Veda felt every ripple of his eight-pack abs, his solid pecs, and his dick, begging for entry at the seat of her panties, all the way down to the soft hairs on his thighs where they tickled the backs of hers. She laid her head on his strong shoulder and tried to disappear into the amazing sensation of his lips sucking her skin, lapping at the dip in her neck that made her pussy pulse for the column between her legs.
Her eyes flew open and revisited the balcony. Celeste was still there.
Either oblivious or rebellious, Veda couldn’t tell which, Gage embraced her and pulled them deeper into the tepid water, until just their heads were visible above the white bubbles. He removed one hand from her bra, the other still tickling her nipple. His big hand traveled down her heaving stomach under the water, fingers flared to touch as much of her skin as possible. Veda felt the heat of his touch over the heat of the bubbling water. Every inch of her skin prickled for more, as if dislodging itself from her bones in sheer desperation for his caress. His fingers lingered at the waistband of her panties, and Veda held Celeste’s eyes as he broke the cotton barrier, his soft fingers entering the slippery lips of her pussy. Combined with the water, the slickness of her channel almost caused his fingers to slip out, but he inserted two of them inside her pulsing walls immediately and used her tightness as leverage, covering her clit with his thumb and beginning a gentle stroke, his lips and tongue still assaulting her neck.
Veda couldn’t help the tortured moan that tore up her throat and parted her lips, sure that Celeste could see it in her eyes. The pleasure rocketing through her with every stroke of his skilled fingers. How well he’d come to learn her body in the short time they’d been together. How close he was to bringing her to orgasm with his mother watching from afar.
Her body rocked and convulsed against his hand but she was careful to keep her face under control, turning her head on his shoulder to bury her whimpering lips in his neck. “God, I’m gonna come,” she whispered. “You feel so damn good.” She lifted her hand from the Jacuzzi. The water splashed down from her arm like Niagara as she buried her fingers in his hair, rocking against his gentle kneads.
“I need you so badly,” he whispered, picking up the pace of his knowing strums, his long, thick fingers hitting her G-spot and her clit at the same time. His free hand left her bra, trembling as he cursed under his breath and submerged it under the water behind her back.
She gasped at the unmistakable sensation of the bare, velvety head of his dick brushing her ass, hard as a rock, inches away from being inside her if he decided to replace his fingers with his aching column.
“Take me inside,” she demanded.
“I want you right here. I want to feel you coming around my fingers.” He chuckled softly. “I swear you nearly break my knuckles every time. It’s the most amazing feeling in the world.”
Veda’s eyes opened and she dragged her nails down his skull, looking back up at those white stone columns. Gage curled his fingers inside her, hitting her deepest spot, pressing his thumb against the throbbing nub of her clit and leaving it there as if he could feel that her peak was seconds away.
Veda tried to stop her mind.
She tried to focus on the tightening in her belly, alerting her to her orgasm. She tried to ride the incredible, spine-tingling wave that only he could guide her through.
But her eyes remained riveted to that balcony, and even as her orgasm rocked through her, sending one hushed gasp after the other flying from her lips in time with her convulsing hips, even as she muffled the sound in his neck, she couldn’t stop her wild mind.
She couldn’t tear her eyes from Celeste. From that white stone mansion. That white stone balcony. Those white stone rails.
She tried to put Gage at those rails, ten years ago.
She couldn’t do it.
Her heart loved him too much to even dream it up.
She couldn’t imagine him behind her, clutching those rails the same way Celeste clutched them right then.
She couldn’t imagine him listening to her screams as they pierced the night sky, the same way Celeste’s green eyes screamed and pierced the black sky right then.
She couldn’t imagine him having a hand in the night her life had been forever changed, the way Celeste’s life had been forever changed when Gage had walked away.
Perhaps Gage had been right, Veda thought, holding Celeste’s eyes. Perhaps, in some strange way, she and Celeste really did understand each other.
Perhaps they understood each other more than either of them would ever know.
“Where are you?”
Veda gasped as his gravelly voice pulled her away from her thoughts. Fingers still tangled in his wet hair, she met his eyes. Her thighs clenched around his fingers. Her body convulsed with remnants of the orgasm she hadn’t even felt. Hadn’t even been able to enjoy.
He frowned at her.
Veda knew what she saw in his eyes.
“Where are you?” he begged, his frown deepening as his brown eyes searched hers.
She stroked his hair, hearing the desperation in her voice. “I’m right here.”
He furrowed his brows, and the frustration in his eyes ebbed deeper. “No.”
Veda turned away from the rocks, from the white stone mansion, from Celeste’s piercing eyes, and faced him, cupping his cheeks. “I’m here,” she whispered.
Gage’s chest heaved, the fingers that had left her pussy now clenching her thighs as she straddled him.
She released his troubled face and reached behind her back, unclasping her bra. “I’m right here, baby.”
Not even the storm clouds that had blackened his eyes stopped them from falling to her naked breasts as she removed her bra and tossed it onto the deck. His arms encircled her, the tips of his nails digging into her back as he sucked one nipple into his mouth, his tongue more warm and sizzling than the Jacuzzi could ever dream to be.
“I’m right here,” she promised, stroking his hair gently as he moved to the other nipple and gave it the same love, rolling it around under his tongue even as the frown line between his eyes remained as strong as ever.
Willing to do anything to make that line go away, Veda reached under the water and claimed his pulsing column, gasping when the moan that instantly jetted up his throat tickled the nipple still implanted in his mouth. The deep, gravelly sound hit her aching bud again and again as she brought the head of his dick to her center, still pounding from the orgasm she hadn’t even felt. The orgasm he could somehow tell she hadn’t felt.
When that line between his brows eased the moment the aching head of his dick popped past the tight barrier to her pussy, Veda was like a famished child who’d just been offered a full loaf of bread. She squeezed her walls around his dick as she sank all the way down, desperate to get rid of it completely.
As she took in every inch of him, sitting on his cock, Gage released her nipple from his mouth to make room for the rapid gasp he sucked between his clenched teeth, pulling her in fiercely and sealing their chests together as he began an immediate pound.
Veda cried out, cradling his head between her breasts, now bouncing above the surface of the water with each strike of his hardness, her brown nipples mingling with the trickling white bubbles.
No longer did she care about the heated green eyes that were surely still watching from behind. No longer did she worry about that white stone balcony. No longer did she worry about anything but easing the darkness she’d just seen in his eyes. A darkness that had looked an awful lot like the kind that lived within her every day. She wouldn’t be the person to transfer that burden to him.
She hoped she had the power to stop it.
His moans changed to uncontrollable whimpers as he turned his head and caught her nipple in his mouth again. One of the hands he had locked around her waist moved to her ass. He pressed his thumb against her second entry just as he drew her nipple back into his mouth, pushing just hard enough to illicit the beginnings of her second orgasm.
&
nbsp; “Yes,” she begged, her eyes falling closed and lips parting in amazement as her skin prickled with her second peak. “Yes, Gage. Fuck.”
Gone, as he always was when his orgasm was near, Gage tightened his arm around her waist, sealed her chest to his, and stood, his hardness never leaving her as their naked bodies left the water. Neither bothered to look toward that white stone balcony, too gone. Too desperate for each other. Too hungry to finish.
The water splashed down from their bodies as they stood, as if trying to hold on to them. Veda came down to her feet and turned her back to him. The plop of his dick as it left her pussy overpowered the bubbling water of the Jacuzzi and the crashing waves. She set her knees on the top step of the Jacuzzi, braced her hands on the deck, and bent over. Lifting one of her legs out of the water and planting that on the deck too, she opened herself up to him while smiling over her shoulder.
He was back on her in a flash, water swishing all around him in his frenzied haste to rejoin her. He wrapped his arms around her waist from behind, clutching her breasts with one hand while using the other to guide his dick back inside. He muffled his scream in the crook of her neck as he sank in and instantly picked up where he’d left off, fucking her blindly, on a desperate hunt for the release only she could supply.
And he found it, slapping both hands over hers on the deck and intertwining their fingers as he came. He muffled a strangled cry into her neck and stopped thrusting completely, leaving his entire shaft buried deep, only pulling out the tiniest inch, over and over, as his body convulsed, emptying shot after shot of his load into her pussy.
“Oh, Veda,” he panted, one of his hands leaving the deck to cup her ass, still planted deep as he gave it a smack.
Veda smiled as that smack rang into the air, swallowing thickly as her chest heaved. Not even the gentle nip of the night air against her skin, skin that any other day would be begging to be returned to the toasty warmth of the water, shook her. She licked her lips and held his heavy eyes over her shoulder, drinking in the serenity taking over his face. His eyes, fluttering closed. His lips, parted and smiling. His head, falling slowly back when the pleasure deemed it too heavy to hold up.
Just before his head fell completely back, she saw the line between his eyebrows slowly disappear.
Her eyes flew back to the balcony, their gasps floating into the night air, and when she saw that those white stone rails were empty, she made a silent vow to herself to ensure that line between his brows stayed gone for good.
Because he was not her number ten.
He couldn’t be.
8
“I need to see more progress on The Shadow Rock Chopper.” Captain Leonard Fox played his fingers together. His hard brown eyes surveyed the rows of seats before him in the briefing room, all filled with the exhausted-looking officers of Shadow Rock’s Police Department. Behind him was a whiteboard covered in pictures and random documents. Fox crossed his arms, his jet-black hair gelled back and showcasing his pockmarked face, which appeared more distressed than usual that morning. “Every rich prick on this island up my ass, including the DA. What do we have?”
Silence. Every officer in the room, some in uniform and some in street clothes, looked on with dismay.
“Castration isn’t just violent, but vicious. Barbaric, even,” a female voice chimed in. “Obviously this is personal. Someone the victims know. Intimately, I’d say.”
“Someone in their circle.” Another voice chimed in. “A serial attacker looking for revenge.”
Fox pointed to him. “Not serial yet. Todd Masterson and Eugene Lockwood are our only vics—”
“That we know of.” A random voice.
Fox nodded. “Correct. One more attack would make it a serial, and I have a feeling this guy won’t disappoint us. He’s far from done.”
“She.”
Silence fell as every eye in the room shot to Lincoln Hill, slouched down in a chair in the back of the room, legs spread wide and bulky arms crossed.
“What was that, Hill?” Fox asked.
Linc lifted his chin, meeting Fox’s eyes over the several heads in front of him. “It’s a woman.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Fox said. “Neither of the vics saw his face because he was covered from head to toe both times.”
“She was wearing a dress at the masquerade ball the night Eugene was attacked,” Linc said.
“Easy to put on a dress. For all we know it could be a man dressing up as a woman to throw us off his trail.”
“And the nail polish that chipped off her hand during her first failed attempt to castrate Eugene?” Linc asked.
“Some men wear nail polish.”
“Cow-print nail polish?”
“Who knows? Kids these days… eh, they’re weird. Could be a… a generational thing.”
“Or….” Linc smiled. “It could be a woman.”
Fox’s eyes left Linc, appearing to realize this could go on all day. “We need to continue exploring all our options is what I’m saying. I’m not ready to expel an entire gender from this investigation considering what little information we have. Not yet.”
“Could be a man and a woman. A tag team,” Sam Gellar said, while cutting her eyes at Linc. “Or a copycat?”
“Doubt it,” Fox said. He motioned to the side-by-side photos of Todd and Eugene’s marred testicles, held by magnets on the board to his left. “The similarities, the quality of the stitching, are identical. This is definitely the same person.”
Linc sighed, officially bored. “It’s a doctor. A female doctor. Maybe even a nurse, even though I doubt it. Are we really having this conversation?” He sat forward, leaning on his knees and motioning to the board. “Like you said, it’s quality work. She knows what she’s doing. She’s injecting her vics with a medication that’s easily accessed at the hospital—”
“Yet we’ve turned the hospital inside out and still have nothing on him or her,” Fox reiterated, sticking to his stance that it could be a man or a woman.
“You can also order sodium thiopental online. You don’t have to be a doctor,” a random voice rang in. “It’s easy.”
“What’s not so easy is knowing how much of the drug to administer in order to sedate the victims but not kill them,” Linc jumped in. “She injected both vics with the same drug, different amounts. Eugene is a hundred pounds heavier than Todd, and she knew to give him a higher dosage. She knew the exact amount to give them, both times, to keep them alive. She wants them alive because this is personal. She wants to see them suffering, and being an employee at the hospital would give her a front row seat.”
Silence. A few people in the room nodded their agreement.
Linc held his hands out. “She knows how to make an incision without leaving a mess. She knows how to complete an extraction without bleeding them out. She’s, literally, performing full-blown surgery. Who else but a doctor?”
“Maybe a med student? Or a med school grad who never sought a job? Maybe even a med school dropout who learned just enough to start terrorizing people?”
Fox pointed to the male voice who’d just spoken. “Med students. Look into it. While you’re at it, find out every website that sells this drug and who they’ve sold it to over the last three months.”
“I’m on it, Cap.”
“Waste of time,” Linc said. “I’m telling you it’s an employee at the hospital.”
“Yet you still have nothing of substance to offer me, Hill, and the DA wants answers yesterday.”
Linc’s voice rose. “Then the DA should stop taking a machete to our funding, doing a hack job on our budget, then turning around and demanding we do ten times more with ten times less. Less money, less manpower, less time. Meanwhile the cases keep tripling. Does the DA want us to cure cancer too? Feed all the hungry children? Exact world peace?”
“Sounds like a lot of excuses, and you know how I feel about excuses.”
Linc rolled his eyes, collapsing back in his seat. “Chasing
our tails like a bunch of fucking idiots.”
“You’re certainly no stranger to chasing your tail, huh, Hill?”
Linc’s eyes shot toward the mumbled voice. His heartbeat immediately picked up at the implication behind their words. Sam must’ve seen the instant change in his eyes, the fury, because she clapped a hand on his bicep and squeezed.
But Linc was already in another place, sitting tall, green eyes wide. “Who said that?”
Silence.
“Who the fuck said that?”
His colleagues shifted in their seats, eyes narrowed. None of them dared to look at Linc.
“If anybody has something they’d like to say to me, then say it loud and proud or shut the fuck up.” His chest heaved, betraying his emotion, not because of his body’s instant reaction to anything that had to do with his missing wife but because some asshole had just brought her up in the most cowardly way imaginable.
More silence.
Fox held out a hand toward Linc, but continued speaking to everyone in the room. “Can we focus, please? Maybe this meeting hasn’t made it clear enough, but someone is running around this island castrating—castrating—people. With the sheer amount of balls we’ve got swinging in this room, not to mention the excessive level of testosterone I’m choking on right now”—he looked directly at Linc—“I’m sure we can find a way to focus some of this macho energy on finding out who the hell is doing this. Hill.” He pointed at Linc. “I want you to focus on finding out who Todd and Eugene’s enemies are.”
“How about anyone on this island who isn’t a billionaire?” Linc held his hands up, heart still racing as he fell back into his seat, hands collapsing back into his lap. “That was easy.”
“Not just the obvious,” Fox said. “Ex-girlfriends. Former friends. Business rivals. Everyone they’ve had even the slightest disagreement or altercation with, all the way down to the kid they got into a squabble with on the playground during middle school recess. No one is off-limits.” He pointed his pen at the woman who spoke up earlier. “Smith is right. Rich or poor, man or woman, doctor or civilian—this is personal. Let’s find out why, and let’s do it fast. That’s it.”
Purr (Revenge Book 3) Page 6