“The bugs are nasty though. You wouldn’t believe.”

“Nastier than Florida?”

He laughed. “Laur, we’ve got mosquitoes the size of pelicans.”

* * *

The evening grew chilly. After dinner, Bill lit a fire and they sat with the dogs and talked. Mostly Bill did the talking. Laura asked him questions, recalled fragments of memory, and had him clarify things. He talked about their parents. He told her about her fifth birthday, when she tried to play Rocket J. Squirrel to his Bullwinkle and nearly impaled herself on a fence when she jumped off a tree stump. He told her about grandparents, an aunt and uncle, a couple of cousins.

When the phone rang Bill answered it, passing it to Laura.

“Hi, honey. How you doin’?”

Rob’s voice was a welcomed sound. Bill discreetly left the room while they talked. Doogie missed her terribly, Steve and Carol said hi, and the police didn’t have any new developments.

“Have you checked your email lately?”

Her heart skipped. “Why? Do the police think he’s sent one?”

“No, silly. I sent you an email.”

She laughed. “Oh. Sorry. I guess I’m just super-suspicious.”

“With good reason.” They chatted for a few more minutes before he said good-bye. “I love you, baby girl. I’ll be out there soon, okay?”

“Okay, Sir. I love you, too.”

Bill returned a few minutes later. “I’ve got tomorrow off so it doesn’t matter if I pull a late one, but it’s got to be way past your bedtime.”

Laura looked at her watch and did a fast calculation, suddenly yawning. “I guess I am tired.”

He hugged her and they said good night. The double bed in his guest room, without someone next to her, felt huge.

She tried to put it into perspective. At least I’m alive to complain about it.

Before crawling into bed, she retrieved her iPad and punched in the password to hook it up to Bill’s wireless modem. She checked her email.

Sure enough, there was Rob’s message.


My sweet baby girl,

I promise I’ll do everything I can to get out there as soon as possible. I love you, and I miss you, but I also promised when you agreed to be Mine that I would protect you.

And I meant it.

Here are My orders: I want you to carry your collar with you everywhere. If you can wear it at night, do so. If not, that’s okay, but keep it with you in bed. Always carry it in your pocket or your purse, where you can touch it when you feel sad. And when you touch it, you think of Me. You think about how much I love you, and how once we’re through this, I’m going to stand up in front of all our friends and collar you as My slave before I marry you.

Email Me every morning when you wake up, and every evening before you go to bed. I know cell reception isn’t great out there, but if you can text Me, too, do that as well.

your loving Master.


The screen went blurry as she cried, tears rolling down her cheeks as she silently sobbed over the message. The collar lay on the bed next to her. She picked it up and pressed it to her lips, inhaling and smelling the comforting, familiar scent of leather.

The scent of Him. Of the leather cuffs he buckled around her wrists and ankles before they played, of the leather floggers he used on her, of the black boots he sometimes wore to the club and she’d kneel with her forehead pressed against them.

It was his leather boots she dreamed about as she cried herself to sleep, alone.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Wednesday morning, she awoke to a message from her stalker in her email. She sat, numb, while Bill called Det. Thomas and reported it.


Sorry I didn’t get to play with you before I was interrupted. We could have had a lot of fun together.

Don’t worry, we still will. I’m very, very patient.


She buried herself in the old journals she had with her, going through everything in an attempt to escape the hell her life had become.

Thursday, Bill had to get back to his schedule. Laura flew with him a few times over the next several days on shorter delivery runs when he had passenger space. She wasn’t keen on flying, but she took her camera and snapped some breathtaking aerial shots.

Bill even coaxed her into taking the controls for short periods of time in calm conditions. While she enjoyed the feel of flying, she thought it wasn’t something she would do on her own.

Montana was different. Rugged landscapes, towering mountains, a literal polar opposite from everything she knew in Florida. It would have been a good kind of different under better circumstances.

A week later, she was pining for home and Rob. Unfortunately he couldn’t leave yet. The wife of one of the guys at the station had a baby and needed to take a couple of weeks off. He’d filled in for Rob while Laura was in the hospital, so Rob felt obliged to do the same.

Heartbroken, Laura agreed. They talked, at least briefly, every evening his time. Between those all too short conversations they e-mailed and texted.

There were no more emails from MedicineMan.

Bill owned two gentle horses he rarely had time to ride. Laura made a point of going out with them for a couple of hours each day. Determined to renew her journaling habit, she decided to go old-school and purchased a new notebook and package of pens during a shopping trip into town.

She rode out to a beautiful overlook every day and wrote whatever came to mind. Much of her childhood and adolescence was again intact. There were still gaping holes in the past several years—including some of her time with Rob the past several months.

Perhaps it was fear of losing what she’d regained, perhaps it was several months of writing skills lying dormant, she didn’t know. Within a week she had filled the first journal and started a second. Soon she wrote not just during her rides, but anytime she thought of something.

Obsessing over the missing journals wasn’t healthy for her, and she wasn’t too oblivious to realize it. She decided to go back to some of her old journals and take notes from story ideas she jotted down in the past. As a result she came up with a story idea she wanted to expand upon.

Over the next several days she generated close to twenty thousand words and felt there might even be a good novel in it. If nothing else, it kept her mind off her loneliness.

One evening Bill noticed her going through an old journal and then writing something in a new one.

“Putting the puzzle back together?”

She nodded. “Something like that.”

“You always have been big on that, almost religious. Every day. Never stopped. Did you find the missing ones yet?”

“No.”

“You looked all over your office?”

She nodded. “Through my computers, everywhere.”

“You’ll find them. Or you’ll get enough memories back that you’ll remember where you put them.”

She wasn’t so sure. “I hope so.”

Rob called her later that evening.

“I miss you, Sir.”

“I know. I miss you, too, baby girl.”

“I want to come home.”

His voice changed to Dom tone. “We’ve had this conversation. It’s not safe.”

“How do we know he’s not just laying low until I return? What if you leave and he follows you out here? I’m tired of putting my life on hold like this.”

“Let’s give it two more weeks. If nothing else happens, I’ll come out and get you and we’ll drive home together. All right?”

“Two more weeks? No, Sir, I don’t want to—”

“Laura.” The firm sadness in his voice silenced her as much as his Dom tone. “I don’t like this any more than you do. He almost took you from me once. I’m not letting him have a second chance.”

She couldn’t respond.

“Are you there?” he asked.

“Yes, Sir,” she whispered.

“This is for your own good.”

“Yes, Sir.” They said their good-byes and she returned to the living room, dejected.

“What’s wrong?” Bill asked.

She couldn’t look at him. “He said at least two more weeks.”

“Hey, sis, if it’s what needs to happen, then that’s it. No argument.”

She picked up her latest journal and pen and started writing to escape her misery at missing Rob and everyone else. Rob had ordered her not to tell Shayla or the others where she was, or to email them for fear of that somehow giving away her location. She was allowed to text message with them only, but the cell reception was spotty, meaning most of the time she couldn’t even do that.

When she went to send Rob her evening email, she found he’d surprised her with pictures of Doogie and him on the shop dock. She smiled, missing them all the more, wanting her life back.

This isn’t how my life should go, away from home and hiding from some faceless psycho.

She cried herself to sleep.

* * *

The next morning, Laura forced herself to go riding. The horses loved her for it, but her mind didn’t make the journey with her. She was once again too focused obsessing over the missing journals.

Despite Bill and Rob both telling her to try to relax about it, it was all she could think about.

Nightmares once again plagued her dream, the shadow bursting through the front door. She couldn’t help but think it had to be key to solving the mystery.

On Sunday, Bill announced he had a surprise for her.

They drove out to the airfield where a friend of Bill’s gave aerial tours of Yellowstone. It was breathtaking and took her mind off her problems. Later, they went on a drive and he showed her a lake not far from the house where bald eagles nested. She watched them hunt, swooping down and plucking fish out of the water with surgical precision. By the end of the day she felt tired but happy.