Hunter: Perfect Revenge (Perfectly Book 3)

by Alice May Ball

  He was closer and so damn big he almost had me surrounded. I started to say, “No,” but he reached for the glass and his arms were nearly around me.

  The door slammed and the sound of heavy footsteps on the wooden stairs made everything stop. His voice drifted down from above. He had a way of talking that his deep voice didn’t sound loud, but it swept the whole room. A a voice that commanded attention.

  “I’m buying that drink, friend. Best you don’t put your pawmarks on the glass.” Horse – could that really be what he called himself? Anyway, the easy menace in his voice made the big man at my side pause.

  The man turned slowly. “You’re too late, bud. The lady’s spoken for.”

  I was about to tell him, that I could do my own fucking speaking, thank you very much, but Horse was already inches away from the man’s face.

  He had a gleam in his eye and his teeth shone through his grin. He lowered his long eyelashes as he said, “You don’t want this fight, friend.” And showed an open hand as he gestured with a nod, “Move aside.”

  The man’s lips pressed together and his eyes flicked from Horse, to the barkeep, and back to me. We all knew he was going to back down and none of us needed to make it tough on him. But we all were keen to watch it play out.

  The man was still. Horse let an easy smile dimple his jaw as he cocked his chin a notch. His patched eyelash beat slowly and he said, “You want me to buy you a drink, too?”

  The man knew he was getting off light. He slumped and said, “No, you’re good.”

  Horse spread his hands and smiled as he watched the man shuffle, round shouldered, back to his table. He turned to me at last. “We’re all good.”

  Donny was pouring out another bourbon and he pushed the tumbler to Horse. “Thanks, Donny.” He made it look like he was so at home in the bar that one of the stools would have his name on it, but I was sure he’d just called ahead, got talking to Donny and established himself. He seemed like that kind of a guy.

  The kind of man you could drop into practically any situation. He’d take charge and have everyone on his side in the time it took him to walk across the floor. He had a slow walk, or it seemed that way, but he could come up on you surprisingly fast.

  He lifted his glass to me. “So, what are we drinking to, a successful afternoon of Agenting Specially?”

  “We’ll have trouble getting along if you keep trying to make fun of the Bureau.”

  “Okay, I won’t do it any more. I just always wonder how Special the Special Agents are if there aren’t any Ordinary Agents,” he looked at me over the rim of the glass. “That’s all.”

  This whole thing was beginning to look like a bad idea. I kept my voice even, “Let’s drink to a fresh start.”

  Even if he was going to make jokes about my work, he should have had the sense not to do it in public when I was off duty. I’d changed clothes and pinned up my hair. Now I was wishing I hadn’t.

  “Let’s talk about your day instead,” I looked steadily at him, “Much extorting today? Successful intimidation, good shakedowns?”

  His boyish grin flashed. Damn he was hot. “Ouch,” he said, “We won’t talk about work then. How ’bout them Yankees?”

  I took a sip off my bourbon. It was smoky with a caramel flavor. The kick was held back and smooth. The fire that it carried down my throat made me think about how stimulated I was by Horse’s performance, facing down the barroom bully. Colleagues at work tended to be protective of me, even though they knew I could take care of myself as well as they could, but they wouldn’t step up as quickly or as effectively as Horse did.

  “Is your name really ‘Horse’?”

  His grin smoldered like the whiskey. “What do you think?”

  “I haven’t got a clue. I don’t like guessing games much either.”

  His eyebrow went up. He had a look like a schoolboy, challenged but undaunted. Coming back for more. He said, “Well, this is awkward.”

  He let it be for a moment, watching to see how uncomfortable it made me. Or how well I covered it. “How about yourself. Do you have a name?”

  “Vesper.” I told him. “Vesper Cross.”

  “Sounds religious. You a believer, Vesper Cross?” It gave me a strange feeling, hearing my name rolling around on his tongue.

  The music from the jukebox was some Brit electro pop from the eighties. A low female voice told us that sweet dreams are made of this. Dark and infectious. Lifting the tumbler again, I hadn’t noticed that I was moving to the beat. Not until I saw Horse’s hips, slightly but unmistakably swivel. Just once but in perfect time with the rhythm that I hadn’t realized I was following. Like it was something we both knew how to do. A thing we had secretly, silently agreed upon. He nodded. I nodded back.

  My legs moved. His pelvis tilted. I realized that we were dancing, but like we were describing the dance that we would do. Like we both knew the moves and we were rehearsing them together.

  His fingers lifted my palm. Something more than the thrill of a musical beat made my spine tingle. The woman’s low voice sang: Who am I to disagree? He backed into the dark floor of the bar. We still were barely moving. But we were dancing. His grin was like a lick of flame as his eyes swept slowly down my body and back up. His fingers twisted and I spun. Someone in the room said, “Ow!”

  He touched my waist and I spun again. He danced, only slightly, but it was for me. At the end he laid a hand on my shoulder and pulled me close. Close enough for me to taste the heat of the bourbon on his breath. To feel the hot strength of his hard body. For a moment we were still like that. Near enough to kiss. Both of us thinking about it. I saw his tongue moisten his lips.

  The heat of his body called to mine. His hips to mine in particular.

  As he guided me back to the bar, his hand slipped down my back and rested at the bottom of my spine. It felt good there. Like we were something together. Maybe we could have been. If only he would have dropped that maddening little boy grin. I wondered if maybe I should slap it off his face.

  The idea had definite appeal.

  S I STEERED her back to the bar there was a bloom in her cheeks. That whole thing with the song kind of took me by surprise. I’m not a dancer, not by inclination or by habit. I’ll step out onto a minefield easier than a dance floor. It had happened so naturally, I didn’t expect it.

  There was sitting a guy at a table on the edge of the floor, I swear that when we stopped he was going to clap. The look I shot him clued him what he’d get if he slapped his hands together just once or made the slightest whisper of a sound. He got the message.

  Back at the bar, she looked up into my face and a rush of sensation went through me. I wanted to fuck her. Obviously. But urgently. It was a pressing need.

  All the time she had moved in front of me I’d savored the thought of how her curves would feel in my hands. The heat of her luscious body as it pressed against my chest. How her spine would wriggle and shake into to life. How her breath would taste.

  A heady image played in my mind of her, on her back in a pile of thick, soft pillows, her legs in the air, parted so that I could feast on her. Taste the delicious flower that I just gotten such an intoxicating breath of. With her ass cheeks in my hands and her thighs clamped firmly around my head, I just knew she would make the most fabulous moans and she’d rumble like a forest fire when I licked and teased her and learned her secret rhythm.

  Dancing with her had given me clues. Images played in my head of how I’d coax her, make her open up. Kindle her and awaken her. Fire her up until she cracked open. Drink and suck her into one explosive orgasm after another. My whole body tightened at the thought of her darkest, deepest flavors. Man, I loved nothing better than a fuck any day, but the weight of my wanting for this firecracker was right off the damned scale.

  There was her infuriating resistance to overcome, but that was just going to be the hunt. The chase. The very thought made me achingly hard for how we’d finally get there. And for how she would be, clawing
hot, sweaty, panting and hungry for me.

  We had a couple of drinks. She was whip-smart and relaxed at the same time. Intelligence in a woman is a turn on for me, and Vesper was off the scale hot. Not to mention her body moved like a poem made flesh.

  She carried a little weight on her frame, and I really love that, but she was quick and nimble. I couldn’t get my head out of how she was going to be in the sack, thinking about of all that energy, rising like a wave and crashing to rise again. Every scent of her made me want to lean closer.

  I had to hold myself back, restrain the urge to just sweep her up, pull her to me and have our bodies wrap and enfold. To pry her open and drive into her. With some effort I stayed focussed on what she was saying, even though my whole every beat of my pulse seemed to be into my cock and pointing directly at her.

  At one point I asked her, “What made you want to be in law enforcement in the first place? You don’t strike me as the goody-goody type.”

  She said, “I’m not. Is that how you see everyone in the enforcement agencies?”

  “No, that’s just one kind. There are two types. The rest would mostly be criminals themselves, only they don’t have the stomach for it.”

  “So you think that’s what I am? Someone who wishes they could rob banks, maybe wave a gun around?”

  “No. You don’t seem like that at all. That’s why I asked.”

  “It was something I wanted since high school. I wasn’t always sure how, but I knew I wanted to do something connected with the law.”

  It struck me, how she said, ‘Since high school.’ Not ‘Since I was in high school.’ I wondered if something had happened.

  “I majored in law at college. Then moved on to a Master's in Criminology. I thought I might be an attorney. A crusading angel in the courtroom, you know? Revenge for the wronged, bringing justice down on the wicked.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Oh, nothing. I liked litigation. Arguing a case. I always love the way that the law works, like an intricate piece of clockwork, you know? Every part fits together.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle at that. “Only it often tells the wrong time.”

  If only I’d have known then where all this would really lead.

  “Well,” she said, “We can agree to differing opinions about that. I’m not saying the law always gets it right, but I would say that it evens out over time.”

  “Oh, right. ‘He may not have been guilty of this one, but he sure as hell got away with others.’”

  “Something like that.”

  “So, all those black men in jail, they really are all crooks. Only some of them just don’t know it.”

  “I said it doesn’t get it right all the time.”

  “And all the Wall Street bankers. None of them should be spending their days and nights in the cells.”

  “Honestly? You’re right. It’s not a perfect system. But the people, the general public, they don’t always help. Everyone has their own pet causes and the people they want to see jailed, the people they wish would be released. And they’re the people that make up the juries.”

  “You know the one thing people on both sides of the fence, my side and yours can usually agree about? What makes it go wrong most of the time is the lawyers.”

  “I don’t think that. I think it’s everybody. Everyone thinks the law should be blind and act without fear or favor, until it’s their friend or relative, their son or daughter or the politician they always liked and trusted on the stand. When that person winds up under a microscope, then the law should be flexible. And people believe that at every level.”

  “So what good does the FBI do?”

  “Honestly? Of all the agencies, of all the parts of the system, I’d say the Bureau gets it right more often. Maybe even more important, I think the FBI gets it wrong less often.”

  “Only when you get it wrong, you get it really wrong.”

  “We don’t do traffic stops and petty larceny. We don’t handle too many small cases. When the bureau shows up, there’s been some serious crime.”

  “Or there’s about to be.”

  “Okay. You have to really know what you’re talking about to be saying stuff like that. In a bar, when you’re making a noise with your buddies, I guess you can say what you like. But around me, around a Special Agent? We put a lot of pride and dedication into what we do. You want to call us out, you better have some facts on your side, boy.”

  She was still cool. She could make an argument like that and still be twirling her drink with an easy gleam in her eye.

  “You should have been an attorney. You’d have made a good one.”

  “I was. And I did.” She held up her glass. It was nearly empty. And I knew she was playing a game. She would buy her own drinks if she felt like it. I was ready to bet she could draw herself up straight and say, ‘the hell you think you’re doing buying me drinks?’ That incorruptibility, that independence. When it suited her. This was a woman with a lot of facets. Wouldn’t do to take your eye off this one for too long.

  She was leaning in towards me and I moved back a little. I said, “You dance like you got bugs in your pants.”

  Her leg shifted nearer and her toes pointed at me. “You’re charm all the way up, aren’t you.”

  “All the way down, maybe.” I smirked.

  She threw her head back, exposing her long, lovely neck. “If you’re heading down tonight,” she laughed, “you’ll be on your own.”

  I gave her a grin. “Oh, no. Any given night there are a dozen foolish women. And one smart one.”

  “Lucky you if there are the foolish ones.” She looked up at me across her glass.

  I grinned as I shook my head slowly, “The smart one is the prize. But she may not always be smart enough to know it.”

  Her eyelids lowered. “You do think highly of yourself.”

  My tongue slipped across my lips, “I’m just going by reviews.”

  “Well, I think I’ll leave you to revel in your Trip Advisor page. I’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

  “Oh, what are you doing tomorrow?”

  “I’m going to work.”

  “Cute. I’ll walk out with you.”

  “Now you’re being cute.” She fought back a smile as she looked up at me, “You make it sound like high school. The football star and the nerdy girl.”

  I held open the door to the steps and out of the bar. My cock twitched at the scent of her as she slipped by. Inhaling deep I said, “You’d be the prom queen.”

  Her ass shook as she turned, “Flatterer.”

  “Or, more likely, the girl who should have been the prom queen, if only the other girl hadn’t blown more guys to get votes.”

  “Oh, that’s clever.“ her eyes twinkled, “Push-pull. Hmm. Wait while I make a note.”

  “You want me to take you home?”

  “Nice try, mafia guy. No, I can make it on my own, thanks.”

  “You know the way?”

  “What?”

  “I meant my home, not yours.”

  “I like a man who doesn’t give up. Shame you’re not him.”

  “Your loss.”

  “I know, right? My life is basically over at this point.”

  We stepped out into the night and she stood near me. Neon flickers reflected on the wet sidewalks. Night time traffic passed and I watched the gleam of the lights in her eyes.