by Laura Day
She thought about telling him that he didn’t really need a condom. They’d both found reasons to be tested in the last month or so, and they knew that bit was fine, and she’d gotten a prescription for the pill at the same time. She hadn’t told him that part yet, though. It wasn’t that she thought he’d flip out, or that she loved the feel of condoms so much, it was just...another step. A statement of trust. And even though she did trust him, saying out loud that she trusted him in a given moment was different than trusting him for an unspecified amount of time in the future.
“Bedroom,” she said. “Easier for you to hold me down there.”
His eyebrows went up. “Is that what you’re in the mood for tonight?”
“You want me to scream for you, don’t you? That’s what you’re looking for?”
“Yes,” he said, the sound dragged out long and low as if she’d tugged it out of him with a fishing hook.
“Then take me to bed and fuck me until I scream.”
CHAPTER FIVE
He growled—he actually growled—and then flipped her over his shoulder with an ease that she sometimes found eerie. They were about the same height, he wasn’t weight-lifter strong, but he could pick her up and carry her around like a sack of potatoes with no real effort expended. It was beyond nerve-wracking. Beyond, and straight into incredibly exciting. Especially when she wiggled too much, and he slapped her ass hard enough to leave a stinging red mark.
The bedroom was just as pin-neat as the rest of the apartment. His mattress sat on a platform bed, with the comforter neatly folded under at the end. He tossed her down onto the mattress, shucking his shorts while she bounced for a moment, and then pushed her down into the bed at her wrists. “How long do you think you can stay quiet?” he asked. “How long do you think you can keep from making any sound at all?”
“I don’t—” know, she started to say, and then he spread her folds with just one finger, gently stretching and teasing at her entrance. She clamped her teeth down, feeling the urge to cry out swell within her, and choking it off.
“What game can we play,” he murmured to himself, adding a second finger to the teasing swirl. “What reward do you get if I bring you off—Hm, say, twice?—without you screaming?”
“You have to be my slave,” she said, trying to force clarity into her head. “I can tie you down and do anything I want to you—that you consent to—and you have to let me. And I can use anything in the toy chest.”
He knew what she was thinking about—the thick black dildo and the strap-on harness that it fit into. “I’m not sure that’s any kind of punishment for me.”
“No,” she said, and then had to take some very intense deep breaths to keep from losing control right there; his fingers had slipped inside her and found that nubbed spot on the front of her core, and he was teasing it while he stroked her clit with his thumb, and she was going to explode, burst, come so utterly that she’d fly into pieces, and he’d have to help her pick them out of the carpet for weeks. “But it would be a reward for me,” she said, all in a rush, and then let her hips go wild, fucking his hand, forcing herself to focus on keeping quiet, silent, feeling the sensations intensity as she denied them release.
“And if I make you scream?” he said, moving with her hips, tormenting her, not letting her thrust as fast and as hard as she wanted to. “What do I get?”
She panted hard for a moment, pushing the arousal away again. This wasn’t going to work for long; her sex felt heavy and thick, electric and tingling, and her hands were clenching into the comforter, wrecking his neat bed, and she didn’t care. “What do you want?”
“You and Trish,” he said, without hesitation. “If that’s something you’d go for. If it’s not, it’s okay, I’ll back off about it, never mention it again, but if I get to choose, that’s what I’d choose. The two of you—god, you would be hot together. And the idea of having both of you?” He shivered, and she felt it all the way down to her core.
“Do your worst,” she said, and he grinned, a nod of agreement.
He pushed her over on her belly, and slapped her ass again, where he’d already hit her, and the sting redoubled. She gasped, her hips grinding down into the bed, and as they lifted, he was there, slapping her again. Her pussy was clenching around nothing, spasming, desperate to come for both of them.
She heard the tear of foil, and then she could feel the tip of him, teasing into her. She pushed back with her hips, looking to sheathe him fully inside of her, but he maneuvered away, keeping just the tip of him in contact with her. “Oh, baby, it’s not going to be that easy,” he said. “I have to make you come twice, remember?”
He pulled her ever so slightly towards him, just enough that she could pull her knee up and ease the pressure on her lower back, and he could reach the front of her body and tease her clit with his thumb. Pinioned between his cock and his thumb, with him moving along with her so that she couldn’t get more contact from either his cock or his hand, she came to a shuddering orgasm, biting furiously at her arm to keep from screaming as the waves shook her.
Once again, he didn’t wait for the aftershocks to finish before he was plunging into the full length of her. He was surging, fast and hard, grunting, slamming, their flesh slapping together. “Come for me, baby,” he whispered, almost to himself. “Please, do it, scream for me, won’t you, scream for me, please.”
She came again, before the first had entirely finished, but she bit the mattress and choked back the sounds that wanted—needed—to come boiling out of her. He didn’t, though; he came, cursing and swearing, drilling so deep inside of her that she thought she’d split in two with the urgency of it. But she didn’t make a sound.
He fell to the side of her, pulling her along with him, and he chuckled gently as she curled into his shoulder. “Looks like I’m getting pegged sometime soon,” he said, stroking her hair back from her face.
“If you’re okay with that,” she said. In the heat of the moment, it was the most challenging thing she’d been able to think of, given his own fondness for that sort of play, but some guys loved to play with a girl’s ass, but panicked at the idea of someone liking theirs.
He laughed again, and she could feel his skin heating with a flush. “I actually like it. Kind of a lot. But—you know, it’s not an easy thing to bring into a conversation.”
“Hi, I love you, fuck my ass. Yeah, I can see how that doesn’t flow off the tongue.”
He laughed harder and pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her in a grip that should have been too tight, but was instead perfectly reassuring. She could feel him relaxing, feel those last vestiges of guard falling away, feel him falling down into sleep. She wanted to follow him, easy and soft, but when she closed her eyes, she saw that cop staring at her, harsh and cruel, and she couldn’t quite let it go. Not even here.
CHAPTER SIX
When she woke up, Mason wasn’t in bed with her. She slid her hand out over the depression in the mattress where he had been, and found it still warm. He hadn’t been up all that long, then. She stretched, feeling her spine pop in a few places. Caroline had slept hard, and had woken up once to Mason feverishly kissing her neck, murmuring something into her skin that she hadn’t quite understood.
She’d urged him into her then, felt the nightmare in his flesh, even if he didn’t tell her about it in words, and if he found relief in her, then she was glad of it. And that time, when he begged, she did scream for him, over and over, as he kept her riding the edge of an orgasm for so long that she thought her world would end in a sea of sparkles amidst darkened vision.
Afterwards, he’d cried, his head pillowed on her breasts, and she’d stroked his hair in its braid, smoothing it away from his face and murmuring comforting words.
She slipped out of the bed; he’d left a folded T-shirt out for her, and she pulled it over her head. It was gigantic, the lower hem hanging down well past the bottom of her butt. But it was comfortable, well worn, the kind of T-shirt that she
would shamelessly steal. She went to the bathroom and peed, then stepped out into the main room.
She would have sworn that she was silent, her bare feet padding quietly across the wood floor, but Mason, crouched as he was by the front window, threw up an impatient hand in her direction, and she stopped moving. He was low down in the window, the curtain twitched barely out of the way by his fingers, staring outside. He was hidden behind the curtain, and she assumed that he didn’t want whoever he was staring at to know he was there.
She stayed silent for a while, waiting. Finally, he let the curtain fall closed, and stepped back slowly, though he kept his back to her and his eyes on the window.
He pulled her back into the bedroom, which was farther from the street than the main room. “That cop is outside, watching the garage,” he said, his voice so quiet that a whisper would have felt like a shout. “I need you to think for a second—did you say anything to him before I got there, anything at all?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Nothing. I was careful.”
Mason nodded. “He’s the dirty cop that Declan was working with. Has to be. Otherwise, why would he come talking to you? No one else would know about the connection.”
She shook her head. “Jack still says he doesn’t believe a word of it. He’s been friends with his guy for years, and swears that the guy would lie down in traffic for him. He says someone else in the department must have gotten wind of what was happening, what we were looking into, but he said that there’s no way it was this guy who sent Declan after us.”
“After you,” he said, quietly, but the emphasis didn’t escape Caroline’s notice. “I can’t lose you, Caro. You’re— too much. I can’t lose you.”
She wrapped her arms around him and kissed the side of his neck. He was trembling with tension, his muscles rock hard and ready to fly into action, and she found herself wanting him pliant and smiling like he was the night before. “You’re not going to lose me. But if this guy is following you— call the department and file a harassment claim or something. The cops aren’t allowed to do stuff like that.”
The look he turned on her— it was the first time she’d ever seen him direct so much coldness her way. “You’re adorable, you know that? Sure, the cops don’t do ‘stuff like that’ to pretty little white girls. But I’m not pretty, and I’m covered in ink, and my jacket’s leather. You know better, Caro. I know you do.”
She took a deep breath, trying to find balance somewhere inside of herself. “I get why things went down with Declan the way they did—” He made an angry gesture, cutting his fingers across his throat, telling her to stop talking. “But that doesn’t mean that’s always the right thing to do. Sometimes, working within the system is the right thing to do.”
“Caroline, I love you.” Her heart swelled at the words. “But the system doesn’t work for guys like me. When we’re incredibly lucky, it just doesn’t work against us, but most of the time— dammit, it’s not simple. I want to make it simple, but it’s not.”
She rubbed at her eyes before the tears could fall. “Yeah, I get it,” she said. Even though she didn’t, not really, and she knew that. She reached for him again, trying to pull him in tight, to recapture some of the comfort and magic of the night before, but he stepped away from her.
“I had a key made for you a couple weeks ago,” he said. “It’s on the kitchen counter. I know you’re going to want some coffee. Lock up before you head out? I need to head over to the garage and see how much he’s freaking everyone out.”
She wanted to say something else, anything else, but he was gone. Even though it took him a few minutes to find clothes, to get dressed, to go, he was already gone. She tried not to feel too — disappointed, too hurt, too angry, too anything — for fear that it would all swell up like a great white wave and overwhelm her entirely.
Her car was still at the credit union, and she didn’t want to turn up at Jack and Missy’s looking for clean clothes in the wee hours of the morning. They’d understand, she knew that much, but it was still… a thing you did in college, not in your late twenties. Which meant going back to the house.
It turned her stomach every time she had to do it. She needed to get over this idea that selling the house was weak and just do it; she wasn’t going to live there again. Emily had been quietly pushing her for a while now to join this support group she knew about for women who’d survived all kinds of assaults, but it seemed… unnecessary, somehow? What was she going to do, sit in a circle and bitch about how this crazy asshole had held her hostage and threatened to kill her? How would that help anything? It wouldn’t even make her feel better.
Things just kept reminding her of that day; that was the problem. If she didn’t have to go back to the house, and this asshole of a cop would just go away, then everything would be fine.
Mason had never really told her what happened with Declan. He’d said he didn’t want her to know anything that would make her feel torn. That they were safe, and that she didn’t have to worry about anything anymore. It was totally possible that he’d just convinced Declan to leave town and never come back, along with his VP. Totally possible, and yet completely unlikely.
She’d pointed out that, legally, even suspecting that someone had been murdered obligated her to go to the police. She already knew enough that she’d be in trouble if he was, and so would Jack and Missy. She’d asked him for the full story.
He’d given her that smile, the tight one, and asked her to trust him.
It was easier said than done, about some things.
She could go over to the garage and ask Mason to come to the house with her. But that was just another version of admitting that it was too much for her to handle. That wouldn’t conjure his tight smile; that would bring out the worried one. She hated the worried one. A lot.
So the logical solution was to be turn her underwear inside out and stop off at the mall on the way in to work and buy a new shirt. Clearly. She knew it wasn’t, knew it was the farthest from rational thing she’d done lately, but faced with either spending $30 on a shirt she actually didn’t need at all or going back to that house, it was no choice at all.
CHAPTER SEVEN
She took the bus back to downtown, stopped at the mall, found a polo shirt she didn’t hate in the first store she went to, and then walked the few blocks back to the credit union. She was a couple of minutes late, but nothing that would cause anyone to bat an eye.
Jack’s desk was empty, and when she glanced at her phone, she saw a text from him that he’d sent in the wee hours of the morning. Still sick. Hope your night was fantastic. She sent back hope that he would get some sleep and feel better, then settled in to check her email and her schedule for the day.
Through one thing and another, it was close to noon before she opened the center drawer on her desk, the only one that wasn’t kept locked. Normally, all it held were pens, paper clips, staples, and a pad of paper. Today, a bright red folder was placed in the drawer, neatly centered.
Her heart skipped for a moment. None of her co-workers would leave client information in an unlocked drawer—it would be tantamount to writing your own pink slip. But anything non-client related— the usual protocol was to leave it on someone’s desk, and then follow up with an email to make sure it was received.
Before she even opened the folder, she was quite sure that it wasn’t from anyone at work. And she was very, very sure that Detective Mike Randall had somehow gotten into the office and left the folder there for her to find. So she wasn’t surprised at all to open the folder and find more of the club’s records. Pages she’d never seen, pages that looked like they were from the beginning of Declan’s suspicious activities. Again and again, Mason’s half-sister’s name was highlighted, and notes were made, here and there, in someone else’s handwriting. What’s the connection? And why Anna Bressette— relationship ?And club officers. It couldn’t be any clearer.
Mason had never known a thing about what happened with the dirty si
de of the club. The transactions to the “Anna Bressette” accounts had stopped once Mason took over as the treasurer of the club. But that wouldn’t necessarily lead someone to think that he hadn’t been the dirty one, or that Declan had been in a position to manipulate the last treasurer in a way that he hadn’t been able to manipulate Mason. Or even that Mason was being framed from the start.
He’d said to her once that guys like him only got a fair shot on cop dramas, that once the police found someone to blame, they rarely looked further— they rarely had the funding or the time, realistically. This was a threat. It was a threat from someone who knew what Mason had done, and someone who believed that they could tie everything together.
She found herself backing away from the desk like it contained a scorpion. The red of the folder flashed at her, and her breathing was out of control, high and rapid, her eyes too wide. Some part of her recognized the panic attack as it happened, but the vast majority of her was too busy screaming to do anything but— well, scream.
She pulled herself together enough to send a quick chat to her boss, saying that she was coming down with something, and was going to head home early, and then she left. She went out to her car, slid into the driver’s seat, and stared at the folder she’d tossed onto the passenger’s seat as she got in.
