by Lane Hart
He’s not saying anything I hadn’t already figured out myself.
“I fucking knew it,” he grumbles, his eyes I can’t quite make out narrowing as he looks over the ink still stinging my ribs. “Roll over,” he orders, with a hand on my back because he wants me on my side so he can read it. His fingertips run alongside the vines, not touching the tattoo itself. “It’s beautiful, and means…more to me than you know,” he says.
I let out the breath I was holding since at first it sounded like he was disappointed that I had done something so permanent to myself. He of all people should know the significance of the words since he knows my secret.
Pushing on my shoulder, he gently rolls me flat on my back again so that I’m looking up at his huge form, hovering over me.
“Forget about him. Forget Brede,” he says, his thumb caressing my bottom lip. “I know how much you’ve already been through. Help me, and I promise I’ll take care of you.”
It’s a tempting offer, even if it is from a stranger in a mask. No one’s taken care of me in ten years. I’m just not sure how he wants me to help him. Before I can ask, he’s distracting me.
Leaning down, his soft lips flutter against my neck. Once, twice, three times, making me squirm underneath him. I reach up to his shoulders, but he pulls away, grabbing both of my wrists in one of his hands. I want to scream in protest and beg him not to stop, but then he stretches above me. And with another tug on my wrists, I realize he’s tying them to the same bedpost like the first night. Last night he wouldn’t let me touch him either when I tried.
“If I let you touch me…” he starts to explain when his partially covered face returns above me. “Well, I wouldn’t be able to stop. And this is all for you. To convince you. Let me make you feel good, okay?” he asks.
“Yes,” I agree, tugging on the soft material to test the hold. They’re much looser than the first night, so much so that it wouldn’t take much to pull free if I wanted to. I don’t think I do, though. While being restrained is scary and reminds me of the place I don’t want to ever go back to, when he does it, however, it’s actually…hot, so much so that my panties are already wet.
His mouth moves to the other side of my neck to continue his sensual torture. It’s nice, but I want more. My entire body is shaking with need. The way he makes me feel is similar to when I was with Brede earlier, but it’s also so…different. In a good way. Instead of being rough and harsh, his touch is gentle and almost reverent, despite the scarf tying my wrists to the bedpost.
“The things I could do to you, Blair,” he says with his lips against my skin. His erection grinds into my lower body, and my legs spread like it’s an automatic bodily function, trying to get him closer to the area where the longing seems to be radiating from.
“If you let me, I’ll worship every inch of your beautiful body.” He drags his lips down my chest, right between my breasts. The cool air has beaded both nipples almost painfully. They’re so sensitive that when his tongue flicks over one and then the other, I moan at the tingling sensation, arching my back to squirm, either to get closer to his mouth or to get away. I’m not sure which.
“You like that?” he asks, blowing one of the wet nipples, making me shiver as I moan in response. "Tell me to stop and I will,” he tells me.
“No,” I reply quickly, making him chuckle in amusement.
“More?” he asks, even though he already knows the answer. He’s just making me say it. “Blair?” he prompts, holding still above me until I respond.
“Yes,” I answer.
“Okay, I’ll give you more. But I need to know something important. Deal? You answer my questions, and I’ll keep my mouth on you.”
“Okay,” I agree, words coming easier the more I use them with him.
“Did you lie?” he asks without elaborating. He doesn’t need to because I know exactly what he’s asking.
Gnawing on my bottom lip while he watches me carefully with those narrowed eyes behind a mask, I consider my options. The first night, he called me a liar. He already assumed the truth, so why not be completely honest with him? He knows the worst of me, yet for some reason, he’s here.
“Blair?” he prompts.
“Yes,” I reply. “He…he made me,” I explain. Sure, that excuse might fly as an eight-year-old girl, but after all these years I never came forward and admitted the truth. Not to a soul, even though I doubt anyone would have believed a silly, raving lunatic.
“That’s what I thought,” he says on a heavy exhale that breezes through my hair. Then his lips are on my cheek, kissing me softly, sweetly. He’s not angry like I expected him to be. “Did you see who did it?” he asks.
“Yes,” I reply, my voice shaking with the memories of her crying while he stabbed her over and over again. The way the blood splattered. The last gurgling sounds she made before she went silent. And even as young as I was, I knew she was gone then.
“Fuck. I’m so sorry, baby girl,” he says. Cradling my face in his hands, he kisses my lips again, and it’s the perfect distraction to make all the blood and gore go away. “He’s an evil fucking bastard; and if you help me, we can nail his ass for this.”
He knows too.
“Not that easy,” I say, squeezing my eyes shut.
“I know it’s not in this town, but this is bigger than him and his reach. The feds want him; we just need evidence. A witness would be good, too.”
“F-feds?” I ask in confusion.
“The federal government. I’m an FBI agent, and while these…search and interrogation techniques are not exactly our normal operating procedure or legal, for that matter, I have more of a…personal stake in this case. More than even my superiors know. I’ve been after the DA for a long time.”
“Why?” I ask curiously, unable to hold back the question.
“That…is a story for another time. Right now, I’ve got some convincing that I would rather be doing.”
“I-I don’t even know your name,” I say when his warm, wet tongue swipes across my breast.
“Aden.”
“Aden?” I ask. At least, I think that’s what he said. His voice was muffled since his mouth was full of my nipple.
“Mmm-hmm,” he replies without his mouth pausing in suction. “Why do you have to taste so good?” he asks, but I don’t answer that one. “I can’t stay the fuck away from you, and I don’t want to, even though it’s wrong.” Now his mouth has moved down, his tongue prodding and flicking the sensitive area around my belly button. I understand his intention right away, and instead of being self-conscious like this morning, I know how good it feels now. In fact, if my hands weren’t restrained I’d even be tempted to push his head down between my legs like the dirty little slut I’m becoming. I blame my scandalousness on being locked away and not being touched for ten years.
Lips pressed to my inner thigh, his big hands spread my legs apart. Aden looks up from between them, just like I knew he would, asking first. “I wanna taste you, Blair. Tell me I can lick your pussy.”
“Yes,” I say right away, lifting my hips for him, my chest already heaving with my panting breaths, needing his mouth on me so bad it hurts. “Oh God,” I cry out when his tongue swirls over my flesh a second later. Being restrained makes it feel even better when he holds my legs down with his strong hands and tortures an orgasm out of me. I scream obscenities to the ceiling for the first time in my life as I buck in his grip, and Aden never relents. He just keeps up his assault until I lose count of my orgasms.
When his mouth finally moves away, my sweat-soaked body sags into the mattress in relief. As I come back down, I blink my eyes open and watch as Aden furiously pumps his hand up and down his long, hard cock until he growls out a curse and jets of cum spray my stomach and across my breasts with his release.
“Damn, Blair,” he says with a grin. Wiping away my arousal from his mouth with his index finger and thumb, he shakes his head that’s still partially covered by the mask. It bothers me that he’s still
hiding from me, more at this moment than any other since he first climbed into my window after being so intimate.
“Please…please take off the mask,” I stutter, pleading my request.
He blows out a breath, hands on his hips in frustration, reminding me so much of Brede. “Okay, but you can’t tell anyone about me being here. Deal?” he asks, and I nod my agreement before he finally reaches up and pulls it off.
“Holy fucking wow,” I gasp in surprise.
Chapter Fifteen
Brede
I left North Carolina around midnight and drove my bike the six hours to West Virginia. Even though I’ve never actually been to see him, I know the address by heart from the letters he occasionally sends. Somehow they always seem to find me, no matter how many times I move around the country.
The long drive gives me too much time to think. For years I’ve hated him, thinking the worst of the man who raised me, blaming him for abandoning his family over some bitch that he stupidly got caught for brutally killing. I even thought he had maybe lied about my mother’s suicide, and he actually killed her. But now I want some answers, especially as to what part Blair has in all this.
Pulling up at the gate, I have to show my ID before they allow me entry. Inside the prison facility, they make me take off my jacket and leave it and all my belongings in a bin before they pat me down. After I’m searched, I have to sign some forms before the guards take me to the plastic partition with a telephone on either side. If I were a wanted man, I’d be concerned with providing all my information, but I’m not, because I never leave a trace.
Face-to-face visits are, of course, out of the question for convicted murderers, which is fine with me. The plastic partition is a much-needed barrier between me and the man I haven’t actually seen since we all had breakfast together the morning he was arrested.
A few moments later, two guards escort in an aging man with thinning gray hair and a snow-colored beard longer than mine. His wrists are handcuffed in front of him, and here the inmates apparently wear navy blue jumpsuits instead of the hideous orange ones of county joints. I would know since I’ve been in one of those jumpsuits a time or two for minor bullshit.
My old man’s bushy salt and pepper eyebrows shoot up to his hairline when he sees me sitting on the other side of the partition. And just like that, I squirm under his gaze like I’m a twelve-year-old boy all over again instead of a twenty-two-year-old man.
“Brede?” his lips form my name, but I, of course, can’t hear him yet. Once he sits down in the chair on the other side, he lifts the phone, so I do the same. “Brede, is that really you?” he asks.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I answer on an exhale, trying to slow my racing heart. For a silent moment I ask myself what the fuck I’m doing here, but then he says, “I’ve missed you, son, so damn much.” He doesn’t even try to hide the moisture in his eyes, and the sobbing sound he makes in my ear is agonizing. I swallow down the fire that races up the sides of my throat and clear my voice.
“Tell me about Valerie,” I say, straight to the point of my visit. Her name was familiar because that’s the name of the woman my dad murdered, or who they say he killed by stabbing her to death.
My father’s entire body sags, and this time, he braces his elbows on the small table to cover his face, breathing heavily into the phone. When he finally raises his head, he wipes his tears on his sleeve and answers me, his voice still shaking with emotion.
“I loved her so damn much,” he says simply. “We were gonna be a family. You were gonna finally have a mother. She had a daughter, and she couldn’t wait for her to meet you and…”
A daughter.
“Blair?” I interrupt to ask.
“Blair,” he repeats with a nod of his head. “Such a beautiful, sweet girl. I can’t imagine how tough all of this was on her, losing her mother, and then that asshole locked her away…”
“What do you mean? What asshole locked her away?” I ask.
“She…she lied, or they made her lie to the cops about seeing me…but she never testified in court. I heard her father sent her away to a mental institution, and the poor girl’s been there ever since.”
Until this week, I think to myself. So that’s why the DA was looking for her. And no fucking wonder she’s suicidal after being locked up for ten years in a shithole facility after her mother was murdered.
“Did she really see who…”
“Probably,” he says with a heavy sigh. “I hate that, too. She was just a little girl, had just turned eight I think. She didn’t deserve that shit. Her mom….Valerie didn’t either.”
“Was it him?” I ask, knowing he understands exactly who I’m referring to.
“Yeah,” my dad answers with a nod. “It was him, after I assume he found out she was leaving him for me. We’d spent the day together riding to the mountains on my bike…”
Goddamn, that’s tragic as shit. With one man’s decision, my family was ripped away from me, my father locked away for life, the woman he loved gone…
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,” I tell him. With everyone in town saying he was guilty, I was young and naively thought that the police wouldn’t have charged him if he didn’t do it.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you,” he replies.
“It wasn’t so bad,” I tell him. “Paula and Jim were nice. They couldn’t have any kids so they spoiled me, even though I was usually a little shit.”
“Then you were the lucky one,” he says with a smile that I know is filled with pain, of not being there himself to take care of us. When the guard approaches him, he grumbles, “Fuck” into the phone. “Time’s almost up already…”
“I’ve met Blair,” I blurt out.
“You remember her?” he asks, his red eyes going wide. “Blair Lockhart?”
“Remember her?” I ask.
“From the community pool. Valerie and I used to let you all swim together on the weekends during the summer.”
“No shit?” I say in surprise, trying to recall those summers. I vaguely remember a scrawny little wisp of a girl who always seemed to be there when we went. Did she ever say her name? Not that I remember. “We met before everything went to hell?”
“Before?” my dad asks. “Wait, are you telling me that you’ve met Blair recently? She’s out of the mental hospital?”
“Yeah,” I reply and have to look away from his inquisitive gaze when I feel ashamed or embarrassed for the first time in my life about fucking around with a girl, maybe because Blair is a girl. And, of course, I also feel guilty for what that bastard was gonna pay me to do to her.
“Brede,” my father says. “The girl’s been through enough. So either take care of her or stay the fuck away from her.”
Since I already know I can’t stay away from her, I guess I’ll have to take the first option. Before he can say anything else, the guard tells him to hang up.
“I’m gonna try to get you out,” I promise him.
With a small smile, he says, “Thank you, son. Don’t blame her, though, and don’t put pressure on her to try and fix anything. It’s gonna take a helluva lot more than her testimony to get me out.”
I neither agree nor disagree. If Blair could tell the fucking truth about what a piece of murdering shit her father is, then I’ll just have to find a way to talk her into doing it. It probably won’t be too hard after I tell her that he hired me to kill her.
Fuck.
Am I really gonna be able to admit that shit to her? The reason I showed up in town was to put her head in the sights of my gun?
“Love you, Brede, and your brother. You know that, right? Always have and always will, no matter what. He misses you, but he’s also worried about you,” my dad says in a rush as the guard pulls him up by his elbow to his feet.
“Yeah,” I reply. “I know.”
There’s still too much history and anger for me to be able to say the words back to him just yet. Maybe I’m not as angry at him as I was, but it�
��ll take some time to come to grips with everything I’ve been wrong about for so damn long. For a damn decade I’ve blamed him for splitting up our family. It was devastating losing our father, but nothing has ever hurt as much as having to leave my brother behind. He was my best friend, my partner in crime, and the other half of my soul.
But now I know that it wasn’t my father’s fault that our family was torn apart, and I’m gonna make the man responsible finally pay for destroying our lives and Blair’s.
Chapter Sixteen
Blair
It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, and there’s been no sign of Brede. I don’t know where he is, why he left me at the tattoo parlor the night before, or what’s going on with him. Which sucks, because I sort of miss the jackass, even though Aden stayed the night with me, sleeping curled up around me, but still not letting me touch him.
When the doorbell rings, I nearly jump out of my skin before I race from the living room to the front door. I check the peephole expecting Brede and not the clean-cut man on the other side.
“Blair, it’s me, Aden. Open up,” he tells me in case I don’t recognize him in the daylight without a mask, so I unlock the deadbolt and chain for him.
“Hey,” he says with a dazzling smile when I pull open the door. He’s wearing a well-fitting dark suit and tie, looking so incredible that an enormous amount of my discontent about missing Brede quickly diffuses.
“Hey,” I reply back so suddenly that I slap my palm over my mouth in surprise. The word came out so freely, with no debate or dilemma in my fucked up head.
“Nice,” Aden says in approval of my greeting. Swooping into the foyer to kiss me, his hands immediately lock around my wrists to hold them down by my sides. Why does he always do that? Restrain me, refusing to let me touch him? I want to ask, but it seems like it’s too soon and he probably wouldn’t answer anyway. In fact, he doesn’t answer many of my questions, but at least I can see his beautiful face now without the mask.
