by EC Sheedy
Q slipped out of his light Hugo Boss jacket, folded it, and placed it on the arm of the pure white sofa. “You take a rather overt approach,” he said, purposefully noncommittal.
“I see no reason not to. We can wait, if you prefer, but when I saw you I decided I didn’t want to.” She shrugged. “And we could waste time on the will-she-won’t-she game, but there’s no real point to that. Because the answer is I will—and so will you. What you’ve got there”—she looked boldly at his crotch—“will be in me sooner or later. I prefer sooner. And I never play games.”
“Obviously, you don’t fore play either.”
She unclasped her belt, slipped it through its loops, and tossed it on top of his jacket. “No. You touch me in the right place a couple of times, chances are I’ll come. And if you don’t, I’ll take care of it myself.” She pulled down the zipper on her jeans, exposed a Vee of blue silk, low on her taut belly. It matched the blue satin covering her breasts. Exposed to him frontally, from her undone shirt to her undone zipper, she put her hands on hips. “You can watch, or you can participate,” she said.
He didn’t move and wasn’t sure he wanted to, feeling, as he was, some new, unexpected responses to such an earthy and direct sexual come-on. His tendency was to analyze them, put them in proper perspective. When it came to sex, Q always took the lead, assumed control. He should hate this, should tell her how underwhelmed he was by her crassness. Yet, unbelievably, he was getting hard.
“Take off your clothes,” she instructed, her eyes again on his zipper area, some of the cool now replaced by heat. “Or I’ll do it for you.”
Carefully, slowly, he breathed deep. “Let me guess, behind your rib cage, beats the heart of a dominatrix.”
“And let me guess, behind your expensive zipper, beats the cock of man who wants exactly what I want.” She peeled her blouse off, dropped it on the floor, closed the few steps between them, and turned her back. “Unclasp me.” He obliged. Her shoulders were straight, her upper arms threaded with firm, clearly defined muscles. Weight-lifter muscles. A strong woman. A powerful woman. He itched to reach his hands around her, cup her breasts, test the weight and firmness of them, but he resisted. Folding the lacy bra, he tucked one cup inside the other and when she turned to face him, offered it to her.
She didn’t take it. “I’d heard you were a control freak,” she said, “but that”—she nodded at the folded bra—“takes some kind of prize.”
“May I ask how you heard I was a ‘control freak,’ as you put it?” He placed the bra on the coffee table. The curl of excitement low in his belly, knotting into suspicion.
“Our mutual friend Victor. He said he’d never seen you sweat. Not about a job, business, or a woman.” She tilted her head. “Especially a woman. He said the two of you shared pussy on more than one occasion, and that you never so much as grunted.”
He relaxed. Trust Victor to spread old gossip. “You don’t like foreplay; I don’t like noise.” Except from Giselle. God, he loved it when she screamed.
Naked to the waist, Mercy put her hands on her hips, her odd-colored eyes fixed on him intensely, her gaze speculative. “So . . . do you want to fuck, Mister Braid, or do you plan on being faithful to the girl back home?”
Q met her gaze. “What do you know about ‘the girl back home’—or even if there is one?”
“A man like you? Unless there’s a boy, there’s a girl.” Her gaze increased in intensity. “And I doubt it’s a boy.”
“You’d be right. But neither is there anyone else of note—which doesn’t mean I’m yours for the asking.” Briefly, his lie bothered him.
Mercy took two quick steps, her expression now bordering on savage. “You don’t get it, do you? I’m not asking.” In one fluid moment, she tore off his five-hundred dollar shirt. Buttons hit the marble floor with sharp little clacks. Then she worked his belt. Slipping the fine leather through the loops of his slacks, she tossed it over her shoulder as if it were a bone from a Viking table. He glanced at his torn shirt, discovered he didn’t care.
He let her proceed unhindered—or his erection did; it was thick with need, greedy for what was to come. Either way, she was right; what she was offering, he wanted. So, he’d have it. Still he didn’t move, content to let her take charge, relaxed under the deft movements of her hands.
He looked down at her agile fingers as they unbuttoned his slacks, and breathed contentedly, savoring the heat and power infusing his penis—those little thrusts and surges so insistent in their demands.
The ambient light in the suite played shadow tricks on Mercy’s strong, corded arms, and accented her physical strength, a feminine power Q had never encountered before. She was new. This experience was new. He wanted her to have him. What was the harm? When this was over, she’d be dead, along with everyone else connected with the forthcoming kills—and his past. He’d go back to his Giselle and life as it should be.
He’d consider this a goodbye party—he just wouldn’t tell Mercy. No need to spoil her fun.
She undid his zipper, slid her hand into his pants, and grasped his fully engorged organ. “So,” she said, squeezing him firmly and meeting his eyes, “do we fuck or fold laundry?”
“We fuck,” he answered, the word strange on his tongue, but instantly understood by the erection encircled in Mercy’s strong hand. It jerked, pulsed to even greater girth. Perhaps there was something to this gutter talk during sex after all.
Leering at him, she released him. “My way?” she asked, cocking her head.
Q worked to ignore his hard, throbbing penis, jutting from his slacks; abandoned by her hand, the cool air of the air-conditioned hotel suite now heralded its imminent collapse. “Your way.” His voice was uncharacteristically hoarse, his excitement level dangerously high, his body drum-tight with anticipation. He needed this raw sex—the coming kills. This was why he’d come here—to feel old feelings, to gasp and grasp—to feel potent again.
Her smile, arrogant and self-satisfied, held the warmth of a specter. “You’re a man, after all, aren’t you, Braid? Just like I told Charity.” He didn’t miss that she’d dropped the mister, but couldn’t bring himself to care when she went back to stroking his penis as if it were a prized pet, her sole possession. “The woman actually thought you wouldn’t like my style.”
“What do you mean—”
She seized his upper arms and forced him down on the sofa.
“Make yourself comfortable,” she ordered. “Because if I do this right—and I usually do—it’ll take some time.” She fell on him and worked her way down, lapping his chest, licking his nipples, his stomach, lower—
Dear God, what was she doing?
Pulling, tugging, sucking . . .
If he’d had a question about her remark about Charity, it was lost in her sexual attack—and his inability to think clearly in the midst of it.
He bucked, reared like a rutting stag, gave himself to her talented, voracious mouth—oral sex the likes of which he’d never experienced before. She pulled him deep, deeper . . .
Panting, thrusting, he threw his head back, the cords in his neck popping like cables snapped from under the water. His hands, tangled in her thick tumble of hair, fisted involuntarily. His mouth slackened, but still he held back the roar poised on his tongue. Every sense he had lay strangled in the depths of her relentless mouth.
Her teeth grazed him, threatened the soft tissues they scraped, only to heighten his pleasure. A harsh hissing sound slid over his lips.
Sliding her hands under his buttocks, Mercy lifted his hips, brought him closer to her insatiable mouth—and Quinlan allowed her to take him, all of him, in a way he’d never been taken before.
Chapter 24
Joe, tense as hell, couldn’t sleep. For Cornie’s sake, April had taken the room across the hall from him, saying something about how she didn’t need Cornie knowing more of their business than she had to.
If Joe was tense, April made him look Zen by comparison.
She left messages wherever she could, but at the point they’d all headed up for bed, Black still hadn’t called. Joe hated that he couldn’t do anything about her stress, do anything to make her feel better. He’d even toyed with the idea of telling her about the possible line on her brother, thinking it might cheer her up—but as Julius had confirmed during their earlier meeting, the information on Gus Hanlon was still unconfirmed. So that idea wouldn’t fly.
Knowing it was a guy thing to figure hot sex would be the perfect cure-all, he was left with accepting—manfully, he thought, considering he wanted her with an ache bordering on terminal—her decision to head for her own room. She’d looked exhausted, more tired and fretful than he’d seen her since this . . . quest, for want of a better word, had begun.
His mother was putting her through hell. It was April’s call to her that started her downhill mood in the first place. Whatever they’d talked about, she hadn’t shared it with him. She expected him to ask, maybe, but he hadn’t. He didn’t want to talk about Phyllis. Nor did he want to tell April that the closer he got to meeting her, the more antagonistic he became; or that his gut got so tight it felt as if it were wrapped in barbed wire. For a man who’d written off his mother years ago, having her emerge as a priority was like being tossed into a sealed room with an open crate of snakes.
Ensnarled. ..
Remembering Riggs and his horoscope, he smiled. If Donny Riggs got wind of Joe’s serpentine thoughts, he’d never let him live it down, be yelling fortunes at him all the way down the block.
But neither April nor Cornie would like the snake analogy. He didn’t much like it himself, but it was what it was. They were crazy about their mother; Joe was . . . not.
So he and April had ended up walking to her door like a pair of teenagers on a first stilted date, holding hands, him full of wishful lusting, her mind God knew where. Hell, even their kiss was adolescent, all need and confusion, as if a parent lurked beyond the door. When it ended, she’d put her hand on the doorknob, looked up at him, and said, “Later, okay?” Then blew him a kiss and went to her own room.
He was counting on that “later” of hers, had been counting on it for two endless hours. Mister Joe Cool hadn’t sweated over a woman like this for as long as he could remember.
Own up, Worth. You’ve never sweated like this. Never.
Tipping back the last of his beer, he ambled out to the balcony overlooking the pool and looked down from his second-floor vantage point.
Ringed in low-voltage garden lights and softly lit from below, the water in the pool shimmered in the small waves made by its lone swimmer.
April.
Joe’s stomach took a hit and he went totally still.
She was swimming easily, lazily, from one end of the pool to the other. It wasn’t exercise, it was mindless communion with the water. He watched her do a final lap, pull herself out of the water, and sit on the tiled edge of the pool. Easy flexible strength, he thought, all her movements fluid, graceful, and unhurried. Pulling her long hair to one side, she wrung it like a towel and flipped it back, letting its thick wet coils settle against her back. The lights from the pool danced over her pale skin, shifting and shining, making her features wavy and indistinct. The swimsuit she’d selected, from Julius’s storehouse of them, was a black two-piece— and the body wearing it was as perfect as a body could be: Endless legs, toes she laughingly said were too long, feet she said were too big, the silver-dollar-sized birthmark on the inside of her left thigh that she’d described as her personal map of Ireland.
April lived in her skin with a grace that beguiled him, always holding her shoulders straight and using her tall, strong body with unapologetic confidence. It was a body he knew and wanted to know again—and again. Like he wanted to hear her laugh, give him a hard time, and look at him with that take-no-prisoners look she was so damn good at. April was all woman. All his woman . . .
She took his breath away. He shook his head. Sap. Had to be if he was thinking words like goddamn beguiled.
Sap or no, he didn’t take his eyes off her. His heart pounded, his muscles, nerves, and skin vibrated from wanting her. This is nuts. He rested both hands on the railing, breathed deep, held fast, and rolled his head. He was full of her and empty of her—and it made him animal-crazy.
In that instant, seeing her lit by wavy pool lights and midnight shade, he was absolutely certain of one thing: He wanted her now—and he’d want her on every tomorrow to come.
Was it love? Shit, he had no idea. He didn’t know love, didn’t know what to expect from it. All he knew was there was an elephant on his chest, and it didn’t seem to be leaving anytime soon.
He was still looking down, sorting through whatever it was he was feeling, when she looked up and saw him.
She smiled immediately—did that gimme thing with her hand like she did when she wanted his credit card—and cocked her head. As invitations went, it would do.
When he got there, she was sitting in the same place at the edge of the pool, but she’d put a towel under her butt and left enough of it beside her for him to sit on.
Joe, wearing a sleeveless Tee and shorts, took his place beside her and put his feet in the cool water. Cool as it was, he knew Julius had turned on the heat for his guests, because while he swam in it winter to summer, he never heated it.
Leaning back on her hands, April smiled at him. “I was coming to you,” she said. “I just wanted to ease up first.”
“And I was waiting for you.”
Looking pleased at that, she nodded and looked away. Despite her swim, he saw her tension still lingered.
“It’s going to be all right, you know,” he said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
She turned to look at him again. “I know,” she said, sounding more certain than she looked. “And it was good to hear Phylly’s voice tonight, confirm that she was okay. Now if I can just get Tomm—”
He pushed her into the pool and followed—in time to be there when she came up sputtering. “What was that?” he asked, feigning innocence and holding her by the waist. “I didn’t quite get it.”
She sputtered some more, then grinned at him. “That was mean.”
“That was a distraction. If I can’t get you into my bed, dunking you in the pool was my next best shot.”
She put her hands on his shoulders while they both treaded water. “I worry too much, don’t I?”
About his wild and selfish mother? Absolutely. But he wasn’t going to say that. “Yeah,” he said, his hands squeezing her waist. “So how about another distraction. Three laps, length of the pool, and the winner gets to be on top?”
“On top of what?” she asked, not even trying to look innocent.
“Whatever—and whoever—strikes their fancy.”
“I think that’s a win-win scenario.”
“That’s the idea.”
She tightened her grip on his shoulders, looked perplexed. “You really hate to talk about things, don’t you?”
“I hate to worry about things that I can’t do anything about—until they’re in my face.”
“Like tomorrow.”
He nodded.
She paused before answering then, as though making up her mind, she said, “You’re right. About that and the distraction.” Her beautiful face turned impish. “Make it two laps, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”
“Fair enough.”
“And one other thing.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’d very much like to win.” She gave him a shot of pure sex from her green eyes. “I could use a good ride.”
Already semi hard, Joe steeled up, and grinned. “You want a head start, say twenty minutes.”
She laughed
and backstroked away from him. “Nope, just stay on my ass, big boy. And I’ll make it worth your while.” He was happy to oblige.
It didn’t take twenty minutes before they were in Joe’s room, dripping water all over Julius’s expensive carpets, and heading for the shower.
Joe pulled his wet Tee over his head, and stepped out of his shorts. He tossed both items in the bathtub and turned on the shower, so they could rinse off the chlorine.
April wasn’t in such a hurry. She stood and watched him from the doorway, her skin glistening, still wearing a wet swimsuit that looked glued to her body. She looked like some kind of misplaced sea goddess. She was studying him.
Slowly, and with keen interest, she scanned every inch of him—every fuckin’ inch. Or inches wanting to fuck, if you cared to get your English right. He was vaguely embarrassed. Damned if guys weren’t at a real disadvantage when it came to the sex game. What they wanted always made a big show of itself, right out there for the woman to see; nothing mysterious about it. For a second, he wondered if there’d been an available fig leaf would he have strapped it on—until he saw she was enjoying herself.
“I could spend a lot of time looking at you, Joe Worth,” she said, running her tongue over her lower lip. “I keep thinking, if I were to design a costume for you, what would it be?” She tilted her head, again looked him up and down. “Maybe a highlander outfit. A kilt would be good . . . And there’s always that no underwear thing.” She took a step toward him. “Or maybe a Roman senator. A soft white robe—again no underwear. Or a biker—yes, one of those dangerous-looking types who wear tight jeans and—”
“No underwear.” The bathroom was steaming up from the running shower. Joe was steaming up period. But the lady wanted to play, so he’d play. For a couple of nanoseconds.
She laughed softly. “I think we’re on the same page.”
