Brutally Beautiful

by Lynne Connolly

  He shook his head and closed his eyes, but she wouldn’t flinch from this. He needed to tell her, and she needed to hear it. She kissed him. “All of it.”

  “We stole shit, but we got caught shoplifting, and only begging and crying saved us. We weren’t good at it. We went to school enough to sign in occasionally, but the teachers didn’t care. Larry liked it, even the shit school we went to, so I gave up, and sent him whenever I could.” He paused, smiled. “I had a book. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Verse. The cover was missing, and some of the pages too, so it wouldn’t have fetched anything if Mum had sold it. So I got to keep it. The only book I had. I read it to pieces, and then I could afford another one. I had a lot of poetry books, but what would that have done to my rep? So I didn’t tell anybody, not even Larry.” Another grin, a wry one but it was there. “That’s the truth.”

  “I know it is.”

  “Of course you do.” He claimed a kiss, traced her lips with his tongue, and tasted her, but didn’t take it any further. Already his cock had risen again, a hard ridge against her thigh. “I didn’t kill the guy in the drug house, but he didn’t have family. Nobody to care. I felt bad, you know? I actually felt bad about what I did. That was when I knew I was losing it. You can’t feel bad about shit like that. You just use it. Every situation you have to use, or somebody else will. Before that happened, I told Larry he had to leave. He was clever, always, and he deserved his chance. Book smart. He did it.” He smiled with pride.

  “But you’re a professor now, or nearly one.”

  “I bought my passport, bought my GCSEs and A-levels, didn’t work for any of them. Took the university entrance they wanted at DUNY, though, and passed it. But I earned my degree, and they transferred me to the doctoral course from the master’s program. Proudest moment of my life.”

  She loved him for it. “I wish I’d been there to celebrate it with you.”

  “So do I.” He traced a finger down the side of her face, ending at the corner of her mouth. “They say it’s in the bag, my supervisors, but you can’t be sure of anything. I won’t believe it until I have the confirmation letter in my hand.”

  “You were reading Tennyson the first time I saw you in the library,” she said. “Are you specializing in Victorian poetry?” Because she wanted to know, she really wanted to know.

  “Not Victorian. Arthurian legends and poetry, right from Geoffrey of Monmouth onward.” He huffed a laugh. “All those stories about knights rescuing maidens from dragons. When I was little, I used to imagine myself as the knight in shining armor. But when I grew up, I realized I was the dragon.”

  She rolled so she lay over him. She lifted herself up on her arms and gazed down at his face, no longer a mask to her. “I’ve always liked dragons the best. They’re beautiful, and they lead maidens into wicked adventures. They can fly.”

  When she dipped her head to kiss him, they didn’t part for a long time. Then he held her face between his hands while she told him, “I want to help you. I’m the only person who can get inside that building and that computer system.”

  He laughed. “It’s easy. I can get in from outside.”

  She shook her head. “Easier if you use my security level. I know that system. It’s old. Like other government departments, they don’t have the money to upgrade, so it won’t be too hard to crack, but if you want to keep Bennick happy, you need me. I can persuade him to stay where he is, let him think I’ve got you on a string. That way he’ll realize he needs me, at least until I’ve brought you home.”

  “You have thought this out, haven’t you?”

  She clicked her tongue against her teeth. “You didn’t give me much choice. I’m finished at the department. If they discover what Bennick’s been doing—and I have every intention of collecting all the evidence I can before I turn him in—then my reputation will never be clear. It’ll follow me. I’m his direct employee, I report to him, and I work closest with him. He saw to that. He had me transferred to his department, and he’s been mentoring me.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t much of a career. I won’t be giving up a lot.”

  “Only the chance of being somebody who matters.”

  Shit, he did understand. Too much. “He’s the one running the immigrants, isn’t he?”

  He nodded. “He must be, because Odell only does a few friends a few favors. No more.”

  “You need me, Nick.”

  “More than you know,” he said, and she knew he wasn’t talking about her job.

  Chapter Ten

  Helpless to resist, Nick watched as she took control, loving the strength she had only just begun to realize. She wouldn’t suffer from this; he’d make sure of it. Maybe Bennick had sent her to snare him that first night. If he had, it was the only thing he’d done right.

  She glanced down at his dick. “Do you always recover this fast?”

  He shrugged, enjoying the way her expression heated at the motion of his muscles, but he resisted the temptation to flex them for her. “Are you always this insatiable?”

  “Only with you.”

  “Yeah. Ditto.”

  That made her laugh, the sound bathing him in warmth. They had tonight before he had to do something that might separate them. He knew that now, just as he knew he had to make sure she was safe before he left. He didn’t trust Bennick one little inch. Once he realized Gen wasn’t playing ball, he’d do everything he could to make sure she didn’t open her mouth again.

  Best not to think of that now. Let her enjoy the hell out of his cock, and he’d enjoy her doing it.

  She stroked her hand over his chest, made a claw, and scratched him lightly. “So these scars were tattoos?”

  “Some of them. When I decided to leave, I went to London, to a guy who owed me a favor. I had lasers for the tats. They were haphazard, as good as a map. I wanted to get changed in the gym, go swimming, sit on the beach, or take a woman to bed without the risk of anyone taking pictures, and thinking they’d seen them before. I was scheduled for plastic surgery too, but I had to leave in a hurry. Never got it done. The amateur tats were a bit deeper than commercial ones. Some of the scars are knife wounds or from fights. You tended to pick them up in my line of work.” He’d been lucky with the tat removal. They’d taken really well. As had the new tooth crown that replaced the gold one. He hadn’t even had to find most of the cash to pay for them. The man had taken a few gold chains that he had no use for any more. The huge, blingy ones he used to wear as a way of taking his money around with him. The diamond knuckle-duster set had helped to pay for the grafts. So the jewelry had come in handy, just as he’d known they would.

  “They give you character.”

  He laughed. “Never heard that one before.”

  “They do. I bet you don’t believe half the good things about you. Like the way you were teaching that girl. She wanted you, and you made her look at the poem. Cheesy poem, by the way.”

  “What? ‘The Lady of Shallot’? I used to dream about being her Lancelot.”

  “I prefer my dragon.”

  He chuckled. “Glad to hear it.”

  He watched as she traced her fingers lightly over the knife scar at the base of his ribs, the one that had nearly killed him because it had pierced a lung. Instead, he’d killed the guy who’d given it to him. Even now he couldn’t feel compassion for lowlifes like that, although some people—the victims, the girls, and the addicts—haunted him most nights. Maybe it was a form of PTSD, but whatever it was, he didn’t sleep well.

  She ran her nails up his cock to the head, lightly tracing the rim, and he sucked in a breath through his teeth. “That feels so fucking good.”

  “Can I make you feel better?”

  He’d bet the farm that she could, and he wouldn’t have lost it either.

  At her first, exploratory lick, he gasped with the intensity of feeling. He felt every swipe of her tongue as she licked his cock from base to tip and back again. The next time, she took the head into her mouth and sucked.


  She drew everything from him, his life, his secrets, any chance he had of keeping a cool mind. “So much better,” he managed to gasp before she began a slow, sensuous rhythm guaranteed to drive him out of his mind.

  He’d told her he could recover quickly, and it was true, but never before had it been at the thought of having the same woman again and again until they couldn’t stand upright even if they’d wanted to. Every time he entered her sweet body, it felt new. Every time his excitement ramped up a touch more, and now she was ministering to him so perfectly he could have trained her himself.

  No, not even that, he thought as he registered her curling a finger underneath his sac, teasing the sensitive skin. He let her do anything she wanted, and it seemed she wanted to wrap her hand around his cock and work it in time with her voracious sucking. Like she wanted to. Like he wanted her to.

  In the end it was all one big sensation, as if all of him was one huge cock. A few lines from the “Lysistrata” drifted through his head, but he dismissed them. It came of carrying a memorized cornucopia of poetry around all the time, and he couldn’t imagine anything more inappropriate than that piece. Except that if he didn’t come soon, he’d surely die.

  She eased off a little so he could again distinguish each separate caress, then went back, drawing him in. Making him her slave. No other woman, ever, would come this close. While his rational side knew he’d had more accomplished blowjobs, more daring stripteases, nobody had done it knowing what he liked so well and catering to her own needs as well as his.

  With a cry and a twist of his body, he came, giving her everything willingly. She could have it all.

  * * * *

  A week later, they were no closer to their aim, except that Gen had succeeded in getting Bennick to believe she had Nick for the taking. Nick sat frowning over an impossible problem, one he’d been unable to crack. His computer skills were mainly self-taught, but he’d achieved a reasonable level. He’d ruined one computer by delving into the murkier side of the Internet, picking up so many viruses on the way that he couldn’t rescue the machine. He’d smashed it, trashed the hard drive, and bought a new one, started again.

  Bennick had an unbreakable security system around his personal network. The best. At least Nick had discovered where he lived and that he couldn’t break the USCIS’s system either, not the part of it that Bennick controlled. The part of his résumé Nick found most depressing was Bennick’s degree in computer science. He knew his way around and the tricks that would mean someone like Nick couldn’t break in. The rest of the department had been laughably easy to break, but it was all routine, guaranteed to put him to sleep. He needed help.

  As if on cue his phone rang, and Nick didn’t have to check the caller ID to see who it was. It was the special phone, the one Jim had sent him. “Yes?”

  “We’re here, in New York. Want to meet up?”

  No warning, no provisions. Yes or no.

  Before he could talk himself out of it, he said, “Yes.”

  Half an hour later he texted the time and place to Jim. He wouldn’t go to their hotel, and while Jim agreed to meet, this would give Larry—Lawrence—the chance to turn him down. He didn’t even have to say no, just not turn up. Nick wouldn’t ask. But he found an unreasonable excitement bubbling in his belly as he got ready. He booked a room at a hotel, one of the many near Central Park that catered to upmarket tourists. Not the swish ones, too obvious, but a decent one. He wouldn’t go to their hotel in case anyone was watching him.

  As it was, he took several subway trains and finished with a cab that dropped him at the Guggenheim before he walked down to the hotel, only then sure nobody was watching. He wore a business suit, assuming the guise of a meeting at the hotel, and carried a briefcase with his laptop in it as well as a few weapons that bordered on the legal. Not his gun, though. He was better with a knife, anyway. More practice. He had one of those with him too. Two if he counted the blade on his penknife.

  He climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. Elevators worried him sometimes, and since the crisis last week, he’d taken even more care than usual. He couldn’t avoid it in his apartment, but otherwise he’d take the stairs all or part of the way. Good for him too. Poetry lecturers didn’t get much exercise in their jobs, and he’d never been a gym bunny, although he had a set of weights he worked out with sometimes. These days he was doing most of his workouts with a partner. He suppressed his smile when he thought of her, the woman he’d spent the most glorious week of his life with. He’d taken a few pictures of her in his bed. Nothing risqué, but he loved watching her sleep and he’d snapped a few shots of her at dawn, her hair spread over the pillow, her mouthwatering figure outlined by his comforter.

  He would have given everything he had to keep her there, but it couldn’t happen.

  After running up an extra flight, he traversed the hallway and came down the other side. The room was close to the stairs at one end, not halfway down a featureless corridor with a narrow escapeway—something that, in other circumstances, he might appreciate, but not today.

  He tapped at the door, using the last safety knock he’d shared with Larry. When the door opened, he slipped inside.

  Standing by the window stood the tall figure of a man he knew well but hadn’t seen for nearly five years. His brother. Someone else sat at the long panel that served for dresser and desk, but he’d greet him later.

  Lawrence was dressed in a blue suit, immaculately cut. His hair was the same, with the annoying forelock that had given Nick the idea for his style, but he’d brushed his back today. He didn’t need the geek factor.

  He dumped his briefcase on the nearest chair and went forward to take Larry in his arms and give him as big a hug as he dared without squeezing the breath out of him. He was barely aware of his brother giving him the same treatment.

  “Jesus, our kid, you shouldn’t have come,” he said. Straight back to Scouse. He cleared his throat, trying to block his mother tongue. He couldn’t leave this room with any trace of it. But seeing his brother so well had choked him up and shot him back in time.

  “Try to keep me away,” Lawrence muttered, his elegant, cut-glass accent still firmly in place. They separated, holding each other by the upper arms. “You’re looking good, Mick. Who knew you had hair?”

  “And so much of it too,” said the dry voice Nick was getting used to. He glanced down to see Jim watching them in amusement. Although he’d have recognized him, the computer nerd he’d known had filled and broadened out, he noted as he ran a professional gaze across the shoulders and down the lean torso.

  “You in the gym these days?”

  Jim shrugged. “Something like that. It’s either exercise or turn into Mr. Lardy. That’s what people expect, for the techie to be skinny and pale. I like to give them something a bit different.”

  “You’ve helped send Symbiotics into the stratosphere,” Nick remarked. “Bucking the trend.”

  “Nah,” Jim said. “We’re bringing out a phone next year. The market’s going soft, and we’ve seen a gap.” He flashed a grin. “Yolanda’s seen a gap.”

  “A genius, my wife,” Lawrence stated, a touch of pride infusing his voice. “A pregnant genius.”

  Nick knew Lawrence was waiting for his reaction, so he gave none, teasing his brother. “I’ll send her a card.” Then dragged his brother close for another bear hug. “Congratulations, you idiot. Trying to get it right this time?”

  “Yeah.” A brave man, to plunge into parenthood, but it had taken Yolanda a while to persuade him. Nick knew it was that way around. Yolanda had a bossy mother, but her family was a model one compared to her husband’s.

  They drank coffee, caught up, and then turned to business. Nick had hinted at it before, but now he gave them a concise summary of events to date. “We need something to prove Bennick’s guilt. A paper trail, something with his name on. But he’s good at locking his stuff down. Most of his stuff must be on a private computer, one never networked to anything, but we nee
d to provide evidence that will give the bizzes a chance to get a warrant to search his place. They’ll find it all there, because Bennick’s a typical civil servant. He’ll have a paper trail.”

  “Or an electronic one,” Jim said. He turned to his computer—big, shiny, impressive—and typed in a few lines on the browser. He had smaller laptops on each side of him and an extra screen behind. All that in a hotel he wasn’t even staying at.

  Nick gave him space. He got out his own laptop in case Jim needed it, and brought Lawrence up to date, even though the bastard sniggered when he told him what he was doing. “On the understanding you don’t hunt me down. Ever. I’m still toxic, and it doesn’t look as if I’m getting out of it any time soon.”

  “We were never toxic, Mick. The people around us were.” Lawrence regarded him, his light blue eyes grave. “You always gave people a second chance, you were never unnecessarily violent, and you gave your employees a fair shake.”

  “A happy staff is a loyal staff,” he said, and couldn’t remember the last time he’d reminded anyone of that. “I might do that next. Small business stuff. There are no end of shysters in that game. An honest dealer stands to make a killing.” Although the thought of leaving the life he’d dreamed of for so long hurt him badly, he had to consider every possibility. He’d never leave the poetry behind, anyway.

  Lawrence laughed, and the sound took Nick to the tiny room in Liverpool where his brother could always see the funny side of things.

  “Memory Lane’s all well and good,” said Jim, “but come and look at this.”

  After exchanging a glance, the brothers went to look over his shoulders.

  “Shit,” Nick murmured. “Do you know how long I’ve been trying to break into his personal files?”