Trust In Lust

by Rhylie Matthews

  A month later, I got a text asking where the fuck I was, that training had started ten minute’s ago. And that was it, we’d never talked about it again. He didn’t want to know what I saw and I damn sure didn’t want to tell him. If I caught a flash, we dealt with the after effects and moved on. It’d become an unspoken rule, and we made it work too.

  I watched him drive while I enjoyed the feeling of his touch. He stared forward, watching the road, his other arm holding the wheel. What little of his tanned skin you could see despite the dark scruff that covered most of his face and throat was shining in the sunlight. I snickered lightly. He looked like a wooly-booger.

  “If you can’t gawk and talk at the same time close your eyes.”

  I barked out a laugh. “You’re such a dick.”

  “But I’m a handsome dick.” He grinned down at me. “Majestic even,” he added and puffed his chest out ridiculously.

  I snorted. “Yeah, you’re a majestic something alright.”

  “So, what’s on your mind?”

  I looked back to the roof and chewed on my lip.

  “Talk to me, woman.”

  His command was weak, more worried than before. If I didn’t say something, he’d have a fucking aneurysm.

  “How’d he know we were there?”

  “He said he felt you.”

  “Yeah, but the way he maneuvered around us? That’s more than a general feeling.”

  “I agree. You’re thinking he could do what you do?”

  My stomach turned at the idea, but nothing inside me told me he was wrong.

  Fuck.

  Could I even rely on my senses when it came to him though?

  “Out loud, J.” He was getting agitated and I couldn’t really blame him.

  I sat up and put my back against the door, then pulled my feet up under me.

  “Everything that happened this morning felt wrong. And I don’t know, there’s just something I can’t put my finger on.”

  He sighed and adjusted himself on the seat.

  “What?”

  “I hate it when you say that. I’m tired and I never get to sleep when that comes out of your mouth.”

  “I can’t help it, my brain’s broken,” I said defensively. If something was nagging at the back of my mind, my brain wouldn’t let it go until I figured it out. Fuck sleep. Forget being able to concentrate on anything else. It’d just hyper-focus and not let go.

  “And that’s why there’s drugs.”

  I made a face and crossed my arms over my chest. As my handler, he often had to forcefully regulate my sleeping. And that meant drugs.

  Another one of the reasons I’d signed on with him. A Sixer’s handler had that amount of control over them; I didn’t trust anyone other than him like that.

  He looked over and rolled his eyes. “Oh my God, woman. Fine. I’m listening, do your thing.”

  My thing consisted of me word vomiting everything that crossed my mind as it popped in my head. It was scattered and random, but the important issues were there. It was like throwing the pieces of a puzzle at him so he could help solve it.

  I leaned forward and prepared to tick stuff off my list.

  “If my wards were up, would I still have been able to feel him?”

  “If my wards were up, would he have been able to feel me?”

  “And if he could sense me, would he have been able to with my wards up?”

  “Okay, stop.”

  I glared at him. “That’s not how this game works, homie. I talk, you listen.”

  “I’m aware. But, he’s dead. We’ll never know.”

  He couldn’t be serious, he wasn’t that dense. I just looked at him blankly and waited for his common sense to kick in.

  “What? Don’t look at me like I’m stupid.”

  “If there’s one, there’s probably…” I left it open, trying to fill in the blank but making it relatively easy to catch on.

  “I get there may be more, Vaughn, and we’ll figure something out before that happens, I promise. But you’re acting like it’s an immediate threat.”

  “Do we travel alone?” I asked, raising a brow at him.

  He scowled. “Now, why did you have to go and fucking do that?”

  I shrugged. “It is what I get paid for.”

  His broad chest expanded, and he adjusted his grip on the wheel before he blew it out slowly.

  “Okay I get it. So what does that all that mean on your level?”

  “I’ve met others like me before, when I was younger.”

  His eyebrows shot up.

  I looked out the windshield and studied the broken blurry lines of the highway as I told the story.

  “Not many, but enough we’d been able to compare notes on things. Wards down, we could all sense each other and the people around us, see them in our mind. Even when some of them put their wards up, they still registered.

  "Except for me. If my wards were up, I was a blank spot to them.” I turned and caught his gaze. "Hicks was a giant fucking blank spot. Nothing."

  His eyes met mine and widened a little as he started catching on then darted back to the road.

  “And if there’s more like him out there? My wards completely cut me off, Sutton. If that skin thing is the only warning I have, will I still be able to feel it with my wards up? Or vice versa? Would my wards cancel it out? And following that logic, if he had wards, and they were down earlier, I still couldn’t sense him. What does that make him? What the fuck doesn’t have any emotions? Or does he just not have wards, and he’s something completely different all together?”

  I expected him to say something, but he just stared hard at the road in front of us.

  “There’s too many unknowns. I can’t work the entire fucking case with my wards up, Sut. And don’t even get me started on how much that sick fuck seemed to enjoy it.”

  He groaned and sunk back into the seat resignedly.

  “What now?” I asked, confused. That wasn’t exactly the reaction I was expecting.

  “There’s going to be so much paperwork.”

  He wasn’t wrong.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sutton

  Nothing. Not one word the rest of the drive. When I actually need her to run her fucking mouth and distract me from shit, she doesn’t say a fucking word.

  I pulled into the hotel lot and parked in front of her room. Her door opened before I even killed the engine and she jumped out of the truck like her little ass was on fire. The door slammed, rattling the frame, and I rolled my eyes. Where the hell did she think she was going so fast? I had her key.

  She stopped at the door and started digging in her pockets.

  Yeah, good luck with that, short stuff. I switched the key off and pulled our packs from the back before meeting her at the door. “Sometime today, woman.”

  “I swear I had it. I remember getting it off the fucking TV yesterday!”

  I didn’t answer, just waited. She could swear all she wanted, but she’d forget her head if it wasn’t attached.

  “Seriously! How the fuck did I lose it?” She checked her thigh pockets again then stuck her hand down the front of her pants and checked the elastic pocket in her concealed carry shorts. If you could call them that; they were fucking underwear with holsters and pockets.

  “Maybe the monster ate it?” I asked because it’s what I’d normally do. I’d somehow turned into her fucking nanny, keeping up with all her crap, but I was too on edge to get any enjoyment out the normal shit I gave her about it.

  She froze, hand at her groin, then looked up and narrowed her green eyes. “You have it, don’t you, asshole?” she asked, the accusation heavy.

  “Yup, because I got it off the TV yesterday when you forgot it, again, along with your sunglasses and phone charger. Both of which you just left in the truck. Again.” I stepped my right foot out and pushed my hip towards her indicating that pocket.

  She grumbled as she leaned forward and yanked the pocket open with one hand and
wedged the other inside with about as much finesse as a fucking goat.

  “They’re not that that tight, calm the fuck down.” I shifted to keep her from smashing my nuts while she dug it out. That’d be just what I needed right now.

  She pulled it free and stuck the card in the lock until it flashed. Without a word, she opened the door and moved inside.

  About fucking time. I ducked down and pushed through behind her into the tiled living area and kicked the door closed.

  It wasn’t much, a small kitchen with a bar, couch, and TV. She slipped through the sliding glass door that led out to a concrete slab with chairs and a view of the ocean. Always the ocean with her. That woman had a fucked up relationship with water I’d never understood.

  I threw my gear on the floor, checked the room, and headed for the bedroom. I needed a damn shower and for this day to be over.

  She was stressing me the fuck out. Her connection with this case, doctor douche, then Landon. I wasn’t stupid, she catered to my temper the way I did her emotions, and I knew she was more worried about them than she was letting on.

  All that on top of this shit with Hick’s. That mother fucker hadn’t known I was there. He’d circled her like a fucking shark in water and tried to put a bullet in her head. If my shoulder hadn’t been there…

  I yanked the back of my collar over my head and the stitches in my shoulder pulled at the same time the seam on the sleeve ripped. “Fuck!”

  I shrugged it off the rest of the way and threw it across the room as the rage I’d been swallowing for hours surfaced again. There was no doubt in my mind, that at one point or another, that woman was going to be the fucking death of me and I just needed a fucking minute.

  I needed to make it to the fucking shower and get control before her wards came down and I did even more damage.

  I’d gotten her used to having the freedom of them being down when it was just us. I’d thought I’d been doing the right thing at the time, but damn if it didn’t turn out to be the stupidest thing I’d ever done. And I did it to my fucking self.

  I walked into the bathroom connected to her bedroom and threw the stall door open, grateful her expense budget covered nice enough hotels I could request showers with extra tall shower heads. Mine damn sure didn’t. And considering this stupid habit was her fault, I had no issue stealing hers.

  Water soothed her, helped bring her back from that ledge, and I’d spent so much time in the bottom of a fucking shower, reigning her in or helping her recover that the stupid habit had transferred to me.

  I flipped the cold water on, grabbed the rail above, and just hung my head. I’d fucking resorted to hiding in the fucking shower. I needed to be better than this; she needed me to be better than this.

  I’d known what she could do; seen it first hand thousands of times. I’d learned to deal, and gotten used to most of it with the exception of the trauma trips she randomly took in my brain. Those… I just fucking couldn’t. But knowing it and living it every fucking day were two completely different beasts.

  Without her wards, everything affected her. People, animals, even fucking bugs. Happy, sad, life, death, she felt it all. She still had fucking nightmares from the bird incident on the interstate. It hit the windshield right in front of her, broke its neck, and traumatized her so bad, it put her in a fucking seizure.

  I shook my head and popped the buttons on my fly. That was a tough memory to shake; hell, they all were. Her life was like a cruel fucking joke from the universe. And if her life was the joke, then her wards were the punchline—here ya go, here’s something that’ll help you out, but if you use it, it’ll kill ya! They protected her from the onslaught of everything around her, and provided those around her with some semblance of privacy, but the energy it took to continuously keep them up drained her until she’d burn out and crash.

  When I found out that was exactly what she’d been doing, I’d flipped my fucking shit. It was a lose lose situation, but I’d have been damned to Hell before I sat back and let her put herself through that time after time, especially when it was just us.

  It had felt wrong to let her continue locking herself away in her own head until she burned out just for the sake of my comfort. She didn’t choose this; her invasions weren’t purposeful. Who was I to bitch about privacy when she was struggling with basic quality of life?

  Fuck that. I could get over myself.

  How she stayed sane with all that and not locked in a padded room in the God forsaken Arctic blew my mind. It’s what I would have done. I barely fucking managed to keep my own shit in check, much less deal with all that and everyone’s else’s shit too? Complaining or saying anything about it made me feel like a dick.

  I’d told her as much, left the option to her, and now it was second nature for her to let them fade when we were alone.

  “Hey, big guy.” Worry weighed her words, making her voice softer, almost gentle.

  It pulled at my chest as I answered her without looking back from the shower stall I’d been staring in. “Yeah?"

  Her soft warm hand landed between my shoulder blades and I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see her face right now. I’d been doing good distracting myself, but if I turned around…

  Her other hand landed on my waist and she pressed herself against my back. She was so fucking warm; heat radiated from her bare stomach and arms like she was the sun and I wanted to lean back and wallow in her like a fucking dog.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Answering that would defeat the entire purpose here. So I didn’t.

  She didn’t ask again, just wrapped her arms tighter around as much of my waist as she could and hugged my back. Her touch and breath against my skin soothed my nerves, and I relaxed, letting go of the bar and hugged her arms to me.

  “Come on,” her voice was a whisper as she pulled back and tugged on my arm.

  I groaned as the cool air replaced her warmth and turned. Her glassy eyes sought mine first thing as she searched my face trying to piece the puzzles together.

  Damn it, they were down and she’d touched me. I yanked my arm out of hers and backed into the wall. “Wards, J.”

  She stood there, her long black and grey hair hanging around her body, clad only in a sports bra and her shorts and frowned up at me. A single tear fell as the confusion over my command contorted her face and she pulled her hand back.

  Those damn glassy green eyes, filled with hurt, gutted me. She thought I didn’t want her in my head and I felt like the biggest asshole but I couldn’t guarantee my own stability right now.

  “Please.” My voice croaked as I tried to ease the command into a request. “Just right now. I can’t handle you going down because of me on top of everything else.”

  The hurt shifted to sadness for a brief second before she looked away and nodded. Closing her eyes, she chewed on the inside of her cheek in concentration as she fought to bring them up. It was always harder for her in a tense situation or when she was being bombarded by chaotic emotions.

  I sighed as the tension eased from her muscles and reached for her, itching to feel her back against me.

  She stepped easily between my legs and buried her face into my chest as I pulled her against me.

  I wrapped my arms around her and dropped my head to kiss the top of hers. “It’s not you, J. My head is shit right now and physically hurting you is not a price I’m willing to pay because of it.”

  She snorted and mumbled into my chest.

  “What?”

  She tilted her head back, and I knew by the humorous glint in her eyes she’d forgiven me. And was also about to piss me off.

  “Most people just apologize.”

  “That was an apology.”

  She raised a brow and did that stupid thing with her lips she did when she thought I was being ‘obtuse’.

  “It was!” I barked defensively. I was trying; I explained myself, told her why I said what I said, how was that not a fucking apology?

  “Uh huh.�
�� She nodded and gave a watery laugh before she sank to her knees and started unlacing my boots. “If you say so, big guy.”

  “Don’t placate me, woman. I am not in the mood. And why are you taking my boots off?” I asked, thrown, but lifted my leg to help her out.

  “Because you can’t even take your shirt off without hurting yourself.” She threw them behind her then raised up on her knees and grabbed the open fly of my jeans. “So, I’m helping.”

  Every damn organ inside me shut the fuck down and I couldn’t move as she looked up at me from that position. The haunted green eyes. The hair falling to the floor around her. Her beautiful face level right with my dick.

  Fuck.

  She ran her hands around the sides and my pulse double timed it. When she started to pull them down around my ass, blood started rushing south. Well, almost every organ.

  “Just hang on to your boxers. I’d prefer not to get hit in the face.”

  She pulled them over my hips, but paused and the heat from her breath through my boxers had my cock twitching for attention as I stared down at the top of her head.

  She looked up again, her lips pulled into a smirk so close... “Boxers, big guy. I really don’t need a black eye.”

  The vicinity of my dick to her face short circuited my brain. “If I ever hit you in the face with my dick, it’s not gonna be in the eye.”

  The smirk fell from her face as her jaw dropped and my brain finally shifted back into gear. What I’d said clicked at the same time she busted out laughing and grinned like she was so fucking pleased with herself. And me.

  Damn woman really was going to be the death of me. Or at the very least my sanity and any morals I clung to around her by the fucking skin of my teeth.

  “Look at you being all dirty and shit. I’m so proud.”

  “Ugh.” I pushed her face away from my still growing hard on. He didn’t fucking care I was her boss; he was just fucking infatuated with her and wanted her attention regardless of the situation.

  “I think he likes me,” she whispered conspiratorially and grinned again.

  “Ya think?” I snapped and stood up from the wall. “Get away from me.”