by Cara McKenna
He let the headboard go, bracing on his forearms. Pushing the damp hair from her forehead, he studied her brown eyes, half-hidden by dozy lids. “That what you needed?”
She nodded, smiling. “You have no idea how bad.”
“Trust me, I do.” He’d gotten her off scarcely twelve hours ago, but Duncan nearly never masturbated, and that denial coupled with this blazing attraction had him strung taut as a crossbow. His cock was ticking inside her, that pulse feeling like rage, he was so frustrated.
She urged him to move, coaxing his hips with damp palms. The second that friction resumed, he was close. So close. But he could fuck this way for an hour and not get there. He was beyond the motions—he needed more. Needed the only thing that had ever let him get there . . .
She stroked his hair, kissed his neck. “You gonna come for me this time, Duncan?”
He could only moan, her words reducing him to a graceless, frantic mess. Yes, he was going to come. Provided he could give the one order that would allow it.
He swallowed, and the dogging need to come drove to him articulate the desires that pride always precluded, outside the abandon of sex. “Hold me,” he murmured.
After a pause, the hands admiring his arms and hips circled him, one palm on his back, the other cupping his neck. The sensation washed over him like a wave—a thrilling, terrifying force he could only bow before.
“Say my name.”
He’d whispered it, and she replied in kind. “Duncan.”
He moaned, the sound joining the weight of her arms and the heat of her body, rousing every last inch of him, so many more places than just his pounding cock. In his mind, in his blood.
She said it again, and again he flushed. His hips lost their grace and he felt the pressure building, the control cracking. Felt fire gathering into a searing ball in his belly.
“Duncan.”
She said it as though she wanted him here, this way, doing precisely these things with her . . . She said it as though she wanted him, period. And though the knowledge shamed him, made him feel pathetic and needy and so fucking predictable, this was what got him off. Feeling wanted. And welcome. Valued.
You’re such a joke. But he couldn’t care, not now. Joke or not, these sensations made him come like a goddamn force of nature. Lamest fucking fetish ever, but effective.
He moaned, the pleasure sharpening, deepening. She stroked his hair and spoke his name, the sound affecting him as truly as caressing hands. His body was helpless now, taking orders from his cock. The surrender, for once, was welcome.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Come on, baby.”
Baby. Fuck, even that name—all wrong. Yet here he was, panting into her hair from it. Her palms slid to his ass, urging his racing thrusts. “Come on, Duncan.”
It hit him like a tornado, sucking the air from his lungs, stealing gravity and time and leaving the earth miles below them. It suspended him in a rush of blinding, quenching pleasure, reality reduced to the heat of her, the smell of her. The inevitability of her. That all-wrong rightness. He felt his body falling in the wake of the sensation, and her arms seemed to materialize around his shoulders, her lips against his jaw.
He sat back on his heels, reeling. He took her in as he stripped the condom, and she didn’t look as he’d suspected she would in this moment. A touch smug, yes, but flushed and sleepy as well. Softer than he’d have guessed. Placid. Beautiful.
Duncan ditched the rubber and lay down beside her, welcoming the dry desert air to cool his sweat. Their wrists touched, and Raina spread her toes along the top of his foot playfully, bobbing it up and down. Nothing demanded to be said. Nothing demanded to be done aside from this wallowing. The panic would come in time, along with the questions.
Will this happen again? Should it? Perhaps it would be best to leave it as it was, so much better than expected, and avoid risking . . . what? The realization that this time had been a fluke, a trick of the anticipation, and that no encore could ever match it, perhaps.
But no, even Duncan wasn’t that deluded.
Risk attachment. That sensation Duncan both feared and craved above all others, that force Raina resented. They could fall madly in love this very hour, yet it wouldn’t change the fact that their lives would never converge along the same track—not for keeps. He hated her world as surely as she’d hate his. She couldn’t keep him here in this dirty patch of endangered America, and no sooner could he host her like a pampered cat in clean, urban luxury. Sunnyside could give him his job back and the casino could keep him tethered to Fortuity for another two years, but two years was nothing at his age. Time accelerated after thirty-five. Two years was a breath. End it now, end it later—it all boiled down to good-bye, farewell, to a parting full of angst or sadness or apathy or relief. A parting, unavoidably. As unavoidable as this collision.
Through a yawn, she said, “That was fucking perfection.”
He took her hand, gave it a squeeze. Perfection. The thing he strived for at the expense of his own mental health. Perfection, with this all-wrong woman, in this all-wrong place, at this all-wrong moment of his unraveling life.
And with absolute certainty, he said, “Yes, it was.”
Chapter 14
If Duncan had expected to find lasting peace in the wake of that sex, he’d been sorely mistaken.
For a time, relief had suffused him, effective as a sedative. He’d fallen asleep beside Raina even, but perhaps twenty minutes later, his eyes had popped open, and in a breath the worries were back, swarming his mind like ants and leaving him itchy as the afternoon arrived. Raina left to run errands, and practically the second he heard her truck drive away, he was on his knees in her bathroom, chasing the calm.
For two hours Duncan scoured, scrubbed, polished, rinsed, until every last square inch of porcelain and glass gleamed bright enough to blind.
With the impulse surrendered to, Duncan felt calmer by a degree. He sat on the couch and tried to entice Astrid to visit, but she could always smell the panic on him—she never wanted a thing to do with him in the moments that preceded a cleaning bout or an anxiety attack.
“Fair-weather friend,” he said to her retreating tail.
Christ, he needed a job. A purpose.
He wandered around the apartment. Puttered. Fretted. He went downstairs and rummaged in Raina’s supply closet until he found a can of spray paint, and did a laughably inadequate job of covering over the bright orange letters on the Merc’s doors. The paint looked pathetic, matte near-black against glossy jet lacquer, but with each coat, the message began to fade. And as it did, a different word rose in Duncan’s mind.
Bones.
Like Vince Grossier before him, Duncan was growing fixated on those five letters. They followed him back upstairs, and in moments that afternoon—waiting for the kettle, smelling some bit of food blackening under the burner—he was flashed back to August, to the foothills, to the night when Vince’s suspicions and Duncan’s snooping had led them and Casey to a disused mine entrance, not far from one of the construction sites. A starry sky overhead, and the terrible smell of charred flesh in the air. The smell that had promised those things Vince had been so fixated on.
Bones. They hadn’t found them, merely the evidence of their fate. And what they saw told them that the bones were black, not white. They’d been broiled fleshless in a metal barrel and then buried, and ultimately uncovered by a worker. Then Alex Dunn had been called to the scene, but Tremblay had arranged for his untimely demise before the truth could get out. Now those elusive bones were gone, deposited who knew where. Or destroyed—pulverized, or dissolved in some chemical or other.
Yet it wasn’t the fate of those things that dogged Duncan so much as the identity of the victim. Who had he been? Why and how had he died? Before or after he’d been curled inside that barrel, and set alight like so much rubbish? What had he seen that had deman
ded so thorough a silencing?
All everyone needed for some answers were those bones. There’d be dental records, missing persons databases, an ID made, some closure, a motive to pinpoint a perpetrator. If someone could only find those fucking things, maybe everyone could get back to their regularly scheduled lives. He nearly wished that task were his, grim and daunting as it was. Clearly the feds weren’t having any luck, and if anyone in this town could use the focus of an impossible assignment, it was Duncan.
A foolish impulse, of course. Duncan was smart, but his powers of logic and deduction were limited to the legal realm; he had no business playing detective in the dusty desert.
Neither did Vince Grossier. Yet if he hadn’t, everyone would still believe Alex Dunn had gotten himself killed driving drunk, and his murderer would still be the sheriff of this county. And how is an ex-con quarry laborer more qualified to meddle than I am?
Shut up, brain. The mere urge was madness.
Stick with what you’re good at. Your exoneration lies in books, not in the badlands.
But that evening, the mad urges got the better of him. Raina was working, and restless from sitting about, flipping through the same pages of notes he’d made in his defense again and again, Duncan climbed into his car and went for a drive. An hours-long drive, without ever leaving Fortuity, a loop that took him out to the fences of the Three C cattle ranch, along the foothills, past the quarry, snaking back through the residential areas before turning down Station Street. He eyed the horizon, dark now, delineated only by the light of a half-moon, searching his undernurtured intuition for some tingle—some tell. Some sign that might whisper, Here we are. Come and find us. Come and dig us up. But nothing, of course. And no way to get to the places where Tremblay or some other actor would’ve been most likely to bury those bones, if they did indeed still reside in Fortuity.
Then on Duncan’s fourth trip around town, something did finally call to him.
One of the two big bay doors of the erstwhile Eastside Auto garage was up, the building lit brightly and spilling rock music. Duncan spotted Vince Grossier’s bike parked outside, then the man himself, carrying some tool from the workbench to the center of the space, where another bike was propped.
The man who’d arguably ruined Duncan’s life. Through no real fault of his own, of course, but if not for Vince, Duncan would still have his job, progress would still be humming along, and he’d never have even heard of the wretched bones that were robbing him of his focus. He turned into the lot, knowing in a flash what he wanted. What he needed.
Vince squinted at the Merc until Duncan killed the headlights and revealed himself. The man’s expression changed, from alert to amused, as Duncan strode into the garage.
“Mr. Grossier.”
“Welch. Nice shiner.”
Duncan frowned, and stooped to examine his face in the bike’s mirror. Sure enough, Raina’s elbow had left a nasty purple bruise blossoming between his lid and brow bone. He’d been too consumed by cleaning the bathroom mirror to even register his own reflection.
“Not getting into fistfights, I hope,” Vince said. “Though if you were, I could go for a good scrap.” He seemed to size Duncan up, looking intrigued.
“It was . . . It doesn’t matter.”
“I was expecting you while it was still light out. ’Fraid I can’t do your paint job now. Maybe tomorrow afternoon.”
“It’s no longer urgent; I’ve found a temporary fix.”
“Well, sorry if you wasted the trip. You want a beer?” Vince asked, stooping to pick up a bottle of his own and tilting it to his lips.
“No, thank you.” Duncan cut to the chase. “I didn’t actually come here about the paint.”
“No?”
“I think . . . I think I’d like a motorcycle. Something that can go off-road.”
Vince stared at him, long and hard. “You been abusing your prescription again?”
“Not today. I’ve just been prioritizing.”
“Fair enough. A bike, huh?” Vince glanced at the wheelless, seatless, barless one he was tinkering with. “You a brand whore for Mercedes? ’Cause if not, this old Toaster Tank’s a beauty under all the dirt, with no buyer yet.” The silly nickname was self-explanatory, thanks to the bike’s chrome gas tank. “R-series, ’73,” Vince went on. “Seven-fifty cc, only a hundred thirty thousand miles. Just needs a few transplants. You and me, Welch—twinsies.” True—that’d make two of them on black BMWs, yet so woefully mismatched in every other way.
“I’m not choosy,” Duncan said. “Whatever can handle the terrain. I’ll pay most anything you ask.” And likely sell it back to him for a song. No chance he’d actually grow attached to the thing, once its purpose had been fulfilled—or Duncan’s fixation exhausted.
“Hope you’re not in a hurry,” Vince said. “I got wall-to-wall shit to handle this week. I just snuck over here while Kim’s talking portfolio stuff with Raina. I can’t get her finished till Saturday.”
“Damn.”
“You feel like knocking the club a little surcharge for the rush job, and I could get Casey onto it.”
Duncan’s face must have revealed his skepticism.
Vince laughed. “My brother’s only a dumb-ass when it comes to people. He’s real handy with mechanical shit.”
“Just tell me how much.”
“Will you tell me what you need it for, first?”
Duncan wasn’t comfortable himself with this little mission’s utter lack of reason. And not comfortable at all with the anxiety he suspected was spurring this obsession. He had feds toying with him, Levins trying to ruin him, rednecks hungry for his blood. On top of all that, to admit he was now fool enough to be chasing after the thing an entire team of investigators had yet to find . . . ? Let Vince think he was fucked, fine—but not an idiot, to boot.
“I’d prefer not to,” he said. “Is there a surcharge for secrecy?”
“Nah, I’m just curious. It’s not exactly your brand, is all. But let’s say four grand for the bike—that’s parts and labor, with an I-owe-you-big discount. I’m pretty sure I’ve got all the shit it needs on hand . . . Make it five even and Casey’ll have it for you by tomorrow afternoon.”
Duncan stuck his hand out. “Deal.”
Vince stripped off his work glove and they shook. “Case can give you a lesson riding it, too.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
The man smiled, the gesture always oddly boyish, not matching the rest of his macho packaging. “And I’m sure you’ve never ridden at all, let alone off-road. I lost you your job and half a tooth—let me at least spare you a broken leg.”
Duncan submitted. He could endure Casey Grossier’s company for a couple of hours to do this properly. Though his desire to do things properly—lawfully, logically—had waned of late.
“Get yourself some boots,” Vince said. “No need to drop a bomb for actual riding boots—just something sturdy that’ll cover your ankles. Jeans are good. And we’ve got spare helmets lying around.”
“Jacket?” He had a leather one, but it wasn’t designed for a ride any more than Duncan was.
Vince shrugged. “Preferable, but you’ll probably live without it. You won’t be going too fast, so you’re way more likely to tip over and crush a leg than you are to go flaying yourself on the asphalt.”
“How reassuring.”
“Gloves are nice,” Vince went on, “but if you don’t want to destroy those schmancy driving ones you’ve got, you’ll get by without them, too. With a few blisters.”
“Noted.”
“Tomorrow. Three o’clock. That’ll give you maybe four hours before Lights Out steals the sunshine,” Vince said, meaning the high peak to the west that cast Fortuity in an early twilight each evening.
Duncan nodded.
“Raina give you that black eye?” Vince as
ked.
“No comment.”
That smile again. “You earn it?”
“Not especially.”
Vince laughed. “Good fucking luck with her. She’ll bang you up way worse than the bike ever could, if you get on her bad side.”
“I’ll keep a helmet handy.”
Vince turned back to his project and Duncan headed out after casting his future motorcycle a final curious glance.
The bar looked busy as he pulled around to park in back, and he considered a drink. Raina would be busy chatting with Kim between filling orders, and he didn’t much feel like sharing her attention. His body warmed as he slammed the car door, remembering everything that had happened that morning. Those burning eyes on his body and face. Those greedy hands stroking, tugging, kneading, urging.
It’d probably never be that good again between them. After all the anticipation, the teasing, the torture . . . Surely anything they did with each other from this point on would pale in comparison. As he slammed the Merc’s door and fished out the keys she’d given him, he realized they’d be wise to avoid any further encounters. It had been perfect as it was—dirty and rough and raw—and it would be a shame to taint it by attempting to stage a repeat. Yes, they ought to leave well enough alone.
Though he had to wonder if he’d have it in him to resist her, if Raina decided she wasn’t done with him yet.
* * *
Raina looked at the number Kim had jotted on a pad, an estimate for the photo shoot they were hoping to set up. “That seems fair. That’s per hour?”
Kim nodded, sipping her beer. “I’d guess four hours, six tops. Depending on whether people show up when they’re supposed to, and how many there are.”
