by Ella Brooke
She drew in a shuddering breath. “But—“
“No buts. You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life, bar none.”
I kissed her belly for long moments while she moaned softly beneath me. At last I hooked my thumbs in the waistband of her panties and drew them down slowly, very slowly, over her thighs.
And then she was naked beneath me, utterly exposed, and I almost came just at the sight of her. I hadn’t been lying to her—she was in fact the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. A work of art, worthy of modeling for those ancient Romans as Venus, except that no marble could have adequately captured her warm, soft beauty.
I almost rolled my eyes at myself, because it wasn’t like me to indulge in poetic thoughts about my sexual partners.
But then again, Char wasn’t merely a sexual partner. She was so much more than that.
To me, she was everything.
I lowered my head and kissed her belly for a few more moments, then moved lower. She had been relaxed, but her thighs immediately slammed together.
“Hunter.” Her voice was scandalized, and I suppressed a smile.
“I won’t do anything you don’t like,” I said gently. “But I think you’ll like this.”
“But I—you can’t—“
Her skin was as pink as the prize Queen Elizabeth roses that flourished in Hilltop’s garden in the summer, and when she blushed, she blushed everywhere. She was such a charming blend of enthusiasm and shyness that I couldn’t hold back my smile.
“Don’t laugh at me!”
“I’m not. I’m not, I swear.” I placed a hand on her thigh, loving the soft, silky feel of her skin beneath my palm. I spoke more gently than before. “I just want to make you feel good, Char. That’s all.”
She looked at me a long moment, holding my gaze. At last she nodded. “All right.”
I let out an explosive breath I hadn’t know I was holding and lowered my head to her.
At first I just kissed her smoothly shaved mound, and she moved restlessly under me, stirring like she couldn’t keep still. At last I brushed a light kiss over her most sensitive flesh, and she gave a sharp cry.
Encouraged by the knowledge that she did in fact like it, I parted her with my thumbs and very carefully stroked my tongue over her clit.
The noise she made was indescribable. I did it again and again, and her hands dug into my hair so hard it almost hurt, like she was on a roller coaster holding on for dear life.
She was already wet and soft and ready for me, and beneath the fragrance of vanilla, she smelled hot and spicy. I was pretty sure I could get high off that smell. I explored her, licking her everywhere with long, slow strokes of my tongue, but always coming back to her swollen clit. Before long she was gasping, trembling, and I knew she was about to come.
I lifted myself to my hands and knees, ready to make love to her, but she caught at my arms.
“No,” she whispered. “Not like this.”
A terrible sensation of betrayal ripped through my chest. Of course I would never force myself on a woman, but the idea that she’d just been playing around with me, that she didn’t want the ultimate intimacy from me—it hurt. All at once I remembered that I was a felon, that no decent woman could truly want me, that I wasn’t worthy of her…
She must have seen my expression because she blinked at me, puzzled, then chuckled softly.
“Of course I want you, idiot,” she told me, reaching up and patting my cheek. “I just think you should take your clothes off too.”
Oh. That I could do. The ache in my chest receded, and I sat up and rapidly stripped. I dug out the condom I’d stashed in my jeans pocket earlier, then tossed my jeans to the floor. I held up the wrapped condom, showing it to her.
“This time I remembered.”
She smiled in acknowledgement, but her expression grew more intent, more focused as I rolled the rubber on. Her gaze seemed drawn irresistibly to my cock, and her eyes grew dark as the pupils dilated, drowning the blue in a flood of black.
She didn’t seem frightened, just aroused, so I knelt between her legs. I took one thigh in either hand and gently parted them, making sure she’d be open and ready for me.
Slowly I bent over her, letting my cock press against her hot, wet pussy.
She felt incredible, and I guess I felt good to her too because we both moaned. I forced myself to take it slow, slipping into her an inch at a time. Soon I was halfway inside, her hands on my hips, her fingers digging into my ass, her voice exhorting me to hurry up: Please, Hunter, please, I can’t wait, I need you now…
At last I was all the way inside her. She felt so good that my cock wouldn’t stop throbbing. I knew I couldn’t last long, but I struggled to hold myself back, moving in her slowly, deliberately.
She wasn’t having any of that. Her long legs wrapped around me, her heels resting on the small of my back, and she rocked beneath me, trying to force me to move faster.
I was already pretty far gone, and her eager movements pushed my control over the edge. A moment later I found myself pounding into her hard and fast. She dug her nails into my back, begging wordlessly for more, and I gave it to her, fucking her almost brutally, until we were both crying out with every thrust.
She called my name as she came, shuddering all over, and barely a second later I felt my own climax sweep over me, a hot wave of ecstasy so intense I wasn’t sure I’d survive it.
I moaned her name too then caught her mouth in a long, sweet kiss.
Chapter Eleven
Charlotte
It didn’t make any sense.
Three days later, I wiped the crumbs and egg particles off a table in the diner, frowning in thought. I’d been turning over the question of Hunter’s supposed embezzlement in my mind since the night he’d made love to me, and I still wasn’t any closer to a solution than when I’d started.
All I was certain of was that it didn’t make any sense.
Oh, the story Hunter had told me wasn’t hard to believe, on the surface at least. He’d been well-known as a bad boy in town, and I didn’t doubt he’d been guilty of some bad behavior as far away as Richmond and Washington. Besides, the Kensingtons were perpetually in the news, and I was sure a young man as handsome and charismatic as Hunter had been a target of the paparazzi for most of his life. His peccadilloes were doubtless well-known, and so it made sense that his father had asked him to take the fall for his brother. No one would have been inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
And it wasn’t hard to believe that Au could have set his brother up, either. Since Hunter had pleaded no contest, there hadn’t been a need for a jury trial, but the guilty party still would have needed to cover their tracks enough that the police wouldn’t get suspicious. If Au was as intelligent as everyone said, he wouldn’t have had trouble accomplishing that.
And yet—I replayed the other night in my mind, remembering how Au had looked at his brother. Yes, he’d been snarky, but I was still certain I had seen respect and the desire for approval in his brown eyes when he’d looked at Hunter. Sending a family member to prison for years seemed like a shockingly vicious and cold-hearted maneuver. Somehow I just didn’t believe Au was capable of it.
I was tempted to pursue the straightforward, sensible course and simply go to Au and ask about it. But I could understand why Hunter had asked me to keep it to myself. The more people who knew about Hunter’s innocence, the more likely the secret would be unearthed by a reporter. And besides, if Au was in fact guilty and thought Hunter was about to betray him and possibly send him to jail—
Well, I imagined that the Kensington money could probably conceal murder too.
If Au was in fact the embezzler, I couldn’t risk putting Hunter into his brother’s crosshairs. No, I needed to work this out on my own somehow.
But how?
You wanted to be a journalist, I told myself, beginning to sweep the diner’s tile floor. Now’s your chance to dig up the dirt on the Kensi
ngtons and find out the truth.
An hour later, I drove home. I’d opened the restaurant and only worked a rare short day, so it wasn’t even lunchtime yet, and Diana was still at daycare. I retreated downstairs to the basement, pulled up Google, and did a search for Hunter Kensington.
There were thousands upon thousands of hits, and a good many of them revolved around the embezzlement charges. There had been no trial and scarcely any drama involving the case, yet the notoriety of the Kensingtons and Hunter’s good looks had attracted national attention.
I’d followed the story avidly when it had happened, and the articles gave me little new information. Hunter Kensington, at the age of twenty-seven, had been charged with embezzlement from the family’s charity, the Kensington Foundation, of which he had been a member of the advisory board. Through manipulation of computer records, he’d made off with over three hundred thousand dollars—an amount so large that it was classified as a felony and could have sent him to jail for as much as twenty years.
Those were the supposed facts of the case. Some articles engaged in speculation, pointing out that he lived a lavish lifestyle, as did all the Kensingtons, and had no independent income. The theory was that the money he received from the family trust was insufficient to cover his excessive expenses. Others hypothesized that perhaps his well-known battles with his father had driven him to embarrass the old man and create a PR disaster for Kensington Media by stealing money from the family foundation.
In a way, it all sounded very plausible, and a faint sense of doubt started to stir in my brain. Suppose Hunter was lying? Suppose the embezzler hadn’t been Au at all, and Hunter was just trying to worm his way into my good graces so he could gain access to his daughter? What if Hunter was, after all, a criminal?
I came across a photo of a younger Hunter and looked at him long and hard, remembering the night we’d screwed in that alley back when he had still been young and wild and reckless. Then I thought of the other night, the way he’d touched me so tenderly, the way he’d made sure that I found my pleasure too, the way he’d kissed me at the end. He’d brought me to a peak of ecstasy I’d never experienced before, and yet the part of our lovemaking I’d loved the most was the way he’d held me afterward, hanging onto me like he’d never let me go.
I don’t believe you did this, I thought. I just don’t believe it.
The picture with the article showed Hunter at the opera in New York. He was with his family—I spotted Au in the crowd behind him, and an older, stately gentleman I recognized as Trevor Kensington. On his arm was a woman who looked faintly familiar.
I expanded the photo on my screen and studied her intently. She was an older woman whose neckline was cut too daringly low for her age. Her nails were too long and too red, her makeup too brash, for a woman over forty. A small fortune in diamonds rested on her amply displayed breasts, and even more gems dangled from her ears. Her hair was piled high on her head, and at last I recalled where I’d seen her, in a photo in the library as I’d looked through Hunter’s family pictures.
A rich widow who moved in the local social circles. What was her name again? Rose, I remembered. Rose Ambrose.
I clicked on more links, hoping to find more photos, and there were plenty of them. The Kensingtons had been photographed together frequently, but in virtually every picture, they all looked sour, as if they sincerely wished to be spending the evening with someone else. And I saw Rose hanging off Trevor’s arm in photo after photo after photo.
I think she had the optimistic belief that eventually Dad would make an honest woman out of her. He didn’t, of course. And eventually he started cheating on her, the same way he’d cheated on my mother, Hunter had said.
Rose had certainly been clinging tightly to Trevor in virtually every photo. She looked like she’d imagined he was hers already. Suppose, I thought slowly, she’d been trying to talk the elder Kensington into marriage, either because she loved him or she wanted his fortune. Or both. And then she’d walked in on him having sex with a younger woman. What would she do?
What would any woman do?
She’d get revenge, that’s what she’d do.
But no, that didn’t make a lick of sense. How could she possibly have had the opportunity to get her lacquered red claws on Kensington Foundation funds? Sure, she’d obviously spent much of her time with Trevor, but she likely hadn’t had access to his laptop.
Means, motive, and opportunity. Those three things, I remembered from a journalism class in college, had to be established before someone was judged guilty of a crime. Rose avenging herself on Trevor Kensington for his tomcatting ways might be a very believable motive, but how about means and opportunity? Hunting for more information, I ran a Google search on her name.
“SOCIALITE ROSE AMBROSE ACCEPTS JOB AT KENSINGTON MEDIA,” read a headline from, of all things, the Pinecone Gazette.
It was dated five years ago, and I read it through carefully. The article was worded in a calculatedly flattering way, but reading between the lines, it appeared that Rose had fallen on hard times, even to the extent of losing her family mansion. Trevor Kensington had taken pity on her and given her a middle management job at Kensington Media.
And thus, access to the company’s computer system.
That’s opportunity, I thought, and motive too. Maybe she’d wanted to avenge herself on Trevor, but maybe she’d just needed money. But what about means? Did Rose Ambrose have the knowledge and ability to embezzle those sorts of funds?
I searched some more, and after a good deal of hunting, I found that she’d earned a degree in accounting information systems from Virginia Tech back in the eighties.
Rose Ambrose knew computers.
Yes, I thought, leaning back in my chair with a feeling of satisfaction. I’d bet my new car battery that it was Rose.
***
Hunter
I hadn’t seen Char in three days, and I wanted to see her so badly my chest ached.
Our night together had been spectacular. But it had only rekindled my desire to prove to her that I wasn’t a criminal or a slacker, but a man who could be a valuable, functioning member of society. I’d gone to Au the moment he’d come back from his business trip and reminded him that I needed a job. He’d sighed, as if he really didn’t have time to deal with me, and coolly informed me that the Pinecone Gazette could use a new manager in its administrative department.
The Pinecone Gazette was an extremely minor holding, so far as Kensington Media was concerned, but it was one that we were all unwilling to give up on since it had been the family’s very first step into the media business decades ago. Unlike the main part of Kensington Media, which was headquartered in a modern glass skyscraper in Washington, DC, the Gazette still operated out of Pinecone in its original headquarters, several shabby one-story buildings in a still shabbier office park.
My father’s former office in the Kensington Media building, now Au’s office, was enormous, with deep, soft carpeting, a huge mahogany desk, and two walls of windows overlooking DC. My office had a peeling linoleum floor, the sort of particleboard desk usually acquired at OfficeMax, and a single, small window that overlooked the parking lot. Also, it was so small that I suspected it had once been used as a broom closet.
Nevertheless, it was an actual office with an actual door, and it represented my first real step into the business world. In short, it was a job, and right now that was enough for me. I was grateful for the chance to be part of the family business, even if only in a very small way.
My first two days on the job had been busy, and I hadn’t had time to see Char, although we’d texted back and forth frequently. I’d called her the first night and told her about the new position, and she’d told me how proud she was of me.
But getting a job through nepotism wasn’t a lot to be proud of really. I wanted to be truly proud of my work, and that meant actually making a mark on the Gazette. To that end, I’d spent two days studying the articles we produced and consideri
ng how we could become more relevant in the modern era and how we could expand past one small town into a regional paper. Digging further, I was shocked to discover the Gazette didn’t even have a website. Getting one up and running, I decided, had to be my first priority.
I was looking over some website mockups that the IT department had sent me when the door to my office burst open and Char came racing in.
“I know who did it!”
I blinked at her.
Clad in jeans and a gray hoodie, she was breathing heavily, as if she’d run the whole way here. Probably she had, as it wasn’t far from her house. She leaned over, put her hands on my desk, and sucked in several long breaths.
“I know who the embezzler is,” she wheezed at last.
I leaned back in my chair and studied her for a long moment. “Close the door and lock it.”
I didn’t have an assistant, so the odds of us being overheard were small, but after the incident in the park, I wasn’t taking any chances. She did as I instructed then turned back to me.
“It was Rose,” she burst out.
I frowned. “Cruella?”
“Your father gave her a job at Kensington Media, you know. But what you might not know is that he gave her the job because she was on the verge of bankruptcy.”
“Yes, but—“
“My theory is that she didn’t cover her tracks too well, and when people started catching on, she made it appear that Au was to blame instead.”
“And then my father decided I should be arrested in Au’s stead?” The thought made my heart clench painfully. She must have seen my hurt, because she reached out and ran a comforting hand through my hair.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “We may never know what your father’s reasoning was since he isn’t around to ask. But Rose is still alive and kicking—and working for a charity, as it happens. The Children’s Lymphoma Foundation. Want to bet they’re missing some funds?”
