by Faye, Amy
There was a brief look of bewilderment, and then she suddenly realized what he meant. "Oh, yeah. No problem."
"You got it," he said, and then he frowned.
"Is there a problem?"
"No problem," he lied. He didn't want to tell her how much it twisted him up to think about a woman living here with two kids in a neighborhood like this one. He knew there were probably a hundred kids just like these in this area. But seeing these two, and their mother, after driving through, made a shiver shoot down his spine. He forced himself to ignore it and waved.
"Thank you again."
"Don't mention it. You're going to be doing me a big favor."
She bit her lip as she looked at him, and then shrugged. The lip stayed between her teeth, though. "You bet."
7
Sarah twisted, wrapped up in her sheets. It was too hot for blankets, and while the A/C worked in the house, it cost money to run and Aunt Pat wasn't the type to spend money on that sort of thing if it wasn't going to be absolutely lethal.
So they had the air blowing through the room, and the girls fussed but they were mostly sleeping, and for the first time in months, Sarah was sleeping deep enough to dream.
The dream was like all her dreams, too long and too complicated. But there were parts of it that weren't complicated. Parts that were as simple and as memorable as a dream could get. Hands running across her skin. Lips pressing into the crook of her neck, awakening a little flame inside her.
The man's face wasn't clear, but it was the only thing about him that wasn't. He was big, tall, and strong, his arms encircling her. Dan's fingers pinched her nipples and pulled, and she let out a long, low breath, partly at the pain and partly at the pleasure. Milk started to come out, too; it embarrassed her, but he didn't seem to notice or mind.
Then he turned her around, making her look up at his big, broad, handsome face. Then that face dipped lower and claimed a breast between his lips, and sucked gently. Her breasts were too full, full to the point that they hurt, and it helped ease that pain a little bit. She let out a breath. Pain in, pain out.
His fingers explored her skin, finding places on her, impossibly sensitive. He moved from one breast to the other, and drank there, as well, but his hands seemed to find their groove. He stopped teasing and started moving. He parted the folds of her lips with one broad finger and ran the tip of his finger up and down, tantalizing. Teasing. Giving her just enough of what she wanted to know that it was his to give or take.
She eased her head back and let out a breathy moan; he seemed to take that as a sign of submission and finally gave her what she wanted. His fingers entered her swiftly, roughly, and immediately crooked and found the bundle of sensitive nerves at the front of her inner walls and roughly rubbed at it, his fingers wiggling and his arm pulling so that it alternated between 'rough' and 'too much.' She liked it.
She could feel something hard pressing against her leg. Sarah had always thought of herself as a good girl. She'd gone to a private religious high school, and unlike some of the girls, she hadn't gone through a rebellious phase where she needed to screw everything that moved. The idea of sex before marriage hadn't crossed her mind until she'd done it, but even still, she had no mysteries about the hardness between his legs.
She caught control of herself and moved her hand to wrap around his hardness; it was big, too big to get her hand all the way around. She tried anyway, pumping gently up and down even though it didn't need any help getting what looked like painfully stiff.
Her stomach fluttered at the thought that this thing was going to go inside her. She felt like it was going to split her in half; he was so big, and she was so small, that it seemed as if it were impossible to fit. She determined she was going to make it fit somewhere, though, and started rubbing him in earnest.
Dan's breath sped up and became ragged, almost enough to match her own needy moans. Sarah leaned over and opened her mouth and he got the message, moving until she could reach. It filled her mouth. Her jaw hurt within moments and she just wanted more of it, wanted to feel like she was feeling right now.
Her body started to clamp up all at once, then, as he explored her, pounded her most sensitive places. A loud moan came out of her, loud enough to wake her up. She was hot and sticky and her clothes clung to her, but worst of all was the way that her skin felt painfully sensitive to the touch. She knew what she wanted, and she knew, also, in a distinct way, that she wasn't going to get it. She wasn't going to let herself get it.
But she could, at the very least, stave off the urge for a little while. She leaned forward and propped her pillows up against the headboard, sat up and leaned her head back against the wall. The images she'd seen in her dreams immediately flooded back as soon as she allowed them to.
Sarah let her own fingers replace Dan's, and rubbed a rapid, tight circle around her clit while she imagined what was going to come next.
Her body started to tighten up again as she imagined him lining himself up between her hips. She'd done it a few times with Cole, but she'd never felt this kind of raw need, the anticipation that she felt just imagining Dan entering her.
He rubbed against her once more, with one hand, for a moment, as if he were still thinking. Still deciding what to do next. And then he entered her, and she'd never felt so full in her entire life. Sarah's fingers pressed into herself in time with the image in her mind of the man fucking her. Faster. Harder. Deeper. She knew what it felt like, but somehow with Dan, even in her mind, it felt different. More.
Her body started to tense up as an orgasm started to approach, and in her fantasy Dan pushed into her one last time, and then finished. The warmth that she felt spreading through her wasn't his seed, but it wasn't imagined, either. She let out a long sigh as her body started to relax. At least, she hoped it would relax. She hoped it would stay relaxed. She wasn't going to get many more chances to take care of herself tonight, and she still hoped to get a little more sleep before the girls woke up hungry.
8
The paperwork was half of the challenge, like any deal Dan had ever made. He had to protect himself from her, same as she seemed to think that she needed to protect herself from him. It was just common sense, really, but it still meant more work.
And then there was the second part of everything, which was her only stipulation. It was, at the very least, something he was good at: location, location, location.
There must have been a thousand churches in Detroit alone. Once you started to get outside the immediate area, the number doubled, at least. And every single one of them was going to say something about him, if there was something bad to be said.
There was a road in front of him. There would be places where he could step off the path. Maybe he didn't want to think about running for President in twenty years, after all. Maybe it stopped after he owned his own television station. But there was a path.
The difference was, if Dan chose to step off, decided that he was satisfied, then he was making a choice. It might be right, or it might be wrong, but it was still his choice to make. That was why he'd put the staging periods in there in the first place, to allow himself to decide whether or not he was happy with what he already had.
Being pushed off that road by a sloppy decision, because he picked a church at random and then it turned out that he'd picked out the one group of nut-jobs in the whole area, it would look intentional. Nobody could possibly have such bad luck, could they?
But he'd seen that kind of bad luck play out before. It wasn't uncommon; in fact, most people make so many decisions in a given year that the odds are actually better that they make a decision that looks worse than they meant it more often than they do.
So he poured over the list, checking off one-by-one. Ugly, he thought. Too plain. Too modern. Too historic, the cost would be astronomical. Too shabby.
The list was long, but his needs were stringent, which meant that he had better start with a long list, because ninety-nine out of a hundred would be dis
qualified. For someone else, it might have been simple. But for him, it wasn't, and that was fine.
He rapped his thumb against the table. An hour passed, his thumb gently rapping. And the list of churches that took up two sides of a page, in three columns, with no information other than a name, dwindled.
It dwindled until it was only twenty. Then it dwindled until it was only ten, and then he immediately threw out half of those on principle. The even-numbered half.
Five was a manageable number. It was a number he could have his people dig deep on. Ten was a less manageable number. It would mean that he'd have to pull twice as many people off their real day jobs and have them researching churches, all so that he could get just a single one that didn't reflect too poorly on him. The math just didn't add up.
He picked up a phone and dialed a number. A woman's voice answered, and he read off the names to her, along with whatever information he'd been able to find in the two hours he looked. No reason for duplication of effort, at least. He explained what he wanted from her.
No crazy political beliefs. No crazy preachers. Ideally, the name would be one that had come up in the news, but only for nothing type stories. Anything that had come up in a negative way, even if it was buried, might come back up. So those were out automatically.
And then he leaned back and he waited. A good deal of his job involved waiting. There were times to do something, and times to wait. For Dan, he preferred to wait. Doing something might lead to trouble. Waiting never caused any problems for anyone. There was always another opportunity waiting around the corner.
This one was special. There might have been a hundred other women on the planet like her. Maybe five hundred or a thousand. But they weren't right in front of him, and he hadn't gotten caught up in their lives.
There were a lot of women with problems. Hell, he knew because he employed some of them. There were a lot of women who needed money, and he knew that because almost the entirety of his staff had needed the money so bad that they'd kill for it, at one point or another.
There were a lot of women with kids. Attractive women with kids, sure. Attractive women, kids, needed the money, and had the alignment of events such that they'd go along with his scheme? The list was short, but it wasn't one person long.
Dan Bryant had built his business on doing things smart. By the book. The book told him that one woman was probably as good as any other. But for the first time in his life, he was doubting that.
He might not know the difference, personally. Any other woman he came across would have her own good traits. But Sarah Jones in particular had a story he liked, and a look that he liked, and best of all, worst of all, she followed instructions.
That was important. He resented the hell out of it, but he needed someone who could just make a God damned decision, and someone who would lean the way he told them to lean. Someone predictable, and reliable. Not some supermodel who might go flying off the handle any moment, or might get caught with a ton of coke going up her nose.
There was always the chance that he'd picked wrong. That Sarah Jones was crazy, or that she was unreliable. But as much as he had learned to think logically, there was no getting around noticing what his gut told him, and his gut was usually right. This time, his gut told him that she was good to go. For the first time in a long time, Dan ignored good common sense.
The phone rang again. It was the woman again. Dan smiled as she started going through the list, one at a time. Ten was too many. Five was a good number of choices to start with, but it was too many to put to a simple choice, either.
In his experience, if you give people too many choices, they get locked up. Five was too many, though not as bad as twenty or fifty or eight hundred and twenty, which was the list he'd started with.
Two or three. That was the ideal. Two or three. And as he crossed off number three and number nine, both of which had a rash of muggings in the early part of the new millennium, he looked at what he had left. On a list of ten, three remained. One, five, and seven. That was the right number of options. She hadn't cared what church, as long as it was a church and they did it right.
That was what she'd said, right? Well, he was happy with three. Pick one. He said it over again in his head. 'Pick one.' He liked that. It made life easier when he could do things that way. It made his life easier when he had someone else do the work he'd just done, but it was hard to convince himself that it wouldn't have been better if he'd just done the work himself.
So this time, he had. The preliminary work was his, and then the fine details came out later, with a half-dozen people collaborating in a room to find all the information they could about five buildings. It was their job, after all.
They just didn't usually do it for his wedding.
"You still on the line?"
"I'm still here," she said, though he didn't know why she was. She was responsible for so much, it seemed almost strange that she would stay while he triple-checked the page.
"Good, okay. Can you call Miss Jones for me? Her number should be in the system. And then, when that's done, you're free for the night."
"Right now?"
Dan rubbed his eyes. "Why not right now?"
Jane let out a long breath. He could almost see the expression on her face, a mixture of amusement and exasperation. "Do you know what time it is?"
"What time? No." He looked at the clock on the far wall. The hands made a capital 'L' shape, with the long arm canted a little past vertical. 3:04. "Oh. Yeah, it can wait, then."
Then he hung up the phone. He should be asleep by now. They all should have been. He pulled open the middle drawer of his desk and pulled out the laptop he kept inside it, set it on the leather writing pad, and opened it. He should have been asleep, no doubt about it. But it was time to get some work done.
9
The first thing that happened in the morning, if it could be called 'morning,' was the phone ringing. If it wasn't within four hours of a class, then it was time to sleep, as far as Sarah was concerned. Otherwise, she wasn't going to get any at all.
The girls had been feeding alternately, in a tag team effort to make sure that their mama didn't get too much sleep, for most of what normal folks would call 'morning.' She had fallen asleep around ten, thanks to the help of a drawn shades and a sleep mask, and three hours later, the call woke her up out of another extremely inappropriate dream.
Her skin was so sensitive that it hurt, but she reached for the phone and ignored the feeling of the sheet sliding across her skin.
"Yes, hello?"
"Sarah Jones?"
"What's up?" Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew it was impolite, but she was too tired. Hell, this all might have been part of her dream. It wouldn't be the strangest dream she'd ever had.
"I'm calling on behalf of Dan Bryant, he wanted me to schedule an appointment for this afternoon. Are you free?"
She pulled the phone away from her face. Twelve-thirty. Okay. Then she rubbed at her eyes, slipped her glasses on, and looked at the calendar across the room. It was big, so she didn't need to use her contacts, at least. But she couldn't be certain without a little help.
"Yeah, uh... any time before seven."
"Before seven, you said?"
"That's right."
The woman's voice on the other end of the line cut off for a second. "Okay, so how's four sound to you?"
"Four works, I guess. Where is this meeting going to be?"
"I've got a note here that you don't have transportation. We can provide that, if you'd like."
Sarah cursed under her breath. The woman was right. She'd let herself forget, some time in the space of trying to play mama and trying to get what few hours of sleep that she could. But apparently, she was the only one who had forgotten. Which was, by itself, super embarrassing.
"Yeah, yeah. You're right. I need a ride. You have the address, or..."
"Mr. Bryant put one in." She listed off the correct address to confirm. There was no hint
in her voice that she might have known where it was, and if she knew, then she didn't seem to have any opinion on the matter. It was a place on a map. The woman might well have been a phone service calling from India.
"That's right."
"We'll have a car there at three-fifteen. Have a nice day, Miss Jones."
"You too," Sarah confirmed. It was only after that she realized the woman had never given a name, which seemed odd. Then again, if she was an answering service, or something like that, then giving the name 'Priya' would have given it away. Better not to, in that case, she supposed.
Three-fifteen was a long way off, but there was a lot to do. The first was to jump into the shower. That was a start. The girls fussed and gurgled in their cribs as she dressed herself again. This time, at least, she was careful when she started packing her bags to get a blanket to cover herself with.
Then she started ticking off the list. Extra clothes in case the girls ruined their outfits. A few diapers, for more or less the same reason. Blanket, in case they got unusually hungry.
Then she fed the girls, who both decided that they were awake enough and hungry enough to eat without needing to scream about it, which was something new that they'd apparently picked up at some point.
She let out a long breath and leaned back. There was one thing she hadn't even considered, but with an appointment with Dan coming up, she was considering it now. How long an engagement was she supposed to expect? Were they going to live together before the marriage? How long?
None of it really mattered. People had made marriages work for a long time before she'd come along. They'd always been able to figure something out. This would be no different. She could make it work, whatever, as long as he was willing to put the same work in.
But there were so many questions. Questions about the specifics of the wedding, the engagement, the marriage. What were the girls going to do during a wedding, for example? Aunt Pat could hold them, maybe, but the truth was that right or wrong, Sarah hadn't ever really trusted her aunt with the kids. She'd never had any of her own, never shown any indication that she liked kids, and never shown any hint that she wanted to spend much time with the. Not that she couldn't, just that she wouldn't rather.
