The Daddy P.I. Casefiles: The First Collection by Frost, J (great novels .txt) 📕

mum would have taken a wooden spoon to me if she’d ever heard me use that word, and not to my ass, either. Some of the women I’ve been with have wanted me to call them bitches, but I’ve had to disappoint them. Verbal humiliation isn’t a problem; I can dole it out when it’s needed. But not that word.

“There were some tweets aimed at me. RespectABitch’s safe word. RespectABitch when she tells you no. RespectABitch’s ass. That sort of shit. It was coming from a couple of different accounts. I didn’t recognize any of them. I ignored it at the beginning, but then I responded saying I always RespectABitch. It was fucking gasoline on a bonfire, man. Pretty soon each thread had hundreds of comments and they kept getting uglier and uglier. They were posting stills and clips from some of my hard-core flicks, and, yeah, when they’re taken out of context, they look bad. I blocked a couple of accounts, but Glory told me not to do anything to de-escalate it because it was driving so much traffic to my damn site.”

He pauses to fuck with his treadmill’s settings and rehydrate like we’re crossing the Sahara.

“Just when it looked like it was dying down on Twitter, it kicked off on the other platforms. They were using the same hashtag and commenting everywhere, putting up stills and clips as fast as they were banned. Commenting on all my videos on the porn sites. Glory shut down the comment function on my site, but just keeping up with deleting comments everywhere else is a fucking full-time job.”

I listen and nod but honestly, this just sounds like a troll attack. I can recommend an IT guy if Rick’s manager, Glory, can’t keep up, but so far, it’s nothing I can help with.

Rick scratches his head. “I need to show you the rest of it. I mean, it was ugly already, but then someone calling herself EvonneBringsTheTruth started posting and what I’d thought was a forest fire became a fucking nuclear meltdown.”

“Okay, let’s go.” I’m not getting anything out of this workout that I can’t get from playing with Emily at the park, and I don’t want Rick to say any more where we might be overheard. This is his gym. I don’t want to get him banned.

We cab it back to his place, because ten blocks are evidently too far for Rick to walk, despite his five hundred dollar running shoes. He’s in the fifth-floor penthouse of a soulless low-rise in Murray Hill, and evidently five flights of stairs are too much effort, too, because he heads straight to the elevator. I don’t argue only because stairs can still be a challenge.

As we step out of the elevator, we bump into Glory, who’s just locking Rick’s front door behind her.

“Mail’s in the kitchen,” Glory tells Rick, stepping into the elevator. She puts a heavily be-ringed hand on the elevator door to hold it while she conducts a rapid-fire conversation with Rick. She’s a gorgeous woman with generous curves, piles of golden-brown curls, and huge, brown eyes accented with thick, black liner, but she dresses like a Jersey housewife, and not the sexy ones on telly. I swear she’s wearing a muumuu, although it’s hard to tell under all the heavy, gold jewelry she’s draped in.

She gives Rick a kiss that seems to involve more tongue than I’d expect from his manager and blows a kiss at me before she takes her hand off the door and lets the elevator whisk her downstairs. In the muumuu-ed whirlwind’s wake, Rick shakes his head. “I have no fucking clue what I’d do without her, and even less of a clue what she just said.”

I chuckle. “Can’t help you there.”

Honestly, I wasn’t paying attention, since their conversation seemed to concern Rick’s business and not the troll attack. It’s not that I have a one-track mind. Emily says I multi-task very well, for a man, which I’m pretty sure is a feminist dig but she says it with such a straight face I can’t paddle her for it. It’s that I don’t really care about the ins and outs of the porn business.

I follow Rick into his apartment. He immediately turns the fake air up to aggressive levels, which brings out goose bumps on my arms. Fortunately, I haven’t worked up enough of a sweat to get chilled, but I wish I’d brought a hoodie.

Rick leads me into his living room, where his laptop is open on the coffee table. I plop down on the couch across from him and pull a Moleskine notebook and a pen out of my gym bag.

“High tech,” Rick scoffs.

“Paper and pen work just fine and they don’t leave a data trail that some bastard can hack,” I tell him. “At this point, you might prefer a little privacy.”

“Yeah,” Rick says. “About that. I don’t want this going any further. You’ll understand when I show you, but you can’t tell Emily about this. I don’t want her knowing.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it, man. Not a word to her. I know I gave you a waiver for her, but not for this.”

“I got it, Rick. If you don’t want Emily to know, I won’t tell her.” I’m not going to argue with him.

“Sorry, man, but you’ll understand . . . yeah, lemme just show you.”

He opens his laptop and pulls up a webpage he’s bookmarked. It’s titled, “The Truth About Rick Errol,” with a candid shot of Rick’s face. As I scroll down, I find some of the stills and clips Rick was talking about it, and no, they’re not nice, but if someone took pictures of me playing with Emily, they’d probably look similar. Except that watersports are a hard limit for Emily; they’re clearly not for Rick. But I don’t see anything worse than kinky porn, until I get to a long blog post.

“The Night Rick Errol Raped Me,” by EvonneBringsTheTruth.

I read through the post slowly, forcing myself to take in the details. When