In a way, that theme of loss bound all three of them.
“He’ll come around, Tasha. I refuse to believe anything different.”
He’s as worried as I am. Somehow knowing that was both better, and worse. Better, because she wasn’t alone in her fears. Worse, because she didn’t want Gord worried, or hurt. I guess there’s just one thing for me to do.
It took very little effort for her to move so that she lay atop him. His immediate grin and the way his cock pulsed against her told her he liked her move.
“Hey, handsome, come here often?”
“Just recently. I plan on coming again tonight. Maybe even more than once. Right after I give you a few orgasms.”
“Is that right?”
He didn’t answer her in words. Instead, he deftly and quickly reversed their positions. Then he snaked down her body and licked her pussy.
“Oh, yes.” Tasha released control of her legs, and Gord spread them, making a place for himself there.
With lips and tongue, he tasted and teased her. Arousal climbed as he licked her clit and kissed that spot where leg and pelvis joined. Back and forth he moved his mouth, his lips open and moist as they caressed her pussy.
Tasha reached for the rungs of the brass headboard. Her fingers curled tight around the slim metal, anchoring her.
Sounds emerged from her throat, sounds that conveyed hunger and pleasure and need. She pushed her pussy closer to his face, her desperate clit chasing his tongue.
Gord chuckled against her wet folds and the vibration of the sound shivered through her from her head to her toes.
“Oh, please!”
He made another sound against her, one she recognized deep down as her mate telling her to wait, to surrender, to simply take what he chose to give her.
He inserted his fingers into her, and she quaked when he found her sweet spot. She felt his smile against her wet flesh, and began, instinctively, to smile in return.
Then he strummed those fingers against that spot, sucked her clit into his mouth, and she came in an explosion of bliss so fierce, she shook and screamed as it overtook her.
Before her orgasm faded, Gord moved up her body and thrust his cock into her, hard, fast, and deep.
“Kiss me.”
His demand thrilled her, and she moved to comply as she wrapped her arms and legs around him. She tasted her own essence in his kiss, the flavor intoxicating her, sending her arousal soaring once more.
Returning his passion thrust for thrust, Tasha gave and took in equal measure. And when he stiffened, when she felt him ejaculate within her, she let go all control and rode her climax until the stars blinked on behind her closed eyelids.
* * * *
“Damn, our timing’s off.” Jake inhaled deeply as he entered the house. He stepped aside so Adam, Mel Richardson, and Connor Talbot could enter, too. He inhaled deeply a second time. “I smell bacon. Damn, we missed breakfast.”
Clay grinned. “Nope, you missed Sunday Brunch. We had bacon, sausage, eggs, pancakes, and a potato casserole that’s so tasty, the kids fight over it.”
“Rubbing it in,” Adam said. “Just like a Benedict.”
Connor laughed. “Ginny still has these two on a ‘healthy eating’ plan. I don’t think either one of them has had bacon or sausage in months.”
“Gee, if I had known, I’d have made extra.” Clay nodded. “However, I do have coffee and some banana bread that Aunt Anna brought by first thing.” He shook his head. “Barely a day goes by when someone doesn’t bring us something.” He led them to the dining table that had been cleaned off and re-laid with cream, sugar, cups, plates, and the aforementioned banana bread. It took him only a moment to bring the coffeepot in from the kitchen.
“Where are the children?” Connor asked.
“They’ve headed off to the park,” Clay said. “I didn’t want to take the chance of any of them overhearing our discussion. I haven’t told them about this problem, of course. I will if I have to, but I’d really rather not.”
Also on the table was his laptop. Once he saw to it everyone had coffee and cake, he quickly keyed into his e-mail, then passed the machine over to Adam. “I got another message yesterday.”
“I don’t think any of us are surprised that you got another one,” Jake said.
Adam passed the laptop to his brother. Jake read the message aloud.
I know what you’re doing, my darling. You’re cheating on me. I won’t allow it, sweetheart. I won’t let you get away with this. Because of all we are and have been to each other, I will give you one chance, and one chance only. Get rid of your lover. If you don’t, there will be hell to pay. Remember, hell hath no fury…Yours will be a very real and a very private hell.
Jake shook his head and handed the laptop over to Connor.
“It’s the same e-mail address. It won’t take me long to determine if this was sent from the same place,” he said. “I’ll start on that in a moment.”
“Were you able to figure out who my mysterious correspondent is?”
“If you mean name and physical address, then the answer is no. But I can tell you from where the e-mail was sent.”
Clay knew a thing or two about the Internet and a little bit about the way investigators could trace online activity. Cops and investigators had all sorts of little tricks up their sleeves—and they had to keep finding new ones, as the criminals they chased were always coming up with more inventive ways of breaking the law.
Clay focused on Connor. “You can tell me from where, but not from whom? So whoever this woman is, she managed to keep her identity from you.”
“For now. I’m not giving up.” Connor nodded at the laptop. “The more times she e-mails you, the more I have to work with.” He took a sip of his coffee. “The first e-mail was sent to you from the Toronto Public Library. So it’s possibly someone you know—or, more properly, someone who thinks she knows you.”
Clay knew that there were several branches of the library in the greater Toronto area. “Which branch of the library?”
Connor looked at his notes. “The address is 171 Front Street East.”
“Okay, that’s smack downtown by the lake. I don’t think I’ve ever been to that branch, myself. We tended to use the one in North York, which was closer to home—and quite a good distance from Front Street.”
“The e-mail account was opened there, and only used that one day, as of the date on the transmission. That e-mail you received was the only one she’s ever sent. Well, until this one, that is.”
“I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out who I know who might pull something like this, but I’m coming up empty.”
“You probably don’t know her at all,” Mel Richardson said. “Sometimes people form fixations on complete strangers—or people they know only slightly, in passing. Unfortunately, we can’t accurately assess the threat potential until we know more.”
“Which means we presume it’s high,” Adam said. “You may or may not know that we stay fairly vigilant about strangers coming to town. We take the security of our people very seriously.”
“You don’t really think she’ll come here and make a nuisance of herself in person, do you?” Clay couldn’t wrap his head around the idea. He’d been thinking more along the lines of attempted extortion, not a possible physical threat to himself, or his family…or his friends.
It surprised him that in response to his question, all four of his guests looked at each other, with no one offering an immediate denial—which was exactly what he expected to hear.
“Do we think her coming here is inevitable? Of course not. Is it possible? Hell, yes.” Adam said that with a fair bit of disgust. “I’m making it a habit these days to err on the side of caution. In the last few years I’ve gotten a real education with regard to how brazen, and stupid, some people can be. So we’re on alert. We already take note of any strangers stopping in town, even if they only ask for directions. That’s just our standard operating procedure. N
ow, we’ll just be even more vigilant.”
Clay really believed that Adam’s reaction was over the top. But as a man who had three children, he appreciated the fact that the sheriff’s department seemed to make citizen safety a top priority.
Connor had been working on Clay’s computer. He connected it to his own, and then moved his fingers fast and furious across the keys.
Grandma had told Clay that Connor used to be in Special Forces with the US military. He imagined such a man might have assets at his fingertips that others would not.
“Son of a bitch.” Connor sat back and looked at his screen.
That can’t be good.
Connor went back to work. Clay knew without asking the man was double-checking his work.
He sat back, a disgusted look on his face. “I think we may have to make that a definite possibility—this crazy chick showing up here. It’s the same e-mail account, but it’s been sent from a different location.”
“What’s the location?” Adam asked.
“It looks like she tapped into a Wi-Fi hot spot just off Interstate 70, outside of St. Louis, Missouri.”
Clay stared at Connor, trying to understand just what it was he’d said. Jake swore, as did Mel.
Adam didn’t swear. He sighed and shook his head. “Looks like you’re going to be getting a visitor.”
No one was smiling and everyone looked serious, and then the implications hit. The professionals sitting around his dining room table believed that this woman, whoever the hell she was, had decided to come to Lusty, to….what? Confront him?
And then he thought of the tone of both of the e-mails he’d received, a tone that spoke, however ridiculous the concept seemed to him, of a woman scorned. She hadn’t really threatened him so much as she’d threatened his lover.
He wasn’t afraid for himself. But suddenly, he was very afraid for the one person this woman might have it in her whacked-out mind to hurt.
He met Adam’s gaze. “I think I better see what I can do about sending Tasha someplace safe, until—well, until you get this woman, whoever she is, into custody.”
Adam met his gaze with a disbelieving look of his own. Jake chuckled, and the investigators just shook their heads.
“Tasha has lived here for just over a year, which means, of course, that she’s a woman of Lusty.”
Jake’s statement didn’t make any sense. “So? I won’t ask her to leave forever, just to go someplace safe until whatever is about to happen, happens.”
Clay wasn’t used to having a room full of men look at him as if he was a dimwitted fool. Then Adam said, “Good luck with that. But if, by some weird, otherworldly chance you’re able to succeed, I may pin a badge on you and give you the title of deputy in charge of the womenfolk.”
“It can’t be that hard,” he said. “Tasha is a sensitive, logical woman. She’ll listen to reason. What woman wouldn’t?”
“I’ll go make more coffee,” Mel said. “Y’all start filling this poor, uneducated boy in on the way of the women of this town.”
Clay looked at each man in turn, and wondered what could possibly be so bad as to put that look on the faces of such seasoned professionals.
Chapter 16
“Not just no, Clayton Dorchester, but hell no.”
Tasha and Gord had just arrived at Clay’s house, and she’d been more than a little surprised to discover that he had guests. Judging by the looks of the setup on the dining room table, it appeared that he had invited these guests. That was all well and good, but he hadn’t told her anything about a meeting. She thought she saw just a hint of guilt on Gord’s face, too.
If these men thought they were going to embark on a relationship playing “protect the little lady from reality,” well, they had another think coming.
Of course, all of the men had scrambled to try to explain what was going on. And then Clay had taken over.
Tasha stood, her hands on her hips, and listened as he explained what they’d been discussing, and how they’d all come to the consensus that for the time being, she should consider going on a brief vacation to visit her parents in El Paso. She skewered Clayton Dorchester with as stern a look as she could muster. “What kind of a woman would I be if I just turned tail and ran away at the first hint of trouble?”
That, of course, had been a rhetorical question. She didn’t expect an answer. Clay must have felt compelled to answer.
“A reasonable one?”
Dead silence filled the space around them. Then Connor said, only, “Dude.” Such pity imbued that one word and showed on the faces of the other married men in the room, that Tasha was hard pressed not to laugh out loud.
To his credit, Clay seemed to get, pretty quickly, how stupid those three words had been. He also read her expression and snapped his mouth closed.
“First we need to focus on trying to figure out who this crazy bitch is. You think only I might be at risk? Well, maybe, if the threat was coming from a logical, rational human being, I would be. Does anyone here think the author of these two e-mails is either logical or rational?” She was still pretty pissed that yesterday, when he’d gotten the latest e-mail, Clay had assured her that it was pretty much “in the same vein” as the previous one.
Men.
“Tasha has a point,” Adam said. “We can’t assume this woman will only go after her. You are the focus of her delusions, Clay. She might convince herself that if she can’t have you, then no one can.”
“You think she’s a threat to me?” Clay’s shock was genuine. Tasha didn’t think it was a case of his thinking of himself as untouchable. Probably, he was just having a hard time wrapping his head around the entire situation.
“I think she’s a threat, period,” Adam said. “I’ve seen that women can be just as dangerous as men when it comes to psychosis.”
“Let me work with what I have,” Connor said. “I might be able to get a bead on her. If we can identify her, we can identify a license plate, allowing the authorities to apprehend her before she ever reaches Lusty. In the meantime I’m going to clone your e-mail. When she sends the next one to you—if she sends a next one to you—I’ll know it. She hasn’t texted you, has she?”
“No. That’s strange, isn’t it?” Clay looked at Connor, then the rest of the men. Gord had remained silent. He stood close to Tasha, his hand on her, helping her to feel grounded.
“Maybe she doesn’t have your cell number,” Gord said. “That would lend credence to the theory that we’re dealing with someone you don’t even know.”
“None of this makes any sense at all,” Clay said. He ran his hand through his hair, a clear sign of frustration. “I don’t have any knowledge about this sort of thing. Why wouldn’t she tell me who she is? You’d think she would at least do that much.”
“Because she thinks you know who she is.” Tasha shrugged. “Reading those two notes over, it seems as if she really believes you know who she is. She believes you have a relationship. I know that if I was going to send you an e-mail I might not sign it.”
“But I don’t know who she is.”
“This woman is clearly living in a different world,” Mel said. “One that has no basis in reality.”
“Crap.” The truth of the situation must have finally sunk in, because Clay more or less plopped down onto his chair as if the strength had left his legs.
Tasha wasn’t really angry with him for wanting to send her away—or even for plotting to have this meeting without her. In a way, his attitude had made her feel protected. She went to stand beside him, and he reached for her hand.
Then he looked over at Adam. “Okay, we’ve established this woman might be a threat to Tasha or to me. But what about the children? She doesn’t mention them. I have the feeling that she either doesn’t know about them, or, if she does, they don’t fit into her vision of this so-called life she thinks we’re going to build together.”
“That’s a concern,” Adam said.
“We can bring them over to my
place,” Gord said. “I sure as hell have the room. We could go right over to the warehouse and pick out furniture for them today. We’ll tell them it’s an adventure.”
Clay looked up at Gord. Tasha had the sense the two of them were actually communicating.
Slowly, Clay nodded. “Yes, all right. That’s a good idea. We’ll tell the younger two that I’m going to be tied up with something for my work, and you offered to have them over—an extended sleepover.” Then he looked at Tasha. “But in view of the discussion Shaun and I had last night, I think I’ll sit him down and tell him the truth—and enlist his help in watching over his siblings.”
If Tasha had ever entertained a moment of wondering if Clay was a truly thoughtful parent, she wondered no more. Clay’s decision would elevate Shaun’s status to that of near adult, while at the same time showing him that situations were sometimes more complicated than they seemed.
“Connor’s going to keep working his magic on those e-mails,” Adam said. “In the meantime, know that we’re all going to be vigilant. And by all, Clay, I mean the entire town of Lusty.”
Clay stood and offered Adam his hand. “I appreciate that.”
“Hey, don’t look so embarrassed, man,” Jake said. “This just makes you fit right in with the rest of us.”
Clay turned and gave Tasha a rather fierce stare. “Which reminds me. You, Natasha Garwood, will not go after this woman, when and if she arrives, whoever she may be, with a shovel, a screwdriver, or, God help us all, bare-handed. Do you understand me?”
Tasha kept the grin that she felt coming on off her face. Of course, during that sleepover at the Big House, she’d heard all about the adventures some of the women of Lusty had had over the last couple of years. She knew exactly what Clay was talking about. The fact that he did look so fierce—as well as a bit ashen—told her he’d recently been informed of those adventures, too. Did the thought of her in danger frighten him? That had to mean he cared, perhaps more than he knew.
Love Under Two Introverts [The Lusty, Texas Collection] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Page 16
