He wasn’t paranoid. The hackers were out there.
The picture loaded on his laptop’s screen, and it was of a woman’s creamy thigh marred by a bruise, rich with purples and brown.
Just below the bruise was a semi-circular remnant of the type of abrasions left by teeth.
His teeth.
Tristan’s dick thickened and grew heavier in his pants.
Underneath the picture was the text, Yes, please.
The heaviness became an ache.
And yet, unease fluttered around Tristan’s head.
He’d spent the day with Colleen Frost, and she was there, somewhere, in the hotel. And even after so short a time, he liked her.
If only QueenMod and Colleen were the same woman, a broken porcelain for him to mend and a spitfire who gazed in rapturous wonder when he introduced her to the world.
It was an utterly ridiculous thought, that the two of them might be the same person.
Colleen Frost was perky and yet fierce in a killer hamster kind of way. He wanted to show her the world and then rock it.
QueenMod had been sensual and submissive, already desperate to be compliant, and he’d sensed a deep trauma behind her Sailor Moon makeup that made him want to make rivers of her mascara and then cradle her in his arms until he’d mended the smashed pieces of her together.
Besides, QueenMod was several inches taller than Colleen, maybe as many as six inches taller, because her head came up to his shoulder and her long, sinewy legs seemed to go on forever.
He’d looked down at Colleen’s pale scalp where her hair was pulled back into a ponytail whilst they’d walked on the beach. She was barely over five feet tall.
There was an easy way to test this hypothesis.
Within a few keystrokes, he’d stripped the metadata out of that delicious picture of QueenMod’s poor, bruised thigh and ascertained that the JPEG had been taken in Phoenix, Arizona, only a few minutes before.
In addition, her direct message had originated in Arizona before it had hit the Sherwood Forest forum servers in Seattle.
Colleen was, of course, presently downstairs in her own room in the Nobu Ryokan Malibu Hotel in Malibu, California.
Thus, Colleen Frost and QueenMod were in different places and could not be the same person.
Besides their height difference.
And demeanor.
And even though QueenMod had been wearing theatrical makeup, they looked different. Of course, they did.
They must be two different people.
And therefore, the uneasiness in Tristan’s head multiplied a hundredfold.
Tristan King was not a two-woman kind of guy.
He’d met QueenMod and they’d had that incredible one-night stand at the Devilhouse that he wished had gone further, but they’d agreed to part and never see each other again.
He’d texted her the next night in a moment of weakness that had become an ongoing source of delight.
But he was still never going to see her again.
And that night with her was before he’d met Colleen. The diminutive Ms. Frost, with her slightly tilted dark eyes and almost cherubic face, was exactly the kind of woman he habitually cultivated as a little, a sweet ingénue to lay the world at her feet, and then sweep her off them, and then discipline her until she was compliant, and then tutor her until she could satisfy his every need.
