by Linda Barlow
I guess that makes me sound more altruistic than I actually am.
Truth was, I wanted him. Yeah, I was attracted to this beautiful man who’d given me a ride in the pouring rain.
He was the kind of rough, tough, smoking hot bad boy who probably got girls with a crook of his finger. If I've been a little less sleepy last night, that finger crook thing would have probably gotten him me.
I hadn’t decided what to do about it yet.
Even though I wasn't inclined to think of him as a killer, I’d found a few worrisome things on his computer. I knew from all the hacking I’d done that people looked at all kinds of weird shit on the Internet.
Examining somebody’s files was a little like looking inside their minds—there are good reasons why people didn't just spew out every random thought that flashed across their neurons. Everybody thought things they didn’t say and fantasized about stuff they would never do.
Besides, Griff knew I was invading his privacy. If he'd had anything to hide, wouldn’t he have stopped me?
I wandered into the kitchen and started cleaning up the dishes from dinner. Maybe I was weird but I actually like cleaning. Putting things in order. Making everything neat and tidy around me. You couldn’t create order out of the confusion of people’s inner lives, but you could brighten up the outward appearance.
When his game ended, I randomly started flipping the channels. As usual, there wasn’t much on. I was about to switch it off when I came upon a scene from one of my all-time favorite movies. I curled up on his comfy sofa and started to watch.
Griff
Rory was in front of the TV when I finally returned to the house. She had cleaned up. The dishes we'd used must be in the dishwasher, since I could hear it running. The kitchen table and counters were spotless.
The exercise had boiled off my head of steam. As I considered how neat the place was, I started thinking again that maybe it wasn't so bad to have a woman around. If I could only get her interested in something other than solving the mystery of Hadley's disappearance. Like how it would be to go down on her knees on my spotless kitchen floor and slide her wet tongue all over my cock.
“Hey,” I said, walking into the living room and throwing myself down beside her on the sofa. I glared at the screen. “Where’s my game?”
“It’s over.”
She barely looked at me. She was deep into some old black and white movie. It didn’t take long for me to recognize which one. Humphrey Bogart was standing on the tarmac telling Ingrid Bergman to get her ass on that plane because their silly romantic problems didn’t amount to a hill of beans in this fucked up world.
Or words to that effect.
Rory, amazingly, was sniffling. Just a little bit. I was sure I’d heard a sniffle.
“I wanna see the game wrap-up,” I said, still feeling dickish. I reached for the remote to change back to the sports channel. She was clutching it, holding it away from me.
“Just a couple more minutes. It’s Casablanca.”
“I know what it is,” I growled. “Damn chick flick.”
She ignored me while the big goodbye scene ran its course. I rolled my eyes. I sure as hell wasn’t gonna admit that I thought it was a pretty good movie or that I’d seen it more than once and knew the plot cold. I could even recite some of the dialogue.
Ilsa had boarded the plane with her husband. Bogart and the French police dude strolled off together, talking about their beautiful friendship as the film faded out. Rory turned to face me.
“It’s not a chick flick. It’s got all this male honor crap and stuff. No happy ending because the usually-cynical Rick has to do the right thing. The noble thing.” She put a disdainful emphasis on the word “noble.” She seemed to be getting steamed for some reason. “If it were a chick flick, it’d have a happy ending. She doesn’t love her husband. They were hardly ever together. She loves Rick and he loves her. But he lets her leave. It can’t have a romantic ending because the script was probably written by a man!”
“Whoa, I’m amazed you care about shit like that.” Seriously, I was learning new stuff about Ms. Hotshit Hacker all the time. I removed the remote from her tight-clenched fist and clicked back to the sports channel, but both my game and the wrap-up segment had ended.
I shut the TV down.
“Are you crying?” I taunted her.
“Shut up. I’m not crying.”
“These wet patches,” I poked the traces her cheek, “are known as tears, Smarty-Pants.”
She twisted away from me. “I have a cold. Allergies. Haven’t you ever seen allergic tears before?”
I laughed at her. “Not as big of a hard-ass as you pretend to be, are you?”
“You’re such a jerk.” She got up and marched off to the bathroom. But just before shutting the door, she looked back at me over her shoulder. Her tears had stopped and she was kinda smiling now. Then she winked at me before shutting the bathroom door.
She winked? What the fuck was that? Maybe she hadn’t winked…maybe one of her eyes was just messed up from crying over a sappy movie.
But what if she had?
I wondered if she was gonna sulk in there for hours just to irritate me, but she was out again in a couple minutes, her face all shining and clean. She came back into the living room and sat down at the far end of the sofa. Not winking or smiling at me now. Just looking at me with an indecipherable expression on her face.
Her hair was in her eyes, as usual, but it looked silky. I wanted to stroke it. Fist a handful of it and drag her face close to mine. I noticed her lips for maybe the first time. Before I'd been struck by the whole effect of her smile, but now I saw her lips as an individual feature. They were wide and plump, the bottom one especially. Soft. Kissable.
I didn’t know how to tell her I thought so, though. Or how such a statement would be received. Instead, I said, “Are you a germaphobe or something? This place hasn't been so clean in months.”
“You're welcome.” She hesitated, and then said, “Why are you so damn touchy?”
“Why are you so damn inquisitive?”
“I'm just trying to help.”
“I still can't figure out why.”
She shrugged. “It must suck to have people think you’re a killer.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not your business.”
“I like puzzles.”
“It could be less of a puzzle than you think.”
She cocked her head, looking intrigued. “How so?”
“Maybe I'm guilty. Have you considered that?”
She made a gesture as if to flick the idea away. “Would I have come back if I thought you were guilty?”
“Maybe you're not as smart as you think you are.”
To my surprise, she nodded and said, “I'm not that smart about people. I mean, I don't have great people skills, as I'm sure you've noticed. I'm better with computers.”
I snorted a laugh.
“Computers are logical. People aren't.”
“How logical is it to crash in the same house with a guy who maybe murdered his last girlfriend?”
She was looking uncomfortable now. Even a little nervous. God, I'm such a dick. I was enjoying tormenting this cocky little stray who had flung herself, unwanted, into my life.
“Well, I'm not your girlfriend.”
“There is that. If I only murder my girlfriends, I guess you've got nothing to worry about.”
Her looking so uncomfortable was getting me hard. Or maybe it was just her being here, all soft and vulnerable. I loved the thought of kick-ass hacker Rory being submissive to me. Was there any chance she could get into that? Should I make a move and find out?
Fuck. She'd come back of her own accord. She'd cooked me dinner. Was she planning to sleep on the couch again tonight? Was she really that desperate for a place to stay, or did she maybe want me, too? Usually I could tell when a girl was hot for my cock, but Rory was still a mystery to me.
Jeez. I was beginning to obsess about her.
Which was crazy. We had hardly anything in common and we spent most of our time together bickering.
“What's your deal, Rory? You know a lot about me now, but I don't know much about you. Who the hell are you, anyway?”
She bristled. “I told you.”
“So you're really a senior in college?”
She shrugged, looking defiant, which made me doubt it.
“What's your major?”
“Math. And computer science.”
Figures. She had to pick something I didn't know much about. I tried anyhow. “What kind of math?”
She rolled her eyes as if to say, what the fuck would you know about it? “Applied. Algorithms, cryptography, stuff like that.”
Okay, that was over my head. I'd been hoping to do well enough to get into some crappy law school someday, and that didn't require advanced math. As for cryptography, I guess that explained how she'd been able to break into my computer so easily. “What college?”
She glared at me for a moment, hesitating. I didn't think she was going to answer. But at last she looked away and muttered, “MIT.”
I'd thought I was beyond surprise, but this was a zinger. “M. I. Fucking T?”
“Told you I was smart.” Smug.
I tried to decide whether I believed this. Maybe it was time I looked her up on the internet. I couldn't mine web data the way she could, but if she went to an elite university, there must be traces of her out there. “So what were you doing in the slums last night?”
“Research.”
“Research?” This sounded totally bogus. “What kind of research were you doing in such a bad part of town? You told me you were on spring break.”
“Some kids head for the beaches, but me, I go to the projects. I figured I'd visit Mom, and check out the sex worker lifestyle. Not such a good choice, obviously.”
“The Negotiable Pleasure Engineer?”
She grinned, probably because I recalled her terminology. “LaVerle's okay, even if she is a whore. My real mom has been pissing me off lately. She doesn't understand why I don't want to spend all my time with her.”
“So you'd rather hang with an accused killer?”
She shrugged. I still didn't like her story. She was lying about something, but I wasn't sure which part.
“Who was the guy with the shotgun?”
“I told you. He's LaVerle's boyfriend.”
“You mean her pimp?”
“Nah, she runs her own business. Ray's a guy she's been hooking up with. I think he helps out with the rent. She claims he's not so bad, but sometimes he forgets to take his meds, or maybe he takes too many, and then he's liable to freak out.” She paused, not looking quite as confident as usual. “He scares the shit out of me.”
“You should stay away from him,” I said, as if I had any right to give advice.
She shivered. “Believe me, I intend to. I wish LaVerle would dump the guy. I worry about her.”
And I'd thought my family had it bad, living in a college town where taxes were high and my mom had to struggle to make ends meet as a hairdresser. “What does your actual mom do for work?”
An odd gleam showed up in her eyes. “Let's just say she gets paid to show off her boobs, bounce her long hair, smile, and sway her hips for a lot of admiring males.”
“So she's, like, an exotic dancer?”
I noticed she was avoiding my eyes, but I had no idea what that meant. “Something like that.”
I was trying to get my mind around the idea of somebody's mom being either a prostitute or a stripper. As far as I knew, it had been a long time since my mom had shown her boobs to anybody. Gross.
“Well, it sounds like you've come from a tough background.”
She burst out laughing. I guess she saw disapproval in my expression because she controlled herself and said, “Sorry. Not laughing at you. Something just struck me funny. But yeah, I guess there are some things about my background that were tough.”
Even though she pissed me off, at the same time I was feeling a kind of reluctant admiration. I tended to feel sorry for myself because I'd grown up poor in a rich town. I'd always been envious of the kids in my school who had more of everything than me and my brother had.
But we'd gone to good schools and our mom had always provided for us, even when she'd had to work two jobs. She hadn't had to sell her body or take on crazy, whacked out boyfriends to make the rent.
Rory had pulled herself out of her environment—which had been real sketchy if that place where she'd jumped into my car was any indication—and set herself up at one of the best universities in the country. Unlike Hadley, who'd been given a fancy new car on her sixteenth birthday and whose daddy was probably a billionaire, Rory was more like me. Worse off than me, in fact.
But she was on her way up and out. I could respect that.
“How the hell can you afford MIT?”
She shrugged, still avoiding looking directly at me. She seemed furtive. Was she lying about the MIT thing? “Scholarships. Loans. The usual.”
“Do you have a job lined up for after graduation?”
Her features had settled into a “bored now” expression. “What is this, show and tell? I've answered your questions. Can we please return to clearing your ass of murder?”
“I want to know why you came back. Why you're even interested in my ass.”
“I'm not interested in your ass.” She stopped short. She met my eyes for a moment, and I could see her blush, which seemed to happen often.
I wondered how much pinker that blush could get. I decided to find out. “You're not, huh? You sure about that?”
The blush grew rosy and spread up to her hairline and down over her throat. But she didn't look away. After a moment, her engaging grin was back, and this time it had a more sensual quality. “Okay, maybe I am interested in your ass.” Her brows rose in a dare. “How about you stand up and let me check it out?”
Chapter 11
Griff
Now that was more like it. It was the first come-on signal she'd given me, and I wasn't about to let it slip by. Still, if she hadn't been grinning up a storm and running those big eyes all over me, I don't think I'd have done what I did.
But, what the fuck, I was in my own living room, in my own house. So I stood up, unbuckled my leather belt, ripped it out of its slots and whipped it down against the bare floor with a crack that made her jump.
“Whoa,” she said softly.
“Shall I go on?”
“I'm all eyes.”
I unzipped and pushed down my jeans. Rory was watching me, her eyes big and blue and round. She was staring hard enough to send all my blood rushing to my genitals. By the time I had shoved my underwear down my hips and stepped out of all that lower body clothing, my dick was rock hard.
Rory swallowed, her face now bright red. Her smile didn't falter, though. She made a circular motion with her hand. “Impressive. But that's not your ass. Why don't you do a 360 so I can get the full effect?”
I was through playing. “Get over here, Rory.”
She rose from the sofa, and my heart-rate doubled. She took a couple steps toward me, then stopped. The look in her eyes hardened. “I want to. Okay?” She was still blushing as she said, “I mean, I even wanted to last night.”
“Yeah?” I was surprised by this. She hadn't given any indication of sexual interest in me last night. So I hadn't been the only one tossing restlessly in bed?
She nodded. “As soon as we got in here where the light was good and I could actually see you...I wanted to.” She smiled as she added, “I expect you already know you're panty-dropping hot.”
Wow, now I was probably blushing a bit, too. No one had ever put it quite like that before. My brother Sean had had the perfect body—tall, honed, and handsome. Even though I'd never had any trouble getting laid—well, until recently—I'd always compared myself unfavorably to him.
“Drop the panties, then.”
Maybe that was a dick response t
o her compliment, but when I get turned on, I'm not so good with the small talk.
She squirmed, her face going soft, and I knew, I just knew we were going to be good together. She was aroused—I could feel it. Hot for me. Sweet and wet and slippery.
But she didn't drop any items of clothing. “Can I ask you something first?”
I was tempted to say no, or just shut the fuck up, Rory, but this was going well enough that I didn't want to blow it. So I nodded. What I wanted to do was scoop her into my arms, carry her straight to my bed, toss her down, and bury myself inside her.
“It's just that—” She hesitated. “When I ask you this thing, I'm afraid it's gonna kill the mood.”
My lust was boiling so hot that I didn't think anything could kill the mood. It was going to take more than her stupid questions to distract me from what I wanted here.
But Ms. 204 IQ Girl turned out to be right again.
“The forensic examination of your computer showed that you'd searched for information on strangling, suffocation, ligatures, and how long you can cut off someone's air before they die. You researched it a lot. Like what kind of rope to use and stuff.”
Fuck. Was nothing private around her? How the hell had she found out what I'd researched online?
“Why was that, Griff? Why d'you look that stuff up? I don't think you murdered Hadley, but...are you into that erotic asphyxiation shit? 'Cause I’m cool with some of the kinky stuff, but breath play is way beyond my limits, you know?”
My anger rose up the same way it had with the killers-get-me-off chick. Fuck. Had she really checked out every dark alley the cops had ever wandered down? She'd been at it for less than 24 hours, and she knew every bizarre secret of my soul?
“What makes you think I give a shit about your limits?” I strode over to her. She was shorter than me and had to tilt her neck to meet my gaze. I grabbed hold of her and slid my hands up her bare arms. The feel of her silky skin was intoxicating. “I've told you before—I'm not a nice guy. Don't think for a moment that because you can stoke me up, I'll treat you well. I won't. I use women. Use them hard.”
