“When were you going to tell me the truth about the artifacts? Never? Or were you just going to let someone beat me to death trying to find out what I knew about them?” I was wrong about being cold. My anger, which had been on a slow boil ever since the night before, bubbled to the surface. I had a head of steam building, and it was ready to blow.
“I wouldn’t have let that happen.” A look of pain flashed across John’s features but then disappeared behind his shields again. “You were safer not knowing, anyway.”
“You weren’t here.” I stabbed the air in his direction, almost spitting the words. “Last time I checked, you couldn’t fly faster than a speeding bullet. How could you have stopped anyone if you weren’t even here? If I’d had even a fucking clue that I might be in danger, I would have been on the lookout. As it was, I almost didn’t pick up on it in time.”
The corners of his mouth pulled down at that, and his brow furrowed. “Look. I admit, that was a mistake on my part. I’m sorry. I thought I had the situation under control. I had good reason to believe that your amnesia would protect you.”
“What was supposed to protect Jean? You didn’t think about that, did you?”
For a split second, his expression was bleak, almost despairing, but then it hardened into granite. “I screwed up. Okay? I’m not perfect. I’ve had a lot of things on my mind lately.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that you were holding out on me. What’s your thinking here? That you’d keep the artifacts for yourself?” Boudica’s Boxes. If the legends were true, the man who held them all probably held the keys to controlling the world. He could topple governments, make a killing on Wall Street, manipulate everyone he came into contact with. And no one would even know. He’d be unstoppable.
“What?” John’s mouth dropped open. Well, at least I’d struck a nerve. “No. How could you think that? Look. You know what the boxes can do, right? You know how powerful they are. Someone’s been stealing them. I’m trying to stop them.”
My heart thudded so loudly, I thought surely he could hear it too. “How do you know…?” I recalled Hal’s exact words. Each box was supposed to do something different. No one is exactly sure what, as the accounts differ. But one box was supposed to make you able to read minds, which is supposedly how she defeated the local legion in the first place.
Fuck no. It wasn’t real. It was a legend, for chrissake. It was impossible.
Out of nowhere, the Sherlock Holmes quotation about eliminating the impossible came to mind. How when you eliminated the impossible, whatever is left must be the truth.
John had to have come into contact with at least two boxes—the one Nancy gave us, and the one from the Weir Museum. One of the boxes was supposed to convey telepathy. John knew things about me that I couldn’t explain. He could anticipate my actions, and there was that weird way he could complete my sentences. I thought it was because we were so close, such an established couple. What an idiot I’d been. The power of the boxes was real.
“You’ve been fucking reading my mind all this time.” I wasn’t even aware I’d moved, but I was suddenly pushing up against John’s chest, snarling into his face.
“Not on purpose,” he snapped, eyes glittering in narrow slits as he shoved me off him. “It was an accident. And not just you. Jesus fucking Christ, I hear everybody. All the time. Don’t you think I’d have turned it off by now if there was any way to do it?”
Heat flooded into my face, but I couldn’t tell if it was due to anger or embarrassment. I suspected a bit of both.
“Congratulations on discovering what they really are,” John said with a sick mockery of a smile. “Boudica. Who’d have thought it? Good work on that, by the way.”
“You bastard.” I shoved him hard against the counter. He bent backward with my thrust and didn’t try to defend himself. His face was etched with weariness. “You motherfucking bastard. How could you keep this from me? I’m your goddamned partner.”
Not just professionally. Personally. In all senses of the word. At least, that’s what I thought. Maybe I had just been kidding myself.
“Look. I get why you’re pissed off at me. I kept a huge secret from you, I know. But you gotta look at it from my side of things. You’d just come out of a coma. You were missing a big chunk of the past. You didn’t know me from Adam—your words, not mine—and I’m supposed to tell you, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m a telepath’? You weren’t even sure I wasn’t going to kill you on the way home from the hospital, for pity’s sake.” His anger glimmered in his eyes. I didn’t have to have ESP to know what was going on in his mind. Oh, poor Jerry. You think you have it bad? Well, suck it up. I’m the one with the telepathy.
“I’m just supposed to forget that you’ve been eavesdropping on my thoughts for the last week?” Longer than that, I realized. Oh, my God. So many things made sense. The signs had been there all along. No wonder the FBI wanted their hands on the boxes so badly, regardless if they believed in the legend or not. It explained why someone was trying to collect them all and would go to great lengths to do so. They weren’t just a legend. They were the keys to ultimate power. That night in the hotel, when I couldn’t figure out how John could sense my every move, even while blindfolded…. Was anything about our relationship real? I thought we were just on the same wavelength, but it turned out my boyfriend was telepathic. Not exactly the explanation I was expecting. Who the hell would?
“Trust me,” he bit off each word, no sign of the drawl now. “I only ‘eavesdropped’ when I had no other choice.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I gave him a hard push in the chest again.
“It means that on any given day, there wasn’t a lot to catch my attention.” He pushed me back, and I staggered.
“Are you saying that I’m boring?” Un-fucking-believable. My personal thoughts have been violated without my knowledge, and this asshole is telling me that I bored him. I was shaking. What an unbelievably nasty thing to say. Especially after his reassurances the other day that I was anything but boring. Read my mind, can you? Well, read this. Fuck you!
“This is why I didn’t tell you,” he shouted, stabbing me in the chest with a finger. “I knew you were going to be a big baby about the whole thing.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m betting you didn’t try that hard to get rid of the telepathy. Didn’t want to fuck with your perfect case-closure record, did you?”
Yeah, yeah. It was a low blow, but damn it, I was still reeling.
He struck out, not at me, but at the coffee mug sitting beside the sink, sending it off the counter, flying across the room to shatter against the far wall. The sound was shocking, and in the silence that followed, we breathed hard—bulls squaring off in a pen before the charge. “Well, at least you said what you really thought out loud, for a change.”
“Some shit is supposed to be private. Just because—I don’t—you—you—” I simply could not spit out what I wanted to say. Worse, tears of rage threatened to spill from my eyes, and I couldn’t bear the thought of John witnessing that. I didn’t even know what I wanted to say. I only knew, once again, someone I loved had betrayed me. You’d think I would have learned my lesson, right? Trust no one. I turned on my heel to leave the room.
“Jerry, no. Wait.”
I could hear the pleading note in his voice, but I was beyond caring. When he caught me by the arm, I came around swinging. He blocked my blow effortlessly—I guess he knew it was coming—and tried to trap my hand. I saw red at that point. I was furious and I wanted nothing more than to reduce John’s impossibly handsome face to a bloody pulp. I shoved him off me, gritting my teeth at the pain that arced up from my broken arm. He grunted when I punched him in the gut, and I hissed with pain when he threw me back against the counter. Despite that, a wild sense of release surged through me.
Game on.
We came together like two rams butting heads, fisting each other’s clothing as we crashed into one another. Swinging around as one, we topp
led one of the kitchen chairs and pushed the table across the floor with a long screech. Our grappling took us back to the counter, where I snatched up the carafe for the coffeemaker and swung it at John’s head. He blocked my aim and knocked it out of my hands. It shattered on the floor, but not even the horrifying crescendo of sound stopped me. Again, I tried punching John, only to have him parry the blow. His actions only infuriated me. My mother. My coworkers. Derek. And now John. A lifetime of taking it on the chin when someone I loved sucker punched me. It vented like a volcano erupting poisonous gas.
John’s betrayal was the worst of all.
I kept trying to hit him, even though a saner part of me begged me to stop. Sometimes he managed to block my attack. Sometimes I landed a blow. He fought back, not pulling his punches, but every time I felt his fist impact my flesh, it only whipped up the rage in me.
“What right do you have to be so pissed? You aren’t the one who’s been lied to,” I shouted and wiped the blood from my cut lip, glass crunching underfoot as I moved warily around him.
“I never asked for any of this,” John ground out, his fists clenched. The way he leaned toward me, it almost looked like some invisible force was holding him back.
Any of this, presumably included us.
“Then just leave,” I roared.
He leapt forward, taking my face in both hands, and kissed me.
I couldn’t recall ever being kissed like that before. Anger, pain, and passion all snarled up into one emotion, an overwhelming drive to have him, right then, right there in the kitchen. I tore his shirt open and buttons pinged off the counter as they flew across the room. I pushed him back against the refrigerator with a thump and pulled his jacket down over his arms, trapping them at his sides. I wanted to make him pay for his betrayal, wanted to mark him as mine at the same time.
I broke off savaging his mouth to nip and lick my way down his neck, nosing his necktie aside to latch onto his collarbone. I sucked his skin against my teeth until I knew I’d left a bruise. Keeping his hands confined in his jacket, and using my weight to hold him against the fridge, I grazed a small brown nipple with my teeth, worrying it until he bucked up against me. I could feel the firm outline of his cock pressing against his fly, and I wanted to mark that as mine too.
I wanted to teach him a lesson; show him what he’d be missing if he walked away from me. Tell him, in no uncertain terms, that he couldn’t walk away from me. Sinking down, I pressed my nose into his skin, breathing in his scent and slowly making my way to his waistband. His abdominal muscles clenched as I undid his belt and sucked hard over his hipbone, which was just peeking out over the border of his dress slacks. He fought his way out of his jacket, ready to resist once more, but thumped back against the wall when I took hold of his cock through his trousers and squeezed.
“Don’t,” I said when he took a breath as though to speak. “Just shut up.”
I focused every ounce of concentration on his zipper, slowly pulling it down while his cock strained toward me. I pushed his trousers down to his knees and pulled the band of his briefs toward me as I took them down as well. John’s cock was free, at last.
At the hotel, I’d admired John’s cock for its sheer beauty. I know, I know. Every cock has its own points of glory, but John’s cock was a work of art. Straight as an arrow, standing up at attention, the smooth, soft head glistening with precome and begging for my mouth. At the hotel, I played at dominating him. I wasn’t playing anymore. I demanded his submission. I fisted his dick, because it was mine, and swallowed it down because it was my right.
It was a perfect fit, as though we were designed for each other—my mouth and John’s cock. Above me, he pressed into the fridge door and lifted his hips toward me as I sucked him down. He braced his legs as far as he could, within the confines of his pants. The warm, musky smell of him felt right… familiar. I kept pushing harder, deeper, trying to take in more of him. I couldn’t get enough, especially with the small sounds I was pulling out of him, and the heat of his rigid cock filling my mouth.
When the plump head of his cock hit the back of my throat, I sucked hard, working my tongue against the underside of his dick. A small sound tore its way out of his throat—somewhere between pleasure and pain. I felt his hands on my shoulders, fingers digging into muscles that should have been screaming in agony, but I was beyond caring. I pulled my mouth off his dick with a soft plop, took it into my fist, and jacked my hand up and down rapidly a few times. Then I took him into my mouth once more. This time I alternated bobbing and sucking his dick, jacking him at the same time. I could feel the tension building in his thighs as I leaned against them, and when I sensed the first tremors of orgasm setting in, I squeezed his dick hard at its base.
“No,” I commanded. “You can’t come yet. You don’t get to come until I say so.”
I looked up at him then, looked him in the eye for the first time since I’d slammed him against the refrigerator. His pupils were blown, as dark as a starless sky. His lips were parted, swollen with the rough kissing we’d done before. His hands, still on my shoulders, opened and closed rhythmically, as though urging me on. His cock, rising out of a dark thatch of hair, was thick, wet, and red. Watching his expression, I held his dick steady in my hand as I licked along his slit. He shuddered, biting his lip to maintain control. I thought about ordering him to fuck me, just so I could prove I had complete control over him. But I doubted, even with the best of intentions, that he could keep from blowing his wad. He was so close. Holding him firmly in hand, I licked down the length of his cock and lipped the thin skin of his balls, until I could take one completely into my mouth.
He left off digging his fingers into my shoulders to scrabble at the fridge door, his feet sliding out from under him slightly. I rolled first one, and then the other ball in my mouth, taking my time. I’d never heard such sounds from John before.
Finally when he tipped his head back against the fridge, banging it slightly in an effort not to come, I rapidly sucked him down. I took him in deeply and released his dick to press up tightly behind his balls. A cry tore its way from his throat, deeply satisfying to me because, to the best of my knowledge, John was nearly silent during sex. It occurred to me that there were some advantages to having a telepathic partner. Issuing commands when your mouth was full of cock was one of them. Yes. Now you can come.
And come he did. The force of it was so strong, I had to pull off to avoid choking. Instead, I worked his cock with my fist as I milked every last drop from him. The warm fluid spurted across my face and over my hand, as John trembled and bucked under my touch. I crawled my way up his body and mashed him into the fridge, kissing him ruthlessly. I wanted him to taste himself on my lips.
I wasn’t done with him, not by a long shot. I was still angry and not sure I would ever get over that. I could have just rutted up against him, pushing and thrusting until I found the right edge of friction to get myself off. I didn’t want that, though. I wanted to sink myself into him, to force those creamy cheeks apart and dig my fingers into his hips, until I left bruises. I wanted to be balls deep in him before I pounded my way home.
I heaved myself off him and held him at arm’s length. What a sight he made—pants down around his ankles, his jacket on the glass-littered floor, his white shirt hanging open, buttons missing. His tie, loosened but still hanging around his neck, followed the line of body hair straight down to his cock, standing at half-mast still.
He was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen. I wanted nothing more than to fuck him into the middle of the next week, but a little niggle of doubt was setting in. Never before had I experienced such raw, animalistic sex. We’d battered our way to that point. Had I not known that John could take me down with one or two well-placed punches, I would have worried that it was too much. I had to know he wanted it. That he wanted me to fuck him.
He stared at me for a long moment, his eyes half-lidded and gleaming in the overhead light, like those of a sleepy cat. Slowly he t
urned his back on me, carefully shifting his feet until he was facing the counter. He gripped it with both hands and bowed down over it. The action pushed his ass toward me. The ends of his shirt barely covered it—a perfect peach of an ass draped in white cotton and strong hairy thighs peeking from underneath.
I was on him in an instant, pressing up against him, taking his hips in both hands and holding him fast. He reached for the cabinet above his head, but I leaned in over him and opened the door. I knew what he was after. I’d arranged the shelves myself. Taking down the olive oil, I set it on the counter, hurriedly undid my fly, and shucked down my pants. My cock leapt forward in anticipation. I could only spread my legs so far, though. It was tempting to take off my pants completely, but that would require taking off shoes, and there was the problem of all the glass. It didn’t matter. John folded his arms and pressed his forehead into them. He pushed back against me with a little sigh.
I hiked up the ends of his shirt and drizzled a small amount of oil down his crack, noting his shudder when the oil touched his skin. I trailed my fingers through it to pick up some slick, I slid them up and down between his cheeks, watching him squirm as I did so. He let out a long, breathy sigh when I touched his hole. I spent some moments teasing him, and then I breached it. He widened his stance as far as he could within the confines of his trousers and twisted against me. My dick was hard and leaking, and the temptation was to just push my way in, ready or not. I wanted to take him apart from the inside out and make him beg for it. He rocked infinitesimally against me as I fingered him. His shirt fluttered faintly with his movement. I swear to God, he whimpered as I moved within him.
Good.
Normally I would have taken my time, but the little sounds he was making went straight to my dick, as though connected with an electric current. I pulled out my fingers and wiped them on his nice, expensive shirt. Oiling my dick was a sensuous pleasure in and of itself, an experience made even hotter when I realized John was watching me over his shoulder, his heavy hair shadowing his eyes.
Truth and Consequences Page 19
