Love on the Dark Side

by Love on the Dark Side [Black Lace] (retail) (epub)

Her other guest, sitting on the kitchen floor with his back to the island, shifted and opened his mouth to speak. Catching the slight movement, Jess dropped her left hand down and pressed her fingertips to his lips, hard enough to make the message clear.

  Blue Brahma paused, but his smile remained. ‘I’m sorry? I assure you that my goal here is entirely –’

  ‘Dwight,’ Jess interjected. ‘Open your eyes, for Chrissake.’

  The man blinked, clearly taken aback by the use of his name. His gaze shifted ever so slightly, actually looking at her; the effect was not entirely unlike a television anchorman focusing past the cameras and looking straight at the viewer for the first time after ten years on the air. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t –’ He paused. ‘Jessica?’

  Jess nodded, her eyes wide and the movement slow, as though she were communicating across language barriers. ‘Yes, Dwight. Jessica.’

  Again, her first visitor shifted, this time turning his head as though trying to clear the obstruction to speech. Jessica slid her fingers around to grip his jaw, and, when his movement subsided, relaxed.

  The big man in her living room frowned. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Jess tilted her head. ‘I live here, Dwight.’ She made a show of looking around. ‘This is my flat.’

  This didn’t seem to clear anything up for the Brahma. ‘You’re supposed to be on holiday.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘But … you’re here.’

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded again, slowly. ‘This is my flat.’

  ‘But you’re supposed to be on holiday,’ he said, his expression shifting from charming to dogged. ‘You’re supposed to go away when you go on holiday.’

  ‘I did go away, Dwight.’ Jess tried to keep her tone patient, but Blue wasn’t her favourite conversational partner at the best of times, and her silent guest was moving again. Though he didn’t seem to be trying to ruin the whole thing by talking; he just kept turning his head from side to side. His lips were brushing across the palm of her hand. It was distracting.

  ‘But you’re here,’ Blue Brahma repeated.

  Jess sighed, clearly exasperated (though her breath caught a bit at the end; Cinder – Nathan – had grazed his teeth over the pad of her index finger). ‘I went away from work, Dwight. Just work. That’s why I’m not down there with the rest of you, wreaking random property damage.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, already tired of the conversation. (Not trying to concentrate on what Nathan was doing with her fingers. No.) ‘Clearly, I should have gone further away.’

  Brahma’s smile came back at that, and he laughed his television interview laugh. ‘I’d have to agree.’ He switched to a concerned expression and started to walk over to her. ‘Are you all ri–’

  She started and took a half step further behind the island, away from him. ‘What are you doing?’

  Blue Brahma paused again, brought up short in mid-hero performance for the second time in two minutes. ‘I was making sure you were all right.’

  ‘I’m not exactly dressed for company, Dwight.’ She looked at him, looked down at the midriff-high countertop meaningfully, then back.

  She had to look up again – had to – her silent guest was teasing the end of each fingertip and watching her face. Looking down, she’d met his eyes and simultaneously become aware of how much closer she’d moved her panty-clad hips towards him. The realisation made her face hot and her knees a bit weak; robbed of blood supply that was rushing elsewhere.

  ‘Oh.’ Brahma’s eyes dropped to the counter again, then widened. ‘Oh! I … Oh!’

  ‘Yes.’ Jess agreed, biting hard on the end of the word for several different reasons; one visitor was annoying, and the other was sliding his fingertips up the inside of her left leg, over ankle, then calf, and higher. ‘So if you could please … ?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ The Blue Brahma nodded, stood for several seconds, seemed to remember himself and stepped back on to the balcony. ‘Very sorry, Timbre.’ He called from out of sight. ‘Jessica, I mean. Sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Jess bit her lower lip, dropped her head forwards until her hair obscured her face.

  Nathan’s fingers traced the curve on the inside of her knee. She looked down at him, moved her fingers along his lips, bracing herself with her other hand on the counter. What the hell, she thought, I’m on holiday. With that, she took another step and placed her feet on either side of him, bringing her sex within inches of his face. She met his gaze, then closed her eyes. ‘It’s all right.’

  His hand reached higher, while his lips opened under her touch and he sucked gently on her fingertips. Jess pressed her lips together to keep a moan from escaping. His touch skimmed her leg from inner thigh to the sole of her foot, and back again, each time travelling higher, lighter, closer. He’d just brushed against the damp cotton between her legs with his knuckle when another piece of glass crashed to the floor, and Jess jumped, looking over at the door.

  ‘Sorry, very sorry.’

  ‘Yes, Dwight?’ Jess braced herself against the counter’s edge and flipped her hair back, putting a hardly feigned look of annoyance on her face. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother … it’s just … well …’ He slipped back into official superhero mode. ‘I was looking for Cinder. He was part of that fight, below, and obviously he was here.’ He indicated the scattered glass. ‘May I search for him?’

  ‘Hell, no, Dwight. Do you ask Batman if you can poke around the Batcave?’

  Dwight looked confused. ‘Batman’s not real.’

  Jess sighed, her breath catching for a moment, as the object of the Brahma’s quest slid his finger under the elastic of her panties. ‘I know! I’m saying, um … Look, he’s not here, OK? He took off right after crashing through my door. Didn’t stop to say anything.’

  ‘Very well, then.’ Brahma ducked his head back outside, then back in again. ‘Keep an eye out for him though, would you? You know his reputation as well as any of us. He’s not exactly a respectable citizen.’

  Big Blue bounded off the balcony again, but Nathan’s attentions didn’t resume. Jess let her gaze drop to his.

  ‘I should go,’ he murmured, brushing her fingers with his lips.

  ‘You can’t. They’ll find you.’ She pulled her hand away from his mouth to run her fingers through his black hair, tugging on it as she forced his gaze to meet hers.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He rubbed his forehead against the soft curve of her belly above her knickers, his nose pressing into her. His teeth caught at the cotton and pulled, gently. ‘You heard him, I’m not respectable.’

  ‘I don’t –’ Her fingers clenched in his hair as his fingertips played along her slick wet slit. ‘Please, stay.’

  Cinder complied, and slipped a hot finger into Jess’s core. She moaned as he flicked her clit, warmth building like an inferno. The heat radiated out from where he touched her, where his fingers slipped inside her and teased, flicking, playing, toying. Jess pressed her palm against the granite countertop, and a delicate glass flower vase shattered as she came in a molten explosion. She sagged against his hands, but managed to remain standing.

  When the shuddering aftershocks of her orgasm faded, Cinder slipped his hands back to (slightly) less enticing locations. ‘I really should go.’

  ‘Maybe I won’t let you.’ She nudged at him with a roll of her hips. ‘Maybe I’m going to have to make a citizen’s arrest.’

  She pulled at his hair again, and he looked up, smiling. ‘You think you can keep me here?’

  It was Jess’s turn to smile. Hadn’t he heard anything? Then again, he had been somewhat distracted while she and Dwight spoke. Maybe he didn’t catch that Brahma had called her Timbre, or that she’d just shattered a perfectly good vase. Then again, maybe it didn’t matter if he had.

  She pulled at the front of his jacket, drawing him away from the cabinet and pushing him down to the floor. She dropped to her knees on either side of him and leant forwards, one hand
pressing against the tile floor while the other gripped the leather. ‘I know I can,’ she whispered.

  He heard a low-level hum. The sound built, peaked and the glass on the floor rattled away across the kitchen, clearing a space around them.

  He glanced to either side, a small smile on his lips. ‘That’s pretty impressive’

  She arched an eyebrow. ‘Wanna see what else I can do?’

  Ask anyone within the news agencies that specialised in ‘paranormal personalities’, and they would tell you that the sanctioned Mercury Bay hero known as Timbre was a ‘sonic’, that is to say, someone who did something with sound. What that ‘something’ was varied, depending on the paranormal in question, but, in almost every case that Jess had encountered, it involved screaming at the top of one’s lungs like a distraught jilted banshee with PMS.

  Jessica didn’t do that. The fact of the matter was that Jessica’s powers weren’t actually sound based at all. Yes, they produced sound, but so did Dwight the Blue Brahma, and Jess could attest that his ability to do so didn’t in any way make him special.

  What Jessica did was produce vibrations in anything she could physically touch, as well as control the direction and intensity of those vibrations, anything from a mild hum to foundation-shaking tremors. She’d lost count of the number of times that some ‘criminal mastermind’ had tried to ‘take her out of the equation’ by clamping some wondrous gizmo (or sometimes just their hand) over her mouth, only to start jerking around like a taser victim as soon as they touched her.

  She didn’t mind that almost no one knew how her powers worked – it’s why she’d called herself Timbre in the first place instead of something like ‘Tremor’ or ‘Seismiss’ or, God forbid, ‘Vibro Lass’.

  She didn’t bother unfastening Cinder’s jacket or pants yet; she let her eyes unfocus and simply feel where he was beneath the layer of leather. The first pulse spread across his chest like gooseflesh, intensifying as it reached each nipple. He didn’t gasp, but she could feel the muscles in his thighs clench and allowed herself a small distant smile.

  ‘I could make this last a while,’ she said. Her voice sounded dreamy in her own ears. ‘But you were so good and so fast for me, I’ll be nice.’

  She slid further down his legs, letting her hands glide over his chest and abdomen, spreading the slow low vibration as she went. At his waist, she tugged the button of his pants loose with one hand, pressing the palm of the other against the rigid length of him, wrapped in the cool black leather. Here, though, she didn’t enhance the contact with her power. Not yet. He didn’t seem to mind. His legs flexed again, lifting his pelvis against her hand. Jess used the motion to help pull the zipper down, then gripped both sides of his pants and pulled them down as far as she easily could, bunching them around his knees. It wasn’t pretty or elegant or romantic, but that wasn’t what this was about. The rest could wait for later.

  The stretchy-tight cotton fabric of his briefs strained to contain his sex. Jess caught the top edge of the elastic band with her fingers and pulled it down to reveal the crown, dragging the fabric along the shaft as she stripped him to the knees. Before she’d even got the cloth entirely out of the way, she was bending forwards, tracing the thick bulge along the underside of his cock with the tip of her tongue.

  Here, she used her power. Any kind of contact worked, after all – it didn’t have to be her hands. The inaudible hum she sent into the shaft elicited a very audible groan from him. She was inclined to drag that out as long as possible, but she stopped herself and intensified the vibration instead. His back arched and he pressed the shaft of his cock blindly against her mouth. She slid her lips and tongue along the shaft again, first down to the thick fuzzy base, nuzzling, inhaling the musky scent, then up to the head, already slick and glistening with his own fluids. The tip of her tongue circled once, twice, and on the third rotation, she slid him into her mouth and amplified the vibrations again.

  There was something to be said for immediate gratification.

  Her hands free, she slid them up his thighs, sending shivers into him from three different directions. He writhed, tried to talk, but only managed half-words; at a guess, Jess thought he was trying to get out ‘Don’t’, ‘God’, ‘Fuck’, and ‘More’, in roughly that order. She focused on ‘more’. Moving slightly to the side, she cupped his balls in her left hand and gripped the base of his shaft in her right, sliding the taut skin over the shaft in time with the smaller motions of her mouth – more than enough to please any partner, even without the waves of additional sensation that radiated out from those points of contact and into the rest of his body. She could tell from his ragged breathing that he was already close to coming – all it would take from her was a small push to put him over the edge.

  She decided to throw him over instead. Hard.

  She splayed the fingers of her left hand, pressing the palm against the very base of his cock and starting a low thrumming pattern that pushed into the core of him. He let out a strained moan that seemed to come straight from his chest. With one finger, she teased down even further, circling his anus in softly vibrating torment. His body arched to the point where it seemed only his shoulders and heels were actually touching the floor.

  Something smelt like it was burning, but she ignored it. Her left hand sent tremulous probes into his core, her right continued the steady hard rhythm along his shaft, and her lips formed a tight ring of sensations just below the head as she swirled the sensitive tip over and over with her tongue. Then she intensified every point of contact until he was straining upwards beyond the capacity for breath.

  There was no way she could take more of him into her mouth than she already was, but Jess knew that that really wasn’t important – it was making him feel everything she was doing, right through his climax.

  He left scorched handprints on the kitchen floor.

  ‘What the–?’ Nathan’s bellow would have shaken knick-nacks from her bookshelves if she hadn’t long since given up on fragile tchotchkes.

  Jess popped her head around her bedroom doorframe. ‘You’re awake.’

  He was a bit more than awake; ‘outraged’ seemed a good word for it. Surprised, maybe, at the very least.

  ‘I’m tied up.’ His voice wasn’t much past a growl. ‘And I’m naked. I’m fairly certain these are both new developments.’

  ‘Not entirely.’ Jess moved into the room and leant on the corner post at the bottom of the bed, making sure her eyes stayed on his. ‘Anyway, I thought we should have a chat.’

  He gestured – tried to gesture, at any rate, with one hand. The movement was hampered by the heavy leather straps securing each of his arms to a bedpost, and the hand (like its mate) was covered in what looked like an oven mitt made out of a shiny sort of neoprene. ‘This how you chat with everyone you have round?’

  Jess found she was actually blushing, struck by the simple fact of what she’d done – taken a man (one who’d arrived in her flat, fleeing authorities, then serviced her and been serviced in turn), who was little more than a stranger in the best light and a criminal adversary at the other end of the spectrum, and finally strapped him, stark naked (except for the hand coverings), to her bed. It wasn’t as though she could claim innocent intent. She tilted her head, suppressing a smile and trying to let her hair conceal her face. ‘No. This is a first.’

  He was watching her, his expression balanced between suspicion and something she couldn’t identify. ‘I honestly can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.’ He glanced at his left hand. ‘Flame-suppressing synthetics?’

  She nodded. ‘We were issued them when you broke out last April.’ She didn’t see the point of denying her connection to the Vindicators – he’d obviously heard Brahma use her ‘public’ name. It didn’t matter much in any case; most professional heroes only used them to avoid paparazzi.

  His gaze moved to the heavy leather straps holding his arms. ‘These look a little more multipurpose.’

  Again, her
face flushed. ‘They’re from when Captain Conundrum escaped from Utumno Prison last year.’

  ‘Ahh.’ His brow arched. ‘Now that you explain, I can see they’re completely innocent.’ He let his gaze travel down the length of his body, dragging hers along with it. ‘Though I suppose I should take heart in the fact that this is not otherwise anything like the usual method of detainment for the Mercury Bay Vindicators, or the police.’

  She returned his look. ‘You should know.’

  ‘I do indeed.’ He watched her face for several seconds. ‘So –’ he crossed his legs, but just at the ankles, and leant his head back, looking for all the world like someone sunning themselves on a beach without a care in the world ‘– you wanted a chat?’

  The conversation hadn’t started out the way that Jess had hoped, but this was the opening she thought she could use to turn things round again. ‘Actually, I thought I’d do you the favour of explaining what was going to happen to you, rather than …’ She paused, letting the corner of her mouth curl up. ‘Rather than letting you find out the hard way.’

  He tipped his head a bit to the side. ‘That sounds a bit sinister; have you suddenly decided to switch sides? Am I hearing your first monologue? If so, I’d have to say –’

  ‘Shut up,’ she snapped, ‘unless you want me to black you out again, pull your clothes back on and give the police an anonymous tip.’

  He started to reply, then changed his mind and waited.

  Jess nodded. ‘That’s better. You see, I could turn you in, but the thing is, I’m on holiday.’ She moved around the post of the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress. ‘I didn’t really have any plans, but I knew without a doubt that I wanted to get away from work. Turning you in would be work, and that rather misses the point.’

  ‘You’ll forgive me for saying so,’ he replied, ‘but in this particular case you’ve taken procrastination to an entirely new level.’

  ‘Well –’ she laid a hand on his leg, toying with the fine hairs ‘– we get on a bit, also.’

  He shifted on the bed, just enough to move the leather straps around the bedposts. ‘Aside from the obvious contradictions, I’d have to agree.’