Queen of Humbolt

by Tagan Shepard

  “Because I’d have something that could be used against me.” She swallowed hard, planning her next words carefully to protect her exposed heart. “I’m valuable because I don’t care about anything.”

  “You care about the women you save.”

  Sloane said it so matter-of-factly, so plainly, that Marisol’s heart raced. Two days ago she had been convinced Marisol was the lowest scum on earth. Now she was defending Marisol’s goodness against her own denials.

  “And they use that against me. They’re not about to fall on their own sword.”

  Sloane spread paste down Marisol’s back, nearing the waistband of her jeans again. Her hand detoured along her side and Marisol ached for her to keep it here. To pull Marisol close and hold her. She knew it was the wrong time and the wrong place to crave Sloane’s touch, but the more of it she got, the more she wanted.

  “Dominique knows,” Sloane said after a long silence.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I talked to her once. After I left you on the balcony at my Inaugural Ball. I ran into her in the bathroom.”

  Sloane slid the jar’s lid back into place. Marisol thought of that night. How she’d had too much tequila and talked too much. How Dominique had watched her while the limo took them home. Had Marisol indulged less that night, she might’ve suspected Dominique’s gaze had held meaning, but then if she’d indulged less she’d never have had the nerve to talk to Sloane in the first place.

  “That explains a lot,” Marisol replied with a laugh. “She’s very perceptive.”

  “Do you think she told the people in Washington?”

  “Absolutely. She’s a loyal friend, but she’s devoted to them.”

  “Why?”

  Marisol pulled her shirt down and turned back to Sloane. “I’ve been trying to figure that out for a long time.”

  “But you still trust her?”

  Marisol nodded, keeping her eyes locked on Sloane. She hadn’t been this close to her in so long, she wanted to feel it. To take in her warmth and her electricity. After so long in the shadows, it was strange to be out in the open like this. To let Sloane see her for what she was. She forced herself to stay here, to enjoy this time.

  Sloane held out the jar, letting Marisol take it from her hands. “I think that’s everything.”

  Marisol knew it was wishful thinking, but she imagined she heard a reluctance in Sloane’s voice.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Sloane came awake all at once, curled up on the couch, her head on one arm and her knees tucked to her chest. A leather jacket was draped across her, keeping out the chill of the evening air that touched her cheeks. She couldn’t remember where she was or how she’d gotten there. She recognized the jacket and the smell at the collar—sweat and a musky cologne—was comfortingly familiar.

  Fighting to understand, she struggled to find what had woken her. There had been a sound, a horrible sound. It all came flooding back then. The sound had been in her dream. The sound of Jordan’s body falling to the ground after she’d shot her. She swallowed hard as she pushed herself upright, expecting panic to overwhelm her at any moment.

  To her great surprise, she was calm. Sloane had never thought herself capable of taking another’s life. She thought it would affect her more. That it would break her. Damage her. The truth was that she felt no remorse. She had killed Jordan to save her own life and, more importantly, to save Marisol’s. Looking at it from that angle, she knew she had done the right thing. She would do it all over again if it meant keeping Marisol alive.

  That thought did make her panic. The jacket fell off as she twisted, looking for the woman who had saved her life. The room was darkening, the setting sun cutting oblique orange angles through the pair of high windows and beaming down like a heat lamp over the mattress, making the white sheet jumbled on its surface glow like a flame.

  The remains of their dinner of beans and rice, papaya and bottled water had been cleared away while she slept, as had the first aid gear. Packed away in the bag at Sloane’s feet, ready for a quick getaway. The green goo had made Sloane skeptical at first, but the way Marisol sighed while she rubbed it into her bruises gave it credence. Marisol had been moving less stiffly even before Sloane had finished. She had used most of the jar, but maybe they could get more before they went to the embassy.

  Picking up the jacket, Sloane brought the collar back to her nose. It was a bewitching thing, the scent of Marisol on the jacket. Equal parts softness and strength, just like the woman who wore it. Again Sloane’s eyes hungrily scoured the growing darkness. She wouldn’t feel safe until Marisol was by her side.

  Sloane sighed audibly when she finally spotted Marisol’s familiar shape on a stool by the door. Her back was rigid and her gaze fixed on the door, opened a crack to peer through with one eye. Her shoulder leaned against the wall and one boot wedged in place, holding the door open. She held the gun loosely in one hand.

  Sloane crossed the room assuredly, her bare feet making no sound on the concrete floor. Still, when she approached, Marisol’s head turned to look at her over one shoulder. Sloane looked into her eye and felt her world peeling slowly, gently apart.

  “I didn’t want to wake you,” Marisol said, her voice pitched low in the quiet evening. “Help is coming, but it’ll be a few more hours.”

  Dimly Sloane remembered Marisol’s heated phone call on the burner cell. Whoever was coming to collect them was moving slower than Marisol wanted. Sloane should have felt the noose tightening around her neck, but she didn’t. All she felt was how those eyes made her knees weak.

  “We have to lie low a little longer,” Marisol was saying in her voice like honeyed whiskey. “You should lie down. The mattress is clean enough. Get some rest. I’ll keep watch.”

  Sloane didn’t respond. She knew she didn’t have to from the way Marisol was babbling and how her eyes shined. Instead, she reached out and took Marisol’s hand. She raised Marisol’s cold fingers and pressed a kiss against them, noting their silkiness despite the callouses. Marisol allowed herself to be led across the room without protest.

  Stopping at the foot of the mattress, just outside the pool of light from the skylight overhead, Sloane looked into Marisol’s eyes for a long, still moment. She searched them wordlessly, looking for what used to make her detest this woman so much. What made her want, more than anything else, to take her down.

  It was gone. There was nothing there but a woman who allowed herself to be tortured to protect vulnerable women. There was nothing but a woman who had risked everything for justice. A woman who was the embodiment of everything Sloane found honorable and good. But that wasn’t why she looked into Marisol’s eyes now. She wasn’t thinking about the spy or the renegade. She was thinking about the woman. The beautiful woman who was so flawed yet so perfect.

  She reached forward, taking the hem of Marisol’s T-shirt between trembling fingers. They did not break eye contact until the shirt coming off blocked Marisol’s face. Even that heartbeat of a separation was agony for Sloane.

  When Sloane was dressing Marisol’s chest wounds earlier, she had studiously kept her eyes on her task. She hadn’t let them stray to the pale blue bra that pushed Marisol’s moderate chest into enticing cleavage. The first time Sloane had been a nurse—this time she would be a lover. This time she would devour every inch of The Queen of Humboldt with her eyes, then her mouth, then her entire body.

  Sloane reached out and unbuckled Marisol’s belt. She was close enough now to hear the hitch in Marisol’s breathing, or maybe it was her own breathing she was hearing, expectant and unsteady. When the button and zipper were unfastened, Sloane lowered herself to her knees. Her fingers trembled and she fumbled the laces and straps of Marisol’s boots until they were loose enough for Marisol to kick off.

  While she pressed the tight leather down over bony hips, Marisol slipped her bra off. Just like that, she stood naked before Sloane. Everything inside Sloane wanted to reach out and touch. The bruises marr
ing that beautiful flesh had coronas of green that could have been healing or could have been the remnants of the paste. The cuts were repairing.

  Sloane’s eyes devoured Marisol. From her square jaw and broad shoulders, across the points of her prominent collarbones. She had small, perfect breasts that made Sloane’s mouth water. Her skin glowed bronze and gold in the sunset. Her abdomen and arms rippled with a musculature Sloane could never hope to attain. In the years that had passed since she’d last seen this body, not an inch of flesh had changed. Her lovers before and since Marisol had all been on the feminine side, but she saw again the attraction of an athletic woman’s frame. Marisol did not waver under her inspection, nor did she preen, she merely stood and allowed herself to be studied. Sloane’s eyes drifted lower until she could no longer stand still.

  Sloane turned her back, closing her eyes as Marisol tugged the tiny zipper at the base of her neck. The simple sound of teeth releasing as she unzipped was earth-shatteringly loud. When the cooling twilight air touched her skin, her breathing faltered.

  Lips seared into the flesh of her neck and Sloane gasped. The lips pressed higher and she tilted her head to allow full access. Marisol’s fingers slipped under the fabric at her shoulders, sliding it loose, unhooking her bra in the same fluid motion. It fell freely away from her now completely bare torso, catching at her wide hips.

  Slowly, sensuously, Marisol’s arms wrapped around Sloane’s body. Everywhere her fingertips grazed was left bare of skin and nerves. Sloane shivered as she was stripped to nothing but desire. When she thought those hands would settle on her aching breasts, they veered off course, sliding down her fleshy sides to the fabric bunched at her hips. With a flick of her wrist, she loosened the dress and it fluttered to the ground.

  Marisol pressed the length of her body against Sloane’s back and groaned. Simultaneously, she sunk her teeth firmly into the base of Sloane’s neck, smothering the sound she made until it became a growl reverberating through flesh. It was animalistic. Intoxicating in a way that made Sloane’s mind go completely blank and her knees wobble. With the first hint of movement, Marisol released her, but there was an unmistakable edge of discontent in doing so.

  Silently and gently, Sloane pressed a hand into Marisol’s shoulder, backing her up to the mattress and then down on top of it. Without protest, Marisol slid back to lie flat on the sheet. For one heart-stopping moment, Sloane lost her nerve. Her body urged her forward and her mind was just as eager, but she had a flicker of doubt. Not doubt of the woman lying before her, but of herself. Doubt that she could provide what her lover needed. Doubt that she could control her own body. Doubt of everything she had ever done to bring her to this moment. Looking into those brown eyes, melting into the dying light, the doubt evaporated.

  Lowering herself to hands and knees on the lumpy mattress, Sloane crawled down the length of the sinewy, broken body beneath her. She felt the heat radiating off Marisol’s skin. She stopped, straddling Marisol’s hips. Marisol’s eyelids flickered shut. Her hands slid across the pale skin of Sloane’s thighs, trying to draw her closer still.

  Sloane bent at the waist, leaning forward until she hovered inches away from those full lips. She ran one long, manicured nail across the square jaw, letting it come to settle on Marisol’s lower lip. The split that had been there the last time they kissed was healing, the skin fresh and pink and fragile. Sloane gingerly pressed her lips to the spot, tasting the newness of the flesh.

  Then her need exploded out of her and she couldn’t hold her body in check a moment longer. She pushed forward with her whole body, swallowing Marisol’s mouth in an aching kiss and tenderly moving her body down into the mattress. Marisol met her kiss with equal passion. Their tongues battled and danced. Their chests heaved in unison, pressing hard nipples into soft flesh. Everything that was real and solid in the world blinked out of existence. Their two bodies, pressed so tightly together, were a single entity.

  Sloane forced a hand down between the layers of sweating flesh. Marisol broke the kiss with a shout, tipping her head back, the tendons in her neck straining through her skin. Sloane needed to provide pleasure beyond anything she had ever done before. She took joy in every whimper and every groan Marisol whispered into the night. It was more life giving that the blood that coursed through her veins or the oxygen that inflated her lungs. It was everything. It was Marisol.

  The scream that tore through Marisol’s throat was louder, more guttural, more intense than anything Sloane had ever heard and it sounded equal parts pleasure and pain. The whites of Marisol’s eyes showed stark and bright between her hooded lids. Her scream was slow to die, but quick to build again under Sloane’s insistent touch. The second time left Marisol panting and spent, the sweat-soaked sheet clinging to her shoulders.

  Without warning, Marisol flipped Sloane onto her back and she slipped into paradise, Marisol’s weight settling on top of her. Her fiery kisses dotted Sloane’s skin. Lips trailed all over her, across her jaw, down her throat and to the swell of her collarbone. Marisol would have continued her journey down, but Sloane stopped her, cupping her jaw and pulling her back up so they were face-to-face.

  “Don’t go. I want you here. I want to look at you.”

  Sloane wrapped her arms around Marisol’s bruised shoulders, holding her close in the cocoon of her embrace. Running her fingers through the short strands of Marisol’s hair, Sloane felt the frayed and lonely threads of her life knitting together. Sloane had spent many nights in the arms of other women. None had made her feel like this. Marisol’s bangs, curled by sweat, dropped in front of her eyes. Sloane swept them aside so her eyes could drink their fill.

  There was a moment of complete stillness. They looked into each other’s eyes, neither seeking nor requesting anything more than this simple moment of peace. After all they’d been through together, after all they’d discovered about the world and each other in the past days, they craved nothing more than stillness. Then, without speaking, they moved together. Sloane’s eyelids fluttered closed, shutting out everything except Marisol’s touch.

  Marisol was surprisingly gentle, holding her as if she were precious and fragile. In that touch, Sloane realized how fragile she really was. It shocked her that Marisol, of all people, would recognize and understand that. The few times she’d allowed herself to imagine what it would be like to be with Marisol again, she had never imagined her to be this tender. Her heart swelled to bursting at the majesty of the woman above her.

  Every stroke of her fingers, every press of her lean broken body, every kiss she scattered over Sloane’s rapidly heating skin seemed like an eternity. A lifetime of ecstasy that Sloane would lose herself in if she could. It built so fast it was upon her before she had time to prepare and she shattered into a thousand glittering pieces and was put back together again.

  Sloane’s release was silent. It came in a flow of tears until she finally allowed herself to feel again. She hadn’t realized how thick the walls she’d built around herself had been until Marisol stepped through them—not crashing through as Sloane would have expected—but sweeping them aside as though they had never existed.

  The walls had been constructed over a lifetime of rigidly held rules and self-denial. Of settling for women who did not make her feel for an instant how this woman made her feel every second. Of forcing her life into a box that, while comfortable, had never been large enough for two. As the waves of pleasure receded, Sloane realized her life would never be the same. There was room for Marisol now.

  “Brin?”

  Sloane was still crying, but she smiled as she look into the questioning eyes above her. There was doubt there for the first time. She reached out and lay a hand on Marisol’s cheek.

  “I’m here.”

  Marisol didn’t ask if Sloane was okay. Didn’t question her or demand more. She simply slipped to the surface of the mattress behind her and pulled Sloane close, tucking their naked bodies together. A chiseled yet soft arm wrapped around her and Sloane f
elt herself drifting toward sleep. She felt so safe. As exhaustion overtook her, the sound of Marisol whispering her newly beloved nickname rang in her ears.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  “Brin, wake up.”

  Marisol whispered as close as she could to Sloane’s ear, but she worried even that was too much noise. At least she woke without making a sound, her eyes clear as soon as they fixed on Marisol’s face.

  She leaned back in, cupping her hand over Sloane’s ear and speaking in a low voice that was quieter than the sharp hiss of a whisper. “Get dressed. Quick and quiet.”

  To her credit, Sloane complied unquestioningly. Despite the danger, Marisol found it hard not to watch that pale skin in the moonlight. She still couldn’t quite believe what had happened. Even waking up with her arm wrapped around Sloane’s naked body was hardly enough to convince her she hadn’t dreamed the whole thing. Before she could get too lost in that thought, she had heard again the sound that had woken her.

  In the distance, the hum of an idling engine followed by the crunch of rocks under heavy boots. It could have been a villager wandering the town in the middle of the night, or it could have been The Bishop’s men. Either way, they had to get out before they were seen. She’d slipped across the room like a shadow. She hadn’t seen anyone outside, but the sound was enough. She’d only stopped to grab her clothes and tug them on before she’d woken Sloane. They didn’t have much time.

  Checking the back door, Marisol saw the path to the tree line was clear. Either the enemy hadn’t had time to locate them yet, or they didn’t think to cover the back of the workshop. The Bishop obviously didn’t have a huge operation here in Bogota. He didn’t need one. His reputation was enough. These men were not as well trained as those in the States. If Marisol could take advantage of that, they just might live.

  Sloane was dressed and reaching for their bag of supplies but stopped when Marisol shook her head. She had the gun and the burner cell phone. They were close enough to Bogota that they didn’t need anything else. The bag would only slow them down and its rattling contents might give away their position.