by Jami Alden
As much as she appreciated that, Caroline wasn’t ready to stop the torture. Keeping a firm hand on his cock, she leaned forward to press a kiss to his inner thigh. He widened his stance, arched his hips into her hand. She rewarded him with a nuzzle to his lower abdomen. Licks, sucks, soft, wispy butterfly kisses, landing everywhere but where he wanted them.
She was so caught up in her torment that she didn’t hear his throaty growl until it was too late. Suddenly she found herself lifted off the floor and landing face down on one of the beds.
“Little tease,” he murmured, his breath hot against her ear. “You should know better than to tease me, Carrie.”
She felt a tug, heard a ripping sound, and what was left of her panties flew across the room. Her bra was next, unhooked and jerked down her arms. She tried to roll over but was stayed by a firm hand on the small of her back. Desire flooded through her, along with a little curl of uncertainty. He was so big, so hard, almost menacing behind her.
It was always part of the turn on, the idea that he could so easily overpower her and do whatever he wanted to her. But his big, hard body had never delivered anything but pleasure.
But that was before. What if she’d pushed him too far?
She’d barely completed the thought before she felt his big hand slide between her legs from behind. Long, thick fingers parted her lips, came to rest on either side of her clit and stroked back and forth. Caroline drew her knees up under her to give him better access.
His legs brushed the backs of her thighs as he knelt behind her, and she felt his cock like an iron brand against the curve of her ass. She rocked her hips back, rubbing herself against his fingers, urging him to come inside her.
“You want me to fuck you, Caroline?” He slid his cock between her thighs, replacing his fingers with his hard length. He dragged himself back and forth against her drenched slit. “Or do you want to play your little games?” He drew back and slid just the head of his cock inside. She reared back, trying to take him deeper, but he wrapped one hand around his cock and the other around her hip, tormenting her with just that shallow penetration.
“How much do you want me to fuck you?” He slid out, then in, barely entering her.
Damn him. She’d meant to call his bluff, teach him a little lesson She should have known she would be the one who ended up begging. Still…
She wasn’t conceding defeat just yet.
“I’m dying for you to fuck me,” she said with a secret grin he couldn’t see. She circled her ass and rocked her hips against him. “I want you to fuck me hard and deep, slide your cock in me so deep I can feel you in the back of my throat.” She heard his breath hitch and was glad she was facing away so he wouldn’t see the heat of embarrassment in her face. “I need you to fuck me so much I’m afraid I’m going to come before you get all the way inside me,” she moaned, feeling the dirty talk roll off her tongue now that her head was full of the images she was describing.
And it was working for Danny too. His grip on her hips tightened as he squeezed himself all the way in and held himself there. Caroline’s words dropped off with a cry as he buried himself deep.
So wet. So tight. Danny struggled for control as Caroline rocked her ass back against him, taking his whole, aching length into her body with a loud moan of pleasure. Still screaming the rafters down after all these years. His hands tightened on her hips as he held her still, struggling to get a hold of himself.
“Don’t slow down,” she panted, struggling against his hold as she tried to work herself on his thick length. “Fuck me like you mean it.” Heat shot through his body, singeing its way to the head of his cock as he struggled not to come immediately. The raw demand in her throaty voice was enough to send him over the edge. The feel of her hot, slick, clenching around him, was so good he was on the verge of incinerating.
“Jesus, where’d you learn to talk like that?” he asked as he flexed his hips, withdrawing inch by torturous inch, savoring the feel of her all the way. Then back inside, showing her, showing himself, dammit, that she could whip him into a frenzy but he would never lose control.
She tossed him a naughty smile over her shoulder. “You like it? I learned from the best.”
He paused, thrown off kilter as he wondered for an agonizing second who the fuck the “best” was.
She moaned, arching like a cat, pushing back to take him deeper. “Remember the first time you told me how good my pussy felt around your cock?”
His balls tightened and his dick pulsed inside her wet heat.
“I was so embarrassed.” Another moan, another swivel of her hips, one he met with a counter swivel of his own. Her dark eyes met his eyes over her shoulder. Her mouth was plump and red. “I’m not embarrassed now. Especially when I know talking like this makes you so hard…” her words ended on a groan as he thrust inside her, unable to control himself under her onslaught. “God, Danny, I’ve never felt anything like your cock in me.”
A groan tore from his chest as he began to thrust hard and fast. His fingers sank into the soft flesh of her hips as the sounds of sex mingled with their increasing groans. Nothing had ever felt like her pussy, so hot and tight and wet around him, like he’d developed a trillion additional nerve endings in the head of his cock.
A tiny part of his brain still possessing common sense recognized why.
No condom.
He was in her, totally bare, nothing separating them.
He’d never fucked a woman without a condom. Not even Caroline back in the day. He’d never felt the hot slick grip of a woman’s pussy against his unsheathed cock. And it was better than he’d ever imagined.
And some sick, stupid part of himself—that dumb kid he tried to keep locked in the root cellar—took savage satisfaction that this first time was with Caroline. Her bare flesh yielding around him. Her juice glistening on his cock as he thrust and withdrew, pummeling her into the mattress as she pushed back against him, taking him as deep as he could possibly go.
He should stop, now, pull out and go get a condom before things really got messy. It was a good measure of how far gone he was that he didn’t even pause in his thrusts.
He didn’t think he’d stop if someone put a gun to his head. It was too good, too much, he needed to savor every second. His eyes were locked on her, unable to look away. It should have been dirty, primitive, animalistic. He was taking her in the basest way possible, fucking her from behind, not even looking at her face.
Even so, he couldn’t stop thinking how beautiful she was, how beautiful they were as he watched his cock disappearing inside her. The lines of her back, the curve of her hips, the silkiness of her skin under his fingers struck him as uniquely gorgeous, even as he tried with everything in him to see her as a body, a sex object, another gray cat in the dark.
Her cries grew louder and she spread her knees wider as she rocked back against him. A surge of triumph coursed through his veins as she stiffened and convulsed around him. He rode her through it, never easing up on his pace as her cunt flexed and released around him.
Danny felt his own climax building, gathering steam as her body milked him. Every instinct screamed for him to come inside her, hold himself deep until she’d wrung him dry of every last drop.
As the first wave of his climax hit him, he somehow conjured up a shred of restraint. He pulled out, his cock jerking and pulsing as he shot thick jets of come across the lush curve of her ass. He collapsed onto the mattress, half on top of her, feeling like he’d been blown into a million pieces and scattered across the room.
What the fuck had just happened here?
The little crack in the wall was threatening to spread wide open. In his effort to bring his relationship with Caroline back to its most base, meaningless level, he’d inadvertently uncovered a cache of emotional baggage he didn’t even know he’d been carrying around. Now it wanted to spill out, the huge colossal mess he didn’t even want to acknowledge much less deal with.
Caroline stirred besid
e him and he braced himself, keeping his face partially hidden by the pillow so she couldn’t see him watching her. She rose to a kneeling position and reached back, tracing her fingers through the sticky fluid on her left butt cheek. She held her hand up and stared at it for a moment, her expression unreadable.
“Thanks for pulling out. Wouldn’t want this to get any more complicated,” she said before sliding from the bed and heading for the bathroom.
She emerged a few minutes later, freshly showered and wrapped in a towel. Without asking his permission she unzipped his duffel bag, withdrew a T-shirt and pulled it over her head. He tingled with anticipation and dread, waiting for her to come back to bed. Would she want to talk? Would she want to cuddle?
Would she want to fuck again?
His cock twitched, apparently approving of that idea.
He watched with mingled relief and disappointment as she pulled back the bedspread on the other bed and slid between the sheets.
She took the remote off the table, clicked on the TV, and settled back against the pillows as though he wasn’t naked in a bed less than three feet away.
They stayed like that all night, staring at the TV, not talking.
When they finally got tired they turned off the lights and slept facing away from each other in their separate beds. Two combatants retreating to their separate corners.
“I’ll take care of it,” Gates said, “but tell Patrick he’s going to owe me for cleaning up his messes.”
He hung up on Marshall and made another quick call to make the arrangements. Fucking idiot James Medford was coming back to haunt them from the grave. Unlike Patrick, Gates had been convinced James Medford’s secrets had died with him. They’d searched his house—discreetly, so Caroline wouldn’t suspect—and found nothing.
But even without the evidence James claimed to have been keeping, Caroline Medford and Taggart were getting too close.
Not to Gates, of course. The thing with Anne Taggart had happened well before Gates’ involvement with Medford and Easterbrook. Gates had only learned of the connection when Anne Taggart’s body was identified and Easterbrook started to get antsy all over again.
The last thing he needed was for the cops to come sniffing around Easterbrook and stumble across him in the process. If the evidence James Medford had saved really did exist, they needed to find it before it led the authorities straight to Gates.
“Tear Medford’s place apart,” he said. He was finished being careful and discreet. He had a business to protect.
When dealing with drugs and whores, it was easy enough to move the merchandise when the Feds got too close. But there was too much invested in the facility, too many people in the network for the adoption ring to reestablish itself easily. If he lost it, it would take years to recoup his losses.
Gates hadn’t been too concerned when the first attempt on Caroline Medford’s life had failed. But she and Taggart were getting too close to the truth, getting too close to him, and that was unacceptable.
Whatever secrets they’d learned needed to die with them.
CHAPTER 13
The next morning dawned clear and cold. The sky was a bright, cerulean blue against the mountains and the sun bounced so brightly off the white snow Caroline squinted at it even through sunglasses. In the bright alpine wilderness Whiskey Creek was transformed from a shabby, worn down dot on a map into a secret mountain paradise.
She focused on the cold air in her lungs and the breathtaking beauty of the mountains. Anything to keep her attention from the man striding across the parking lot, his breath steaming around a face as hard and cold as the mountain peaks surrounding her. Dark wraparound shades hid his cool gray eyes and his mouth was set in a tight line.
He paused as a truck pulling a trailer with a snow machine on it passed in front of him, then continued to where she was waiting under the awning in front of the motel’s office. Danny handed her a cup without a word.
She murmured thanks and took a sip, impressed in spite of herself that he’d remembered exactly how she liked her coffee. Light but not too light. Sweet but not too sweet. “Are the roads clear?” she asked as she followed him to his Jeep.
“They just finished plowing the last stretch,” he said as he unlocked the driver’s side door. “Weather’s supposed to be good so we should be fine to get home.” He got in and leaned over to pop the lock on her side.
“You know, in my century they make cars with things called automatic locks,” she couldn’t help sniping. Anything to penetrate the oppressive silence that had enveloped them from the moment they woke up.
She’d taken one look at him, laying awake in his separate bed, and the tension between them had gone way beyond awkward, straight to excruciating, and hadn’t abated a bit as they’d dressed, and packed up to leave.
She couldn’t decide what was worse. Looking at him and remembering in vivid, unsparing detail exactly what had gone on in that room. Or looking at him and knowing with dread and certainty, that the body with Anne Taggart’s had been that of Emily Parrish, and that James had most likely killed them both.
Caroline opted not to dwell on either.
Danny’s only response to her swipe was a grunt as he backed out of the parking space. Caroline stared out the window as Danny drove for several miles on the freshly plowed road. The view of the mountains was quickly obscured by the thick pine forest edging either side of the road. “It’s beautiful up here,” she murmured. Almost beautiful enough to make her forget the ugliness she would have to somehow come to terms with.
“I ran a race up around here a couple years ago. It’s even more beautiful fifty miles into the backcountry.”
“Like a marathon kind of a race?” She turned her attention away from the view to look at him. When Danny played football in high school and when he’d joined the military, he’d done the necessary conditioning runs, but she’d never known him to run for pleasure. Especially not at those distances. It seemed too boring, too repetitive, for someone like Danny.
He let out a humorless laugh. “Not just a marathon, an ultramarathon. The race I did through this area was one hundred ten miles with over twelve thousand feet of elevation gain.”
Her mouth dropped open. “You ran one hundred miles? In a row?” No one could be that psycho.
She looked at the man sitting across the seat from her. Maybe Danny could be that psycho.
“Some people do yoga and meditate, some people drink or do drugs. I run. It takes the edge off and calms the demons for a little while.”
What demons do you have, Danny? Are some of them the same as mine?
Caroline didn’t dare ask those questions. “How much do you have to run to train for something like that?”
“I usually run fifteen miles or so a day,” he said and rolled his shoulders restlessly.
“That explains it.”
“What?”
“Why you’re so lean.” Running fifteen miles a day shaved any spare flesh from his body. “You don’t have a single ounce of fat anywhere on your body.” Heat rose to her cheeks as he cocked a knowing brow at her. She snapped her mouth shut, cursing herself for mentioning his body, even thinking about his body, because that brought up a whole slew of images reminding her of exactly how she knew he was all lean, hard muscle. Everywhere.
He turned back to the road while a smile that was annoyingly close to a smirk tugged at his mouth. “You’re looking pretty good yourself.”
Her face flamed hotter as she thought about all of the different angles from which he’d been able to make that assessment.
The smile faded from Danny’s mouth as he glanced in the rearview mirror. He shifted the Jeep into fifth and pressed on the gas. He glanced in the mirror again and his brow furrowed as he sped up even more.
Caroline looked back to see a blue sedan following closely. Two men were in the car, their faces partially hidden by dark sunglasses, their heads covered in knit skullcaps.
Danny took a curve at stomach lurc
hing speed. “Why don’t you pull over and let them pass?”
“I have a feeling that would be a really bad idea.”
The Jeep’s tires squealed as Danny took another curve. Caroline watched as the sedan fishtailed on the wet pavement behind them, but didn’t give up any ground. She gave a little cry as the sedan knocked into the bumper of the Jeep. “What’s happening?”
“Trying to knock us off the road, I imagine,” Danny replied, totally calm. For once, Caroline was grateful for Danny’s ability to suppress any sign of emotion. They only needed one person freaking out in the car, and that person was definitely her.
Caroline dug her fingers into the dashboard as the Jeep whipped around another curve. They were near the top of a pass, and the forest broke as the road wound its way around the side of the mountain. A thousand foot deep canyon opened up beside them, nothing but a single guardrail keeping the Jeep from plunging to the jagged rocks below.
The driver of the sedan crossed the double yellow line and turned sharply into the Jeep, sending it into the rail. Caroline gave a little scream and closed her eyes. That way her last sight would be of the beautiful mountains and the blue sky, not the ground rushing up to meet her.
Miraculously, the Jeep kept its grip on the road and shot forward, gaining ground as the sedan was forced to slow to avoid going through the guard rail. Blood roared in her ears as Danny, grim, silent, focused, negotiated the sharp, exposed curves until they were once again surrounded by forest. It was small relief, but Caroline figured they had a better chance of surviving a collision with a tree than a plunge down a cliff face.
Caroline heard a loud pop and the back window of Danny’s Jeep exploded.
“What happened?”
“Motherfucker’s shooting at us,” Danny said grimly as he slid lower in his seat. “I want you to get your head down and stay there.”
Caroline ducked down and pressed her face against the upholstered seat. She moved to unbuckle her seatbelt so she could slide all the way to the floor.
“Don’t. You’re going to need that.”