With Extreme Pleasure

by Alison Kent

  It took several minutes for him to relax, for his breathing to steady, his heartbeat to settle, and his goose flesh to disappear, before he realized he was feeling her body heat and not just that of the bedding.

  Things got kinda weird then, what with the two of them being in bed there together, and her warming him so nicely the way she was, and him remembering the way she’d stared when confronted with his wash cloth and his body. He hadn’t come up against that expression in a very long time. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d run into it ever.

  It was a wanting kind of look, a hurting for something kind of look, a look that tore at something inside of him that even he didn’t like knowing was there to be torn. He sure didn’t like thinking that he’d disappointed her, left her unfulfilled, but that was exactly the sense that was eating at him now, and making it hard to get to sleep.

  It had been awhile since he’d slept all night with a woman, since he’d gone to bed wrapped in one’s arms and woke up with her wrapped in his, his dick at the ready, her pussy hot to trot. Because those were the only women he’d slept with. The same ones he’d fucked.

  He’d never had a woman he had no plans to touch warming him the way Cady was now—with the heat of her skin seeping into the blankets, and her soft breathy snores, and the tiny sounds she made when she stretched and turned and rolled.

  And this woman, who had no one in her corner and nowhere to go, was the woman who tomorrow he was going to have to find someplace to dump so he could hit the road for home. Yeah, that made him feel like a first place winner. More like a first class mother fu—

  A window shattering explosion of fiery light and booming thunder cut off everything King had been thinking and sent him into survival mode. He knew Cady had bolted upright, and he dived toward her, taking the both of them and all the covers to the floor between the two beds.

  She screamed, but she didn’t fight. She ducked as completely beneath his body as she could, leaving him to the brunt of the raining glass and debris. He felt the scatter shot of detritus like bullets pummel the blanket where it draped him, felt shards strike his uncovered shoulders and head.

  In seconds it was over, smoke billowing into the room through the frame where the window’s panes had blown out. He tossed off the blankets and urged Cady to her feet, finding her shoes on the extra bed and his boots on the floor, then sprinting for the room’s exit.

  Coughing against the smoke, Cady grabbed her backpack and laptop and sweatshirt, following him into the hallway and the chaos of half-dressed people, strobing lights, and the hotel’s blaring fire alarm.

  “What happened?” she called over the panicked voices and crush of bodies.

  Fearing their separation, he took her by the upper arm and pushed their way through the crowd. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Fuck orderly fashion. He wanted out of here and now, because there was something telling him he wasn’t going to like what he was going to find outside, and the sooner he found it, the better.

  They reached the end of the hallway in time to see the first fire engine blow into the parking lot. King shoved his way through the knot of hotel guests congregated there and pulled Cady behind him through the door and outside into his worst nightmare.

  “Son of a fucking bitch!”

  His Hummer was a burning shell. Orange fire licked through what was left of the vehicle. Black smoke rose in foul-smelling columns. The rest of it, including his supplies and all of Cady’s possessions, was strewn around the parking lot in pieces, the result of the blast that had turned their room’s window into similar shrapnel.

  “King, you’re bleeding.”

  “What?”

  “You’re bleeding. You’ve got a piece of glass sticking out of the back of your head.”

  Too bad it wasn’t sticking out of his eyeballs so he wouldn’t have to see this. He reached back and nudged the embedded shard. “Ouch. Shit. Ouch.”

  “Come on. Sit down.” She led him to the sidewalk and forced him to sit, dropping her bag and computer in his lap before shrugging into her hoodie. “Hold my stuff. I’ll see if there’s an ambulance on the way, or if any of these guys are medics or whatever. Don’t move until I get back.”

  He watched her go, knowing he wasn’t going anywhere. Not anytime soon, and not under his own steam or in any vehicle he owned, goddamn Hummer garbage shit blown everywhere.

  Soon enough he’d need a ride to the hospital for stitches. And then to the police station to find out who the fucking hell had blown up his truck. But for now, he’d do as she’d told him and sit.

  Cady was right. It was hard being King.

  Twelve

  Her backpack hefted over her shoulder, her hands stuffed in the pockets of the hoodie she was so glad she’d grabbed from the room, Cady paced a rut in the speckled linoleum in front of the emergency room cubicle where King was being stitched up. She’d been checked out in the cubicle adjoining, and released, no damage or dangerous smoke inhalation.

  King was the one who had taken the hardest part of the hit. King was the one who’d lost what looked like half of his blood. King was the one who’d protected her when all she could think to do was sit up and scream.

  If she’d taken off on her own this morning, she couldn’t imagine where she’d be now, if she’d be anywhere at all, or if she’d be dead. Because she knew without a doubt that what had happened to his SUV had nothing to do with King and everything to do with her.

  And yet he’d saved her before saving himself.

  She didn’t know why she was sticking around. She knew he wouldn’t want to see her. But she couldn’t make herself go without knowing he was okay.

  Then again, neither one of them would be leaving until they’d talked to the authorities. The doctor who’d looked her over had relayed that order from the investigator standing near the ER door.

  She was doing her best to ignore him. She knew his type, had dealt with men cut from the same cocky cloth during the investigation into Kevin’s murder. They knew it all, knew better than everyone around them, knew a lie when they heard one—even when the lie was the truth.

  She was not looking forward to the grilling she knew was coming. She should’ve just stayed in New York, recovered from her beating, and moved on. Except moving on hadn’t worked in all the years she’d been doing it. Why she thought things had changed…

  But then she stopped thinking about the cop who was waiting, stopped wondering whether or not she’d ever be able to move on, because the curtain to King’s cubicle opened and the doctor who’d been attending to him told him, “Good luck,” and walked out.

  Cady rushed into the small partitioned room and watched as the nurse finished dressing the back of King’s head. When the other woman nodded, Cady came closer, leaning down close to King’s ear. “Hey. It’s me. Are you all right?”

  “Sure,” he mumbled from where he rested facedown on an inflatable donut-shaped pillow. A four-inch circle on the back of his head had been shaved to the scalp. “As all right as a bald man can be.”

  The nurse rolled her bright brown eyes, but couldn’t stop from grinning, her teeth white in her dark chocolate face. Cady didn’t even try. “You’re not bald. Just looking like a mangy dog.”

  “Thanks. That helps.” He reached out a seeking hand, and she took it. “What about you? Any damage to your jugular or carotid?”

  “Not even to my hair,” she said, laughing when he groaned.

  “That’ll do ya, Mr. Trahan,” the nurse said, packing away the rest of her supplies. “Your discharge papers have the doctor’s orders on them. If you insist on traveling while on pain meds, you’ll have to get your girl here to do your driving for you.”

  “Since my truck just blew up, that’s going to take some doing on her part,” King said, leaning more on Cady than on the nurse as they helped him to sit. “I think my face went to sleep while I was lying there. I can’t feel a thing.”

  “Your face went to sleep because of the anesthetic th
e doctor injected before pulling that window out of your head.” The perky nurse showed them both the shard of bloody glass in the bottom of an aluminum pan.

  Cady gasped. “Wow. I had no idea.”

  “He’s lucky it hit where it did,” the nurse said, staring down at the huge projectile. “He jokes about your carotid and jugular. This thing could’ve sliced through either. Head wounds are big bleeders, though, so we gave up on trying to save his shirt.”

  Cady didn’t know what to say. It was all she could do to meet King’s eyes and mouth, “Thank you,” without bursting into tears. But just as quickly she found herself telling him, “I’m so sorry,” and then whirling to leave before he could say a word in response.

  This was all her fault, and as soon as he realized that, he was going to send her packing—unless he did worse. Why give him the chance when she could leave under her own steam before he forced her out?

  She was stopped from completing her mad dash by the cop who’d been waiting. “Miss Kowalski? Mr. Trahan?”

  King had been frowning at the paper scrub top he’d been given to wear, his T-shirt having been cut away during his examination, and was still frowning when he looked up. “Who wants to know?”

  Cady wanted to laugh and ask him if it wasn’t obvious that they were about to be grilled and accused and covered by a blanket of suspicion and doubt.

  Just because the man was wearing a designer suit, his silk tie barely askew, his white shirt gleaming, his leather shoes lacking a single scuff mark, and all of this in the middle of the night, was no reason to think otherwise.

  But the cop surprised her by giving King a hand off the table and looking at her as he asked, “Are you two up for a very early breakfast?”

  King gave the other man a thorough once-over. “Depends on who’s buying and what you want in return. Oh, and whether or not you can rustle me up a shirt made out of something besides paper towels.”

  “I think I can do that,” the cop said with a smile.

  “Good,” King said, pulling the disposable scrub top gingerly over his bandaged scalp. “Because everything I had with me just went up in flames.”

  “Wait a minute,” Cady said. For King to be so compliant, his brain must’ve been deadened along with the rest of his head. Holding the strap of her bag, she demanded of the man not under the influence, “Who are you?”

  His smile took on the look of molded plastic. Too shiny and fake to be worth anything. “I’ll fill you in on all of that once we’ve got a pot of coffee in front of us.”

  Cady shook her head. “You’ll fill me in now, or I’m not taking another step.”

  “Then let’s do this in the cafeteria at least.”

  King finally came around. “Sounds like you don’t want an audience for this conversation.”

  “If it is a conversation,” Cady added. “He hasn’t said a word about what he wants besides breakfast.”

  The cop’s brown eyes darkened. His smile faded completely away. “You can’t think you wouldn’t have to answer questions about what just happened to your vehicle.”

  “I figured I would’ve been asked a lot more of them by now, come to think of it.” King pushed by Cady and the cop, and looked up and down the ER corridor. “So where’re the troops? Where’s the bad cop to go with your good cop?”

  “I’m not a cop,” the man told them. “But you are going to talk to me or I’ll bring them swarming down on this place to see that you do.”

  Cady stayed silent and where she was, holding tight to her heavy backpack should she need to it as a weapon. His gaze fixed on that of the man between them, King remained in the corridor unmoving—the corridor that she realized was unnaturally quiet and absent the hustle and bustle of only minutes before.

  There were no patients calling out for help, no gurney wheels rattling, no rolling crash carts or orders shouted, or pounding feet. Even the nurse who’d been attending to King had vanished, as had the doctor from before.

  And where were the other victims of the explosion? It wasn’t like King had been the only one hurt, or Cady the only one who’d been transported to the ER to be seen to. Something was going on here, and she didn’t like it one bit.

  She took matters into her own hands, needing to do something before King’s wooziness sent them down a path that ended in another trip to the ER—if not the morgue. “We’ll go to the cafeteria. But we’re not going anywhere else. Not without a whole lot of explanation and documentation and answers from you.”

  The man-who-wasn’t-a-cop’s smile came back. “That I can do.”

  “Fine. Just don’t think this is going to be the start of a beautiful friendship or anything.”

  “Friendship? No. But we’ll see about the anything,” he said, then indicated she and King should go first.

  She shook her head, gestured with her chin for him to get moving. “You lead. We’ll follow. I prefer having someone behind me who’s got my back, not someone waiting for a chance to stab it.”

  At that, the man laughed, a strangely chilling sound that had Cady wondering if she, the peasant, should’ve left things alone, and let the royalty call the shots.

  Thirteen

  “My name is Fitzwilliam McKie. You can call me Fitz, Will, or Liam,” the man told them. “I answer to anything that gets close.”

  King, Cady, and the ridiculously named Fitzwilliam McKie were sitting in the corner of the cafeteria that was the farthest from the door and the food service line. McKie had insisted.

  King had insisted the conversation not go beyond an exchange of names until he’d downed a sausage biscuit and two cups of coffee, strong and black.

  It wasn’t that he was hungry, but he was halfway to being stoned.

  Thank God Cady’d had the sense to keep them inside the hospital’s walls, else who knew where the hell they’d be by now, King going along for the ride because the bright lights and sirens made the trip in his head more fun.

  “Okay…Fitz.” King grabbed the first choice the other man had offered them. “Who are you? What do you want with us? And how did you manage to clear a busy hospital ER?”

  “And can we see some ID?” Cady added. She’d ordered a cup of hot tea that had gone cold three times over, but had skipped ordering food. “Something that doesn’t look like it came out of an arcade machine?”

  That was Cady. Suspicious to the end. And obviously still stuffed with last evening’s cheeseburgers and onion rings.

  “The ER wasn’t that busy so it wasn’t hard to clear. Small town. Small emergencies.” Fitz looked from King to Cady and back. Cradling his coffee mug in one big hand, he leaned into the forearm he’d braced on the table. “Most of the explosion victims were routed elsewhere.”

  “You mean you routed them elsewhere,” King said as he lifted his drink and finished it off. Fitz didn’t respond with a yay or a nay or a bite me, so King prodded. “You routed them elsewhere because you wanted to talk to me and Cady alone.”

  The other man still didn’t acknowledge King’s accusation. What he did was say, “I know who hit your truck.”

  The blow came out of nowhere and left King stunned. At his side, Cady gasped, nearly knocking over her tea, righting it with shaking hands. Fitz lifted his gaze slowly, taking in one of them then the other, as if how they responded would determine what he did or said next.

  King recognized the power play, and he wasn’t having any of this man’s bullshit. He wanted to get home and gorge himself sick on crawfish. And this suit with too many names was not going to stand in his way, even if he did work for some X, Y, or Z Files government agency.

  He glanced toward the empty food service line, hoping to steady his skyrocketing blood pressure, wondering if staff members used to grabbing muffins or fruit or cups of coffee on their breaks were being kept out at gunpoint, or maybe by an alien technology force field.

  Then he glanced back at Fitz, pissed. “You know who hit my truck. And you’re doing what about it?”

  Fitz shook
his head. “Nothing yet.”

  “Right. Because you’re not a cop, and you’re not sharing what you know with those running the real investigation.”

  McKie didn’t say a word.

  “Well, Fitz.” King paused to make sure he had the other man’s attention. “That’s a load of shit.”

  “Especially because you still haven’t told us who you work for,” Cady put in, taking hold of King’s hand where his fist rested on the table beside his empty plate. “Or what you want with us.”

  “Actually, Miss Kowalski, I want you.”

  King felt his hackles rise. He squeezed her fingers that had gone numbingly cold. “You want her for what?”

  “Wait.” She pulled her hand free, reached across the table, and grabbed McKie’s wrist, as if she needed his truth more than King’s protection. “Does this have something to do with Kevin? And the trial?”

  Fitz nodded. “And the men who’ve been watching you since it ended.”

  Cady pulled away, brought both hands up to cover her face, and sobbed once. King kept his fists on the table, his gaze on the crumbs scattered over his ugly beige plate. He wanted to reach for her. He wanted to offer her something.

  But he didn’t do anything, because he didn’t know what to do—or know her. She was a girl who’d stowed away in his truck. That was all.

  “I can’t believe it,” she finally said, dropping her hands to her lap. Her eyes were red and wet, though no tears spilled free. “After all this time. I knew it was happening. But I didn’t think anyone would ever be able to prove it. Or do anything to make it stop.”

  “I can prove it,” Fitz said, and when he left it at that, turning his mug in a circle on the Formica tabletop, King picked up the gauntlet.

  “But you’re not going to make it stop.” The words were hard to speak, and held the weight of very bad news.

  Fitz didn’t look at King, but glanced toward Cady instead. “Not immediately, no.”