“He’s hungry.”
She nodded. “I know. I was leaking a little and it woke me.”
She took the baby and settled on the couch, offering him a bare breast that he took with a small sound of pleasure. She leaned back as soon as he was happily latched, closing her eyes as she lay her head against the back of the couch.
“Have you heard from Megan lately?”
“No.”
“Do you think you will? I mean, she’s still checking all this stuff out, right?”
“Of course.”
She peeked at me. “You okay?”
I settled on the couch beside her and slid my hand across her bare belly. She rested her free hand over mine, reaching over to kiss my cheek lightly.
I wanted to ask her. A part of me desperately wanted to know the details of her relationship with Peter. Was it really just a one-night thing? Or was there more to it than that? Did she love him? Was she still grieving him like Megan grieved Luke? Or was it just a chance thing that caught her in a mess she couldn’t control?
But then there was this part of me that really didn’t want to know. Because if she was in love with him, that would always be this barrier between us.
I kissed her neck as the baby drifted off to sleep, his suckling growing lazy and intermittent. She sighed, moving her hand to my bare thigh.
I might not know what was in her heart. But I knew this, she was willing to share with me…and I fully intended to take full advantage of it until she reached that point where it wasn’t enough.
I slid my hand up her thigh, pushing it under the thin material of her nightie. She hadn’t bothered with panties, and my fingers were quite grateful for that. They slipped over her trimmed mound, slipping down to where her labia just poked out between her outer lips. I ran the tip of my finger just lightly over it, feeling the moisture that had already gathered there, the effect of just sitting on the couch beside me. That idea excited me more than anything she could say or do.
“He’s asleep,” she whispered, as I moved slowly over her jaw, making my way along her chin to her beautiful lips.
“Good boy,” I responded just before I tackled her mouth, taking possession of it like a jealous child wrapping his arms around his mother’s leg.
We kissed for a long moment, my fingers digging, searching for more than that little peek of labia. But then I pulled away and slipped the baby from her arms, laying him gently in the portable playpen set up across the room. She watched me almost shyly as I crossed back to her, the evidence of my arousal thick and heavy, pressing against the front of my shorts. She reached for me, sliding to the front of the couch, releasing my cock before I’d even stopped moving.
Her mouth was like a bow when her lips were pressed together. But when she let those lips fall apart, like they were now, they became a promise that made my balls tighten and pull up into my lower belly. There was this look that came into her eyes when her lips were that way…it made me nearly lose control each time I saw it.
And that tongue. She was so impossibly talented with that tongue. She might have been innocent when she first came into my bed, but she wasn’t now. She was a devil, an incredibly erotic devil, the way she used that tongue to touch the most sensitive parts of my cock. All I could do was close my eyes and hope that my knees didn’t give out.
I let her take the lead for a moment, let her decide how much she could take, how long she wanted to hold me in that hot, silky mouth of hers. I let her do her best to drive me out of my mind—something that she was very capable of doing. But when my control began to slip away, I couldn’t help but bury my fingers in her hair; I couldn’t help but feed her more than she had taken thus far. But she was a willing playmate, taking more and more until I could feel the muscles of her throat working against the edges of my cock.
It was…damn, there were no words for it!
It was all I could take, watching her swallow me and ask for more.
I pulled away and lifted her, flipping her over as if she was a pancake, but a beautiful pancake full of erotic surprises. I lifted the back of her thin nightie, exposing the perfect curves of her beautiful ass. I ran my hand over it, smacking her lightly a few times. She glanced back at me, a smile on that bow-like mouth. I kneeled on the couch behind her, guiding my cock to her cunt, sliding it along her moist lips, teasing her clit with just the tiniest bit of pressure. She pressed her hips back against me, begging me to fill her with my length. But I pulled back, waiting until her hips were still before rubbing against her again.
She gripped the back of the couch with both hands, soft moans slipping from her lips that spun around me, making me dizzy with need. I played with her until my own need refused to be ignored a second longer. At that moment, I thrust hard inside of her, filling her in one, quick thrust that made her cry out. But she pushed back against me, wiggling her little ass, encouraging the underside of my cock to rub hard against her clit. She was grinding into my pelvis, pleasing herself, as her movements sent wave after wave of pleasure through my body.
I leaned over her, tugging her head back to steal a kiss. Then I began to move, thrusting against her over and again, filling her and escaping as much as her responsive movements would allow me. I wrapped my arms around her waist, wrapped my body around her, my hips flying in air as friction made my cock as hard as it’d ever been, as her muscles tugged and pulled at me, begging me to come deeper, deeper, deeper. And then she screamed, her thighs quivering, her muscles going wild as they pulled against me, her orgasm racing through her entire body until I could feel tension in just about every muscles in her small body.
I tried to last; I tried to offer her more than one. But her movements, her body, her scent, her pleasure…it was all too much. I straightened up, ready to pull out since I’d forgotten, in my haste, that the condoms were all upstairs. But, at the last second, she pressed her hips hard against mine and reached back to grab my thigh, refusing to let me move away.
“Amber,” I groaned, but it was already too late.
I lost control, filling her with very ounce of desire that lived and danced along my spine. I cried out, once again melting against her body. And when it was over, we sort of collapsed sideways.
“You shouldn’t…” I whispered breathlessly.
“It’s okay.” She ran her hand along my thigh, our bodies still intertwined, my cock still caught partially inside of her. “The doctor prescribed the pill for me last month.”
“Yeah? But what about other things? Aren’t you worried about—?”
“I trust you.” She was quiet for a second, her fingers making a little pattern in the hair of my leg. “Besides, I want to be as close to you as possible.”
My heart did a little stuttering jump in my chest.
She drew a word on my leg. I thought I knew what it was, but I was afraid if I was wrong…
“You’re the first person I’ve ever felt like I could truly trust.”
“You can.” I kissed her neck. “I won’t hurt you if I can help it.”
“I know.”
“You and PJ…I can’t imagine what my life would be if you hadn’t come into it.”
“We certainly made everything exciting, him coming into the world the way he did.”
I chuckled softly. “You did.”
She was quiet for a long moment, her finger drawing that word again. I pressed my face to her shoulder, my eyes moving to the baby, just barely visible in his little play pen. I really couldn’t imagine my life without them, which was funny since there was a time, not long ago, when I couldn’t imagine settling down to the same domestic prison that so many of my fellow unit members had done. But now I could see the draw. To have Amber in my bed every single night for the rest of my life…now that was a dream in which I was afraid to allow myself to indulge.
“I never thought I would ever find someone like you,” she said softly. “I was so used to being on my own, to people wanting only one thing from me, that I thought I would always be alone, always have
to fend for myself. But then you, dragging me out of that trailer, insisting on buying me things, just taking charge of everything. I didn’t know what to do with all that.”
“I could have been a little less demanding.”
“No…I don’t think we’d be here now if you hadn’t done things the way you did. I was so stubborn that I’d be living in that piece of junk car of mine if you hadn’t taken charge.”
“You’ll never have to do anything like that, Amber.”
She nodded, her fingers still dancing on my skin. Then she grew still, leaning back into me.
“I love you,” she whispered so quietly that I almost didn’t hear her.
A part of me wished I hadn’t.
I carefully lifted her and carried her upstairs to the bedroom we now shared. I just wanted to hold her, to pretend for a while that she’d always been mine. That I wasn’t just sloppy seconds and that her love didn’t come from a sense of gratitude rather than true emotion.
Chapter 23
Amber
Time seemed fluid all of a sudden. Sometimes I would wake in the dark, and I’d think I was back in that trailer and it wasn’t Cole lying beside me, but his brother. But then I’d roll over and see the now familiar tattoo on his upper arm, the United States Marine Corp emblem, and I’d be filled with such a rush of relief that I couldn’t breathe for a minute. It happened during the day sometimes, too. I’d be in the nursery with the baby and hear the door close downstairs. He’d be coming back from the grocery store or from visiting with friends, and I’d be convinced that it would be Peter who’d come through the door. But it was always Cole.
I don’t know. There was this thing in the back of my mind that kept telling me that this was too good to be true. That a man like Cole couldn’t possibly want me as much as he seemed to. That someday it wouldn’t be Cole coming through the door, but someone—his sister, maybe—coming to tell me he wanted me out.
It didn’t help that I was completely dependent on him. I felt like that took his choice away. So I’d been searching for a job for the last week or so, looking on line and then slipping out during the day from time to time, making up excuses, to go on job interviews.
That’s what I was doing now, riding the city bus to an interview at Rice University. Ironic, yeah, but the cafeteria was looking for an assistant manager, and I thought that my experience at the diner over the years might, almost, qualify me for the position. I must have convinced them, too, because they called this morning with the request for an interview.
It would be a good job, daytime hours. I could get Mrs. Bradford to babysit. She’s already offered a dozen times over to babysit whenever. She adored PJ, coming over at least twice a week to see him. She’d caught us by surprise just this week, knocking while Cole and I were making out on the couch. We seemed to do that a lot lately. He was almost insatiable. And it was…I blushed as a smile bloomed on my lips. The idea that he wanted me that much, that he couldn’t keep his hands off of me…it made me feel like a queen. As if I hadn’t grown up on the wrong side of town, but that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. As if I was better than I was.
He told me all the time how beautiful he thought I was. How good a mother and how kind a person I was. How thoughtful he thought I was. No one had ever said those things to me before. But the way Cole said them silenced all the negative voices in my head for a while. No one had ever done that, either.
Sometimes when I thought about Peter, I felt a little guilty for falling so hard for his brother. But then this part of me that was unbiased by both my experiences and my emotions, pointed out that Peter was simply being nice in the things he said and did. He was a kind man and he saw a broken girl. His instinct was to try to put her back together again. That’s what he’d been doing with the time he took to talk to me, in the encouragement he gave me. He saw me as a project, as someone he could help. Things might have shifted a little after the night we spent together. He might have begun to see me as something more than broken. But I don’t think he would have ever looked at me the way Cole did. We might have been together, because of PJ, and we might have had a good life. But it would never have been as good as it was with Cole.
Peter wasn’t the Bradford I was meant to be with. As grateful as I was for his encouragement and for the perfect little boy he gave me, I wasn’t in love with him. I could see that so clearly now.
I loved Cole with everything I had and everything I was.
I smiled again, feeling a little like a lunatic. I was in love. I never thought I could ever say that.
My life had taken such a turn these last months, no one could ever have predicted them. Watching Cole with PJ, watching him just move around the kitchen, or sitting on the couch watching his sports, I found myself wondering what I’d done to have such a man in my life. The only thing that would make my life more perfect would be if I could show Cole that I could take care of myself, to take that element out of our relationship. Then we would both know that we were together out of choice, not necessity.
I could feel it in him, the resistance when we talked about the future or when I whispered words of affection to him in the dark of the night. Something was holding him back and this was all I could imagine that it was. So I wanted to show him, to prove that I was all in.
The bus came to my stop. I got up and fished the cell phone Mrs. Bradford had given me out of my pocket to check my texts. She was watching PJ. I told her I was meeting a friend. I told Cole that she was taking us shopping. I hoped that they didn’t check in with each other.
There was a picture of PJ smiling at the camera in my text messages. I laughed, the people around me not even giving me a second look.
Doing great. Have a good time, Mrs. Bradford had written.
I was glad that PJ liked his grandmother. It bothered me at first, that whole I-want-my-baby-to-only-like-me mentality getting in the way. But I knew, maybe more than anyone, that PJ needed as many people around him as possible who loved him. And he was certainly loved.
I checked the directions the manager of the cafeteria gave me and headed off, crossing onto the Rice campus, feeling almost like a student as I joined a few students walking to class. I was about to turn into the walkway that led to the right building when someone bumped into me from behind.
“Hello, Amber,” a deep voice said. “Come with me quietly and I won’t shoot you right here.”
I started to turn, but then felt the familiar shape of a gun barrel pressed into my back.
Not again!
“What do you want from me?”
“We want to know what Peter Bradford told you about us.”
“He didn’t.”
The man pushed me into a space between two buildings, a narrow space that was barely wide enough for the two of us to pass comfortably.
“You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself wrapped up in, Amber,” he said close to my ear. “Even Peter couldn’t appreciate what we’re really up to. If he’d known, he would have made sure you and everyone he cared about left this damn country. But even a guy as smart as him didn’t see it.”
“Please. I don’t know anything.”
“We’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?”
He pushed me forward. I stumbled, but he lifted me up. When we reached the end of the narrow alley, he shoved me into a waiting SUV. There were two more men inside, but I didn’t see their faces before someone covered my head with a dark bag.
“I have a baby…”
Chapter 24
Megan
I was searching through my desk drawers for a pen when I happened to open the drawer where I’d stashed the gift for Amber that I’d found in Peter’s desk. A part of me wanted to open it, to see if there was something inside that was related to what he’d been investigating before he died. But my sense of respect for other people kicked in, reminding me that Amber came to us. She told us everything she knew as soon as she decided she could trust us. And she was with Cole. Like it or not, I
had to trust her to share with us any information that might be inside this box.
I slipped it into my bag and snatched it up, deciding to call it a night. Sam was glaring at something as I stepped out my office door. It didn’t take long to figure out what it was. It was the same thing as always. Hayden was across the room, leaning close to one of the system operators, a pretty, college-age girl wearing a tight t-shirt and short skirt. I could feel the sexual tension from across the room.
“Ignore him,” I said, laying a hand on Sam’s shoulder.
“He’s a professional. He shouldn’t act that way in the office.”
“Yeah, well, he’s Hayden. He can’t help himself.”
“Maybe.”
Sam kind of shook herself and then focused on me, her big eyes filled with so much emotion that I could feel the weight of it as her eyes rested on me.
“Going home?”
“Yeah. You?”
She shook her head. “I want to finish working on Peter’s hard drive.”
“There’s no rush, you know. It’s been sitting in his office for ten months. A few more days won’t hurt.”
“I know. But it’s not often you ask for my help.”
“No. Just every single day of my life.”
“Not like this.”
I pushed out my bottom lip as I tried to think of the right words to respond. But there didn’t seem to be any.
She touched my arm. “Go home. Get some sleep.”
“I’ll try.”
I was in my car a minute later, wondering what I should do for dinner. Then I remembered the gift and decided to run by Cole’s place. Maybe he’d have something hot on the stove when I got there.
He opened the door before I’d finished knocking, his eyes shifting from me to the elevator down the hall.
“Waiting for something?”
“I’m getting a little worried about Amber and the baby. They went shopping with Mom, but they should have been back by now.”
“Mom’s at home. I talked to her less than an hour ago.”
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