Ishq Factors

by Suleikha Snyder

  She pulled back just long enough to breathe, to trail words along his jaw with damp, fruity lips. “You really missed me? You really missed this?” There was still that hint of disbelief in her voice, and he couldn’t blame her. All he could do was try to drown it out, slanting his lips against hers.

  She slid her hand into the undone vee of his jeans, diving into his briefs and stroking him like he’d stroked her in the bar. “Christ, Anna,” he swore into her mouth. “Way to take things in hand.” He didn’t have her name tattooed along his groin, but he was her property just the same. He helped her shuck his jeans and briefs and when he was throbbing, slick with pre-come, against her palm, she all but confirmed it. She cupped him, barely even squeezing his cock, and he practically spilled right then. Like a boy with his first hard on. He laughed, raggedly, leaning into her. “Darlin’, if you’re looking for that blowjob I promised… I don’t think I’m going to last.”

  Her eyes were wide open, dark and pure like the absolute center of a flame. Her hand fisted him up and down in slow, torturous strokes. “You were never one for keeping your promises, Ty. That was always my territory.”

  Tyler accepted it like a choreographed slap, as his due. Then he walked her backwards towards the bed, falling down with her and pressing naked skin to clothed. His cock was aching, begging for release, but he struggled — fought, won — to ignore it as he tugged her skirt up around her hips and tore at her staid, white blouse. “Then keep the biggest one: to have me and to hold me, from this day forward.”

  She spread her knees for him, rising up just slightly so he could slide her panties down her legs. “Like I said before, Ty. Not if you were the last man on earth.” Her words were clipped, closed, cynical, but the rest of her was flushed, soft and honeyed…

  Property of Tyler St. Cloud. “Anna, when it comes to you, I am the last man on earth.” He set his tongue to the swirling letters, tracing each one, lingering until she was moving restlessly beneath him. Only when she gasped out, “Ty, please,” did he crawl back up and settle between her legs. He was painfully hard, ready to bury himself deep inside her. Ready, except… “Dammit, Anna. I don’t have anything with me. Are you safe?”

  “Does it matter?” Her fingers were in his hair now, clutching him tight. “If you’re going to leave again… I might as well have a part of you, right? Something to remember you by besides alimony?”

  For someone who was a consummate planner, who’d kept him buying condoms for nine years, that was the most ridiculous logic. He was ninety percent certain she was being sarcastic. But Ty couldn’t care. Not when he was so close and she was so close and… and she would look so damn gorgeous carrying his baby, added the breathless, horny voice from the addled part of his brain. “I won’t leave you. Not ever again. Definitely not if you have my kid.” It wasn’t the sexiest of declarations, not something any writer would win an Emmy for, but Tyler meant it. And he meant it when he thrust into her in one, smooth movement. “Property of Anna Chan St. Cloud,” he whispered as he sank in to the hilt. “Do you hear me?”

  She took him like a glove, sheathing him in wet silk. “I’ve never needed to hear you, Tyler. I feel you. I always feel you.”

  Something snapped within them at the same time. He grasped her hips, pounding into her like fucking her was the equivalent to breathing. She met him, matched him, and echoed him with her kisses, tongue moving against his, licking the inside of his mouth. Her feet beat a rhythm against his lower back, her nails dug into his shoulders. Ty hadn’t earned this, hadn’t worked for it, but he couldn’t let it go. Not until he was spilling deep inside her and she was following him into sticky, sweaty oblivion. It lasted forever… and not nearly long enough.

  It was like coming home — coming home to a house wrecked by storm and hearing nothing but thunder. He was broken, too, by the end of it. Sprawled across her, smiling like an idiot. “Well, Anna. What d’you think? Best Performance By a Lead Actor or what?”

  She reached up and palmed his face, touching him with more tenderness than he would ever deserve. “If I wasn’t lying down, I’d give it a standing ‘o.’“

  It wasn’t forgiveness. It was better. It was a chance.

  Quid Pro Quo

  Long days at the office stretch into longer nights. His candle burns at both proverbial ends. Alex has something to prove, though he doesn’t know exactly what. That he’s earned his spot in the DA’s office and the neat little nameplate that comes with the job? That he’s not just a fair-haired boy still tasting the metallic tang of a silver spoon under his tongue?

  Each closed case is a personal victory, and each point for the defense is a failure he takes home. Maybe that’s why he spends so little time there, instead catching precious minutes of sleep in his leather office chair — feet up on his desk, all calls but the emergencies sent to his answering service. Not that power naps pass by without interruption. At half past midnight, in particular, there is a standing interruption.

  Standing. Leaning. Lounging against the doorframe like she’s posing for a picture. “Wake up, Mr. Roskov. Now’s not the time for boys to be asleep.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I’m a man, not a boy,” he murmurs, eyelids at half-mast, voice edged with the gravel he hauled during that one, long-ago summer he rebelled against his dad.

  “Keep telling yourself that.” Lucky only laughs, shutting the door behind her and dropping into the chair in front of his desk like she belongs there. When you total the amount of time she spends in it — all between the hours of 10 and two — she’s practically eligible to rent the space. “Age doesn’t make you a man — no more than it makes me a woman,” she says, with the assurance of someone not just older by a few years but in pound for pound life experience. She crosses her legs, all supple black leather boots and a short skirt that gives him a devious preview of what’s to come. “What do you have for me tonight? Spin me your story, Scheherazade.”

  “Nothing,” he lies, rubbing the last of the fuzz from his eyes and slipping his feet back into his shoes. “I have nothing you can use, Lucky, so you’re just going to have to kill me. Isn’t that what the sultan was supposed to do?”

  “So you acknowledge I’m the sultan now? I’m flattered.” Her smile glistens ruby red, and it tells him that she’s not really flattered in the least. “Why play games, Alex, when we both know the deal?”

  “So we have a ‘deal’ now?” He mimics her tone. “I thought it was just you hitting me up for info on your clients and me being too powerless to resist you.”

  She arches a dark, perfectly sculpted brow. He can picture her getting threaded at a salon downtown, enjoying every bit of the pain. “You don’t think you’re powerless,” she dismisses with her clipped English vowels. “On the contrary, with me is the only time and place you think you have any control.”

  For a long, uncomfortable moment, it’s like he’s looking at his reflection. He can almost see the outline of his face, still boyish like a Harvard 1L, and his hair sticking up like straw. Lucky is so good at holding up the mirror…distracting anyone from looking at her too closely. But he’s made a study of her these past few months. He knows her face. He knows what her hair feels like slipping through his fingers. He knows exactly where she likes the scrape of his teeth and the burn of his two-day stubble. He knows “Lucky” is a nickname, a bastardization of the more traditional “Lakhi,” because she would rather be thought of as coincidentally fortunate than one in a million.

  Generally, she doesn’t like to be thought of at all. So, she creeps around his office in the dark, works out of hotel rooms and briefcases and has a business card that’s nothing more than a plain piece of cardstock with a name and a number. If Alex has any power or control here, it’s because she makes such a concerted effort not to own anything. She won’t even own why she’s here.

  She doesn’t shift a muscle or bat an eyelash while he stares at her. When he stands and comes around his desk, she still doesn’t betray a single emotion. She’s j
ust waiting for him to respond, for him to react. To say, essentially, “Yes, Lucky, every time you come in here and take off your clothes for me, you make me feel like a man.”

  Alex has something to prove, but not that.

  Her lips curve into the slightest of smiles when he grasps her wrists and tugs her out of her seat. Lucky’s hair is a razor-cut bob that swings short and sharp at her stubborn jaw line. When he buries his hand in it, it doesn’t scratch or nick. His silk wrapped knuckles don’t bleed. No, Lucky jabs him in other ways…with her cryptic expression, with the whisper-slide of her thigh between his legs. “What are you waiting for, Alex?” she asks, mouth brushing the corner of his lips. Too coy for a kiss, too cautious for anything real.

  What is he waiting for? For rain. For lightning to strike him dead. And for any sign that falling for this woman isn’t the biggest mistake he’s ever made. Alex pulls her against him, cradling the back of her head in his palm as he initiates the kiss. Far from their first, certainly not their last and rife with second guesses. She plays the passive participant, as if proving her thesis about his delusions of grandeur, and Alex breathes stilted Russian curses into the smug gate of her teeth. “Stop it,” he growls in a tongue they both understand.

  “I can’t. It’s who we are.” There’s an odd tenderness to how she kisses him back. Sweetly indulgent. She touches his cheek with the backs of her fingers. “We barter, Alex. We play. We’re not people who do business lunches and dinner dates.”

  Her words call up the absurd image of laughing over coffees and salads…and it’s chased by another, more vibrant, picture of her bathed in midday sunlight, naked in his bed. “We could do lunch,” he points out, unbuttoning her jacket and the silk blouse beneath. “We could do breakfast and dinner and drinks. You don’t want to. You like keeping me on a string, Lucky. More than that, you like keeping this in the dark.”

  She doesn’t deny it. She doesn’t confirm it. She just tugs at his already loosened tie. “Quid pro quo,” she whispers. “You get something out of this, too.”

  “I know. I count the scratches on my back.” He slides his hands beneath her blouse, pantomiming scoring his blunt nails across her skin. She doesn’t shiver. Of course not. All of their encounters are an exercise in the things Lucky won’t do. She won’t shiver, won’t blink, won’t feel.

  The thought is enough to flip a switch in him. Just minutes ago, he was dozing off, but now he’s wide awake, with his emotions cast in stark, violent relief.

  Lucky laughs even as she kisses him back, meeting his fury. Matching it with her ice-cold satisfaction.

  Just once, Alex wishes he could taste something on her tongue besides lies.

  ***

  Alex is beautiful when he fucks her, when he pins her hands behind her back and bends her over his desk. But when he kisses her like he might truly care for her, he is absolutely devastating.

  Lucky doesn’t know why she keeps coming back.

  She tells herself it’s for the job. Because he’s her inside man at the District Attorney’s office, and it’s too good a connection not to exploit. Because some day soon she’ll get back on track and do what she’s supposed to.

  She rationalizes that anything that happens between four walls, in the middle of the night, can’t possibly mean much. They screw, they shag, they fuck. That’s all. But Lucky doesn’t have a lover during the day. Any man who touches her in the sunlight gets his fingers broken. This man should have no dominion over her, regardless of the hour.

  He should be nothing to her.

  He is nothing to her.

  She is just passing the time.

  Lucky has a dozen excuses, each more ridiculous and flimsy than the last.

  And three, sometimes four, times a week she drives to Alex Roskov’s office under the pretense of an information exchange and lets him hold her like she’s never spilled blood. Like she’s never woken screaming from an endless loop of committed sins. Like she’s one in a million.

  He wants to date her. To court her. To act like this is a relationship. So proper, this crusader for justice. He thinks he can bring her to justice, too. “Just bring me off,” she urges, tossing aside his tie, starting work on his shirt…so that, soon, they’re both as bare as they’ll allow themselves to be.

  She never gets to know them, not really. But she knows Alex. His unbearably youthful smile. The way he tents his pockets with his clenched fists and paces the carpet while he’s working out a problem. She knows how he likes his coffee — one cream, one sugar — and that he still hasn’t fully furnished the high-rise flat he loathes going home to. Lucky knows the hairy hollow of his armpit, the unshaven shadow beneath his jaw and the crease of his ass. She’s heard him gasp out her name when she graces each of those spots with a kiss or a lick.

  These facts are more important than any she might learn from a neatly typed dossier. They tell her where he’s weak, when he’s vulnerable, when he’s needy.

  He doesn’t stiffen when she puts the gun to the back of his head, pressing the blunt nub into the base of his skull. He doesn’t stop, doesn’t skip a beat. He just thrusts into her other hand, believing in her, trusting her…comforting her when she says, “Next time. I’ll do it next time. I swear.”

  “Okay,” he soothes her as he comes. As he turns and takes her — filthy, stained hands and all — in his arms. “Okay, Lucky. Next time.”

  Fool that she is, she believes him.

  The Test Flight

  The long, narrow room was filled to the brim with people and noise. Typewriters chimed merrily and telephones rang off and on. Ashok saw none of it after his initial assessment. Because as he closed in on Miss Maria Fernandes’s desk — second from the front, he’d been told — his vision was filled only with glory.

  A brown pencil skirt hugged the typist’s trim waist and thighs, tapering to just below her knees and revealing plain war-time stockings with pin-straight seams. He couldn’t look away as the girl stretched across her desk to adjust the ribbon of her machine. Because the material stretched, too. Bhagwan. It was too much. And not enough.

  “Hey. Eyes front, Flyboy,” she snapped in husky and broken Hindi, even though he hadn’t announced his presence. Even though she couldn’t possibly know he was there. Likely she was used to stares, could feel them directed at her pert bottom. What was one more lewd look?

  “S-sorry, Mem,” he murmured, tugging at his too-tight collar, suddenly abashed. His mother had raised a gentleman, not a lecher. A major. “Major Ashok Saxena. Again, apologies.”

  She slipped back into her seat, patting the shining roll of her black hair. “Accepted, Sir,” she chirped in English, before finally deigning to set eyes on him.

  Unearthly, beautiful eyes. Huge. Thick-lashed. Like the gaze of a goddess in a temple. They ruled her entire face and made him forget almost entirely about her legs. Durga, Saraswati and Laxmi were cursing him and blessing him at once.

  Still beaming from passing his training and qualifying for the RAF with seventeen of the others who’d come to Britain, Ashok had walked into the typing pool like a strutting cock — top of the world — holding his letter for Ma and Pitaji and hoping for a little aankh-micholi with a pretty girl or two. But this girl’s gaze didn’t flirt. It conquered. It flickered over him, from his jaunty pilot’s cap to his shined shoes, and then returned to her typewriter. Unimpressed.

  “May I help you?” Her English was perfect. Like her dark skin. A silver cross on a chain sat at the base of her throat, the metal a shining contrast. She was a Christian, then. A Catholic. It made a sort of sense. He could not imagine his sisters being allowed to come to England, much less to wear white collared shirtwaists and talk back to fighter pilots. Good Hindu girls from good Hindu families stayed home, or so he’d been told.

  According to Pitaji, there was a long list of things good Hindu girls were supposed to do. Ashok wasn’t interested in a single one. They could hide behind their purdah. He preferred the woman who was right in front of him.
Lush and lovely with coral lips.

  “I’ve a letter.” There. That was halfway to smart. “The other officers say you are the best.” She would type it, and then it would be combed over by Intelligence, sanitized before it was sent on to India. Singh and Rathod had assured him that Miss Fernandes had a softer touch than some of the other girls from the typing pool. That she found a way to communicate things to families back home despite the strictures.

  “Eighty-five wpm,” she said, crisp pride and satisfaction filling her voice. “Give it here.” She extended her palm, flat and waiting for his papers.

  His tongue was thick. His fingers even thicker, too clumsy to hand over the scribble-filled pages straight away. He’d never had trouble chatting up girls in Lucknow. One tight skirt, two perfect seams, even more perfect eyes, and he was lost. “Mem…” he began, only to stop and shake his head.

  When he didn’t move, didn’t say anything further, Miss Fernandes just sighed. And her tart Hindi chastisement returned. “Hey. Ustad.” Again she called him “flyboy” as if he was just another man, another annoyance. Any man. Any annoyance. “I do not have all day. This isn’t your father’s office.”

  Ashok choked and felt the tips of his ears grow warm.

  He was RAF now. He was going to fly for the Allies.

  And he’d been shot down without leaving the ground.

  Steal Away and See Me

  The hull of the ship gleams like old-world copper in the low lights of the hangar. I rock back on my heels, admiring an hour’s worth of work. The rag in my hand is black with space dust and grime, and so are my fingers. It’ll take half the night to get the grit out from beneath my nails. But it’s worth it to see her shining, to press my cheek to her clean skin and hear her humming. She’s my best girl, this one. I know her every curve, her every angle, and she knows how high and how far I love to fly. We’ve been together a long time.