Not My Spook!

by Tinnean

  “Yes?” He touched his tongue to his upper lip; he knew where I’d like to have him. His gaze dropped to his plate, and he seemed to contemplate a cherry tomato that he chased around with his fork. He managed to capture it and raised it to his mouth, sliding it past his lips. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his mouth, and he fucking knew it! His smile was wicked. “As tempting as a position under you—I assume it would be under you, wouldn’t it… Joe? As tempting as that is, I think I’ll have to decline. I like the structure… State… has to offer.”

  Structure, my ass. “If you ever change your mind, baby, just let me know. You’d make director in nothing flat, believe me!”

  We spent the rest of the meal discussing plans for the next two days. But as soon as we’d finished eating, we visited the CVS the proprietress of Proven House had told us about and stocked up on condoms—a lot of condoms—and plenty of lube. I’d have gone with a tube of the regular stuff, but Quinn chose one that was chocolate-flavored.

  I raised an eyebrow, and he blushed. Oh, what the hell? I held out the basket, and he smiled and dropped the lube into it.

  XXV

  THAT was the most relaxing time after a funeral that I had ever spent. We looked through the brochures Mrs. Proven had given me, and on Wednesday, after a trip to get some suitable clothes for Quinn at the nearest Sears, which happened to be in Hyannis, we drove to Plymouth Harbor to go whale watching and feel the sun and wind on our faces. On Thursday, we drove to Falmouth to fish for striped bass in the tide rips, and since we had no use for the fish, we turned our catch over to the first mate.

  And on Friday, we flew back into DC.

  “My car is in the long-term parking lot.”

  He gave me a smile. “So is mine.”

  “Uh… okay.” It turned out he was parked two rows over from me. “Well….”

  He handed me a key ring with a single key on it. “It—it wouldn’t look good if someone from the WBIS kept bypassing my security system as if it were child’s play.”

  I closed my fingers around it.

  “Hold onto this longer than you did last time, okay?”

  “Okay.” I put it in my pocket. I could tell by the look in his eyes that he wanted to kiss me. Well, I wanted to kiss him too. But broad daylight, in the long-term parking lot…. Not a good idea. “I’ll see you later.”

  I was about to get in my car when he touched my shoulder and said, “I expect that dinner you promised me, Mark.”

  “When…?” And then I recalled when I had promised him dinner: Monday morning, before I’d left for work, before I’d learned that my old lady had bit the big one, before I… started having second thoughts about this thing between Quinn and me, whatever this thing was.

  He ran his palm over my arm—my right arm; he was still cautious of the injury to my left shoulder, even though it was almost healed—gave it a squeeze, then touched that lock of hair in a little salute. “See you later, baby.” He strode through the lines of cars to where his Lexus was parked.

  I laughed softy. Baby. I leaned against my car and watched the bunch and flow of his trousers over his ass as he walked away from me. He did have a fine ass.

  And it was mine.

  I slid behind the wheel, put the car in gear, and went to work.

  XXVI

  I PARKED in the spot I’d been given with my promotion to deputy director and sauntered into the inconspicuous building, then walked up the empty stairwell to the seventh floor.

  Ms. Parker looked up from her computer monitor. “Mr. Vincent. It’s good to have you back, sir.” She said nothing about the fact that I was limping.

  It was only partly because my foot was still healing. The night before, Quinn had used the last of our condoms and fucked me through the mattress. I found I enjoyed the physical reminder of what we had done.

  “I have a number of messages for you, sir.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Parker.” I thumbed through the slips of paper. Most of them were routine. The last one caught my eye.

  According to the message, on Wednesday evening, Daren Curtin had ceased to occupy space on this planet. He had died struggling for his last breath.

  I smiled at my secretary, and she permitted herself a thin smile in return. “Get Matheson. I’ll want to see him immediately.”

  Matheson had done a good job. It looked like The Boss had chosen a decent replacement for me.

  I took the coffee Ms. Parker handed me, went into my office, and closed the door. It was time to get back to work.

  Once my computer was booted up, I opened my e-mail program to see if anything of interest had turned up in my absence.

  Aside from an e-mail from Matheson updating me on the Curtin matter, it didn’t look like much. I was about to open the file dealing with that problem in Arizona when I noticed an e-mail with a time stamp of early Tuesday morning. It was from AA notifying me that a donation in the amount of five hundred dollars had been made in the name of Virginia Vincent by Quinton Mann.

  Well… well… damn. If Mann wasn’t a class act down to his Edward Green oxfords.

  How to let him know I appreciated the gesture without making a big deal of it?

  Hmm. I’d promised him dinner. I remembered Matheson drooling over the porterhouse steak at B. Smith’s.

  Yeah. I hit the intercom. “Ms. Parker, would you get B. Smith’s on the line for me?”

  Change Upon Change

  I

  MARK and I planned to view an exhibit at the National Gallery this Sunday afternoon, and when I returned from my ride with Mother, I told him I’d join him downstairs as soon as I’d showered.

  I had adjusted the spray and was just lathering myself up when the shower door opened. “Mark, what…?”

  He grinned at me, his eyes hot, and the next thing I knew, he was on his knees before me, swallowing my cock to the root.

  For the longest time, he kept me hovering on the cusp, so that when I finally climaxed, my knees buckled, and I found myself sinking to the floor of the shower stall, to be impaled on Mark’s clever fingers. I was too bemused to take note when the water stopped pouring over us, when his fingers were replaced by his cock, or to even wonder when and how he’d managed to roll on a condom. All I could do was hold onto him as he drove into me again and again.

  I was unable to come again so soon, but if anyone could have fucked another orgasm out of me, Mark was the man who would have done it.

  All in all, he made my prostate very happy

  My lovers were polite, well-bred, waiting for me to make the first move. Since I also was polite and well-bred, I did so only when I felt that move would be welcome.

  I’d never realized how wearing that could be, not until Mark followed me into the shower and fucked me senseless.

  II

  FROM the museum, we went to Raphael’s, the Italian restaurant where I’d bought him dinner on his birthday.

  I grew aroused again at the thought of how I had followed him into the men’s room and fellated him that first time, an act that was completely out of character for a man like me.

  We finished dinner, and I found myself cutting a glance toward the restrooms at the rear of the restaurant. “Care to check out the men’s room, Mark?”

  “You don’t need me to hold your hand if you have to take a leak.”

  “This is true, but won’t you indulge me? I have such fond memories of it.”

  “You like living dangerously, don’t you, Quinn?”

  This from a man who was notorious in the intelligence community for the risks he’d been willing to take for his agency, and for his phenomenal luck in never being caught? I murmured as much to him.

  “Luck has nothing to do with it! I’m the best!”

  Yes, he was. “Are you sure I couldn’t interest you in a visit to the….”

  “You’re impatient tonight, baby. I like that in you.” He was trying to appear nonchalant, but I was able to read him. His tongue peeked out to touch his upper lip. If it hadn’t
happened that on this particular Sunday night Raphael’s was too busy to dally, he could have had me pushed up against a stall in the men’s room, driving against me while he kept my wrists imprisoned and his mouth swallowed my groans.

  “Pity.”

  He raised an eyebrow and then gave a slow grin as he realized where my thoughts had been going. He signaled the waiter over. “Check, please.”

  Mark paid the bill, his stare hard until he realized I had no intention of battling him for it.

  I had something else in mind. I sauntered out of the restaurant ahead of him, my hands in my trouser pockets. It was a casual attitude I never exhibited in public, since not only did it cause my suit jacket to rise up, but it also drew the material of my trousers tight across my ass.

  This time, however, knowing his eyes were on my ass, almost able to feel the heat of his gaze….

  He growled softly in my ear, his palm ghosting over the seat of my trousers, and I grinned at him over my shoulder.

  There was no one to see as he crowded me back against the Lexus, running his teeth over the side of my throat and murmuring what he was going to do to me once we got home.

  My erection marred the smooth line of my trousers, and he palmed it, running his fingernails over my fly. “What do you say we head home?”

  Home…. Did that mean he—

  I drove us to Alexandria in record time.

  III

  IT WAS later that same evening, and here I was, in my bed and leaning on my elbow, watching Mark as he slept. He was lying on his stomach, his left leg bent, and I was tempted to run my fingertips along the length of his spine, to the dip of his lower back, down to the shadowed crevice that separated his buttocks.

  According to the file I had compiled on him, Mark never let anyone get close, not even his partner, the sole time he’d had one. He appeared to be estranged not only from his family, but from anyone he might have known before he was recruited by the WBIS. Which was sad. No man was an island, after all.

  As for romances, there had never been any. It was well known that the WBIS had a list of ladies who were very beautiful, very talented, very accommodating, and of course, very well compensated. On rare occasions—surprising in how extremely rare those occasions were—he’d been known to visit them.

  He was a man who clearly preferred to be in control of himself at all times. He would have made the perfect zealot, denying his body’s urges until the time he decided he would allow it.

  What he didn’t do was relationships, or even affairs. However I might feel about it, I knew that one day, probably sooner than I’d have preferred, he would walk out of my life.

  After all, nothing lasted forever.

  But I was going to make damn sure he remembered me.

  I moved his leg a bit further out of my way and began kneading his buttocks. They were firm and resilient, and I leaned forward and took a small patch of skin between my lips, sucking carefully—I didn’t want to wake him just yet.

  When I was satisfied with the results, knowing it would last for a few days, and also knowing he would be unaware of its presence, I moved lower, parting his cheeks, and found his puckered opening unerringly with my tongue.

  Whether asleep or awake, he shivered and thrust back against me.

  Oh, yes, he was going to remember me.

  IV

  IT HAD been a marvelous weekend, something I would have sincerely doubted on Friday, when I’d had to do a lot of make-work at State.

  But that evening I’d walked down the hallway of the second floor of my town house and spent the night in the bed in my guest bedroom.

  Last night we slept in my bedroom. I could feel the flush heat my cheeks. We hadn’t actually slept.

  And now….

  I had heard of Mark Vincent, but I’d never come into contact with him, for while the FBI, the NSA, and the CIA worked together on occasion, the WBIS was never involved with the more mainstream agencies.

  After all, WBIS agents didn’t have the reputation for being the most stable of operatives, and to hear Major Jonathan Drum II tell it, Mark Vincent was the most unstable of them all.

  So it wasn’t surprising that before the incident with Bruchner’s cyclotron, when I’d managed to get that prototype away from Vincent, we hadn’t crossed paths.

  That changed in the Wyman Bros. Warehouse. As I’d breathed through the pain of a bullet wound inflicted by a rogue Company man, Vincent had stood staring down at me in that warehouse. I’d managed to get that cyclotron away from him, and he’d smiled, a slightly perplexed look in his eyes, and said, “You do good work, Mann.”

  I’d shown him just how good I could be when I went down on him in the men’s room at Raphael’s on his birthday and made him moan as he climaxed.

  Several weeks later he’d returned the favor, cuffing me to my bed and blowing me as I’d never been blown. His mouth had been hot and wet and unbelievably skillful.

  We played mind games, each time raising the stakes, trying to one-up the other, and when I learned of his promotion, I went to his apartment with a bottle of champagne.

  I kissed him that night for the first time. Or perhaps he’d kissed me.

  Clichéd as it might sound, I’d felt an almost electrical shock—tingles shooting up my legs and down through my torso, and they’d all converged in my cock.

  He fucked me that night for the first time, his cock a hard, blunt intrusion that forced me to acknowledge his possession. And it was… good.

  I would perspire and grow hard just from the thought. There had been nothing in the file I’d compiled on him that even hinted he could make love like that to a man.

  Prior to Mark Vincent, I had never considered asking anyone to move in with me, not even Susan Burkhart.

  The manager of Mark’s apartment complex was either very brave or very stupid. He had informed Mark, after his apartment had been blown up, that he had thirty days to find a new place of residence.

  I’d convinced my lover of two things: it really wasn’t in his best interest to kill the man, and more importantly, to stay with me in my town house. It would be strictly temporary, I informed him. Just until he could find someplace new.

  He agreed, taking the bedroom down the hall from mine. And I assured myself that was the perfect arrangement, the only logical one, he in his bed—me in mine. I was still assuring myself of this as I knocked on his door, let myself in, and spent the night in his bed, over him, under him, plastered against him having hot, sweaty sex.

  I’d had any number of relationships in my life. I wanted something that would last, but they all seemed to be short-term—because of my occupation, because I never knew when I would be called on to leave the country, or how long I would be gone. For whatever the reason, the physical aspect rarely lasted very long. However, when I parted company with my lovers, it was always on good terms, and I prided myself on the fact that whenever I ran into a former lover, she did not turn tail and run in the opposite direction.

  Other than Susan Burkhart. She’d decided she would be the perfect Mrs. Quinton Mann, and when I hadn’t agreed, when I’d broken it off, it hadn’t been pretty. I’d had to go out of the country for the following few weeks, and when I’d returned, I couldn’t help noticing the cool glances sent my way from a number of so-called friends.

  As for the occasional male lover, they’d been so few, so far in the past, and so far away in distance that the odds we would ever meet again were minimal. Sometimes I even wondered if I’d recognize them.

  I had no doubt I would recognize Mark Vincent.

  V

  I’D FORGOTTEN how snug a man’s back passage could be, and Mark’s…. None of the young men with whom I’d had sex back before I’d joined the CIA had ever clamped internal muscles around my cock with such intensity, but then that was fifteen years ago, and we’d all been so young.

  I strutted to my office at Langley, whistling. Oh, yes, baby, I was very good to you!

  I knew I was full of myself, bu
t I’d fucked Mark; I’d completely driven him out of his mind.

  “Well, you’re in a good mood!” Janet observed.

  “I had a wonderful weekend. And I hope you did also,” I hurried to add, although I doubted anyone’s weekend could have been as fantastic as mine.

  “I’m glad to hear that.” She smiled at me. “And yes, I had a good weekend too. Mother and Dad took a cruise to nowhere, and I got to watch the pets.”

  “Oh.” Except for the stable cats at Shadow Brook, the Sebring farm, I hadn’t had any pets. Had Mark? Other than that ceramic dog?

  “They’re a pleasure to take care of. When I retire I’m going to become one of those cat ladies.” She grew serious. “Mr. Mann, Agent Cooper is waiting to see you.”

  “DB?”

  “No, Syd.”

  “She hasn’t been waiting long, I hope.”

  “No, Quinn.” Syd appeared in the doorway to my private office. “I’m glad to hear you had a good weekend, because I think we might have a situation.”

  “Are we going to need coffee?”

  “Yes.”

  “Janet?”

  “Two coffees coming up, Mr. Mann.”

  “Thank you.” I gestured toward my office and then followed Syd into it. “What’s going on?”

  “I thought you’d better see this.” She nodded at my desk. “I put it in plastic as soon as I realized what it was, but it’s bound to have my prints on it. I just hope I didn’t smudge any latents.”

  I stared at the message on it, able to read it through the clear plastic into which Syd had placed it.

  That’s Robert Sperling’s body in the morgue, and not Vincent’s. I don’t know why the WBIS is keeping it under wraps, but that’s how it’s playing out. This is the last time you’ll hear from me. Odds are Vincent will become Director of Interior Affairs now, and nothing is worth crossing him. There’s one more job I have to do for the WBIS, and then I’m out of there.