Little Red Riding Crop

Rookies.

Nora rolled her eyes as she lifted her handcuffed wrists and pretended to scratch her ear. Most days she cursed her unruly black hair for its mass of waves and curls that took an hour to tame. But she loved it on days like these.

With a quick flick of her fingers she removed a hair pin and surreptitiously bent it into the perfect shape. In less than five seconds she'd popped the handcuffs open just as Detective Cooper dropped into the chair behind his desk.

Flashing her dark green eyes at him, Nora threw her booted legs up onto his desk, crossed her feet at the ankles, and tossed the cuffs at him.

Cooper hadn't walked the beat in years, but he still had his street reflexes. The wickedly handsome detective caught the cuffs with the tip of his fingers.

“Seriously, Nora.” He held the handcuffs up. “Do you want to get locked up?”

She cocked her head to the side and smiled at him.

“Isn't that the question I usually ask you, Coop?”

With a groan, Cooper rubbed his forehead. She’d never seen a black man blush so thoroughly before. Part of her wanted to crawl over his desk and kiss him just to make the public humiliation complete. A petite but stacked white Dominatrix in red leather knee-high boots, a red and black mini-skirt with a matching corset crawling across the desk of a six-foot-tall tough-as-nails police detective and giving him a kiss on the tip of his nose? The temptation to out Detective Cooper as a secret male submissive nearly overwhelmed her. But she restrained herself. Number one, she liked Cooper and wouldn’t do that to such a nice guy. And number two, she was a professional. No freebies for anyone.

“Nora...” He sat back in his chair and studied her with a mix of half-hearted disgust and barely disguised amusement. “You can’t take off the cuffs yourself. It’s considered resisting arrest.”

“Then tell your damn rookies that when they arrest a professional Dominatrix they might want to cuff her hands behind her back instead of in front.”

“Would that have really stopped you?”

Nora thought about it a moment.

“Probably not. But it would have slowed me down. Can I go now?”

“In a hurry?”

“Places to go. People to beat. And you and I both know I didn’t do anything wrong. S&M is not illegal in the state of New York.”

Cooper opened a file nearly as tall as his coffee mug—her file.

“The maid who stopped by the house to pick up her cell phone and heard ‘gut-wrenching screams,’ as she called them, would beg to differ.”

“The maid wasn’t paying to get the shit beat out of her. My client was. Only he can press charges, and he won’t because he’s scared of me. He pays extra to be scared of me. So I’m going, right? You’re letting me go, aren’t you? Say ‘yes, Mistress.’”

Cooper sighed heavily.

“Coop…say it,” Nora ordered.

“Fine. Yes, Mistress. You’re free to go,” he said as Nora pulled her legs off the desk and started to stand up. “The boss man is outside waiting on you anyway.”

She collapsed into the chair again.

“Cuffs, put them on me. Now. Slammer. Lock and key. Never let me out. Please please please, Coop. This is me begging you. Record it. You’ll never hear it again.”

“That bad, eh?”

Nora put on a pout, and sunk deeper into the chair.

“He’s going to yell at me.”

Cooper rolled his dark eyes at her.

“Nora...grow up. You’re a Dominatrix. Have some dignity.”

“But he’s got the sexy French accent and the whole ‘I’m very disappointed in you’ thing, and I just can’t handle that right now.”

Nora turned pleading eyes to the detective.

“Go. Out.” He waved his hand at the door. “Scoot before you embarrass me even more.”

With a growl, Nora rose out of the chair and glared down at Cooper giving him her best Dominant stare.

“We still on for Thursday at eight?” she asked.

“Oh, hell yes.” Cooper broke into a smile.

She grabbed her toy bag from the floor by his desk and flung it over her shoulder.

“Later, Coop. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“We figure out what that was yet?” he called out after her.

Nora hit the police station hallway.

“Nope.”

As soon as she walked outside a raindrop hit her forehead. Not wanting to ruin her leather she skipped nimbly down the front steps toward a silver stretch Rolls Royce idling in front of the station. A driver stepped out and opened the door for her. Throwing herself inside, Nora landed across the lap of a man reclining on the wide back seat.

The man raised his eyebrow and looked down at her as she pulled herself into a sitting position. Slowly the Rolls pulled away from the curb and still the man didn’t speak. Fine, if he wanted a staring competition, he’d get a staring competition. Nora locked her eyes on his and waited. She could do this forever if she had to. After all, there weren’t many men in New York, hell, even the world more fun to stare at than Kingsley Edge. Long dark hair held back tonight in a ponytail, deep brown eyes, olive skin...In his long military coat, embroidered vest, and riding boots he looked so damn handsome she wanted to slap him for it. But she refrained. Kingsley would like that too much.

“What?” she demanded when he still hadn’t spoken after a whole thirty seconds of their staring contest.