Do you…?
Yes.
I’m not going to survive her, I think.
She comes apart into a slippery, shivering mess, her cunt pulsating all around my shaft and squeezing me on to my own orgasm—as fierce as it is tender, surging into her warmth with her blue eyes on mine and her hand in my hair.
For a minute, we simply pant together like that, the water still spattering our shoulders and feet and our shared essences beginning to seep out from where we’re joined. It’s a surprisingly cozy feeling—or maybe cozy isn’t the right word.
Restful, maybe. Familiar in the sense that it feels right.
In that I want to feel it again and again and again.
I comb her hair once we leave the shower and then bundle her into a big T-shirt of mine, and we nestle into my bed together. I’m too sated and sleepy and filled with this big new feeling for her to care that my bed is a store-closing-sale mattress on a plain metal frame or that my comforter is an old threadbare thing from my sister’s college days. And Cat doesn’t seem to notice. She just tucks her hands under her cheek like a fairy-tale princess and closes her eyes.
Not good enough.
I wrap an arm around her waist and pull her snug against my chest, allowing her to wriggle a bit so that her backside is pressed against my ever-present erection and her back is to my chest. I tell my dick to settle down, tuck her head under my chin, and completely encase her in my arms.
For a long time, we lie like this in the darkness, breathing together, her feet idly rubbing around my calves, and I think she’s asleep. Until she takes a deep breath and says, “Frazer died at night. In a dingy little house in the bad part of town. The electricity had been shut off at some point, so when I went in, there were no lights on…”
She pauses, tensing in my arms, and I wonder what she’s remembering. What she’s seeing in her mind as she shares her pain with me.
“It was dark and so hard to see, and everything happened so fast. And Frazer—” She stops abruptly, and I guess that’s a part of the story I won’t get. At least not yet.
Another breath. “I shot, but I wasn’t fast enough. It was dark, and I didn’t want to hit the man I was going to marry.”
I squeeze her close, knowing there’s nothing I can say that will fix it.
“It was so stupid of me, but after…everything…I went outside to wait for backup, and there was blood everywhere, just everywhere. And it was starting to dry on my hands in this awful, sticky way, and all I wanted was to wash them, just fucking wash them, because all that blood was supposed to be inside him, not on me, and he was dead and I’d watched him die and it was all over my hands…”
“Cat. Babe.” I hold her tighter, wishing there was some way I could cage her in my arms and keep her safe and free from bad memories forever.
“I did all the mandatory counseling after it happened, all the therapy for PTSD, and I’m fine most of the time. Nearly all of the time, in fact. But there’s something about squeezing the trigger in the dark that makes it all come back.”
I let her words fall back down around us like rain and soak into the ground. Soak back into silence. Sometimes that’s all that’s needed.
But this is something she and I share. Maybe we don’t share an age or the same kind of upbringing, but tragic violence in the course of duty…yes. I know it too.
My voice is tired with experience when I speak. “Knowing you killed someone is hard. Knowing you didn’t kill them fast enough to save someone you care about is even harder.”
She considers this. “Did you kill anyone in the war?”
“Yes.”
“And watched someone you care about die?”
“Yes. Not a fiancé, but a friend. Yes.”
“Oh, Jace.”
I press my lips into her hair. “It’s okay. I did all the counseling too. And it’s still hard, but I’m going to be okay.”
Cat sighs. Rubs her toes on my shins. “I’m going to be okay too.” And then more silence.
This time I think she’s really drifted off, and I’m about to follow her, when she whispers, “Jace?”
“Hmm.”
“Were you going to fuck that girl if I hadn’t shown up?”
I don’t know what it says about me that I’m a little glad she’s still jealous, even though I left that girl in the cold so I could bring Cat home instead. Even though it was Cat who got her hair washed and then had my tongue in her pussy.
But I want her to know the truth. I want her to know where this is going for me. “No, I wasn’t going to fuck her, no matter what happened. She’s a friend’s sister, so I didn’t want to shove her off of me in public and embarrass her, but I planned on letting her know it wasn’t going to happen.”
“Why not?” Cat asks, and she asks it almost like she’s afraid to hear the answer.
“I think you know why not,” I reply. There’s a long pause, and I may not have a ton of experience with delicate talk like this, but I know I’ve gone as far as I can go tonight. “Good night, Cat,” I add softly, and she nestles her nose into my bicep in response.
And this time we really do fall asleep.
Chapter Nine
Cat
I wake up still wrapped in Jace’s arms, with an almighty erection wedged against my bottom and soft snores in my ear.
The sun is bright and new, telling me it’s still fairly early, and the lack of any alarms chiming in the room reminds me that we both have the day off. I stretch my legs and arms and back as much as possible inside his giant bear hug, wonder if I could possibly doze back off, and then reluctantly concede that I’m awake for good now.
I pry myself free of his embrace and make to slide out of bed and investigate Jace’s coffee or tea options—but I’m immediately seized and hauled back against his big, sleepy body.
“No,” comes his half-awake growl. “Stay.”
“It’s morning, Jace.”
“It’s our day off.” His voice is petulant, adolescent even, and I roll over to look at him, to coax him awake, but I’m simply crushed back into his chest. I can feel the snores vibrate through him when he falls back asleep seconds later.
“Young man,” I whisper to myself, smiling a little. I manage to push away enough that I can stare at him—really stare at him—as he sleeps. At the adorable sprawl of his big body, the pout of his parted mouth, and the long eyelashes resting dreamily on his cheeks. All those handsome features, normally so severe, normally so stormy and scowly, are relaxed into a boyishly sweet expression in his sleep. He barely looks twenty-four like this, and you’d never guess he’s a cop or a former soldier. You’d never guess he’s known grief or fear or anger. That he’s haunted by the memories of war.
He looks gentle and dear and young. So young.
I try to get out of bed again, this time more because I need a moment to process my feelings. About this young man, about how tenderly and thoroughly he made love to me last night. About how he wanted to take care of me beyond sex and outside it, before he even knew what was wrong.
Do you…?
Yes.
Even now, I’m not sure exactly what he was going to say, but it didn’t matter. Whatever he wanted to know, the answer was yes.
This is skidding off the rails fast, Cat.
But I never do get a chance to process my feelings. I’m grabbed again, and this time Jace wakes up enough to put that massive erection to good use.
For two weeks, I am unbearably, abominably weak, and for two weeks, Jace and I fuck constantly.
And everywhere. We fuck everywhere.
At my place. At his place. Twice more in the station—after the brass went home this time. In his car, in my car, in the bathroom of an office building after interviewing a witness.
And every night as I fall asleep with his arms around me and his lips pressed to my neck, I think you have to stop this—you have to end this pointless fling because it’s going to hurt one or both of you. It’s unprofessional to have se
x with a coworker, and it’s a fireable offense to do it on duty, and it’s just…unseemly, given his age.
Catherine Day doesn’t do unseemly things! It isn’t me, this torrid, sex-fueled affair, yet every time I convince myself to end it, something else happens and my resolve vanishes like it never existed in the first place. Jace will yank me into a searing, movie-worthy kiss or send me a heated gaze from the passenger seat of my car. Or he’ll rumble Cat, baby in that husky growl of his, and nothing else will matter. Not our jobs or my reputation or seemliness. The only thing that matters is him and how close I can get my body to his in the next thirty seconds.
But despite the sex and the snuggling in bed and the occasional domestic moment of making coffee or dinner together, there’s not another vulnerable moment like there was that night in the shower. I don’t cry, he doesn’t ask do you…?, and we don’t talk about our pasts again. We have sex and talk about the case. Professional and age considerations aside, it should be perfect.
Why isn’t it perfect?
Why do I keep thinking about that moment in the shower? Why do I keep wishing he’d finished his question?
Keep hoping he’ll ask it again?
My confusion isn’t helped any by Kenneth, who’s been trying to corner me into dinner for a few weeks now. Would I say yes if I weren’t screwing Jace? Should I still say yes? I mean, Jace and I haven’t defined what we are to each other, and it’s not like he’s the loquacious type and full of effusive raptures about how much he adores me. For all I know, that night in the shower was a fluke and I really am just a convenient lay. For all I know, I’m just a fun way to pass the time until something better comes along.
But.
But.
Even though the entire thing is ridiculous, even though I’m worse than foolish for carrying on with a man so much younger than me, I can’t bear to entertain even the thought of another person while I’m with Jace. Maybe I’m being too romantic or overly monogamous, or maybe it’s some kind of transferred loyalty from Frazer, who was the last cop I dated before Jace—but whatever the reason, I won’t start something with Kenneth. I don’t even want to.
I call him back and agree to dinner, deciding I owe him this conversation face-to-face. I won’t tell him about Jace—certainly not—but I’ll tell him there’s someone else right now. It will be a hard conversation to have, but Kenneth will understand. I doubt he spent his three years in St. Louis pining for me, and surely he didn’t expect to come back and find me pining for him.
But now it’s nearly time for that dinner—just a few hours away—and I still haven’t told Jace that I’m going out with Kenneth.
He won’t understand, I think.
But you know that he’d want to know about it anyway, I argue with myself, and then I sigh. I’m thirty-seven, and I’m obsessing over boy drama like I’m in junior high. What the hell has gotten into me?
With a sigh and a quick press of my fingertips against my forehead to help alleviate some of the pressure building there, I refocus on the files in front of me. I’ve been combing through them ever since our last two leads ran dry.
In a case as big as this, there’s always another lead. Always another angle. I just have to find it.
I’m deep into the file on the last burglary—the one where I met Jace—and I’m clicking through the photos on my laptop when I hear a deep voice ask, “Drywall?”
Startled but happy, I turn to see Jace leaning against the edge of my cubicle, looking like a cop from a cop calendar with his crossed arms showing off biceps and forearms and his pretty mouth lifted into the tiny crook that passes for a smile for him.
“Drywall?” I ask back, trying to think through the temporary haze of electric lust and happiness that descends upon me every time I see him.
He tilts his head at my desk. “You were staring at your laptop, muttering ‘drywall, drywall’ at the screen.”
“Oh.” I turn back to my desk to make a quick note while gesturing for him to come in. “I hadn’t realized I was talking out loud. How was the warehouse search?”
“Nothing there,” Jace says and takes a seat in the spare chair next to me. He brings the chair close enough that our knees touch under my desk, and I want to melt. I want to run my fingers along the cut hardness of his thigh up to the heavy cock currently pushing at his zipper.
I don’t. But the temptation is agonizing.
“Any chance they could have moved the televisions before you got there?” I ask, forcing myself to focus on the task at hand. I sent Jace to check out a couple locations that had been used to hide stuff like this before. A shot in the dark but worth looking into.
Jace shakes his head. “One warehouse is being renovated into lofts, and the place was crawling with a construction crew. No one I talked to had seen anything being moved in or out. The other was completely abandoned but had a few squatters staying inside. They swore up and down they hadn’t seen any trouble.”
“They would say that,” I murmur, but I trust Jace’s instincts—for now.
“And the drywall?” Jace asks.
I frown back at the screen. “I’m not sure yet. There’s just something about all that drywall dust at the scene that keeps tugging at me. It will come.”
“Mm,” Jace says, and from the way he says it, I can guess the word come sent his mind in a very different direction than police work.
I’d roll my eyes, but that wouldn’t be very fair of me since I’ve spent the last five minutes vaguely considering pulling him back into the meeting room for a quick round to help me last the rest of the day. The day that I’m—sigh—spending part of with Kenneth.
Tell Jace. Tell him now. He’ll be pissed, but he’ll be less pissed than if he finds out later.
I open my mouth to speak, but Jace gets there first. “I have my niece’s birthday party this evening,” he says quickly, almost as if he’s blurting it out. “It’s nothing super formal, just a barbecue and cake at my sister’s house, but I thought you could come with me. And, um. You know.” He looks down at his boots, suddenly bashful and boyish and so…un-Jace-like.
The first time I ever drove a car faster than one hundred miles per hour, I was in academy and terrified beyond all reason. Yet there was this moment as I accelerated—adrenaline screaming through my veins, and my stomach back where I left it at the starting line—when my heart floated in my chest out of sheer, exhilarated joy.
I feel that now.
Jace’s invitation to meet his family and the unusually shy way he asked—it makes me feel like I’m driving one hundred miles per hour, with my heart hammering fast and happy even as my body registers unheard of terror.
Because I know what happens when you drive fast.
You brake hard.
I can’t meet his family tonight because I have to have dinner with Kenneth, and anyway, it would be ludicrous for me to meet his family. How would I even introduce myself? As the coworker he’s been jeopardizing his job with because we can’t seem to wrangle our hormones under control? As the cougar who caught his poor, innocent body in her claws?
Jesus.
No. I can’t meet his family and his parents, who will only awkwardly be a decade or so older than myself.
And I shouldn’t meet them because we aren’t a thing anyway. We aren’t going to be together for long, because these flings never last, and then when his family doesn’t see me again, they’ll know for sure that I was the predatory sex-harpy taking advantage of their handsome son.
All the euphoria, the heart-floating-in-my-chest, it just stops, like I really have mashed on the brakes with all my weight. And I suddenly very much want to cry.
I glance at his face, with its red of embarrassed hope burnishing his cheeks, and hate myself. “Jace, I’d love to go, but—”
“It’s okay,” he says, very fast. “It’s okay. I didn’t really think you’d want to go anyway, and I only thought it would be an easy way to get dinner and stuff, so—”
He’s killing m
e. My cubicle has become the scene of a homicide.
“Stop,” I say, grabbing his hand and hating myself even more for the white lie I’m about to tell. “It’s just that I’ve made plans with a friend for dinner already. But I will see you tonight at my place after? Just let yourself in through the garage if you get there before me.”
“Sure,” he says, and there’s so much in his voice, so much that isn’t normally there for this quiet, primal cop, and I think my heart is breaking. And that’s almost the scariest part of this.
I’ve gotten to the point where his unhappiness is more painful than my own.
Kenneth and I meet at one of the understatedly elegant restaurants that suits us both so well, and it’s as I’m walking in that my work phone rings.
“Day,” I answer after I fish it out of my purse.
“Hey,” comes the person on the other end. “This is Jessica in Dispatch. We just had a woman call in trying to speak to you. She says she works at one of the doctors’ offices that’s been robbed and needed to check something on the missing items report.”
I see Kenneth at a far table, already with a bottle of wine on the table, and I give him a small wave before I turn away. “Did she leave a number?”
“She did. I’ll email it, along with the call notes. She sounded pretty upset about something, but she only wanted to talk to you.”
That isn’t unusual. Speaking to the detective on a case is like speaking to the manager at a store—there’s an imagined aura of authority cloaking the interaction. And I certainly wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to talk to anyone directly. Our dispatchers are good, but there’s a limit to what they’ll be able to lift out of a conversation if they’re not familiar with a case. And at this point, I need every lead I can get.
After confirming that she’ll email the details, I hang up with Jessica and then make my way over to Kenneth, who stands to greet me.
“Cat,” he says warmly, taking my elbows and kissing me on the cheek. It’s shocking how unpleasant it feels, how very wrong to be kissed by someone who’s not Jace, and I’m quiet as I take my seat, trying to process the tumult of troubled feelings currently jostling around in my chest.
Misadventures in Blue Page 8
