by Leslie Kelly
“Turn around,” he ordered, wanting to see more.
She did. He groaned, low and long, at the gorgeous ass revealed by the thong panties. Hearing him, she looked over her shoulder and said, “Are you going to stay over there watching, or are you going to join me?”
Shifting in his tight jeans, he smiled lazily. “Depends on what you’re going to do next.”
“What do you want me to do next?”
Oh, just about everything. He started with the most basic. “Touch yourself.”
She turned to face him, her lips curling up at the corners. Bringing one hand to her throat, she trailed the tips of her fingers down, skirting lightly over the curves of her breasts that pushed high above the seam of the bra, down to her belly.
When her fingers disappeared beneath the elastic hem of her panties and streaked through her curls, he heard her emit a little gasp of pleasure.
Her eyes closed. Licking her lips, she dropped her head back as she continued to delicately stroke herself, her hand hidden by the red fabric but her actions entirely clear just the same.
When she moved, he hoped she was going to kick off the panties and show him exactly how she liked to be touched. But instead she reached around and unfastened her bra, letting it slowly slide down her arms to the floor.
Now Simon groaned. Her breasts had been gorgeous, glistening and wet in the low light last night. Now, in the brightly lit room, he felt certain he’d never seen a more beautifully shaped woman. He already knew how much she liked having her nipples sucked and the way she began to rub her palms over them, then tweak them, told him even more.
“Lose the panties,” he said, unable to stand much more of this but wanting to stay here—a few feet away—to appreciate her for a minute longer.
She did, sliding her hands down her sides and hooking her fingers in the waistband. They fell to the floor, leaving her completely unclothed, bare and beautiful. There was no shyness in her, no worries about the number of lights on in the room. Not that she had a thing to worry about.
Finally, unable to stand any more of this self-imposed torture, he rose and walked to her. “You are absolutely breathtaking, do you know that?”
She said nothing, not denying it because she had to see by his expression that he meant what he said. When he reached her, she wrapped her arms around his neck and brought him close. Licking his lips, she made herself at home with his mouth. She didn’t let the kiss end even as he unbuttoned his shirt and twisted out of his clothes.
Only when he was completely naked did she pull away, glancing down at him. She swayed a little, putting a hand on his shoulder to steady herself. “You know, I’d say it takes one to know one but it sounds so third grade.”
Laughing—charmed by her, as always—he dropped to his knees. She tried to come down to meet him on the floor, but he wouldn’t allow it, holding her hips to keep her where she was. When he pressed a hot, open-mouthed kiss on her stomach, she obviously figured out why. “Simon…”
“I didn’t get to taste you the way I wanted to last night,” he murmured, kissing his way down her belly, sampling the indentation of her navel, then following her hip bone with the tip of his tongue.
She jerked a little when his cheek brushed against her soft nest. Jerked right toward his face, which was exactly where he wanted her to be. Still holding her hips, he tugged her closer, toward his waiting mouth, loving her smell and the glisten of arousal on her most secret flesh.
Unable to wait another second, he opened his mouth on her, licking between her folds. She cried out, dropping her hands to his shoulders and digging her nails into him. Wanting to smile at how responsive she was, he instead moved a hand to her thigh, silently ordering her to spread her legs to give him better access. Once she had, he went back to what he’d been doing, covering her clit with his tongue, scraping it gently with his teeth.
“Oh, God, I won’t be able to take much of this,” she said through hoarse gasping breaths. “My legs will give out.”
He couldn’t have that. So again, without saying anything, he gently guided her to the leather chair beside the fireplace and pushed her to sit down. “Simon?” she asked, looking a little confused.
That confusion changed to shocked excitement when he lifted both her legs and placed them on the arms of the chair, opening her—exposing her completely.
She tried to close her legs.
“Don’t,” he ordered, keeping his hands on her knees as he looked his fill at the beautiful folds and glistening curls. “Don’t you dare stop me.”
“Uh, okay,” she said with a whimper, sounding almost desperate.
He knew how to end her desperation. Bending to her, he licked her from back to front in one long, slow slide. She jerked hard, letting out a tiny screech, but Simon was only beginning. He wanted her to be saturated with pleasure, until she came in his mouth. So dipping down again, he slid his tongue into her wet channel, making love to her the way he would with his fingers and his cock in just a few minutes.
Finally, when he saw the way her muscles were clenching and he heard the sweet, helpless groans of pleasure coming from her mouth, he moved in to take her over the top. Sliding a finger inside her, he lathed her tight little clit, staying with her for the ride as she cried out her ultimate satisfaction.
Unable to wait, he didn’t even give her a chance to recover. Grabbing a condom out of his jeans pocket, he sheathed himself, then slid up her body and between her still parted thighs.
“Yes, oh, yes,” she murmured as she wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips.
She thrust up and he plunged down and they burst together in a hot, hard frenzy of pleasure. They pounded together for a few deep, hungry thrusts, then slowed down to savor the moment.
Worried about putting too much strain on her, he wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her, keeping his body tightly joined with hers. Lowering her to the thick carpet in front of the fireplace, he followed her down.
“Have I told you I hadn’t had a lot of experience with…this…before?”
He froze for a second, wondering if she was saying she’d been a virgin. It seemed impossible in this day and age, especially with a woman as sexy as Lottie.
She apparently saw his shock because, laughing softly and cupping his face, she continued. “I mean, I’ve never done a lot beyond the basics. So I just never knew—I didn’t realize—in spite of reading sexy books or watching dirty movies.”
One eyebrow shooting up, he gave her a look of surprise. “Dirty movies?”
“Don’t get so excited, I don’t have them with me.”
Sliding deep, he moaned at her heat, the tightness of her wet body. “We don’t need them.”
She shook her head. “Definitely not. But my point was, I’ve never known how wonderful it could really be.” Kissing him sweetly on the mouth, she murmured, “So thank you.”
Thank you. With the tension building as he thrust hard, then tormented her with shallow little strokes, he almost started to laugh. The woman was thanking him during sex.
He’d been thanked afterward. But never during the, uh, heat of the moment.
“You’re one of a kind, Lottie Santori,” he said as he kissed her face, her neck, her throat.
Then he wasn’t capable of saying anything because the familiar heated sensations had begun rocking his body hard. Everything centered low, deep inside him, and Lottie’s shallow gasps of delight told him she was coming along with him.
Finally, groaning as every last bit of physical pleasure was wrung from him, he buried his face in her hair, whispered her name, and wondered how on earth he was ever going to let her go.
11
Lottie
I DIDN’T KNOW it was possible to be so happy and yet so worried at the same time.
Physically, of course, I was completely and totally immersed in sensual fulfillment. The way Simon made love to me was like something out of a fantasy, a woman’s erotic journal that she never
expected to show to anyone much less actually experience in reality.
He gave me everything I’d ever dreamed of having physically. And since he’d opened up to me about what had really happened to him, I felt much closer to him emotionally.
One thing was sure—knowing what he’d been through had only deepened my feelings for the man. I wanted to crush anyone who hurt him, to ease away his scars and his bad memories and make his life go back to the way it had been before such ugliness had intruded into it.
I also wanted the world to see him the way I saw him—as an innocent, brave man forced to do something he personally found repulsive in order to stay alive.
He wasn’t a killer. Certainly not a murderer, like those hateful old people from the town below seemed to think.
I wanted them to know the real him so much that I decided I was going to get him to go down to Trouble and socialize with some of its residents. Of course, the moment I’d mentioned the two of us going to the Halloween party at the fire hall tomorrow night, he’d laughed so hard I almost smacked him. He’d never even answered, just continued to chuckle as he walked out of the room, shaking his head. Like I’d made a big fat joke.
“You are going to that party, buddy,” I whispered Friday afternoon as I sat in the basement, looking through his uncle’s papers. I wasn’t finished in the attic, but something had been bugging me. I couldn’t even say what it was, but I knew there was something I’d missed, or overlooked, about the more recent activities at Seaton House.
Damned if I could figure it out, though. I’d been down here for hours and so far hadn’t discovered a thing.
Maybe it was because my head wasn’t in the game. I couldn’t keep focused on my work because my overactive, vivid imagination—remember it?—kept replaying Simon’s awful experience in my brain.
I am not a bloodthirsty person, and I generally don’t believe in the concept of an eye for an eye. But despite all my protestations that I’m civilized and liberal-minded, I genuinely could not bring myself to care that the woman who’d attacked him was dead.
Awful, right? Inhuman?
Maybe. But it was true. In those moments on that balcony, it had been her or Simon. And I was not the least bit sorry that Simon was the one who’d walked away. Bloody and injured…but alive.
It could have ended so differently—that’s what had me so freaked out about it, a full twenty-four hours after he’d told me the story. My brother Mark is a cop, a detective with the Chicago P.D. So I know a little something about crime and criminals and the way they operate. The whole family, including Mark’s new wife, Noelle, whom he’d married two months ago, lived in terror whenever we heard something on the news about the cops taking down a violent criminal, or interrupting a robbery or something.
I’d heard my brother talk enough to know that someone bent only on robbery wasn’t going to risk his neck if things went bad. They were usually after a quick infusion of cash for some other illegal purpose—often drugs. And they quite often bluffed about having a weapon during their holdups, since committing a crime while armed was a much more serious offense.
These two people, the sister and brother—Harrington, he’d said—had planned out their crime. They’d chosen Simon as their target, gained entrance into his room and obtained everything of value without any genuine protest from Simon. They could have gotten away without upping the ante of their crime by assaulting him.
But they hadn’t. Simon had said the man wanted to kill him and make it look like a suicide or an accident. I believed him.
Why? That was the question that wouldn’t leave my mind. Why Simon? Why try and kill him over a hundred dollars and a laptop? It just made no sense. They could have tied him up so he wouldn’t be discovered until the next morning and hit the road, never to be seen again.
It was a mystery, a puzzle. I like those, so I couldn’t let it go. Though certain Simon wouldn’t want me poking around in his troubled past, I felt the need to know more. To do my job—investigating—and see what I could come up with.
Before going back upstairs, I grabbed a box of materials I wanted to go through again. It wasn’t that heavy. Besides, hoisting it up a flight of stairs was better than having to come back down here and breathe this musty air again today.
Once upstairs, I took the box into the empty room that had once been the hotel’s restaurant. Small two- and four-person tables still dotted the place, with chairs sitting upside down on top of them. Not wanting to disturb Simon in his office, I left the box in the corner, flipped on the lights and carried my laptop over to one of the tables.
Setting up a little work station for myself, I got online and started digging around in the archives of the Charleston papers. It wasn’t hard to find the articles about the case. A Google search of Simon’s name quickly brought up pages of references on the books and articles he’d done, but in the top ten findings was a recent story about the robbery-gone-bad.
I read the article with interest, looking at the grainy mug shot of the male suspect. Interesting. He’d been charged not just with armed robbery and the attempted murder of Simon, but also with his own sister’s murder. I wasn’t sure of all the legalities, but it appeared that because she’d been his accomplice in a felony and had died while committing the crime, he was culpable for it under the felony murder laws.
“Ironic,” I whispered as I scrolled through the article.
The man was awaiting trial, having been denied bail because investigators had been unable to determine a permanent address for him and he’d been uncooperative about his background.
He and his sister—also pictured…a license photo, apparently—had not been from Charleston. They’d had ID from other states but when police had tried to track down the addresses listed, they’d found empty lots or mailbox companies.
“Why?” I whispered, more confused than I was before. If the pair had been career criminals, surely the police would have been able to find some history of felonies dating before that night. They weren’t locals acting on an opportunity. As crazy as it seemed to me, it almost appeared that they’d gone to Charleston and targeted Simon on purpose.
Unable to learn much more, I decided to do something I’d never thought I’d do. My brother Mark was a protective pain in the butt, but he was still my big brother and there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for me. And, of course, vice versa.
It was time to call in some help.
Going outside and walking around the house until I could find a spot where a few bars appeared on my cell phone, I dialed his number.
“Detective Santori,” he answered.
“Private Citizen Santori.”
“Lottie! Hey, girl, where are you? Why the hell haven’t you called? The folks are worried.”
“I’ve called, they just don’t know how to check their damn answering machine.”
Mark didn’t respond for a second, then he chuckled. “You’re probably right.”
“How’s Noelle?” I asked, wanting to stall a bit more before admitting why I was calling. It wouldn’t be good to appear too desperate, I’d learned from experience. Growing up, the more I’d wanted something, the more my brothers had made me work for it.
“She’s great,” he said, his voice getting soft and mushy the way all my brothers’ voices did when they talked about their wives. Or, in Nick’s case, when he talked about his latest Marine skirmish or machine gun or something. Ick.
“She’s getting an award from a national family organization for the Give a Kid a Christmas program she saved at the shelter last year.”
“Wow, that’s fantastic.” Then, knowing my brother, I added, “Don’t do something stupid like get involved in a case and forget to show up!”
“Impossible. The ceremony’s in D.C. I’m taking a few days off and we’re going on a minivacation. So how’s the job going? Everything okay at the murder house?”
Mark had been interested in my trip because of the crime angle, and I quickly gave him a rundown of wh
at had been happening. Skipping, of course, any description whatsoever of my host. Or any details about our wild, sexual affair.
He obviously read between the lines. “Wait a second. You’re telling me the hotel is no longer even open and you’re staying there with the owner and nobody else? Who the hell is this guy?”
“He’s a nice man who could use some help,” I replied, determined to get through this without getting into a shouting match with my nosy sibling. “I need you to do something for me, okay? Simon—Mr. Lebeaux—was attacked during a robbery that went bad in Charleston in June.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Mark murmured. I heard a few clicks and knew he was sitting at his desk, already pulling up any information he could find on my lover. Not because I’d asked him to help, but because he wanted to know more about the stranger I was living with. Alone. In the middle of nowhere.
“He’s young,” Mark said, his voice disapproving.
“He’s also totally hot,” I snapped back, “but that’s not the point.”
“Christ, he killed a woman? Get out of there, Lottie, now.”
I gritted my teeth. “Read the whole report. He was attacked, Mark. Brutally. And he has the scars to prove it.”
Another few moments of silence. Then came a grunt. “Okay. It was self-defense.”
That was probably as good as I was going to get. “The case is strange. Even I can see it.” Rubbing the corners of my eyes with my thumb and forefinger, I added, “They went into his room that night to kill him, not to rob him. Yet the media makes it look like the police know nothing about these people, not even where they were really from. How does that happen? Does it make sense to you?”
“People kill people every day.”
