“This is the Gunsmith’s real gun,” she said, lowering herself to her knees.
She pressed it to her face, suddenly going from urgency to patience. He, in turn, had grown so hard—and even harder in her hands—that his patience was waning.
But she cooed to his hard penis, held it in both hands, rubbed her lips over it, kissed it, then got up on her knees so that she could rest it between her breasts. She pushed her tits together and began to rotate his hardness there, reaching with her tongue to wet the head as she did so.
“Jesus, Mandy—” he said, hoarsely.
“Do you want me like I want you?” she demanded.
“Yes.”
“Even if my husband came home right now?”
“Yes.”
She released him from between her breasts, took him in her mouth, and sucked him wetly, taking him all the way in and then letting him pop out.
“And if he came home now, would you kill him?”
“No,” he said, reaching down to place his hands beneath her arms, “but I might just fuck you to death.”
He lifted her and pushed her down on the bed, then kicked away his pants and underwear, removed his boots, and joined her there.
Ben McCloud circled the house impatiently. Suddenly, he could not wait for Clint Adams to come out. And he didn’t care who saw him. If anyone confronted him, he’d show them his badge and tell them to get lost, he was investigating a murder.
And he had been investigating the murder of Eliza Johnson when he first met Mandy Hollister and her husband. Later, on orders from his captain, he gave up the investigation when the black boy, John Taylor, was arrested. He was also warned to keep away from Mrs. Hollister. Apparently, her husband knew all about her afternoon delights and little “conquests,” as he called them. He didn’t mind them, Chief Dent said, as long as none of them were repeated. This was apparently the agreement the couple had.
So McCloud had had her—or been had by her—and was then told to stay away. Now Adams was with her, presumably for the first and last time. But Adams had no way of knowing it was the last time, and he had no way of knowing what price he was going to pay for even having been with her one time.
Ben McCloud knew the price, though, because he was the one who was going to mete it out.
TWENTY-FOUR
Upstairs, Clint Adams was mindlessly fucking another man’s wife.
The situation, as it had presented itself, was just so damned unexpected and exciting. He’d never expected to find a vital, sexy woman in the house, and certainly didn’t expect her to offer—demand, actually—to trade sex for information.
He had gotten on the bed with her and grabbed her ankles immediately. He spread her that way so he could look at her. On her back her breasts barely flattened at all, which was remarkable for a woman in her thirties.
“Do you like what you see?” she asked. “I like to be licked and sucked and touched down there. Do you do that?”
“Lady,” he said, “I do that and a whole lot more.”
Suddenly, his face was buried in her black pubic thatch, his tongue invading her, his fingers stroking her, and she wondered if she had finally found a man who would truly satisfy her. Because that was really the main reason she had sex with so many different men. She was looking for satisfaction, and no man—not her husband, not anyone— had ever been able to give her that—not totally. Momentary satisfaction, yes. Relief from boredom, yes. But not full and complete sexual satisfaction.
Already, with his tongue deep inside her snatch, she was feeling things from Clint Adams she hadn’t felt with any other man. He was using not only his tongue, but his lips and his fingers, to build a fire inside of her. She’d had the fire before, but never the quenching of the fire.
This was going to be the day.
Clint’s thoughts were not as momentous as Mandy’s. He wanted to taste her, smell her, and fuck her, in that order. That’s all that was in his head.
He continued to work on her cunt with his mouth until he felt the shudder going through her. Suddenly, she went even wilder, and he knew—instinctively, because he’d been with many women over the years—that this was her first orgasm. Her body shook, her pussy gushed, a scream caught in her throat. Her body went tense, stayed that way for several seconds, and then began to spasm again. All the while he kept licking her, sucking her, even slid a finger inside of her . . . and while she was still shaking, he mounted her and drove his rock-hard dick into her.
“Oh . . . Gohhhhhd . . . ,” she shouted, and then as he began to fuck her, she just started making these high-pitched sounds, over and over again. She grabbed at him, raked him with her nails, beat on him with her fists, and he continued to pound away at her, looking for his own release now. He slid his hands beneath her ass and pulled her to him, striving to get even deeper into her. She reached above her head for the bed rail and held it tightly, her knuckles turning white, as she spasmed again and again, and then suddenly he was there with her, exploding, everything suddenly being absorbed by a kind of white blindness, the kind that came when everything was just going completely out of focus . . .
“Okay,” she said, later, “that’s it.”
“What’s it?” He was just as breathless as she was. Well, almost . . .
“You can never leave.” To push her point home, she reached out and took hold of his penis. “Or, if you do, this has to stay here. And your mouth.”
He rolled over, cupped one of her breasts in his mouth, and kissed the nipple. She shuddered.
“See? No man’s ever done that to me before.”
“Kissed your breast?”
“Kissed it and given me the chills like that. Jesus, where did you learn the things you were doing—or how to do them?”
“I learned them from women, over the years,” he said. “Women are the best teachers.”
“My God,” she said, covering her face with her hands, “how does my husband get to his age and not know how to make me feel this way?”
“How about Mr. Knox, the neighbor?”
“Hell no,” she said. “He was horrible.”
Clint rolled over, propped himself up on one elbow, and faced her. She remained on her back, staring at the ceiling in complete wonderment.
“All right, Mandy,” he said. “Time to keep your part of the bargain.”
“I don’t want to.”
“What?”
She turned her head and looked at him. Her lips were puffy from how hard they’d been kissing. She looked so sexy he started to stir again.
“If I tell you what you want to know,” she said, “you’ll leave. I’ll never see you again. I’ll never feel this way again! I might have to kill myself.”
“You’re being dramatic,” he said.
“Of course I am,” she said. “This is dramatic. I’ve found the perfect man and I’m not gonna be able to keep him.”
“I’m not perfect—”
“In bed,” she said. “I mean in bed. Hell, no man’s perfect out of bed. You’re all so annoying. Still, you’re better than having to be around a bunch of women and talk, but never mind that. I’m talking about in bed.”
“Well,” he said, “I think you’re pretty perfect in bed, too, but if you don’t keep your part of the deal, you’re going to be extremely annoying out of bed.”
“If I tell you,” she said, reaching out for his hand, “will you come back? Sometime? One more time? Before you leave town?”
“Are you kidding?” he asked, squeezing her hand. “Look at you. Of course I’ll come back.”
She looked at his face, smiled, and said, “God help me, but I believe you. Goddamn. I never thought I’d believe another thing a man said to me, but I believe that.”
“Okay then, tell me.”
“Tell you what?” she asked. “What specifically do you want to know?”
“Did you see John Taylor kill Eliza Johnson?”
“No.”
“Did you see him in her house?�
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“Yes.”
“Standing over her?”
“Yes.”
“Did you think he had killed her?”
“I did, then.”
“You don’t anymore?”
“No.”
“Would you testify to that in court?”
“I would, but what good would it do?” she asked. “It’s just my opinion.”
“Okay then,” he said, “in your opinion, if he didn’t kill her, who did?”
“Her lover, of course.”
“What lover?”
“The one who paid for her house. You didn’t think a young girl like that could afford a house, did you?”
“I did think it was odd.”
“Well, there’s nothing odd about it,” she said. “She had an older lover, probably married, who paid for the house.”
“Have you ever seen this lover?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know there was one?”
“That’s silly,” she said. “She told me.”
“She told you she had a lover?”
“Well, yes, I’m the only person around here she had to talk to.”
“So she told you about her lover.”
“Yes.”
“Who he is?”
“No, she wouldn’t do that.”
“So what, exactly, did she tell you?”
“That he was older, rich, and married.”
“Anything else?”
“She told me he was very good in bed, but what did she have to compare it to?” Mandy asked. “And she blushed furiously when she said it. The girl had no experience with men, except for this rich man.”
“Maybe she found the perfect man in bed the first time she looked,” Clint offered.
“Only if she never has another one,” Mandy said. “Oh crap.” She realized that Eliza was certainly never going to have another man. “That was awful of me.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
She turned to look at him again and asked, “What else do you want to know?” Now she realized that the more questions he had, the longer he’d stay, and the longer he stayed, the more chance there was of them having sex again.
“You never saw a man going into or coming out of the house?” he asked.
“No,” she said, “he must have been very discreet. Also, I didn’t spend my days looking out my window at her house.”
“So you’re saying her lover killed her, but you have no proof.”
“No, I don’t—but you can bet on it, Clint.”
“What makes you say that?”
“John Taylor never would’ve killed Eliza.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He was in love with her.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“How do you know? Did he tell you? Did she tell you?”
“I asked him over one day to do some odd jobs,” she explained. “I did to him what I did to you today—well, that is, I tried. He wouldn’t have me. Do you know why?”
“Because he was in love with Eliza.”
“He said he didn’t want to stay in the house too long,” she explained. “She might get the wrong idea.”
“Did he ever tell Eliza how he felt?”
“A black man in love with a white woman—did he tell her? Of course he didn’t, Clint.”
“Maybe she felt the same way.”
“Believe me,” Mandy said, “she was in love with her lover.”
Clint turned onto his back and stared at the ceiling. He felt Mandy’s hand snake down over his belly and take hold of him again. Immediately, he began to rise to the occasion.
Oh well, he thought, turning to face her, why not?
TWENTY-FIVE
McCloud was getting impatient, so he decided to enlist some help.
“What do you want?” Knox asked when he saw the policeman at his door.
“You still wanna stay out of jail, Knox?” McCloud asked.
“I ain’t done nothin’—”
“That girl next door may be dead, but I still know you were harassin’ her,” McCloud said. “Maybe that black buck didn’t kill her, huh? Whataya think?”
Knox’s shoulders slumped.
“Whataya want?”
“A man is going to come out of the Hollister house soon,” McCloud said. Adams would have to come out, because the banker would be getting home soon.
“What man?”
“The one who was here askin’ questions before.”
“Him? He’s in there with . . . with Mandy?” Knox demanded.
“Yep, he’s in there, and he’s with her,” McCloud said. “When he comes out, I want you to teach him a lesson.”
“I fix that son of a bitch— Wait, he’s got a gun.”
“Don’t you have a gun?”
“I ain’t no gunman,” Knox said. “I’ll break his damn legs and make him wish he was never born, but that’s it.”
“That’s fine, Knox,” McCloud said. “You do that.”
“What about his gun?”
“He’s not gonna shoot an unarmed man. While he’s thinkin’ about it, take his gun away from him and make him eat it.”
“I’ll do better than that,” Knox said. “I’ll shove it up his ass.”
McCloud smiled.
“Now you’re gettin’ the idea.”
Clint turned Mandy over on her belly, kneaded her ass cheeks as hard as he could, then slapped them. She yelped, wiggled her butt at him, and said, “Do it to me there.”
He wanted to, but first he spread her cheeks so he could see her pink anus, leaned down, and wet it good with his tongue. She groaned as he licked her; then he got behind her on his knees, pressed the head of cock to the wet target, and slid in. He went slowly at first, but he didn’t need to. Before long she was imploring him to fuck her harder. He took hold of her hips and began to slam himself in and out of her ass. The sound of his belly slapping her ass cheeks filled the room, along with her moans and his grunts.
“Oooh, yeah,” she said, “that’s it . . . that’s it . . .”
He reached around in front of her to touch her there while he took her from behind, and suddenly she was a frenzy of movement. She shouted and whooped and shoved herself back against him, gripping him tight with her insides until he exploded again with a loud cry of triumph . . .
“I hate to say this,” she said, toying with his limp penis, “but my husband will be home soon. Oh my God, look at that. Ready again?”
“How could a man not be ready around you, Mandy?” he asked.
“Oh God, look at it just comin’ up again.” She leaned over and took him into her mouth. He continued to swell as she sucked him, held his testicles in her hand, and reached up between his legs to touch his anus, and before long he was shooting off into her mouth and she wasn’t spilling a drop . . .
“Now you have to leave!” she said, moments later. “Winston will be home any minute. You’ll have to go out the back. My God, we’ve been in bed all afternoon.”
“And what an afternoon,” he said, getting up and getting dressed. This wasn’t what he was supposed to be doing today, but he’d feel guilty about it later. At least he’d managed to get some information out of her.
He sat on the bed and pulled on his boots. She snaked herself around him from behind, pressing her breasts into his back and kissing his neck.
“You want me to leave, you’ve got to cut that out.”
She slapped him on the arm and said, “I don’t want you to leave, that’s just it. You sure you won’t stay and just put a bullet in my husband for me?”
“Sorry,” he said, “I draw the line at killing the husband.”
“Clint . . . you’re just amazing.”
“Mandy, you’re fantastic. Thanks for the information, too. Tell me, why did you tell that story about running from the house, yelling for the police?”
“That’s what I was expected to say,” she told him.
“Winston talked to someone, came home, and told me what to say.”
He stared at her.
“Your husband told you that?”
“Yes,” she said, “but in fairness to him, he’s not a brave man. Whoever told him to tell me scared him silly.”
“Do you have any idea who it was?” he asked.
“Not specifically,” she said, “but I’m fairly sure it was a policeman.”
He leaned on the bed and kissed her.
“You’re an angel.”
“No,” she said, “I’m not.” She reached for him, but he moved back out of her grasp.
“Yeah,” he said, on his way out the door, “I know you’re not.”
McCloud had told Knox to wait by the back door. Adams was going to have to come out that way so he wouldn’t accidentally run into the husband.
When Knox slept with Mandy, he had offered to kill her husband, that’s how in love with her he was after the first time—well, the only time. She said he was crazy and told him to get out. She told him not to come back again, to go back to sniffing around little Eliza Johnson. Eliza wouldn’t have anything to do with him, though. All he had left was to wait for Mandy to come to her senses. When she was ready to kill her husband, she’d come to him.
What he had told McCloud was right. He was no gunman, no killer, but he would kill for her.
For a woman like her, what man wouldn’t?
Clint made his way into the kitchen and to the back door. He was as quiet as he could be, just in case her husband was coming in the front door at the same time.
He had decided now that he had to get a look inside the Johnson house. There might be something there that would tell him who Eliza’s lover was. He was deep in thought as he went out the door, but his sixth sense, the instinct that had kept him alive all these years, kicked in. He turned and got his arm up in time, before Knox could strike him with a huge forearm. Clint blocked it, then danced away from the man.
Clint Adams, Detective Page 8
