulness suddenly appear in her eyes.
 
“Does that mean, are you saying that it won’t
be in your report?”

“Not unless Resden makes an issue out of it, which
I’m sure he won’t.”

“He won’t,” Shay assured him too.

“And since it started out as a consensual sex act
by some wannabe who didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and he stopped when
you told him you didn’t want to go that far, it won’t need to be in my report.”

Shay stared at John.
 
What a man
, she had a sudden need to
say.
 
But she wasn’t about to say
something that lame.
 
“Thanks,” she said
instead.

John gave her a quick smile that didn’t last two
seconds.
 
“Resden’s already admitted that
he slapped you first, so I’m determining him to be the primary aggressor.”

“Even though he’s the one who needed medical
attention?”

“That’s correct.
 
You won’t be charged.”