by M. S. Parker
Even as I toweled dry, however, I knew it wasn’t enough to help me sleep. I’d need something else for that, and it wasn’t much of a mystery as to what would work best, or where I could find it. I wrapped the towel around me and crossed the hallway to where Clay waited in the house’s one bedroom.
Brianne had offered to sleep on the couch, whether out of some sort of sense of restitution for the lies she’d told or because she knew that I would sleep better if I was next to Clay. Hell, she could have made the offer for some other reason that I hadn’t thought of yet, I didn’t know, but neither Clay nor I were about to turn the offer down.
“Did that help clear your head?” Clay asked from where he was stretched out on top of the most hideous green paisley bedspread I’d ever seen. The vision on top of that bedspread, however, was divine. Wearing only a pair of dark purple boxer briefs that left little to the imagination, Clay looked good enough to eat.
I, however, had something else in mind.
“A bit.” I walked around the bed and sat down on the edge, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off of him. “But I was thinking that no matter how many showers I take, I’m going to be thinking about all of that all night. I can’t turn my brain off.”
He pushed himself into a seated position. “I’m listening.”
“There’s something you could do to help me forget about all of this crazy, something that you promised you’d do at some point.”
He looked puzzled but willing. “What’s that?”
I leaned toward him and put my mouth right against his ear. “I want you to fuck my ass.”
“Fuck.” He whispered the word, but there was no denying the desire in that one syllable. “It would be my honor.”
“All right then,” I said, trying not to let my nerves show. “Tell me what to do.”
Clay and I had had sex that was spontaneous and sex that was a little more planned. Logically, I’d known that anal sex – particularly the first time and with such a size difference between the two of us – would need preparation, but the extent of it still surprised me. All of it made me appreciate Clay taking the time to ensure that this would be an enjoyable distraction for both of us.
Despite my appreciation, anxiety still had me glancing over my shoulder as the bed dipped with Clay’s weight. I was laying on my stomach, naked, so when he ran his hand the length of my spine, I felt the heat all the way through me, and it eased the worst of the nerves.
“We’re going to take this as slow as you need to,” he said as he pulled my curls over my shoulder and then leaned down to kiss the space between my shoulder blades. “If at any point you want to stop, just say the word.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I didn’t want him to think that anything he heard in my voice meant I was having second thoughts.
“I’m going to talk you through this,” he continued. “Let you know each step as I’m doing it.”
I nodded again, then turned my head so that my forehead rested on my folded arms.
“Let’s get you relaxed first.”
The mattress shifted again, rising then dipping as he moved between my legs. He palmed my ass, spreading my cheeks, massaging the muscles with his thumbs. I gasped as his tongue ran along the seam, teasing my asshole even as his fingers moved down to slide inside me. I closed my eyes, letting the sensations wash over me. The pleasure as he stroked my walls, as his thumb made slow circles over my clit. The slick pressure of his tongue over that tight ring of muscle.
The sense of time thickened and congealed until it felt as if the world itself had ceased to exist. It was Clay and me and the web of pleasure snaking through my body. A body that barely felt real. The pressure low in my belly coiled and built until I was writhing, desperate for release.
“I’m going to start stretching you with my fingers now, sweetheart,” Clay said, his voice rolling over me like warm silk.
The fingers inside me left but reappeared a few seconds later a little higher. Already wet with my arousal, the tip of one pressed against my ass until it yielded. I gasped at the slight burn, but it wasn’t painful exactly. The deeper that finger went, however, the sensations shifted. Prickles of something like static electricity, painful but also not, somehow.
“Relax, sweetheart.” Clay kissed the small of my back.
I nodded and tried to remember how a physical therapist I’d had once had taught me to visualize each muscle and consciously unclench it.
“One more finger.”
I made a soft sound of protest, and he chuckled.
“Sorry about that, sweetheart, but trust me, if you think about how thick my cock is, you’ll appreciate it.”
I was fairly certain the last thing I wanted to think about at this moment was how big his cock was.
As Clay worked a second finger into my ass, his other hand dropped down to allow his thumb to sweep across my sensitive clit. Pain and pleasure fused inside me into one intense, explosive tangle that lit up every cell in my body.
The more his fingers moved in and out, stretching me, the more the fire inside me grew, consuming what I’d previously known as pain, as pleasure, and filling me with something else. My orgasm hit me without warning, without the sort of build-up I’d come to expect, and I cried out, my body stiffening.
“That’s my girl,” Clay murmured. He lightly bit down on the back of my thigh before removing his hands from between my legs.
I’d only just started coming down when I felt something blunt push against my ass. I blew out a breath and willed my muscles to stay loose.
“I told you you’d appreciate me using more than one finger,” he said. “I’m going to take this slow, but if you want me to stop, just say the word. You call the shots here.”
If I didn’t stop nodding all the time, he was going to think it was my only possible form of communication.
Any other thoughts I might have had vanished as he eased the head of his cock into my ass, making me catch my breath. I panted as he moved forward, my hands curling into the bedspread as I sought for something, anything, to help relieve this impossible sense of fullness. Except I couldn’t escape it, couldn’t lose myself in my head, couldn’t detach from it. It consumed me until I thought I would break…
…and then his voice was there, in my ear, in my head, filling me in a different way.
“You’re doing so well, sweetheart. Just keep breathing. Your body will adjust, and then I’ll make you fly.”
I could hear the strain in his voice, but that didn’t stop him. Nothing stopped him.
“It feels so good inside you,” he groaned. “I don’t know how long I’m going to last, but I’ll do my damnedest to make it good for you.”
I reached back and found his wrist. Wrapping my fingers around it, I managed to say, “You do. You always do.”
His lips brushed against my shoulder as I released his wrist and went back to clutching the bedspread. I still had no sense of how much time had passed before he informed me that he was all the way in, or how long he managed to hold still before nature took over and he rocked against me. One hand slid underneath me, and he braced himself with the other. Stroke for stroke, his fingers on my clit matched his cock, and at some point, I began to moan. Moans turned to cries which turned to wails and then I was shaking, soaring, and everything in my head became blissfully blank.
Twenty-Seven
Clay
Tess was still sleeping when I left the bedroom for the bathroom. The door was still shut when I came out ten minutes later. Since I’d taken clothes into the bathroom with me, I went out to the main room and let Tess rest a little longer. Brianne was already up, the bags under her eyes making me wonder if she’d slept at all.
She stood in front of a coffee pot, sipping from a mug that said “I love my pug.” I assumed she’d found it in one of the pastel yellow cabinets fastened to the wall above the stove.
“Morning,” I said.
The glare she sent my way had me hesitat
ing to ask for access to the coffee. “What?”
“The walls in this house are fucking thin, asshole.”
Heat flooded my face. “Oh.”
“Yeah, oh.” She stepped to the side and held out a mug with several lurid pink flowers on it. “You seriously couldn’t control yourself one fucking night? Bad enough the two of you couldn’t even sleep apart for one night.”
I poured myself some coffee, then added a spoonful of sugar. I let a few swallows of the hot liquid slide down my throat before addressing Brianne in a deceptively mild voice, “Sorry we kept you awake, but you’re the reason we’re here in the first place, so you might want to check the attitude.”
“I really don’t like you anymore,” Brianne said, sounding like a teenager again.
The toast popped up, and she picked it up, dropping it on a plate a second later. I opened a cabinet, looking for something to eat. For several minutes, we moved around each other in silence. From down the hall, I heard the bedroom door open, then the bathroom door open, close.
“If you hurt her, I’ll kill you.” Brianne’s voice was flat as she picked up her plate and carried it over to the couch.
I shrugged. “I figured that went without saying.”
She arched an eyebrow at me. “I figured I’d say it anyway.”
“How did the two of you manage to spend two weeks looking for me and not end up killing each other?” Tess asked as she came into the kitchen.
“Finding you was more important than putting him in his place,” Brianne said, scowling in my direction. “Get some coffee. Find something to eat. We’ve got a lot to cover today.”
I took a sip of my coffee before asking, “Does this mean you’re going to explain to us how a Red Care group ended up being taken hostage by the drug cartel you were investigating?”
Tess turned toward her sister, one hand on the coffee pot. “Please tell me that you didn’t endanger that entire group just to get close to the cartel.”
“Get your breakfast and sit down,” Brianne said with a long sigh. “I’ll tell you the rest.”
Neither Tess nor I had to wait long for Brianne to start talking, because as soon as Tess sat down, Brianne opened her mouth.
“Sofie and I have been together for four years. We knew it wasn’t allowed, fraternizing within the unit, so we’ve kept things quiet. No one else knows.” Bri made a face. “Or, at least, no one else knew. With things all going to shit, I have no idea what anyone knows now.”
For the first time since all this started, I saw on her face the toll her choices had taken. She looked tired, and not only physically. Her eyes, a clear aquamarine color, were duller than I remembered from just a couple days ago, and she had new lines around her mouth.
“I told Sofie that I didn’t want our relationship to affect the missions she sent me on, and she promised it wouldn’t, but about two years ago, she started holding me back from the more dangerous assignments. When this one came up, I insisted she let me go. We had a huge fight.”
I didn’t see what this had to do with anything else, but we were safe here, and we wanted answers. I might as well let Brianne tell things at her own pace and in her own way.
“Doing work with Red Care was a great cover. My team set up an alias–”
“Taylor MacIntosh,” Tess interrupted.
Brianne nodded. “Yes. A lot of our aliases have names like that, ones that can be for either men or women, so only a gender has to be added once things are more settled.”
Smart. These sorts of units had to operate intelligently, or they’d never stay secret, or survive. Sofie, it seemed, had made some improvements even from what I’d ever heard of groups doing.
“It was only supposed to be reconnaissance at first. Talk to the locals. Find out as much as I could without rousing any suspicions. Sometimes, local gossip yields as much or more than speaking to the people actually involved.” Brianne sighed as she set down her empty plate. “But, sometimes, that’s not enough. I started going out on my own, exploring, but never going all the way to the cartel’s headquarters. That’s all I intended to do. Then two more members of my unit showed up at the Red Care office. They said they had new orders for us. We needed to go all the way in, get specific numbers, other information.”
I stood and collected all of the plates and utensils, taking them into the kitchen. The main area was close enough that I could still hear Brianne talking as I washed up.
“It was only supposed to be the three of us going into the cartel’s neighborhood, posing as Red Care workers. We’d had it all set up when the location the rest of the group was supposed to go to fell through. At the last minute, they all decided to come with us. We couldn’t tell them no, not without risking our mission.” She hesitated, pain on her face and swallowed hard. It was several seconds before she continued, “We thought we could protect them. We were wrong.”
Tess reached out and put her hand over Bri’s. I knew it’d take time to completely repair the rift between them, but Brianne was clearly torn up about what had happened.
“The two people who died…” Tess began.
“They were the other two members of my team.” Brianne’s voice broke, and it took her a minute to regain her composure. “Shawn Marshall and Amberlee Connell. Those were their real names.”
My stomach clenched as the memories of bodies flashed through my mind. I could almost feel the heavy weight of them, smell the blood and underlying scent of decay. I’d been around dead bodies before, but dragging them into a vehicle, wondering if one of them was Brianne…those moments would continue to haunt me. I returned to my seat, wondering if I should stay up and occupied, or if the shadows would continue to be there, no matter what I did.
“The three of us spread out around the group when we went into the neighborhood, but we didn’t have any weapons, so when the cartel came at us with guns, we had to go. We couldn’t fight the way we would have if it’d been just the three of us. We tried to keep the others from getting hurt, drawing the attention to us and away from them.”
The words were coming more quickly now, as if now that she’d allowed herself to talk about things, she couldn’t get them out fast enough.
“They told us that they were going to kill two of us. Just flat-out said it, then walked out. They came back fifteen minutes later. Shawn and Amberlee put themselves at the front of the group, forced me to stay at the back. I argued with them. I didn’t want to be the one who…” She inhaled slowly, then let it out, but she didn’t look at either of us. “They knew…about me and Sofie. They knew, and they insisted on sacrificing themselves instead of letting me do it. I had to stay and protect the group as best as I could.”
“You did protect them.” Tess squeezed her sister’s hand. “You kept them alive and safe until we got you out.”
Brianne nodded, then seemed to collect herself. “Thank you, but that’s not what’s important right now. We need to focus on figuring out who’s behind all of this, who’s been pulling the strings. That’s the only way we’ll be safe.”
“Do you think someone tipped off the cartel?” I asked.
“I do,” she said. “The men who took us hostage tried to act like they were after a ransom, and maybe they were, but they wanted something else too. They kept asking us who we were, where we were from, what we did for a living, that sort of thing. The rest of the group thought that it was something the cartel would use to determine who were the most expendable, and we agreed with that assessment, but not for the same reason. We felt they were trying to figure out who they could hurt or kill to keep the rest of us in line, without killing the people their bosses wanted.”
“Weren’t you worried that fighting them would draw the wrong sort of attention?” Tess asked.
Brianne shook her head. “For this assignment, I requested an alias that had a background or occupation that would allow me to have at least basic fighting skills without blowing my cover. Taylor MacIntosh had a dojo that specializes in self-defense clas
ses. Staying quiet while my friends…it made sense for me to try to protect the others once Shawn and Amberlee were gone. When you guys came and got us out, I thought my cover was still intact.”
“But now you don’t think that,” I said.
“No,” she said quietly. “I don’t think that anymore.”
“Because they came after us.” Tess pressed her fingers to her temples. “That’s what it was, wasn’t it? They knew you were somehow linked to the escape.”
“Couldn’t that have been our fault?” I asked. “Tess and I were asking around about you. People who run this sort of massive business aren’t unintelligent.”
“I talked to the others in the group before they left the hospital,” Brianne continued. “Two of them said they’d overheard our kidnappers saying that I was the one their boss wanted answers from.”
“Shit,” I muttered.
“Yeah,” Brianne said, meeting my eye, “shit.”
“If Clay and I were walking into a trap, that means they know who we are too,” Tess said. “They know we’re connected.”
“That’s why I got you guys out of the country. You’re no safer here than I am.”
“It still doesn’t excuse drugging us,” Tess said, “but I can understand now why you felt the need to do it.”
“How did you know about the trap?” I asked.
“I have a friend at the airport. He called me about a private plane coming in from America. I saw the two of you get off and followed you.”
“Why didn’t you just meet us right when we got off the plane?” Tess asked.
I kept my eyes on Brianne as I answered for her. “Because if she followed us, she could find out where they were trying to lure us, which would give her a better idea of who she’s dealing with and where they’re based.”
“You used us as bait?” Tess asked, the hurt in her voice clear.
Brianne raised her head and looked her sister square in the eye. “You told me to stop protecting you. You can’t have it both ways.”
