***
No fewer than five bruises existed on Sylvia’s body by the end of the week. The first two came from the self-defense class, where she was thrown over some muscular woman’s shoulder and landed with the hardest hupf! to ever bounce off those mats.
The third was from a really nasty kickback during her firearm course. I’ve never fired a gun before! She had been intrigued at first. But after the pistol sent her back hard enough to make her slam against her instructor, Sylvia decided she was okay never doing that again. She was more petite than anyone took her for. Who knew she needed to work out in a gym before taking up a gun?
The fourth bruise? Came from knocking her elbow against her desk after she read in Alexander Sheen’s (very thorough) dossier that he had a nine-inch dick.
Finally, the fifth bruise was a result of her tripping on the stairs when she passed Joseph going the other way. He had come out of nowhere, flying down with a cup of coffee in one hand and a manila folder of disarrayed papers in the other. He was a tanned, hairy blur flying by, and somehow that gave Sylvia tingles.
By Friday afternoon, a mere four days before Sheen was due in town, Sylvia had passed her courses and was ready for her final briefing of the week with Joseph and Cindy, the woman playing her fake madam. They each read through the script Sylvia was to follow her first night meeting Sheen.
“You’ll be joining him for dinner,” the woman said. “He’s already paid for a full course of your services.”
Although Joseph stiffened beside her, Sylvia did her best to ignore him and focus on how things played out in her head. “So he’s gonna fuck me.”
“Probably. Is there a problem?”
I mean, this time I know going in that the guy paying to fuck me is a piece of shit, but I guess that way I definitely won’t fall in love. “No problem. I saw his pictures. He’s cute.”
Neither Joseph nor the woman were impressed with that answer. Joseph especially.
Every time the subject of her actually doing her primary job came up, Joseph turned into a tight-lipped statue. His heartrate quickened. Some vein in his arm – which he always left exposed with his rolled up sleeves – pumped extra blood, probably to his cock. When he spoke, it was usually with a dry voice and a wish to change subjects. He’s jealous, isn’t he? That amused Sylvia greatly. Typical man. Just because they exchanged partners a couple of times didn’t mean they were an item of any kind. But men didn’t think like that. Once they stuck their dick in a woman, they assumed some kind of ownership, didn’t they? Joseph may have been dating another woman – who slept with Sebastian during those same occasions, no less – but he didn’t like the idea of Sylvia Rogers getting her orgasm from some other man. It would’ve been hilarious if they weren’t supposedly working together now. If Sylvia were wired up for the whole next week? And doing her original job? Ah, Mr. Montoya would be hearing a lot of her deep, penetrative moans. He would hear every word of flirtation. He would probably get hard listening to Alexander and Sylvia grunt and sweat during all-night fuckathons. Will he angrily jack off? I hope so. Sylvia needed all the amusement she could get right now.
“Anyway,” Cindy continued, eyes darting between Sylvia and Joseph, “I will be there as well under the guise of checking up on my girl. I’ll be armed.”
Oh, well, if she was armed…
“Once you’ve established rapport with Sheen, you’ll mostly be on your own, aside from whomever is listening in through your devices. We’ll go over your equipment later.”
“Which will be me,” Joseph interjected. “I will be listening whenever you’re with Sheen.”
He said it with such determination that Sylvia couldn’t help but laugh. “Okay, Dad. Sheesh. Even when I worked at the Château I didn’t have my superiors breathing down my neck this much. And I was being filmed with every one of my clients.” She caught Cindy staring at her. “Security footage. It was wiped after two weeks. Supposedly.”
“As you can see, Agent Kline, Sylvia here is a professional. She won’t even be acting.”
“Bet that gets you real excited, huh?”
“Oookay.” Cindy scooted back from the table and grabbed her copies of their information. “I have another meeting to get to. I’ll see you for the big setup Tuesday.” She stopped halfway across the conference room. “You two should probably sort this shit out by then.” A finger bounced between Sylvia and Joseph… as if there were shit to sort out.
Sylvia waited for the door to close before addressing the man beside her. Joseph was gathering his things as well. “She’s right. We need to figure out what this shit between us is.”
His motions slowed. “Don’t know what you’re referring to.”
The fact that you’re jealous and still want to bone me. It was fine. Sylvia had dealt with situations way more awkward than this. “Oh, Sylvia,” she moaned with the deepest voice she had. “Oh, fuck, I’m coming.”
The papers spilled on the table the moment Joseph stood up. After cursing to offend half the religions in the world, he glared at Sylvia with enough ire to turn her on. I’ve got a thing for angry, dominant men. How do you think I ended up in half of my shitty relationships?
“That’s what you sounded like when you popped off in me the second time.” She sighed, smiling. “I haven’t forgotten.” She hadn’t forgotten a lot of things, but they were liable to make even her blush. The man knows how to drill…
Ahem!
“Thank you for the reminder.” Joseph covertly covered his crotch with his folders. “But I think it’s best if we don’t keep bringing that up. We should keep things… strictly professional.”
Sylvia glanced at the hard-on growing in his pants. “Uh huh. I’m not the one bringing things up, Agent Montoya.”
“Think I’ll hit the gym.”
“Yeah, you could easily lift a few pounds with that thing. Nice and sturdy.”
“Like I said. Let’s keep things professional.”
Sylvia leaped up from her seat, almost forgetting her own folder as she followed him out into the busy office. Agents, officers, and other civilians sat hunched over their desks filling out paperwork and doing lengthy searches in internal databases. More than a few of them glanced up at Joseph as Sylvia trailed behind him.
“You want me, don’t you?”
He stopped halfway to his desk, lips sucked into his mouth. When he turned toward Sylvia, she realized how much taller he was than her. Was he doing that on purpose? Flaunting his seven, eight inches over her? Joseph Montoya wasn’t quite six feet tall, but when Sylvia was barely the national average, he was tall. And athletic. And tanned. And hairy in all the right places. Need someone to groom your happy trail for you, sir? Sylvia had a thing for some well-placed hair. Ahem. Again.
Maybe he wasn’t the only one wanting someone around there.
“Let’s not have this discussion here.”
Sylvia cocked her eyebrow. “Then where? Because we apparently need to have it.”
“There is nothing to discuss, Ms. Rogers.”
Oh. Ouch. Suddenly she was Ms. Rogers, huh? “Sure there isn’t. You men really have two brains, huh? One telling you to fuck me, and the other telling you to walk away?” When his lips curled out of his mouth and pursed in disbelief, Sylvia laughed. “Yeah, I know what I’m about, Agent Montoya. When you’ve been doing my job as long as I have, you learn to read men pretty damn well. And you’re an open book. A very, very open book. Go ahead and rip your heart out and tattoo it on your sleeve.”
He went from making eye contact to gazing over the top of her head. Sylvia looked back, all breath leaving her body.
“Well, well,” said Maggie, the FBI agent who arrested Sylvia for solicitation and possible conspiracy to commit murder at Xavier Crow’s mansion several months ago. “I had to see it for myself. When I heard that you and her were working on the investigation together, I couldn’t believe it.” She spared Sylvia a cold, calculated smile. Fuck off, asshole. Sylvia held no love for people who arreste
d her. “I didn’t even know you were still in town.”
“Not much choice when your meal ticket is swiped from you.” Sylvia could spit that fake-ass smile dripping with disdain right back at Maggie. “Or have you forgotten?”
“The fact that your ex-boyfriend is currently rotting in a prison cell with his five new boyfriends? Absolutely not. Only wish I was the one who got to arrest him.” That had been her partner’s pleasure. Apparently Sebastian had made disparaging comments about him during their tenure in Crow’s sex club. “That man is about as alpha as an omega,” Sebastian once said to Sylvia. “I would never let you sleep with him. It would be beneath us.” The fact both Maggie and her partner were black definitely played into it. Sebastian wasn’t racist like Sylvia wasn’t a sex worker. “No hard feelings. You got your immunity, didn’t you?”
“And arrested a couple more times after that.”
Maggie almost laughed. Sylvia couldn’t hate her for it. At least that laugh would’ve been genuine. “You two have fun, and good luck with the investigation. Take ‘em down for us.”
“You’re not interfering this time?”
“We have another investigation going on.” Maggie shrugged. “But if you need someone to clean you up off the floor after he wipes it with you, eh. You have my number.” She turned. “By the way, Commander Stone is looking for you two. Wants to swear in Rogers.”
Joseph tensed up behind Sylvia. “Right. Let’s get it over with.”
After Maggie showed herself out, Joseph nodded toward his mother’s office and insinuated that Sylvia should follow him. A loud knock landed on Commander Stone’s door before Joseph threw it open and entered without invitation. Is that a privilege others don’t get because he’s her son? Oh, Sylvia couldn’t wait for this. She had been wondering about this Commander Stone since she found out the woman existed.
Joseph’s mother was not… what she had been expecting.
For one, they looked nothing alike. Joseph was tall, lean, affable, and, uh, darker. Commander Genevieve Stone, on the other hand, was built like a champion gymnast, with a short stature but plenty of muscles. Her hair was a solid brown with blond roots growing in. You don’t see that every day. A giant, defensive wall was built all around her, the only penetrative spots her two hazel eyes that invited no one in. The only way Sylvia could tell that Commander Stone and Agent Montoya were related were from the way they both made their lips disappear when they braced themselves. Which they both did now.
“Commander,” Joseph said. At least his hard-on was gone. Because, yeah, I was looking. “Allow me to introduce Ms. Sylvia Rogers. She’ll be our undercover operative in my investigation.”
The commander stood up, hand outstretched over her desk. “Good to have you on board, Ms. Rogers. I’m Genevieve Stone.” Her grip was so strong that Sylvia’s eyes bulged out of her head. “I was looking at the reports your trainers delivered to me. Seems you passed.”
The word “barely” was unspoken, but Sylvia figured at this point the department didn’t have much choice but to accept her. “Thank you, ma’am.” She should call her ma’am, right? “Looking forward to helping.”
Genevieve’s visage went from neutral to critical as she looked from Sylvia to Joseph. Interesting. “You briefed her?”
“With Agent Kline, yes.”
“Good. Tuesday morning we’ll sit down with Agent Gibbs and go through the tech. I’ll be listening in with you that first night.”
Sylvia suddenly felt like she was a ghost. Whatever was going on between Joseph and his mother… well, it was no concern of hers. “I can assure you, ma’am, I’m quite comfortable with the task given to me.” That was a half-lie. She would be way more comfortable not knowing what a shitass Alexander Sheen was before she met him. Nothing says life choices like volunteering to sleep with a shitstain on society in the hopes of getting damnable information out of him. But like Sylvia had told Joseph, men tended to spill more than their seed in bed. Not to mention Sylvia had no problems going through a man’s wallet when he was in the shower. That’s how I made my living before being picked up to work at the pleasure house. Internet ad? Check. Sex drunk fool snoring in bed? Check. Fat wallet now devoid of cash he would never miss? Check, check, check!
“If you don’t mind, Ms. Rogers, I’m prepared to swear you in as a member of this investigation. This includes me swearing to uphold the department’s end of our deal.”
Clean record, here Sylvia came!
Chapter 8
Joseph
“Josef!” the loud and demanding voice of Verónica Montoya echoed through the large and spacious living room of Montoya Manor. “Have you seen Rafael?”
He looked up from his game of cards with little sister Reina. The nineteen-year-old’s silky black hair jerked up at the sound of her mother’s voice. Relax. She’s yelling at me this time. His step-mother had that effect on everyone, even when she was in a chipper mood. On Fourth of July weekend, when half of the extended Montoya clan was meeting up in Lake Oswego for food and fireworks? Verónica was a mess trying to run her household.
“I have not seen him, no.” Verónica’s oldest son would show up whenever he damn well pleased. Rafael would saunter into his childhood home, acting like the hottest shit because he managed to land another account for their father’s international investment firm. He really, really loved making these announcements in front of Joseph, who had been blocked from inheriting any part of his father’s legacy after Rafael reached puberty. Something about legitimate heirs being more important than half-gringo bastards. Lo que sea.
Verónica entered the living area, heels clacking, skirt riding up her toned thighs, and extravagant nails lightly combing her curly brown hair. She looked around the room as if she didn’t see two children she raised already sitting there. “Dónde está Rafael?”
Reina dramatically rolled her eyes in her mother’s direction. “Hermano said that he’s not here, eh?” she said in Spanish. Like her mother, she preferred to speak Spanish whenever possible, even though she was also a native speaker of English. “He’s probably out polishing that ugly car of his.” When her mother left the room, Reina looked back at her older half-brother. “Yours is way cuter.”
“You’re the cute one.” Joseph held up his cards. “And good at avoiding all the chaos in the kitchen.” Here’s to being the two kids who can’t cook.
“Why you always gotta be so nice?” Reina was still a baby as far as Joseph was concerned, but even he had to admit that she was growing into a young woman’s body. I can remember the day they announced the pregnancy, let alone the day she was born. Joseph was already a teenager by the time his youngest sibling entered the world. He had been grateful it was a girl. His younger brothers had never been interested in a relationship beyond “you’re from a time of our father’s life before his marriage” so having a baby sister who adored him from the day she was born was a nice change. To this day, Reina was the one he got along best with in the family, outside of their father and abuela, Juanita.
That woman rolled her wheelchair past the living area now, her grim face softening when she saw her grandchildren. “Josef,” she barked. “Where’s that ungrateful son of mine?”
“Pa’s at a business banquet. He’ll be home soon.”
“And my even worst grandson?”
“With Pa.”
Scoffing, Juanita wheeled herself back to the kitchen where she would spend the next two hours yelling at the help and her stupid daughter-in-law over the horrendous enchiladas they always made for American Independence Day. She was the reason Verónica told her sons to never marry a Salvadorian woman. “Bitter pendejas, all of them,” she would say after her fourth margarita of the day. Juanita was the only member of the family with non-Mexican ancestry, and the blood sometimes boiled when cultures clashed.
Still, Joseph would take this over his mother’s cold home any day. In fact, he had chosen it a long time ago.
It started when he was six years old, living
in a quiet house with his emotionally distant mother. Genevieve took more than adequate care of her son, but she reached a point where she was tired of being a law clerk and decided to go to the police academy. As a single mother, she decided it would be impossible to juggle a school age child and being a police officer at the same time. So she presented her young son with a choice. He could either live with his anxiously German grandmother in Vancouver, or he could go live with his father full time.
The Montoyas, particularly Horatio and Juanita, were more than happy to welcome the oldest son of the new generation home. I only saw my mother during Christmas and my birthday, and even then, I didn’t miss her that much. The Montoyas were the ones who showed him what it was like to have a warm home full of boisterous laughter as they drove home from galas and discussed what private (Catholic, of course) school to send the children to. Even Verónica, who already had born Horatio’s two other sons, didn’t seem to care that there was another boy in the manor. Not until he grew up, anyway.
Joseph lived in that house until going off to college. He even went by the name Montoya – although he didn’t legally change it until he was eighteen – at school. As far as he had been concerned, he would go into the family business, have a friendly rivalry with half-brother Rafael and have an amicable relationship with his step-mother and her constantly visiting relatives from Mexico City.
Then he joined the age of majority.
The news hit him before he had time to prepare. As he readied to start a business and accounting degree at his college of choice, his father sat him down and told him the harsh reality that had been coyly kept from him for the past ten years: he would never inherit. Rafael would be trained to take over the family business, and Joseph could do as he pleased. Away from the family.
I was still a teenager. A reactionary one. What better way to say a big fuck you to the family that raised him than by chasing after the mother who was already eyeing a promotion to sergeant? Joseph changed his major to criminal justice and never looked back.
Damaged Goods Page 6
