by J K Ellem
Then he found that spot just at the base of her skull, the little groove between the joints where all her stress and tension lay hidden. He continued, increasing the pressure of his fingers and thumbs, melting away her tiredness. Clare’s mind drifted, thinking about him, about last night. She could feel the slow burn of arousal, a warm seeping heat that started in the pit of her stomach then spread lower. She shifted slightly on the chair, spreading her legs slightly, allowing herself to indulge in the moment.
Shaw worked his hands lower, to her shoulders. Clare could feel the heat intensifying, deep inside her, a wildfire spreading unchecked, threatening to grow out of control. Then came the hunger, a niggle at first, slowly building into something ravenous.
Clare leaned back into him, resting her head against his waist as he worked the front of the shoulders, pressing tight muscles and caressing sore tendons.
Without even thinking Clare reached up, took his hand and guided the tips of his fingers to the top of her chest. With her other hand she started unbuttoning the top of her shirt, slowly at first. She guided his hand inside her shirt, her eyes still closed, relying purely on touch, willing him until the front of her shirt lay open. She could feel her breasts swell tight against her bra, straining to be touched. She arched her back as he slid a hand inside each cup and began to massage her breasts, tender caresses that grew more vigorous.
Her skin seared with the heat of his touch, his fingers digging into her flesh, rubbing and twisting each nipple, stretching them to the threshold of pleasure and to the brink of pain.
Clare groaned, rubbing the outside of his forearms, strong, hard, rippled with muscle.
She urge him downwards, further. She didn’t care or feel ashamed. Why should she? She just wanted sex, stress-relieving, unashamed sex. Last night he had awoken a hunger that had lain hidden for too long, unfed and dormant. Now she was ravenous and wanted more. A lot more.
She wanted someone else to take control for once. Someone else to take the authority from her, to reverse roles. Every day she had the power, the authority, and for once she wanted someone else to control her.
Clare stood, turned and pulled Shaw towards her and kissed him hungrily, biting his tongue, his lips, her teeth roughly against his, a tinge of blood mixed with the hot wetness of her mouth.
He responded, pushing her back against the desk. Wrapping an arm behind her, pulling each breast out with his other hand. They hung heavy and swollen. She drew him into her and wrapped her legs around his waist. She felt a granite rod press against her groin, vertical, the mast of a ship, rigid and massive.
She tore at his clothing and in seconds he was naked.
She dug her fingers into the back of his head, willing him lower and he ravaged her, his lips, tongue and teeth devouring her breasts, swallowing them almost whole. Clare threw her head back and moaned. He forced her back further, the desk shuddered hard up against the wall and she placed both palms behind her on the desk to keep her from falling backwards.
Her fingers found the handcuffs on her belt behind her on the desk. Without turning around, she unclipped them expertly with one hand, sprung one manacle open, swung it around, slapped it on Shaw’s wrist and locked it tight.
“What the—” He stepped back as Clare pushed off the desk.
“Do not resist. It’s against the law,” Clare said, her voice husky.
She pulled Shaw toward the open door of the holding cell, then pushed him inside and hard up against the bars, locking the other handcuff around one of the steel bars.
Clare stood back just out of his reach and admired him for a moment. Then she slowly undressed while all the time she held his gaze. She desperately wanted him inside her, but she wanted to savour each and every moment. She stood beside him and placed her hands on the bars, spread her legs and arched her back so her buttocks pushed outwards.
Shaw went to enter her from behind, but she placed a hand on his chest stopping him. “No, not yet.”
She was feeling sinful, greedy, and selfish. For too long it had been about everyone else. Now she wanted it to be about her. She wanted a man to do what she wanted, what she told him to do, to obey.
She turned and faced the bars again, spread her legs a little further, the petals of her womanhood engorged and glistening. She glanced over her shoulder. “Your mouth first.”
Shaw paused, as though he didn’t understand at first. Then he smiled.
“Do it until I tell you to stop,” she commanded.
He knelt behind her, one arm stretched above him handcuffed to the bars.
Clare shifted slightly making sure he could reach her in the manner she wanted him to while still being handcuffed.
She felt her cheeks pull part, her core, completely open, gaping, and vulnerable. First she felt his hot breath on her, a scorching desert breeze across her unfurled orchid. Then fingers delicately spread her lips apart pulling back the tiny hood of flesh before the tip of his tongue lay siege to her in long slow swirls.
Clare gripped the bars tighter as waves convulsed through her. She couldn’t breathe, all the air had been sucked out of her lungs, out of the entire room. Her juices flowed, the tap of her own wild pleasure turned fully on. She pivoted towards him and draped one leg over his shoulder, opening herself even wider, making it easier for him to bury his mouth deeper into her. He responded, licking her harder, the coarseness of his tongue dragging long slow tracks across her sensitivity.
He bit into her, not harsh, but not playfully either, teeth and lips tugging and sucking at her petals, her furnace building, a rolling wave, an uncontrollable unfurling of years of neglect and loneliness melding together into one unearthly climax. Then she felt fingers slide deep into her, back and forth, bringing her to the brink, his tongue unrelenting.
Clare screamed as all her nerve endings exploded at once as she tensed, gritting her teeth, her limbs coming apart at the joints, his tongue moving faster, rougher, unrelenting, his fingers a frenzy.
Then a wave lifted her in one painful torrent and threw her into oblivion.
27
They got dressed quickly. Clare couldn’t remember the last time she had felt this good, this alive. The sex with Ben was both intoxicating and acted as a detox as well, purging the past, clearing the cobwebs and dust that had gathered over the dormant years.
She had the authority but lacked confidence, confidence in herself, in her sexuality. Absence of any decent man over the years had dulled her. Before Ben, she felt wilted, barren, now her oasis had been watered, replenished and she was thriving.
She thought that after their initial sex, she would get it out of her system, a lustful fling with a younger man, then she would move on. But as she watched him get dressed she doubted that.
She clipped her handcuffs onto her belt, the metal still warm to touch from his skin.
Even now looking at him, she wanted him again. There were other ways with him she wanted to explore.
She did her best to straighten her wild and tussled hair. He had fucked the living daylights out of her, she would be sore in the morning, but it would be the good kind of soreness.
“I want to head back to Emily’s. Make sure she’s alright.”
Clare nodded and lifted a set of keys off the wall. “Here take these.” She tossed the keys to Shaw.
He plucked them from the air and looked at them. “What are these?”
“There’s an old Ford Bronco out the back, in the shed. Used to belong to the previous sheriff who drove it for about twenty years. Had no real use for it, they gave me a new police SUV when I started.”
“Does it still work?”
“I wouldn’t be giving you the keys if it didn’t. I start it up every few weeks, just to keep the fluids running and battery turning.”
“Thanks.” Shaw finished dressing under the watchful gaze of Clare.
“All the sheriff’s decals have been removed, but it’s still got the police two-way radio in it. You can reach me on my portable or here
in the office when Alice is in.”
They went upstairs and grabbed their jackets. Clare began locking up then returned to her desk just to check her emails one final time. She scrolled through them, deleting a few, junking others. Most of them were police bulletins that Alice would take care of in the morning, if she came in.
Then she saw an email from the Colorado Department of Transport and her heart sank. They had also closed the western road on the other side of the mountain. It was too treacherous with the ice and now the snowstorm. Both roads in and out of Echo Mountain were closed until conditions improved.
“Damn it,” she said.
“What’s up?”
“We’re cut off. On our own. Both roads are closed, no one can get in and we can’t get out.” Clare was disappointed. It meant Denver PD weren’t coming back up in the morning. She found a later email from Dan Reynolds confirming it too. Then her excitement jumped as she read further, he had attached the DNA report on the body.
They had found a match.
“Aren’t you going home?” Shaw stood in front of her.
She looked up at Shaw, a smile on her face. At last she had finally got a break on the investigation. “Denver got a match on the body of the young girl.”
Shaw came around the desk and pulled up a chair. “Who is it?”
Clare opened the attachment. It was one page, like a scan of an official document. In the top left corner was pinned a passport-size picture of a girl, sunken eyes, short dark hair with a straight fringe. She looked scared as she stared at the camera.
Clare’s eyes darted down the lines of the report, trying to fathom the document.
“Syrian,” she said. The girl was a refugee, originally from Syria. Her name was Saya Azrak. She had arrived on the Greek Island of Chios with her family from Turkey after fleeing war-torn Syria. Her family had paid Turkish smugglers to take them across the Aegean Sea to Greece, but the boat capsized and Greek Coast Guard had plucked them out of the sea.
Clare remembered watching on the news a few years back the exodus out of Syria of hundreds of thousands of families fleeing the war, all struggling to reach Eastern Europe. Many of them never made it, drowning in the crossing.
Shaw sat alongside Clare and read the report.
The girl and her family had been processed through one of the many centres that had been set up to cope with the refugee crisis. They were photographed and luckily DNA samples were taken.
“How the hell did a young immigrant girl from Syria end up dead and buried here?” Clare said.
Shaw pointed at the screen. “There. It says she went missing two days before her family were granted asylum, just before their new papers were issued.”
It was true, the report listed the girl as missing. No trace, she just vanished from the processing centre.
“It happens a lot.” Shaw sat back and Clare turned to him.
“What do you mean, it happens a lot?” Clare could feel her anger rise. She understood that people do just disappear into thin air. There were thousands of missing persons reported each year. Children vanished just walking a few hundred yards from school to their front gate, wives who went shopping but never returned. Foul play was the main reason. But how does a child disappear from a refugee camp where there are fences and security guards? Some of these places looked like Guantanamo Bay, Clare thought. It didn’t make sense.
“Clare, it is a known fact. Over ten thousand child migrants went missing in Europe last year alone. Migrants make the perfect target. They’re homeless, stateless, no one would miss them. Most of the time they flee their country without any passports or official papers. No one knows who they are. Perfect targets, like I said.”
Clare couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Perfect targets?”
“Human trafficking. I have a few friends in Immigration and Border Protection. They told me Europe during the refugee crisis was a haven for criminal gangs. They’d take the children and put them into child prostitution, slave labor, or worse, sex slavery.”
“But this is America. That doesn’t happen here.”
“What, you think it just happens in Third World countries? Believe me, it goes on a lot here.”
She turned back to the screen, not wanting to accept what she was hearing. “It does not explain how she ended up here. In Colorado. In my town. Maybe she was adopted?”
“More like kidnapped, then sold.”
Clare stared at the girl’s mournful face, trying to picture how it could be the same person as the tortured, beaten body they had found buried beneath the snow. How could a young child who was innocent, loved and cared for by doting parents, now be lying dead on a steel gurney in a cold room in Denver? How did this happen?
Clare turned back to Shaw, “Look, you go. I’ll stay and lock up.” Clare wanted to do some research, find out more about this little girl. She wanted to call Dan Reynolds and see what he thought. She knew it wasn’t her investigation anymore, but she owed it to the little girl with the haunting scared eyes, eyes that drilled right into Clare’s soul.
“Don’t stay too long, you might not make it home.” Outside it was dark, windy and thick with a curtain of falling snow.
Shaw placed his hand on the front door but paused. “Clare?”
Clare didn’t look up from her computer, her mind suddenly preoccupied. “Yep.”
“Keep your gun close by.”
Clare looked up and frowned, puzzled but also touched that he was concerned about her. “Always do.”
“No, I mean keep it close by, all the time.”
Clare pushed back her chair and walked over. She looked into his eyes and felt a pang in her heart. His boyish good looks could melt any snowstorm. “What’s wrong?”
“You’re a good person, Clare. You have a kind heart. But there’s something bad in this town, someone who hasn’t really shown themselves fully yet. I don’t want any harm to come to you. Keep your gun near.”
“On my bedside table every night,” she said. “And a few others around the house, in good spots.”
He nodded. “Be careful. Keep your cell phone with you and your portable radio.”
She reached up and touched his face. God, something like this never happens to me. It always happens to other women, younger women, better-looking women. She kissed him on the mouth, full, hard, lingering. It was cold and bleak outside, but on the inside she felt warm and fulfilled. “I will,” she whispered, “because I haven’t finished with you yet.”
* * *
The street lights glowed through the windshield as Shaw drove downtown. Much to his surprise the old Bronco kicked over with the first turn of the key. It felt solid and powerful, the rugged tires and brutish V8 engine pushed the vehicle purposefully at an easy pace, churning a path through the snow and ice on the road. It had a full tank of gas and the interior, even though a little dated in brown and cream, was comfortable, and the heater took the edge off the freezing air.
He turned at an intersection and drove past McKenzies Bar, one of the few places still open, its neon sign out front a beacon through the haze of snowflakes. There were a few cars parked in the lot, big serious SUVs, and for a moment Shaw contemplated pulling up for a bite to eat. The urge to get back and talk to Emily made him press the gas pedal a little firmer and he drove right past.
A few minutes later he turned into Emily’s street and pulled up to the curb a short distance from her driveway. He killed the engine and lights and sat in the darkness. The downstairs lights were on, but he couldn’t see any movement. He didn’t know if Emily was just paranoid about her safety or she really did have cause to be. Either way he wasn’t being told the entire story. Someone was following her and even if Clare wasn’t going to confide in him about her past, he had a fair idea of who it was. The police could handle it, it was their job. What he didn’t understand was why the same person had followed him today up to Al Beckett’s house on the ridge. What he hadn’t told Clare was that the same person he chased on t
he ridge was also following Emily Bell. She needed to know as the sheriff of the town, but he needed to talk to Emily first. He wanted to hear it from her.
Shaw watched the house and wondered if he should just go, just grab his rucksack, drop the key in her letterbox and leave town. Even if he wanted to leave he couldn’t, the roads were closed. Maybe in the morning, or as soon as the storm passed, he would. Yet something was niggling at him. He felt a chill about the town beyond the snow and ice, something malevolent in the background, just out of sight, something he couldn’t see no matter how hard he looked.
He let out a sigh of exasperation and started the Bronco, kicked it into gear and pulled into Emily’s driveway.
28
It had taken Shaw about ten minutes under the scalding hot water to finally get some warmth back into his body. He dried himself off, wrapped the towel around his waist and stepped into the bedroom.
He stopped dead.
Emily Bell stood in the middle of the room, looking at him. Her face was hard and callous. A gun was held casually in one hand at her side, cold and metallic.
“What were you doing in my house?” Her voice was even and firm. She patted the gun against her thigh impatiently.
Shaw did what anyone would do. He lifted both hands in the air. Instantly he felt the towel loosen slightly around his waist. It still covered him, but only barely. “I wasn’t in your house, Emily. I’ve only been there when you invited me in last night.” The towel around his waist slipped further.
If Emily noticed she didn’t show it. Her eyes were locked on his. She slowly brought up the gun, levelling the front sight on his head. “You’re lying,” she said venomously.
Her hand tightened around the grip, her finger closing around the trigger. The diminutive schoolteacher had changed completely. What stood in front of Shaw was a focused, hardened woman who knew how to shoot a handgun. She rotated the gun slightly inwards to compensate for the recoil from a one-handed shot. Something you only get taught.