“Wait.” Brooke spanked some of Gabriel’s welts with the crop. “You like being punished, don’t you, Gabriel?”
“God, yes,” he groaned again.
“See, Adrian?” Spank. “It hurts so good. It stimulates the skin, makes the blood rush to the skin’s surface, charges your kundalini with kinetic energy.”
Adrian had to smile that she remembered his tantric talk. He mumbled, “Gabriel’s dick is tingling with kinetic energy.” His mouth watered, hovering above the mushroom head of the penis, but the dominatrix wouldn’t let him act.
Instead, she spanked Gabriel’s ass some more. He hissed in air, posed with one hand gripping the back of his neck, swiveling his hips to get the maximum enjoyment from the saddle horn. When she reached around to pinch Gabriel’s nipple, Adrian would stand still no more. He lunged upward to nibble on the neglected nipple. It was amazing, sensuous, delicious sucking on such a well-built man, and Gabriel fucked the saddle horn with renewed vigor.
“I’m going to—” Gabriel gasped.
Adrian shut him up by sinking his bursting cock down his throat. Now all that came from Gabriel’s windpipes was a long, drawn-out groan of agonized bliss as Adrian’s mouth lovingly drained him. Adrian milked jets of delicious creamy jism from the dick while Brooke kept up a pitter-patter of tiny slaps with the paddle. Adrian could tell by the breeze against his chin that she was taking pleasure in batting Gabriel’s full balls. Further, she was apparently so turned on by the men she was rubbing the little triangle of fabric that covered her pussy against Adrian’s shoulder as he guzzled his friend’s spurting penis.
“That’s it,” she encouraged, her spanks coming lighter now. “So…good…”
But when Gabriel came back to life with a few gasps and gulps and pushed Adrian away, Adrian wasn’t in any mood to be ordered about. Grabbing Brooke, he practically flung her on her back atop another saddle rack. Her pink Stetson went tumbling to the floorboards. She leaned back with her palms on the saddle’s skirt, watching avidly with shining eyes as Adrian divested himself of his boots and pants. He liked that Gabriel watched lazily, with sleepy eyes. He liked that Gabriel was admiring his ass as he positioned himself astride the saddle. It was easy to yank aside the tiny fabric strip and impale Brooke with his ravenous cock.
“Ooh, I like being taken this way,” Brooke purred, locking her ankles together at the small of his back. “You’re such an animal. That really turned you on, sucking on Gabriel like that.”
“Of course it did,” he ground out between clenched teeth. He found that he could grip a stirrup and get better traction that way. This was the ideal place to mount this saucy buckle bunny. “You’re going to get fucked good, Cattle Annie.”
“Is that so?” Brooke whispered now, nibbling lightly on his lower lip. She swayed her hips back and forth so he could drive his cock deeper. “Because I have a feeling you were so turned on by making love to Gabriel with your mouth and making him fuck that saddle horn that you’re not going to last very—Oh!”
A monumental orgasm gripped Adrian so strongly he was afraid something would break. Wave after ecstatic wave flooded his body with bliss, and Brooke milked his cock with her athletic pussy walls.
“That’s good, that’s good, oh, so good,” she whispered, urging him into her with the heels of her little boots.
Adrian had been so taken by surprise by the force and suddenness of his orgasm, all thought of tantric oneness went out the window, and he pounded Brooke mercilessly, his hips twitching with every spasm. She was wide open for him, gulping air with each contraction of her inner pussy muscles, massaging his cock with her pussy.
They must’ve stayed there on top of that saddle for several minutes before Adrian thought to breathe, blink, and look around. He disengaged and stood, wobbly. Gabriel had already mostly dressed—he didn’t seem in a rush to button his shirt. Brooke swung one foot over the cantle and set both boots firmly on the floor. Adrian reached a hand out to help her up.
“I need to know,” she said instead, looking him directly in the eye. Just as they’d gazed at each other while fucking in the mineral pool. “When will you be going on another mission overseas?”
Adrian exhaled. “I don’t have any particular urge to go on any mission in the near future,” he admitted. Missions were the ruin of any stable relationship. He had no doubt that it was his constant absence that had driven Lyla back to her ex-husband. “Why do you need to know?”
Brooke tilted her head thoughtfully. “You know I’m in love with you. Why would I want you to go overseas on some deadly mission where you risk your life just to retrieve some damned sultan’s ring? At the same time, though…I don’t want you to give up a big part of your life. You’d wind up resenting me if you gave up your military contracting for me.” Exhaling, she forced a giggle and looked to Gabriel for assistance. “Listen to me. Already planning his future for him. I’m going to drive him away before I even give him a chance!”
“Adrian’s his own man,” Gabriel said with certainty. “He wouldn’t be telling you he didn’t want another mission just to please you. He came to that conclusion on his own.”
Brooke looked back to Adrian. He felt awkward under the microscope, but he supposed this was how mature adults in mature situations talked. He spent most of his time in mosques, speaking impeccable Arabic to earn the trust of targets and potential assets. He was more accustomed to praying to Mecca, chewing the stimulating plant khat, or dancing in filthy discotheques than he was accustomed to serious talk with a woman about relationships. “Is that true? Are you thinking of giving up your dangerous overseas life?”
“Thinking of it, yes,” Adrian said truthfully, buttoning his own jeans. “My last trip to Damascus didn’t end up so well, and I’ve never been one of those suicidal maniacs like Nathan Horowitz, flinging himself off cliffs, or strafing militant strongholds. I never had a death wish. I just fell into this after my service in the Marines, because I got an art master’s degree on a fellowship at Princeton. Someone told me that with my knowledge of artifacts I could whore myself out working for governments, retrieving priceless treasures, returning them to their governments, to museums.”
Brooke looked misty-eyed and more than a bit sad at this news. “Yes. It does sound so noble when you put it like that. Probably worth getting tortured over once in awhile.”
“No!” cried Gabriel. “Nothing is worth getting tortured over—not some damned inanimate object, anyway! I don’t mind coming out and saying blatantly—can’t you just quit the dangerous part of it without quitting the interesting part? You flew out here to examine a coin that Xandra had found. Couldn’t you just fly around examining things, authenticating things, without the dangerous part? Make someone else go retrieve the things, someone less valuable.”
“Yes,” Brooke agreed heatedly. “Someone less valuable to us.”
Adrian was about to say that, along with Brooke, he was becoming very interested in the workings of the cattle ranch, but someone pounded on the tack room door then.
“I know you’re in there!” yelled Sol Greenspan. Adrian knew Sol from dealing with Xandra and the coin. The lawyer was a very amusing, fiercely protective, and sleazy sort. Sleazy lawyers were the best. They knew all the ins and outs of things. “Manuel told me he saw things that can’t be unseen looking through that window! I don’t want to suffer the same fate, but I have something urgent to impart to you!”
Adrian waited until Brooke had buttoned her jeans and her cowgirl shirt to unbar the door. The lawyer with the bad comb-over came whistling into the tack room, bringing a rush of frigid air. “What’s so urgent?” Adrian asked.
Sol held his hand out in the “stop” signal toward Gabriel and Adrian. “I know you had every right to arrest that fucktard Wade Rivers, or Thor Heyerdahl, or whatever he’s calling himself. You did a clean sweep of the house, DNA matched, casings matched, cigarette butts, yadda yadda. You had at least ten legitimate charges to keep him in the pokey for a good long tim
e, or several months, whichever comes first.”
“Yeah?” Adrian didn’t like the sound of this. “What happened—he bust out?”
“Close. He made bail. I know you requested it to be set at two hundred thousand dollars, but guess what—someone had even better taste in lawyers than you guys, because ole Dirk Hausenstrauss there had bail reduced to fifty thousand, which he easily made this morning.”
“Fuck!” yelled Gabriel. He grabbed the first thing he saw, a bridle, which he smashed against a saddle.
Now Sol made a picture frame out of his hands. “I’m just telling you this as a courtesy warning. I’ve known about ole Wolfgang Katzenjammer there for years. He’s a thorn in everyone’s side, spewing racist remarks like a volcano, breaking and entering every house between here and Moab. No one’s ever been able to nail him for much of anything. So I got to warn you. He’s going to have it out for you, rifling through his house, taking all his weapons, confiscating his racks and hides. Julian might have to fear the most because he’s half-Navajo.”
“Yeah,” Gabriel snarled bitterly. “Adrian should be safe, with that lily-white skin of his. I resemble my Italian grandfather.”
Sol said, “I think all three of you have some shit creek action going on. And in case you’re thinking what I know you mercenary types like to think, winging this guy isn’t going to mitigate your predicament. You’re gonna have to be on the lookout at every moment.”
“For what?” Brooke asked. “I mean, what’s his style? What does he like to do?”
“Short-sheet the bed?” Gabriel wondered.
Brooke giggled. “Egg the lodge?”
Sol waved them away. “I’ll have to be honest. There have been a few unexplained rapes where his name was bandied about. That seems to be his style. They’re always talking about founding a white breakaway nation. So before you even protest, Opie—you’re the man, you’re the protector, you and Smoky the Italian Bear here. I don’t want to hear any high school protestations that you’re not even going steady and you barely know her. All right? This is your perp and your responsibility to keep my McQueen girls safe.”
Adrian stood next to Brooke and even took her hand. “Oh, I’ll do that, all right. No problem there.”
“Good,” said Sol, jutting out his chin stubbornly. “I’m glad to hear that. Because there’s at least one ranch hand named Manuel who will have to go wash his eyes in bleach after witnessing your shenanigans, which were definitely not high school level. So don’t pretend you don’t know each other.” He walked to the door and didn’t turn around as he pointed behind him.
“And that saddle. Bleach that, too.”
Chapter Twelve
“Adrian was in Medina once, having just retrieved some artifact,” said Nathan Horowitz. The group sat around tall tables at Camp Walden’s outdoor deck, taking a sunny break after a couple of hours skiing. Gabriel was sitting surveillance on Wade Rivers’s house, determined to arrest him for any fresh crimes he might commit. “What artifact was that again, Adrian?”
“Are you going to tell that embarrassing story?”
Adrian pretended to be shy about telling the story, but Brooke already knew him so well she could tell he was dying to hear the story again. “The more embarrassing the better,” she said.
“It was a Coptic cross,” Adrian filled in, to get Nathan going on the story. “I was going to return it to Ethiopia.”
This was what Brooke feared. That Adrian would miss the glamor and danger of his former job. Who wouldn’t want to be skulking down glamorous back alleyways in Medina, becoming a hero in Ethiopia for returning a cross? It sounded like a win-win job, if one left out the painful or potentially lethal parts.
“Right, right,” said Nathan, “a cross. So he’s tear-assing away from whatever church he nicked it from when a crowd of dudes in black robes starts pounding down the flagstones behind him.”
“Oh, God.” Adrian rolled his eyes but shot Brooke a heartwarming smile. He had been very relaxed and open since the encounter in the tack room. Brooke imagined that he’d come to a sort of conclusion. Since deciding he didn’t want to be a “suicidal maniac like Nathan Horowitz,” his disposition had been downright sunny. Still, Brooke worried that he’d miss the action-packed life of the antiquity retrieval specialist, or whatever the hell he was. Nathan had already told her that Adrian was the top expert in the world, so she doubted he’d be satisfied hanging around animal psychic conventions in Utah.
Nathan continued, “So Adrian’s running his ass off. It’s plain they know that he knows they’re back there, so no need for any pretenses. Only problem is, they’re running faster. And faster. Adrian’s used to leaping over fences and crashing through fruit stands like they show in the movies—”
“Slipping on banana peels,” Adrian inserted. “Yes, that happened once,” he told Brooke in answer to her quizzical look.
“But he just can’t shake this little group of three pursuers. They’re obviously very well-trained at pursuit, and he’s figuring they probably know all the martial arts, too. In fact, just as he’s leaping to the top of a moat wall, preparing to dive into some sludge to make a swim for it, one of the men reaches into his robes about to throw one of those ninja stars at him, right?”
“You’ve watched too many James Bond movies,” Adrian said fondly, but he didn’t stop Nathan from continuing.
“So these three ace mercs have got him pinned on this wall, and one reaches into his robes and pulls out”—Nathan looked around the table to make sure he had everyone’s rapt attention—“a camera.”
Everyone gaped, and Xandra was the first to cry, “A camera? What, he wanted to document Adrian’s thievery?”
Nathan explained jovially. “They weren’t men at all. The three women hadn’t seen him take any cross, just leave the church. They were young, modern women, very interested in Western ways, and when they saw Adrian’s flaming hair they simply had to have a photo standing next to him.”
“So they were groupies, essentially,” stated Julian.
“Oh, absolutely,” Nathan affirmed. “They were all over him like police sergeants on a jelly donut.”
Adrian inserted, “I wore a keffiyeh covering my head, too, so I have no idea how I stood out from the crowd.”
Nathan grinned. “It certainly wasn’t your lily-white face.”
“No, not at all.” Adrian shocked Brooke by reaching over to take her hand. He had the passionate, tantric look in his eyes, holding her gaze steady.
“Don’t you miss that?” she asked him quietly while the rest of the gang made corny references to Adrian’s white skin.
He shrugged. “In a way. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. But I think Gabriel had the right idea yesterday. There’s nothing to stop me from flying around evaluating antiquities. I don’t necessarily have to be the one breaking into the safe to get them.”
This warmed Brooke’s heart more than anything. She was so happy, she was afraid to rely on it. Relying on something positive meant taking it for granted. And one could be very thrown for a loop when some disaster occurred to upset a happy home. It was much better to remain skeptical and be prepared for the worst.
“Hey, Adrian,” said Doug, meandering over to their table while looking at his cell phone.
“I just got a weird message from Cody. He was doing a perimeter fence check and found two more breaches that definitely weren’t there the day before yesterday.” He looked up from his phone. “Sounds like your man is on the move again.”
“That tool bag.” When Wade Rivers was mentioned, Adrian wrenched his hand from Brooke’s and frowned something fierce. “Gabriel’s got eyes on him as we speak, but the moron’s probably already aware he’s being watched. I’d like some face time with him myself. I can probably accomplish a lot more by not going through the official channels.”
“Yeah,” Nathan agreed, “but the blowback on Gabriel wouldn’t be worth it. You don’t know how much I wanted to just whack Xandra’s stalker, b
ut that’s one unfortunate side effect of going mainstream.”
Xandra nodded. “Can’t just run around whacking people.”
That’s too bad. It might come in handy in a case like this. Brooke rose to go to the bar and get more sparkling waters. She liked how quickly Doug had taken to Adrian. Xandra had told her that Doug had had a difficult time accepting Nathan at first. Doug had given Nathan a raft of shit, accusing him of being a money-grubbing lothario only out for Xandra’s lodge income. Then Doug had haplessly, and continuously, thwarted Nathan’s efforts to apprehend a guy who had been breaking into her suite.
Doug didn’t seem to have any of these problems with Adrian. Brooke was relieved. They had seemed to bond together over the cattle operation that Xandra had deeded over to Doug. Adrian seemed a little ashamed of his privileged upbringing in New Canaan, Connecticut—his father was some kind of steel magnate—but one of the obvious benefits was that he was very comfortable on a horse and had taken a keen interest in the ranch aspect of the Triple Play. That was fine with Brooke. If she was going to run the office there, it would be nice to see her boyfriend during the day sometimes.
My boyfriend. Brooke nearly laughed aloud as she paid for the drinks. When was the last time she’d had a real boyfriend? Sure, she had partied with the fast crowd in Charleston. As a lingerie model, she’d collected many admirers. But she’d never admired any of them back passionately enough to think of him as a boyfriend.
Nathan stood at the bar next to her, and she found herself asking him a question. “Nathan, can you tell me…Was it difficult to adjust to life here in Utah? After living such an action-filled life in Africa, don’t you find it too dull here?”
Nathan smiled wryly at his sister-in-law. A stunningly handsome and virile man, he had mostly run precision assaults against crazed warlords in central Africa, working for the same company as Adrian. Brooke knew that right before deciding to come to the Triple Play, he’d lost his partner when their plane was strafed by some missiles. To quit that life had been a fairly cut and dried issue for Nathan. “At times.”
Woman on Top [McQueen Was My Valley 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Page 12
