“I don’t think we’ll find anything.”
“There seem to be lots of prints,” Sage said.
“Yes, but I suspect they’re postal employees. Luckily, they’re all fingerprinted, so we can eliminate them. I’m just hoping whoever he is got sloppy.”
“Why do you think it’s a guy?”
“Two-thirds of the women stalked are stalked by a past intimate partner, most of them male.”
“That should narrow the pool. Not a lot of guys in my past.” At least not a lot who know who I am.
Charlie finished his examination, and they went to lunch. He was sweet, charming, and a little shy. Sage thought he was NGB—Nice Guy But—absolutely nothing wrong with him, a perfectly lovely guy, yet she couldn’t imagine getting involved with him. She might be wrong, but she was fairly certain if he was anything other than straight vanilla, it was only vanilla with a few birthday sprinkles.
Sage had found to truly experience and revel in sex, she needed more. Not pain for pain’s sake, but dominance, so she could shed her own need for control, relax, and just enjoy. She often wondered if Gail might benefit from the same. Sage had found it was better to frequent high-end kink clubs where everything was negotiated beforehand and confidentiality was assured.
Sage was certain no one from any of the clubs would be stalking her. She felt safer in most of the clubs than she did anywhere else.
The new Roark Samuels book wasn’t coming along as well as the ones that had come before. The fact was she had an alpha wolf shifter who kept growling at her to tell his story, and she was trying to ignore him in order to finish Roark’s new novel. Sometimes, when she found a sex scene wasn’t coming along the way she wanted, she’d slip into a sexy corset and thong to write. If that didn’t work, she’d turn up the music and take a break, singing and dancing in her solarium. She couldn’t dance and was an awful singer, but she enjoyed it, and sometimes, the break from the grind and the endorphins from moving around freed up her creativity.
Gail liked to tease her about her penchant for dressing up when there was nobody home, confessing she often stayed in her pajamas if she didn’t go into her office. Sage figured she was the only one there, so it didn’t matter if others thought her weird. There was something about singing and dancing around the large space, especially at night under the stars, which helped her think.
He watched her dance. He loved when she danced in the solarium—a private show just for him. Once or twice, she’d forsaken the lingerie and danced naked. He watched as she swung her body around and moved gracefully across the floor. He couldn’t understand why she didn’t think she could dance. He’d heard her say to herself and others that she moved like an ungainly foal on a set of roller skates. But she was wrong. She had an innate beauty, style, and sense of rhythm that made her an excellent dancer. Like many things, Sage’s shortcomings were all in her head. He’d love to take her dancing—someplace dark with soft, sultry music, so he could press her body against his. He longed to have her in his embrace, her arms wrapped around his neck, hip-to-hip as his hands cupped her ass, holding her close, but more than that, he wanted her naked and in his bed.
Even thinking of Sage naked was enough to make his recalcitrant cock aching and hard. She was so fucking hot and so completely ignorant of that fact. The idiot she had once been engaged to was a fool. A woman like Sage was a rare and marvelous creature to be cherished. He knew she hadn’t had sex with a man in a while, and he was much larger than her vibrator. He wanted to lay her down, spread her legs, and make a place for himself there, shoving his cock balls deep up inside her.
Watching her, he wrapped his hand around his shaft and began to stroke, sweeping his hand from its weeping head all the way back to its root. He needed to maintain control. He’d managed to manipulate the phone system in a way that when her fence was breached, he had the security company come out and convince her she needed to upgrade her system.
God, how he’d wanted to put her over his knee and spank her gorgeous ass when she’d refused to call the cops. Granted, the police at the signing event had been less than helpful, but she had to know the deputy sheriff with the puppy-dog eyes here in her hometown would have believed her. Neither Sage nor the deputy had figured out how he found out about the breach. The deputy might be attractive, but he was dumb as a rock and not at all what Sage wanted—he wasn’t always sure Sage knew what she wanted.
Now she’d received a letter. It had unsettled her, and thankfully, the deputy had followed her back to the house after she received it. She’d scanned and sent it to Gail, so he knew what it said. “You have been warned. Your filth must be stopped!” Her note to Gail had said there had been no return address, but the postmark showed it had been sent from Hilton Head. Sage didn’t know anyone who lived there.
She tried to hit a high note and missed. He groaned, only partly in response to the sensations his cock continued to experience from his ministrations. Sage could be taught to be a wonderful dance partner, but she would never be able to sing. There were a number of things he wanted to teach her—how to shiver from his whisper of her name along her skin, how to climax just from his mounting her, and how to call him Daddy when she came.
He
