Brock nudged me and leaned close. "I'm seeing her again next weekend."
"Really?"
"Really." He shot me a look. "And you know, you've been rocking a pretty dumbass grin yourself most of the day. Don't think I haven't noticed."
"I have not," I groused.
Lucian set four glasses on the bar and filled them with ice and Coke. "Have too." He dug his cell phone out of his pocket and pulled up a grainy, blurry photo of me he'd obviously taken on the sly and, yes, I was sporting a grin exactly as described: big and goofy. "Exhibit A." And then he was gone, having done his damage; typical Luce, dropping a bomb and sauntering off.
"The asshole took a picture?" I snapped, staring after my second-youngest brother.
Brock just snickered. "You mentioned something about a relationship between goofy grins and prime pussy?"
"Yeah, well...she's way more than just prime pussy, so show some respect, you little bastard." I grumbled.
"Hey, you don't have to explain that to me. Those were your words, not mine."
"Shut up," I growled, and pulled a handful of limes out of a refrigerator and set about slicing them...a little too vigorously, possibly.
"Awww, did poor widdle Zaney-wainey get his feewings hurted?" Brock mocked from across the bar. "Methinks the lad doth protest too much."
I stopped slicing and turned to fix an evil-eye glare at Brock. "Hold your hand up against the wall," I told him.
"What? Why? What are you gonna do?"
"Just do it, asshole."
Brock held his hand against the wall at the end of the bar, fingers spread wide, back of his knuckles against the wood. I flipped the knife in the air and caught it by the back of the blade, hesitated in the name of dramatic pause, and then whipped the knife at my brother's hand. The blade flipped end over end and buried itself point-first in the wood between his middle and ring fingers, handle quivering.
"Remember that I can do that the next time you feel like mocking me, dickhead," I snarled.
Brock slid his hand away from the knife and yanked it out of the wall, staring at it like he'd never seen a knife thrown before. "You could have hit my hand, jackass."
I took it from him, washed it, and went back to slicing limes, ignoring the smattering of applause, stares, whistles, and whispers my little display had gotten. "Oh, please. I could do that from twice the distance in the dark with a hatchet."
"Bullshit."
I frowned at Brock. "What do you mean, bullshit? My unit and three others held knife-throwing competitions every year, and I won every time. Got to the point that they'd only let me compete with a handicap, meaning kitchen knives and hand axes and shit instead of actual properly-weighted throwing knives like everyone else got."
Brock shrugged. "Huh. Never knew you could do that." He scooped the lime slices from the cutting board onto the tray.
"There's a lot of shit I can do that you don't know about."
"Like getting offended too easily?" He suggested, pouring a pint of beer for a customer.
"Like beat your scrawny, pretty-boy ass if you don't shut the hell up," I snarled.
Brock just laughed. "Case in point." He shook his head as he handed off the beer and made change for a $10. "You're crankier and tetchier than usual, even for you."
"Jesus, you dork, who even uses words like 'tetchy'?
"I do, Crankshaft."
"Crankshaft?" I asked, staring at him.
"You know, the comic strip about--"
"I fucking know what Crankshaft is, cock-waffle."
"Yeah, well, you're acting more curmudgeonly than Crankshaft. Which is at serious odds with the idiot grin you were floating around with all morning."
I glanced at the time on the register screen; 3:55 p.m. "I gotta go. Got shit to do."
"Classic avoidance technique, brother."
"I'm not avoiding anything, I just--I'm supposed to call Mara at four. And if you say a damn word, I'll castrate you in your sleep."
"The nurse from the wedding? You're...calling her...on the phone?"
"No, you dick-turd, I'm gonna stand on the roof and shout."
"Dick-turd?" He paused in the act of pulling a pour-spout from an empty bottle of Jameson and stuffing it into a fresh one.
"Yes. Dick-turd." I washed my hands and then collected the tips from the tip jar by the register. "Ass-muffin. Douche-canoe. Shit-goblin. Scab-eating shit-sucker. Walking moose knuckle. Sheep-fucker. I got more--should I keep going?"
"Please, no. You're offending my delicate sensibilities with your crude, barbarian epithets. I might faint." He delivered this dripping with monotone sarcasm. "Where do you even come up with this stuff, anyway?"
"Long flights to insertion with not much to do except find new and ever more creative ways of insulting each other," I said.
"Well I'll give you an A for creativity, that's for sure."
I laughed, counting the bills and sorting them. "Seriously, we'd do that for hours. Those are tame compared to some of the shit we'd come up with. Your ears would shrivel off your proper little head if you heard what we'd come up with after six or eight hours in the back of a C-130. The goal was always to be as vile and offensive as possible."
"Go. Call your woman. We got this."
"She's not my woman. We're just...practice dating."
Brock stared at me for a long moment. "There's so much to unpack from that statement I don't even know where to start."
"So don't start. Just let it go."
He shrugged, hands raised in surrender. "Okay, okay. But you realize I'm gonna psychoanalyze you later, right?"
I waved and stuffed the cash into my pocket. "Yeah, yeah, egghead. I'll see you later."
I jogged upstairs and changed into clean jeans, a plain black polo, my combat boots, and my leather jacket. I hesitated for a moment, and then stuffed a few condoms in my back pocket, just because it never hurts to be prepared, especially considering the intense physical chemistry between Mara and I.
Xavier was gone on his bike so I was left on foot, a situation I'd have to rectify posthaste if I was gonna live here another eight months, minimum. To be honest, I could see myself being here in Ketchikan for a little longer. I was enjoying being around my brothers, being back at home, living a little boring civilian life for once. I'd been in the Navy for ten years, the bulk of that as a SEAL and my life had been anything but normal, so this was new and kind of weird and I was enjoying it.
I slipped downstairs and outside, then started walking toward the dock where I knew Mara's friend Claire's cruise ship was docked. I dialed Mara.
She answered on the third ring. "Hey you."
"Hey. Have fun with Claire?" I heard noise and voices in the background, which definitely put her at the cruise ship docks.
"Yeah, it was a fun day. We hiked more of the Rainbird, took a Duck tour, had some lunch."
"Funny, I grew up here and I've never done one of the Duck tours."
"Yeah, well, I've lived in San Francisco for half my life and I've never been to Alcatraz or the Muir Woods. When you live somewhere, you don't tend to do the touristy stuff."
"True," I said. "So are you at the docks? Want to meet somewhere?"
"Yeah, I am. I just dropped Claire off, actually. Do you have your brother's bike?"
"Nope, he's got it, so I'm on foot. I was just thinking I should buy a truck or something. This walking everywhere is bullshit."
"Aren't you a soldier? I thought you'd be used to marching."
I laughed. "I was in the Navy, not the Army. And as a SEAL, we don't do a lot of unnecessary walking. It's not an efficient way to infiltrate, for the most part."
"Infiltrate what?"
"Eh, whatever the mission target was. Way behind enemy lines, onto a boat in the middle of the ocean, behind compound walls. It varied."
"So how do you infiltrate, then?" She asked.
"Well, again, it depends on the mission. If we were hitting a drug lord's shipment way out in the middle of the ocean, w
e'd jump out of a helicopter and swim to it, or if the boat was big enough we'd even do a HALO insertion."
"What's a HALO insertion?" she asked, and then spoke before I could answer. "And where are you, anyway?"
"I'm close to you. Just stay where you are, I'll find you."
"Okay. So HALO insertion. Go."
I was close to the docks by then, so I started scanning the crowd, wishing I had Bast's extra four inches of height to see over the crowd. Finally I spotted her on the boardwalk near one of the gargantuan cruise ships. She was facing away from me, so I crept up behind her.
"Well," I started, "HALO stands for High Altitude Low Opening. It's just a really complicated way to skydive, basically. It means we jump at thirty thousand feet and dive to anywhere from four thousand to two thousand feet A-G-L."
"And A-G-L is what?"
"Above ground level." I was close now, I kept my voice down so she wouldn't hear me, though the crowd was thick enough there was little chance of that anyway. "So we'd free-fall for several minutes and reach something like a hundred miles per hour, easily."
"And why do these HALO jumps?"
"Because at thirty thousand AGL, the aircraft isn't visible from the ground with the naked eye, so the target won't be able to see us coming. In a regular fun jump, you go at fourteen thousand AGL, and you open pretty high up, so you have a lot of time floating down. That's fine when it's for fun, but when you're inserting for a military operation, you don't want the bad guys to see you coming, right? So you free-fall hard and fast and open at the last possible second, so there's as minimal a chance of being spotted as possible."
"Oh, I guess that makes sense." Her voice lowered. "And what other kind of...insertions did you do?"
"All kinds," I said. "My favorite insertion method was to just sneak in nice and slow..."
I cut the connection, stuffed the phone in my pocket, and closed the last few feet between us. Mara was still facing away, obviously cottoning on to the fact that I'd hung up or that the connection had been lost. She pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at the screen.
"Zane?" Her head pivoted, scanning the crowd around her.
I was within touching distance, now. I sprang, wrapping my arms around her and burying my nose in her neck, then whispered in her ear. "I was always really good at the slow kind of insertions."
"Oh, yeah?" She'd jumped when I first grabbed her, but had immediately relaxed when she realized it was me. "You'll have to show me that slow kind of insertion, then. It sounds...interesting."
I slid my hands across her belly and up beneath her breasts. "The trick is go really slowly, just sort of...slide in, you know?"
She tilted her head back to rest it on my shoulder, slipping a hand between us to trace the ridge of my zipper. "I think I might have an idea how it works. Pretty sure I'll need a demonstration, though. Just in case."
"Oh yeah?" I let my hand drift down to cup her core over her jeans.
"Not--not here, though," she murmured, catching my wrist. "I'm not quite ready for exhibitionism yet."
"No, me neither." I bit her earlobe. "So how about you show me your room?"
"Doesn't that usually happen after the date?"
"I think that's up to us," I said. "I'd like to think we can decide for ourselves how we want this to work."
"And you think sex first is a viable plan, huh?"
"And after." I tickled her ear with my tongue. "And maybe even during. You never know."
"During?"
I took her hand in mine and led her in the direction of her B&B. "Yeah, during. You wear something more...accessible, and I can do all sorts of interesting things to you."
"Is that so?" she breathed. "And...and what if I didn't bring anything more accessible?"
"You didn't?"
"I might have brought one skirt."
"I think you should change into that, then." I put my lips against her ear. "No underwear."
"I never go commando," she answered. "It's weird."
"That's fine," I said, an idea flitting through my head. "Wear underwear with the skirt. I can work with it"
She eyed me. "And what does that mean?"
I just grinned. "Oh, you'll see."
We didn't talk much the rest of the way to the B&B, since we were both kind of power-walking. I know for my part, all I could think of was the video she'd sent me, the glorious, erection-inducing visual of beautiful Mara with her thighs spread apart, that pink vibrator sliding into her pussy. I kept seeing that over and over, the way her tits had bounced while she came, and how badly I needed to be the one to make her tits bounce.
Just thinking about it had me going hard in my jeans, which was a problem because we'd reached the B&B and my cock was pointing down, which meant I needed to adjust myself...a difficulty when the living room of the B&B was crowded with guests. Mara said her hellos as she veritably hauled me through the room to the stairs. We reached her room, and she unlocked it in record time and shoved me through, slamming and locking the door behind herself.
"Naked," she murmured. "Get naked."
I peeled my jacket off, tossed it aside, and then yanked my shirt over my head. "Eager, huh, Mara?"
"All damn day I've been thinking about that video you sent me. I can't get it out of my head."
I bent to unlace my boots, kicked them and my socks off, and then shucked my jeans and underwear before reaching for Mara. "I've been having the same issue."
She toed off her shoes and socks while I started tugging down the skintight jeans she favored, leaving her in a red thong and her T-shirt. "You have?"
"Hell yeah. I might have had to relieve myself because of it this morning."
"And you didn't record it?"
"Should I have?"
"Hell yeah." She grasped my cock and stroked it slowly. "Always record it, and always send it to me."
"Ditto, in that case."
I decided to play with her a little bit, so I left her shirt and bra on but slid her thong down. I pushed her back against the door and traced her slit with my middle finger, then again, and penetrated her ever so slightly, teasing her pussy gradually until my finger was inside her and she was writhing against my finger.
A fist rapped tentatively against the door at that moment. "Miss Quinn?" The voice was elderly, thin and sweet.
She blinked, hips flexing as I slid my finger slowly in and out of her channel. "It's Mrs. Kingsley, the hostess," she whispered to me, and then twisted away from me and opened the door a crack. "Hi, Mrs. Kingsley. What's up?"
I palmed her ass as she leaned into the sliver of an opening, just her head and shoulders visible on the other side; Mara batted at my hand, but I ignored her, sliding my hands over her marvelous ass, then cupping her hips, then carving both hands around to palm her pussy. I teased her opening once, twice, a third time, and Mara's hips began flexing as I flitted the tip of my middle finger against her clit.
"Hello, dear. I just wanted to see if you were planning on joining us for dinner this evening. I'm doing a nice beef stew, and Mr. Kingsley has some fresh salmon he's smoking. It'd be nice to know if we can count you in or out so I know how many settings to put out."
"I...um--" Mara stuttered, hips fluttering as I circled her clit; she had a death grip on the side of the door, trying desperately to hold still and not give anything away, but I could tell by the way she was moving her hips that she was nearing the edge of climax. "I don't--I don't think so. Oh--god--goddammit!"
I heard a surprised gasp from the other side of the door. "Is everything all right, dear?"
"I just--I stubbed my toe against the door, is all. I'm fine." She was writhing in earnest now.
"Are you sure? You're acting awfully strange." Suspicion tinged Mrs. Kingsley's voice.
I had Mara on the cusp then. I delved two fingers inside her, gathered her wetness and withdrew my fingers to spread her juices over her clit, then sped the circling of my fingers. I saw Mara's knuckles go white on the edge of the door, wa
tched her shoulders tense, and then she couldn't stop herself from moving with my touch, her hips pushing to grind into the rhythmic pulse of my fingers on her clit.
"I--um, T-M-I, maybe, but I was just about to go the bathroom. So I'm--ohhhh...I'm doing the potty dance. So, yeah. I have plans for dinner, but thank you very much, Mrs. Kingsley."
"Well, if you change your mind, just let me know." A pause. "And if you do decide to join us, let me know how many I should expect, all right? You could bring a...guest, if you wanted." There was laughter in her voice, as if she were wise to the game.
"Okay, thanks. Maybe I--mmmm...maybe I'll see you for dinner after all."
"All right, dear. I'll leave you be."
And then Mara was shutting the door and twisting the lock; the second I heard the lock slide home, I was on my knees in front of her, hands on her hips, turning her to face me. She ran her fingertips over my scalp as I buried my face between her thighs, lapping at her slit, my tongue eager. She gasped as I probed her opening, her hips flexing nonstop now. I slid two fingers inside her and flicked my tongue against her clit, and then she was clutching my head to keep my face buried against her pussy, writhing against me.
"Oh yeah, Zane, right there. Just like that. God, yes." She dipped at the knees, thighs spread apart, grinding down against my mouth. "I'm there, Zane--oh, fuck, yes...make me come."
I thrashed her clit with my tongue and slid my fingers in and out, going hard and fast with both, pushing her to the edge and then over it. I felt her come, felt her pussy clamp around my fingers and her thighs quiver, and she was gasping and writhing and grinding.
"Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck," she moaned through gritted teeth, hips flying wildly.
I kept going, kept licking, kept fingering, and she kept writhing, and then I pulled my face away and stood up, sliding three fingers inside her and pressing the heel of my palm against her clit and fucked her hard and fast with my fingers, palm grinding, and she went crazy, groaning out loud, head pressed against the door, spine arched, hips pressed forward.
"Zane...Zane, I'm--oh, oh, oh...oh my god! I'm gonna--I'm--ohmyfuckinggod!" she wailed, curling forward.
Her forehead pressed against mine, her hands gripping into my shoulders like claws. I used my other hand to yank her bra cup down far enough that I could pinch her nipple, squeezing and twisting it to the rhythm of my touch between her legs, and then, as I felt her start to come, I clamped down hard and held on as I worked her pussy as fast as my hand would go.
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