by Terra Little
“Your entrées should be out shortly. Can I get either of you anything else in the meantime?”
Elise shook her head at Broderick’s silent query. “I think we’re fine for now, thank you,” he told the woman as she set his wineglass in front of him. As soon as she was gone again, he turned back to Elise with his brows cocked. “You were saying?”
“Just that I was a militant nerd and Olivia wasn’t. She fooled around so much throughout high school that I don’t even want to think about how she managed to get passing grades the whole time. My parents were sure that she’d eventually end up in prison for running some sort of black-book escort agency, and, I have to admit, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised myself if she had. She’s always been for making love, not war, so, I figured, she’d get herself into some kind of worldwide sex scandal and I, being fresh out of law school and ready to take on the world by then, would have to save her ass. I guess you can see that things didn’t quite work out that way. Her SAT scores were actually better than mine.”
“Did she go to Northwestern, too?”
Elise shook her head as she swallowed a mouthful of wine. “Loyola. She studied chemistry. Turns out, she was a closet nerd all along. Who knew that it was possible to be serious about education and be a party girl at the same time?”
His eyebrows shot up again and a smile toyed with his lips. “It’s not?”
“I never thought so before.”
“What do you think now?”
“Now, I’m wondering why I never thought about starting my own black-book escort agency. I could’ve easily overseen the day-to-day operations between classes or after work.”
Broderick had been in the midst of taking a sip of wine when Elise shared her latest revelation and clearly it caught him off guard. He quickly set his glass down and snatched up a linen napkin from the table, pressing it to his mouth while he worked out swallowing without choking himself and breathing at the same time. Several seconds passed with him struggling to clear his throat.
“Why is that so shocking?” She wasn’t sure if she was amused or offended.
“It’s not.” He cleared his throat one last time and reached for his water glass. “In fact, it’s actually kind of arousing,” he murmured as he put the glass to his mouth and sipped. “But then, so is the fact that, at this very moment, I happen to be the only man on Earth who knows that your clitoris is pierced with a tiny pink diamond. So I might be a little biased, either way.”
“I was wondering how long it would take you to get around to mentioning that.”
He cracked a smile. “You knew I would.”
Her genital piercing was only six months old and, until Broderick, only she and her vibrator knew it existed. “No one else knows about it, not even Olivia, so if I ever hear about it somewhere else, I’ll know it came from you.”
“And no one ever will,” he put in quickly, staving off the rest of her tirade with his hands up in mock supplication. “Your secret is safe with me. I only brought it up to point out something that’s very obvious to me.”
“Which is?”
“Which is that it’s okay to keep some things secret and sacred. Personally, I’m glad you were a nerd growing up.”
“Why?”
“Because it means you gave me something that very few people have ever been given. From where I’m sitting, that’s considered a gift. As a matter of fact, everything about these past couple of days with you has been incredible. So here’s another secret for you, Elise. Your diamond-studded clit is the sweetest that I’ve ever had the distinct pleasure of tasting, and, despite what you might be thinking, there haven’t been very many. If I ever hear that somewhere else,” he said, gesturing across the table at her with his wineglass before sipping. “I’ll know it was you.”
If their server was aware of the tension between them when she reappeared just then with their entrées, she didn’t let on. If she noticed that they seemed to be hypnotized by each other’s gazes, she didn’t comment as she set their plates before them, politely asked if they’d like anything else and eventually drifted away when it finally occurred to Broderick to shake his head in response.
Has been. He’d said has been. The subtle difference in tenses hadn’t escaped Elise’s notice. As turned-on as she was by Broderick’s admission, she couldn’t help feeling an accompanying wave of disappointment. She’d known all along that what they were doing was temporary, that they’d part ways and probably never see each other again after it was over. But now that the time had apparently come, she wasn’t as ready to be done with it or with him as she thought she’d be.
She could hear Olivia now. Suck it up, Elise. This is why they’re called flings, remember?
Yes, and this is also why I’ve avoided them like the plague, she mentally countered.
She was the first to look away, picking up the linen napkin beside her plate and transferring it to her lap. “When do we leave?”
“First thing in the morning” came his quiet reply.
“Then I guess we should hurry and finish up here, so we can get back to the hotel and get some sleep. You probably want to get an early start.” She picked up her knife and fork and cut into her tuna steak.
“Not too early, I hope.”
Her eyes flickered up to his and instantly went liquid with arousal when she saw the raw desire on his face. “No...not too early. Oh, and, by the way,” she whispered as she forked up a morsel of tuna and offered it to him across the table. His full lips closed around her fork just as she said, “Did I mention that I’m not wearing any panties?”
* * *
A redhead walked out of the ladies’ room first and then, finally, the brunette that Broderick had been watching for, for the past sixty seconds. Once she was out of sight, he stepped from the shadows and slipped through the door before it closed after her. Locking it behind him, he met Elise’s saucer-sized eyes in the mirror in front of her at the vanity and put his index finger to his lips. “Shh,” he warned her horror-stricken reflection, then disappeared down the walkway fronting a row of stalls. Finding them all empty, he returned, walking up behind Elise at the mirror and parking his lips next to her ear. The lip-gloss wand in her hand froze halfway to her mouth.
“Was there any particular reason you felt it necessary to mention to me that you weren’t wearing panties?” he growled against the shell of her ear. Needing to see for himself, he reached down and slowly lifted the hem of her skirt until it was gathered around her waist and he could see her smooth-shaven mound clearly in the mirror in front of them.
Reaching around her, he slowly sank his middle finger into her slit and dragged the pad of his finger back and forth across her swollen clitoris.
She gasped. “Oh, God, Broderick. You can’t do this to me here. Someone might be waiting to come in.” He hit a sweet spot and her hips bucked, mouth fell open. “Oooh, that feels so good.” She covered his hand with hers and slowly rocked her hips in sync with the rhythm of his finger’s strokes.
His penis bone hard and pulsing wildly inside his Brooks Brother’s trousers, Broderick watched Elise’s face closely in the mirror, enjoying the play of sensations that randomly darted across her face. Fear that they would be caught warred with the excitement of struggling to keep her eyes open so she could watch his fingers play between her slick lips. She was wet and the fact that she could see for herself just how wet she was every time his finger plunged deep and then withdrew, coated with her glistening juices, seemed to ramp up her excitement that much more. As a result, his own excitement shot through the roof.
“You’re so goddamn beautiful when you cum. Did you know that? You’re not wearing panties because you want me to suck your clit until you cum, isn’t that right, Elise?”
“Oh, God, yes,” she pleaded, catching his eyes in the mirror. “Yes!”
�
��All right, but only if you promise not to scream.”
“I won’t,” she promised breathlessly.
“Turn around then.” She did and he quickly lifted her and set her butt on the edge of the vanity top. She instinctively leaned back against the mirror as he parted her thighs. “That’s a good girl,” he crooned as he dropped down to his haunches between them and inhaled the aroma of her dripping sex deep into his nostrils. “Have I told you yet exactly how much seeing your bare pussy turns me on?”
“N-no,” Elise whispered.
“No?” He dipped his head and dragged the flat of his tongue across her honey-soaked slit, chuckling when her thighs began trembling. “Then allow me show you,” he said, spreading her lips open and homing in on the pink pearl that lay within with the tip of his flickering tongue.
In two minutes flat, Broderick dropped a soft kiss on the back of Elise’s neck, met her sleepy-looking, feline eyes in the mirror and whispered, “Meet you back at the table,” into her ear. Then he unlocked the bathroom door and slipped out as quickly as he’d slipped in.
He was in trouble, that much was obvious, even to someone as pussy whipped as he admittedly was. The problem, if you could call it that, was that he couldn’t quite figure out how to snap himself out of the spell that Elise Carrington had somehow cast on him. Or if he even wanted to.
Nah, that wasn’t really the problem. Time, distance and throwing himself into his work would take care of his insatiable sex drive easily enough. They always did. The real problem was that she was so damn irresistible in the here and now. He liked to give her a hard time about her constant blushing because it only made her blush more. But in reality, if blushes equaled hard-ons, then he was no better than she was at concealing his body’s reaction to her. One look, one slant of those incredibly expressive tigress eyes in his direction, and he was ready to do whatever he had to do for a taste of her lips or a lick of her silky skin—for the privilege of burying himself balls deep in her heat and riding her until he was slick with sweat and ready to pass out.
Broderick adored women and he loved sex. He’d had plenty of it over the years, and, God willing, he’d have plenty more before it was all over. But this...whatever this was that he and Elise Carrington were doing was starting to wander over into more-than-sex territory, and that was the real problem. He wasn’t supposed to want her this much, and being with her definitely wasn’t supposed to feel so good.
Yep, he was definitely in trouble. Not a lot of trouble, all things considered, but enough that he considered Leahy’s summons a lucky break. The sooner he got the hell out of Dodge, the better. Admitting that he had a problem was the first step. A few days spent lurking in the shadows of an Argentinian ghetto would surely take care of the rest.
Chapter 12
Olivia’s face was the first thing Elise saw when she walked through the door at home.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t our very own Lady Chatterley,” Olivia drawled sarcastically, strolling across the foyer in Elise’s direction with her arms folded underneath her breasts and her reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose. She stared at Elise over the hot-pink rim. “You look very...satisfied. Did you enjoy yourself?”
“Uh...” Suddenly wary, Elise watched Olivia’s face carefully as she hung her jacket in the coat closet, searching for clues as to how she should respond. By itself, the question seemed innocent enough, but Olivia’s tone was off and so was her demeanor. “I guess so, yes.”
“Good,” Olivia chirped. “I’m glad you enjoyed yourself. That’s what it looked like when I peeked out the window just now and saw you two together. I thought, wow, it’s about time Elise got her groove back. Then I thought, well, it’s not like she ever really had a groove in the first place, but that doesn’t matter right now. What matters is that she finally got some. I just hope it was enough to last you for a while because, after today, you can never see or talk to Broderick Cannon again. Whatever just happened between the two of you, as of right this second, is over. It has to be.”
Elise was stunned, looking at Olivia like she’d lost her mind. “What are you talking about?”
“What am I talking about?” Olivia unfolded an arm to scratch her head as if it would help her think faster. “Well, let’s see...” She started pacing back and forth nervously in front of Elise, who noticed the manila folder tucked underneath her folded arm on Olivia’s third pass. “You know how we sometimes make women in desperate situations disappear from one place and then help them reappear someplace else as a completely different person?”
Oh, God, no.
“Yes,” Elise heard herself say.
It can’t be.
But Elise somehow knew that it was long before Olivia spoke and confirmed her worst fears. After all, wasn’t this exactly the kind of luck that she always seemed to attract?
“We erased eight women back in 2013. Guess who was one of them?” Olivia announced as she handed over the folder she was holding, pushed her glasses higher up on the bridge of her nose and then refolded her arms smartly. “Brandy Cannon was, Elise. You bet the man that you could find the sister he’s been searching for, for three years and, as it turns out, you and I are the reason she went missing to begin with.”
* * *
Karma was a bitch.
Elise had always known that. But, still. There was nothing like a head-on collision with the lady herself to really drive the point home. One minute, she was floating on cloud nine, enjoying the kind of sex-induced high that she’d only heard about from other women, and the next, she was trying to make a deal with the devil for a do-over, a chance to refuse Joel’s case—again—and stick to her guns this time.
“I knew I shouldn’t have taken Joel’s case,” she said, pushing aside one of several shoe boxes lined up on a shelf in her bedroom closet and pressing her index finger to the small pane of glass that the shift revealed. After a series of short beeps, during which time an electronic device on the other side of the wall scanned her fingerprint to confirm her identity, the false wall to her left unlocked in silent welcome. She pushed gently and the panel swung open, taking two rows of neatly hung blouses with it and revealing the hidden room behind it. “Thank you, again, for that, by the way,” she said, stepping through the doorway and activating the motion-sensitive overhead lighting.
Olivia barged through the doorway right behind her, tossing the manila folder in her hand on the glass-topped conference table in the center of the room, then slapping her hands on her hips and rounding on Elise. “I’ve already apologized six times now, sis. Doing it once more isn’t going to make me feel any worse, but it will piss me off. This is no more my fault than it is yours. It could’ve happened to either of us and you know it.” Sidestepping Elise, she rounded the table and switched on the flat-screen monitor on the far wall. “Frankly,” she said as she scanned the color-coded tabbed options already on display there, “I’m surprised it hasn’t already.”
Elise pulled a leather chair away from the table and dropped into it heavily, sliding the folder across the table in her direction and flipping it open on the tabletop in front of her. “Start from the beginning, please, so I can wrap my head around this nightmare.”
As deeply offended as she’d pretended to be when Broderick had confronted her, he’d really only been slightly incorrect in suggesting that she spent most of her investigative time tracking down errant husbands. It wasn’t something that she liked to dwell on, but she did, in fact, log a decent number of billable hours following philandering spouses around and gathering ammunition for nasty divorces. Certainly not all of her billable hours, but enough of them to satisfy their tax accountant, the IRS and any other legal entity that cared to look closely at their daily operations. Those hours, as well as the ones they logged while working missing persons cases, were the very things that lent Carrington Consulting both the credibility and the in
visibility that it required in order to continue flying under the radar—undetected and undisturbed.
The real work, though, was done right here in their secret war room, away from the eyes and ears of the rest of the world. It wasn’t included on any blueprint of the house in existence, and, other than the two of them, no one else knew that it was there, which was a good thing because, if it was ever discovered, theirs and several other heads across the country would roll. The last time Elise had bothered to check, helping battered women walk away from their current lives and making them disappear into thin air was a crime. And orange, she thought with a shudder of revulsion, had never been her color.
“As you wish,” Olivia said, detaching a remote from the side panel of the monitor, aiming it at the screen and then stepping aside as several different images expanded to fill the seventy-two-inch space in a checkerboard pattern. “This is Brandy Melissa Cannon Dortch,” she said, enlarging the first image—a professional portrait of the woman in question. It was the same photo as the one that Broderick had shown her, but, for some reason, Elise was just now clearly seeing the shared resemblance.
“At the time of her disappearance three years ago, she was the forty-four-year-old wife of Dennis Dortch.” She glanced back at Elise over her shoulder and smirked. “He was the forty-eight-year-old mayor of Los Angeles, California, then and just beginning his second term.” A second image came forward, setting up a side-by-side photo comparison. “As you can see, they were a stylish interracial couple, so their marriage was sort of like a political poster child for racial tolerance, which, since Barack Obama was on the scene, as well, was sort of the country’s collective theme song at the time. It’s also a large part of the reason why a fairly unknown city councilman, which Dortch was up until early 2007, when he suddenly appeared on the local political scene and announced his intended candidacy in the city’s 2008 mayoral election, gained a majority of the minority vote and won the election by a very skinny margin. Not long after, Brandy gave up her position with LA’s branch of the Federal Reserve. He was reelected for a second term in 2012, and then Brandy came to us through the network in 2013. She and Dortch had been married for ten years by then.”