A Taste of Sir (Doms of Decadence 6)

“Not yet,” said the woman who still had her face glued to her laptop screen. “There are a lot of Alan Stones, but I’ll find him.”

“Alexa is good at what she does,” Travis told him. “I want him found. Now. And where the hell is Lacey, anyway? If you guys sent her out to get coffee on her own, then heads will roll. I want her under surveillance twenty-four seven. She doesn’t take a piss without one of you getting up in her business.”

The whole room stilled. Oh, shit.

“We thought she was with you guys,” Jace told them. “You don’t know where she is?”

“No, we don’t know. Fuck! I want her found. Yesterday!” Travis yelled.

Chapter Eighteen

Lacey cried out as her whole body slammed against something. Ouch! She groaned and opened her eyes, her vision blurry. Where was she? And why did her mouth feel like she’d been sucking on cotton balls? She knew it wasn’t a hangover because she never had more than one drink. But her head was pounding, and her stomach lurched sickeningly.

“Wake up, my dear. Come on, let me see those beautiful eyes.”

She blinked. Who was that? What was he doing in her bedroom? As her vision cleared she realized she wasn’t in her bedroom. She glanced around. The smell of unwashed bodies and days old garbage hit her and she nearly gagged. She stared up at the man leaning over her. Fear made her heart race.

“You,” she whispered. “You kidnapped me.”

The older man smiled, showing off a row of perfect, white teeth. Maybe he might be considered handsome by some, but to her he was the ugliest man she’d ever seen.

“Why? Why me?” Why had he set this all up to get her?

“Because you are my biggest triumph. A gorgeous female FBI agent. You’ll make an excellent victim for my next book. All of the others were just practice until I found you.” His face darkened. “Well, until Victor found you.”

Book? What book? “Victor? The Latin Lothario?”

He started to laugh. “Victor was never the Latin Lothario. He didn’t know Latin from French. He was an idiot. But a useful idiot. He made an excellent scapegoat, don’t you think? Everyone thought they had caught the Latin Lothario. They didn’t realize I was lying in wait, biding my time until I could take you.”

Holy shit. So she’d been right all along? Her profile hadn’t been wrong.

There was a whimpering noise and her eyes cut to the corner of the room where she saw a bedraggled, naked woman sitting on the floor. The man turned, snarling at the girl, and she shied backward, something clinking. It was then that Lacey realized she was chained to the floor. Oh, God.

“Rory?” she whispered.

He turned back with a growl. “Don’t speak to her. She was a means to an end, nothing more. A way of getting my dear Lacey here.” He reached out and brushed his fingers gently down her cheek. She pulled away, and his gaze narrowed. “Soon, you’ll beg me for my touch.”

Like hell.

She glanced around. She seemed to be in some sort of cabin. The windows were covered so she couldn’t tell what time it was or how long she’d been unconscious. She was lying on the bare metal base of a single bed.

“Victor did well to find you, even if he did decide to contact you without my permission. It was then I knew he needed to go. He was starting to think for himself, and I didn’t appreciate that. So when he was dumping lovely Carlie, I sent an anonymous tip to the police and boom, he was gone. Problem solved.”

“How did you know they would kill him? That they wouldn’t capture him and he would tell them about you?”

“He had a deep fear of jail. He’d been in jail as a juvenile, and I knew he’d do whatever was necessary to stay out of jail. Including running. The idiot. If he wasn’t killed, well, I had ensured he would never talk. If he did, I told him his dear mother would be my next victim.”

“Dear God, it’s a wonder he didn’t kill you.”

He smiled. “He didn’t kill me because he got to have fun with my girls before they died. Victor went to juvie for raping one of his teachers.”

She swallowed heavily. “What do you mean, I’ll make an excellent victim for your next book?”

“I’m an author,” he told her proudly. “The killer in my next novel is going to stalk and kill an FBI agent. I won’t use all the material I’ve gathered in my next book, of course. No need to make it too obvious for all those law enforcement officers who read my books. Not that any of them are smart enough to figure it out.”

“So, this is all research for a book? All the women you’ve kidnapped and killed? Kidnapping me? It’s all for a book?”

“No,” he answered smugly. “It’s for several books. After my first kill years ago, I couldn’t settle down at night. It kept playing over and over in my head like a delicious movie. I needed to get it down for all eternity. To have others appreciate my work. So, I started to write. Of course, my writing was atrocious to start with, and I had to perfect my art. But the story itself was amazing. How could it not be? I decided to move to Connecticut. I couldn’t risk another murder in the small town where I lived. I wrote another book, but it just didn’t have the same authenticity as the first one. That’s when I realized I needed another kill.”