“Objection!” the Attorney General complained. “I think he’s pursued this line of questioning long enough!”
“It goes to her state of mind!” the lawyer countered. “She already admitted that Paul Warner didn’t threaten her either verbally or physically. Nor did her father. She had to have had some reason to believe it was a kidnapping.”
“Which she already stated,” the Attorney General countered. “She was informed of the fact that he was the suspected leader of a terrorist organization!”
“I’ll allow it to continue, but you’re warned Mr. Lawson. Wind it up.”
“Thank you, Your Honor.”
“So, Dr. Blake, you’re saying that your ‘one night stand’ in no way influenced your acceptance and belief that your father represented a threat to you?”
“Well, it was great sex,” Anna said, “but it happened after they’d told me about my father.”
The courtroom erupted into laughter.
The judge called the court to order and gestured to her to continue.
“I believed them when they told me because they are officers of the law and I saw no reason to doubt that what they’d told me was the truth. And also because I realized when they told me why my mother had run from him. She was afraid of him. That was why I was afraid of him.”
“Judge!” Mr. Lawson said angrily.
The judge shrugged. “You introduced her state of mind, Mr. Lawson.”
“No more questions at this time, but I’d like to reserve the right to recall her.”
Dragging in a deep breath of relief, Anna got up and went back to her seat, trying to ignore the grins she encountered along the way. Caleb looked almost as red-faced as she felt, but his eyes were gleaming with suppressed laughter when she glanced at him.
Simon, Ian, and Joshua were all stony faced, but she wasn’t sure if it was from anger or if they’d also found her dilemma amusing.
She thought she’d carried it off as well as could be expected, however. It would’ve been far better if she hadn’t had to make a public admission, but she knew there’d been no way to avoid it as soon as she realized they had to have taped it.
It irritated her. She was sure that they’d told her that the listening devices and cameras were all over her house—except in her bedroom and bath, but she realized abruptly that she’d been having sex with Caleb while Joshua was checking the rest of the house.
They hadn’t checked her bedroom or bath!
She supposed Caleb might have simply decided not to tell her because he knew it would upset her more, but it was more horrifying after the fact, damn it! She’d thought she had at least some privacy!
She narrowed her eyes at the back of her father’s head. Almost as if he sensed the death glare, he turned to look at her—and then scanned the men on either side of her.
There was something about the way he looked at them that chilled her to the bone.
“Not that I didn’t think you handled it well, all things considered,” Simon growled when they got home, “but it didn’t help us for you to admit that you’d had sex with Caleb.”
“They had it on tape,” Anna said tightly. “Do you honestly think I would have said anything about it at all if they hadn’t?”
Simon was taken aback. “How do you know they had it on tape?”
“I could tell by the way he looked at me and the direction he was leading!”
“They had her place wired from one end to the other,” Caleb said. “She’s probably right.”
“But you wouldn’t know because you were in her bed fucking her instead of checking the god damned house!”
Anna exchanged an uncomfortable glance with Caleb. “We screwed up,” she said placatingly. “Nobody really believed me. You didn’t! And I certainly wouldn’t have had sex if I’d known some pervert was watching!
“Anyway, it was the truth! It had nothing to do with my belief that my father was a threat to me. If anybody influenced me, it was you, and it certainly wasn’t because we’d been intimate!”
Simon sighed tiredly. “Well, it’s done. All we can do is hope for the best.”
She glanced at Ian and then looked away quickly, but not quickly enough. Simon saw the guilty glance. “Let’s just hope he doesn’t decide to ask you if you’ve made the rounds,” he muttered. “I’m probably going to have to suspend Caleb … at the very least! At this rate, I won’t have any of my lieutenants left!”
“Suspend …!”
Caleb clamped a hand over her mouth and shook his head at her.
“I could go ahead and resign,” Ian said a little stiffly.
Simon glared at him. “That would look just fucking great! You might as well get up there on the stand and announce it!”
Amusement glittered in Ian’s eyes when Simon had stalked off. “Don’t worry about it, magpie. You handled it well. He’s just worried about the trial.”
Another week passed before they called Mrs. Bagley to the stand. Simon had calmed down when the Attorney General had apparently decided to simply ‘overlook’ the indiscretion—for the moment, anyway. He’d informed Simon not to suspend Caleb since he thought it would give the appearance of wrongdoing when Anna’s testimony had seemed to suggest otherwise.
It was the first opportunity Anna had had to thank the lady. She hugged her effusively while they were waiting to go in. “Thank you! Thank you so much! If there’s any way I can repay your kindness, anything I can do, just ask.”
Mrs. Bagley beamed at her and patted her cheek. “I don’t need anything else, deary! It’s enough to know you appreciated the effort. Really, I had to clean up my house and yard, you know! The damned city people would’ve been down before I could spit and fined me for the mess!” she added irritably.
She did so well on the stand that the prosecutor looked like he wanted to kiss her when she was finally dismissed.
The Attorney General, feeling as if he’d proven his charge of kidnapping, moved on to the much harder but far more important phase of the trial, trying to convict Miles Cavendish of terrorism. His attempt on Simon’s life was to be part of that process and the trial moved into a far more vicious stage as they upped the ante.
The Attorney General advised them that he thought the case was weak and that their chances were slim in getting the verdict they wanted, but he was willing to try since it seemed their best shot. At the least, he concluded, they could get the kidnapping verdict and he would spend years in jail. If they could convict him on attempted murder of a law officer and the murder of Paul Warner, he might never see the outside of a jail again.
Anna knew, though, that Simon desperately wanted him convicted for the murders of all the people who’d died in the bombing and the only way to do that was to convict him of acts of terrorism.
And she and Caleb might have screwed that up for him just for that one moment of pleasure!
The prosecutor’s certainty that he’d made his case in the kidnapping didn’t matter if the ‘indiscretion’ undermined the rest of the case by shedding a less than flattering light on the watchmen and their work. It made them look unprofessional and that made them look sloppy, which the defense lawyers could use to further weaken an already weak case.
Simon was going to really hate her if it was her fault they lost, and what was worse, she thought the others might, too. Maybe not at first. In the beginning they would just feel too guilty about it to want to be around her and then later, they would begin to think it was her fault for enticing them to start with.
It was the way people’s minds worked, she knew. When they couldn’t bear their guilt, they tried to find an excuse that would allow them to forgive themselves. It was part of the survival instinct, self-defense.
She had one more chance to redeem herself in Simon’s eyes, just one. She had to testify that she’d overheard her father discussing the destruction of her home and lab as part of the prosecution
’s case for terrorism. Somehow, she was going to have to convince the jury that she’d been part of his plan to wipe out the mutants—an unwitting pawn, but a piece of the puzzle.
Chapter Fourteen
Anna had settled down to read for a while before she tried to sleep to see if she could ‘calm the waters’ enough to actually sleep. Between the trial, her anxiety about the outcome, and her struggle to come up with enough data on her project to help them, her mind rarely rested.
She’d thought everyone else had gone to bed and to sleep long since when she heard a tap on her door. Instantly alert and wild with the possibilities, she sat up and set the reader aside, struggling with her conscience.
She didn’t think either Ian or Caleb would dare come to her room after the near disaster in court, but what if they had?
She had to say no, she told herself firmly. No more fooling around until the trial was over!
She was almost disappointed when she saw it was Joshua.
“Can we talk?”
She nodded a little warily and stepped back to let him in.
“I wasn’t sure you still needed this, but I got it and I wanted to give it to you when Simon wasn’t around—well, any of the others.”
Anna stared at the chip in absolute shock. “My chip? You got it? Oh my god! Joshua!”
He shushed her. “For god’s sake don’t let the others know! Simon would have my ass.”
“Why?” Anna asked, dumbfounded.
He grimaced. “I stole it out of the evidence room of the Water City PD,” he admitted.
Anna gaped at him, horrified. “You stole …?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t see that it would do their case any good. They don’t have squat. We’d all agreed to do it, but after that shit about Caleb …. Well, nobody said anything, but I figured they didn’t want to do anything else that might bring us grief. I knew you’d been worried about it before you got the stuff from Mrs. Bagley, though, and I figured it was still important.”
“Oh! You shouldn’t have, Joshua! What if they’d caught you?” Anna gasped in dismay.
He shrugged and grinned a little sheepishly. “I’d be in shit up to my neck. That’s why I decided to go it alone—so the others wouldn’t be fucked if I was.”
Anna very carefully placed the chip on the table by the bed and then turned to Joshua and slipped her arms around his waist. “You’re a life saver … really! From the bottom of my heart, Joshua, I thank you and if you ever do anything like that again, I’ll kick your ass myself!”
He chuckled, settling his arms around her loosely. “You’re welcome. Ian’s right, you are a magpie! Vicious attacks when a man least expects it!”
She pulled away to look up at him and reached up to caress his cheek. “I just wouldn’t want anything to happen to you, you crazy man!”
He swallowed thickly, his expression going taut. “I should go.”
He didn’t move, though, and the look in his eyes was enough to encourage Anna.
She shifted up to her tiptoes and brushed her lips lightly along his.
“This was a bad idea,” he said, swallowing audibly.
“Do you honestly think he’s going to ask me if I had sex with you?” Anna murmured.
Joshua nuzzled his face against hers. “The lawyer or Simon?”
“Either,” she said after a brief hesitation, plucking at his earlobe.
“Jesus,” he muttered, turning his face to meet her mouth and kissing her with a ravening hunger that sent her instantly into a drunken spiral of need.
Jesus, she thought as they crashed onto the mattress together. It was like unleashing a tiger. He had stripped her of her robe before she even hit the mattress. He broke from her lips as they landed, diving for her breasts.
She couldn’t catch her breath. He caressed her breasts and moved from her neck to her mound as if he was consuming her. She felt consumed, burning up with fever, achy all over. When he surged up to kiss her again, she met him with her own hunger, disentangling her legs from beneath him and curling them around him.
It was all the encouragement he needed. He curled over her, stabbed at her blindly a couple of times and made contact, forcing an inelegant grunt from her when he drove inside of her.
She scarcely noticed. The moment he began to pummel her, first to reach bottom and then to stroke her channel in a wild rhythm, she felt herself climbing toward climax like a rocket. He climbed further, faster. She was teetering when she felt his cock jerk.
“Wait!” she gasped a little frantically, but it was already too late. She could feel his hot seed spilling into her, feel his body jerking with the force of his climax.
It set hers off, pushed her over the edge into an explosive release. She was still quaking with the hard spasms when he collapsed heavily on top of her and groaned.
“Jesus, baby! Shit!” he muttered.
“Wha?” she gasped drunkenly.
“I left you.”
“No, no! Close thing, but I caught you.”
Apparently, she didn’t convince him. He started over. She groaned, but she wasn’t in any shape to fight him off. She was too weak. She discovered she was also excruciatingly sensitive. It was pure torment to feel him tugging at her breasts, agony to feel his mouth caressing her painfully sensitive skin. She was almost relieved when he left off on foreplay and got down to business, although she was also vaguely alarmed at how swiftly he’d recovered.
Her muscles quivered when he began to stroke her more slowly than before.
Pleasure wafted through her. She stroked his broad back, enjoying the slow, delicious cadence in an entirely different way than their first wild coupling and before she knew it, she felt the tension stir again.
She distrusted it immediately. She’d come. She was done.
Apparently not. He changed his cadence, began to move a little faster. Her body burgeoned once more. She seesawed between hopefulness and the absolute certainty that he couldn’t bring her off again—not so quickly. That being the case, she preferred to lie limp and let him have his way with her.
That lasted until he flipped her onto her belly and entered her again from behind, gnawing on her shoulders and her ears. Her kegels clapped. She groaned. He jerked her up onto her knees and began to pump into her faster, reaching down to pinch her clit.
Two seconds of that and she completely forgot she’d just come. She was just approaching explosion when he abruptly changed positions again. Flipping her onto her back, he shoved a pillow under her hips and began thrusting into her again, slamming the head of his cock into her g-spot.
She began to sing when the first convulsion hit her. Joshua plugged her mouth with his, spearing his tongue into her mouth in the same rhythm. She thought for a moment that she was going to fly apart. She whimpered, sucked his tongue frantically and came so hard she nearly blacked out.
She was semi-comatose when he came the second time.
He collapsed beside her, panting for breath. “Better, baby?”
“God!”
Dragging in a shuddering breath, he pulled her rag-doll limp body against his own. “Was that a yes or a no?” he murmured, nuzzling her neck.
“So help me, Joshua, if you stick that thing in me again I’m going to bite you!”
He seemed taken aback, but when he’d pulled back to study her face, he chuckled.
“I didn’t leave you hanging that time,” he murmured in satisfaction.
“You didn’t leave me hanging the first time. I think I might’ve pulled something when I came the second time.”
“Like what?” he asked, laughter threading his voice.
“My womb!” she muttered testily. His hands felt good, though. He felt good.
She thought she could drift to sleep right then. She’d almost achieved coma when he roused her.
“You didn’t …. This wasn’t because I brought you the chip?”<
br />
Anna frowned, trying to make sense of the question. She was vaguely insulted when she did. She might’ve been more than a little insulted if she hadn’t been so out of it. It was a fortunate circumstance, because it dawned on her that it wasn’t an accusation.
It was a request for reassurance. She felt around blindly until she found his shoulder and patted it. “’Course not, baby. I adored you before you brought the chip.”
The tension eased from him. He lay strumming her back until she almost dozed off again. “You adore me, huh?”
“Dunce! Go to sleep.”
His arms tightened around her. “I can’t. They’d string me up by my balls if they found me in your bed.”
“Then go to your bed.”
She thought she’d insulted him but a moment later he was nuzzling her neck again. “As long as I’m here ….”
“I’ll string you up by your balls if you start again, damn it!”
“Grouch!” he said without heat, dumping her on the bed and rolling off of it.
“’Night, sweety!” Anna muttered.
He leaned down and bit one cheek of her ass. “Goodnight, magpie.”
* * * *
Anna was more than half convinced she’d dreamed the entire incident. Her sore inner thighs, the stickiness between them, and the chip on the table near the bed were all the evidence necessary to convince her it wasn’t a dream, though.
Smiling to herself, she stretched and finally got up and went to perform her morning ritual. She was tempted to grab her chip and head for the computer to check it for damage immediately, but when she smelled breakfast and heard the men’s voices, she decided disappointment, or victory, could wait a little longer.
She almost regretted the decision. Joshua greeted her with a brilliant smile that she returned without thinking and breakfast went downhill from there. Discovering the moment she sat down that Simon, Ian, and Caleb were looking distinctly suspicious, she plopped her elbow on the table, shielded her face with her hand on her forehead, and focused on her coffee.
Dark Abyss Page 23
