Ransom (Dead Man's Ink #3)

by Callie Hart

  She tastes fucking incredible. There’s something about eating pussy. It’s always been one of my favorite parts of sex, but eating Sophia’s pussy is a whole different ball game. She doesn’t have one of those barely-there pussies, everything neatly tucked away. She has pussy lips, and I fucking love sucking on them. Teasing them. Teasing her everywhere—over her clit, over the slick, wet entrance to her pussy, down, over her asshole. Everywhere.

  Sophia’s soon shaking, trembling, her whole body vibrating as I work my magic. She makes frantic, desperate sounds as I suck gently on her clitoris, laving my tongue up and down quickly with the very tip of my tongue again.

  “Fuck. Holy shit, Jamie. This is…this is…”

  Driving her fucking wild. I can tell by how wet she is. It’s turning me on like crazy every time the sweet, glossiness of her pussy hits my tongue. She shied away from it when I asked her just now, but it’s not long before she’s rocking as best she can against my mouth, grinding her hips, riding me just like I wanted her to. She loses herself, completely withdrawn as she ascends toward her climax. I hold onto her tight, sucking, licking, swirling my tongue, as she grows more and more frenzied. Her tits bounce like crazy as she rocks, and it’s a miracle I’m not coming all over myself as she suddenly screams, head tipped back, chest proud, and she comes hard in my mouth.

  “Oh my god! Oh my god!” She repeats this over and over as she comes, her body still shaking. I hold onto her tight, making sure she doesn’t go anywhere as I continue to flick my tongue against her overly sensitive clit. “Shit, Jamie. Shit. Stop, please! Kansas, Kansas, Kansas!”

  I probably wouldn’t stop if not for the safe word; it’s far too much fun watching her flip her shit. I need her to trust me, though. I need her to feel safe, so I stop.

  Quickly I place her down on her stomach and untie her hands and feet. She’s boneless, unable to move as I spin her over onto her front and retie just her hands this time.

  The item I collected from the bathroom has tumbled to the floor. I pick it up and hold it so she can finally see it. Her eyes, dazed and glazed over one second, are suddenly round and alert the next. “You are not using an electric toothbrush on me, Jamie.”

  “Oh, but I am.” I turn it on, and Sophia pales a little at the high-pitched whir.

  “I can’t take it. My clit will literally fall of my body.”

  “I bet it won’t. I bet you’ll enjoy it an awful lot. Open your legs, Sophia. Open them for me and I won’t have to go find another toy to tease you with after this one.”

  She swears under her breath. “Remember. Kansas,” she says, and then she opens her legs. She’s soaking wet. If she weren’t I might have rethought the toothbrush, but it won’t make her sore if she’s like this. It’ll send her into fucking outer space, and I will have the pleasure of watching that happen.

  Carefully, I apply the vibrating end of the toothbrush against her clit, and Sophia’s hips rise as her eyes roll back into her head. She’s amazing. She’s so fucking beautiful. I watch for the next three minutes as she falls apart, and I take hold of my dick when she comes, finally stroking it, squeezing hard as she screams and pants. Her orgasms are impressive, consuming things.

  I let her catch her breath before I allow myself to fuck her. Her eyes snap open, her lips slightly parted when she feels me slide inside. “God, Jamie,” she whispers.

  “Wanna call Kansas?” I ask.

  “No. No way.” She loops her bound hands over my head and hugs me to her. I fuck her with the force of a derailed freight train. After so much teasing, my dick is so sensitive, so hard, so ready to fuck that I have to fight off my own orgasm twice before I give in. Sophia’s thighs tighten around me, holding me deep inside her, my balls covered in her come, and I explode.

  When it’s over, when we’re both spent and exhausted, our bodies tangled up in each others, our lips numb from the thousands of kisses we rain down on each other’s skin, we sleep like the dead. And I don’t think either of us minds.

  CHAPTER TEN

  CADE

  I’ve never really wanted to hit a woman before I met Agent Denise Lowell. A part of me still cringes away from the idea, the southern gentleman in me skirting away from the concept of planting a right hook squarely into the jaw of a five-foot-five blonde, but when I see her getting out of a black sedan on the other side of the compound fence, I find my fingers curling in on themselves, forming fists.

  She’s wearing aviators and a pale grey pant suit that screams power, her tailored white shirt tucked in at the waist. A tall, cookie-cutter generic dude gets out of the passenger seat, also wearing sunglasses, also suited, but nothing about him screams power. There’s no time to let Jamie know we have guests. I send Carnie a warning glance, carefully suggesting with my eyes that he should run up to the cabin immediately and let our boss know what’s going down. I, on the other hand, walk slowly toward the gate with my hands shoved into my pockets, all evidence of my terrible mood hidden from sight while I feign indifference over the fact that the DEA are on our fucking doorstep.

  Lowell’s already got her badge out and is holding it up for me to see, sunlight glinting off the polished metal. “Hello, Mr. Preston. Glad we finally get to meet properly.”

  I think she wants me to be impressed that she knows who I am. Like maybe I should be intimidated or something. I was stationed in Kabul and Helmand Province though, so this bitch had better try harder. “Dee Dee. I wish I could say the feeling was mutual. It isn’t, though. What can I do for you?”

  “I need to speak with Rebel. Is he here?” She’s pressed her mouth into a pinched line, the edges of her lips turning white. I don’t think she liked the whole Dee Dee thing.

  “I don’t know where he is. We don’t keep a tracking collar on him. I’m sure you’d like to, though, right?”

  Lowell flips her aviators up, resting them on top of her head. Squinting, she looks off over her shoulder into the flat, dry, dustiness of the desert, her face in profile as she muses over my words. She’d be a pretty attractive woman if only she wasn’t such a raging bitch. “I’m fully aware that your club isn’t happy about my presence here in Freemantle, Cade. I’m also aware that you and your friend Jamie have some serious problems with authority. The Widow Makers run guns. You guys run drugs, too. You’re the least of my concerns, though. I’m more worried about the outside influences you’ve attracted into town, and what it is they might be up to here. I need Hector Ramirez in jail or back in fucking Mexico. Either way, I can’t accomplish this without evidence, and with no one willing to give up information they have on him, that’s making my job really hard.”

  “Mmm. I don’t really know many people that would want to make your job easy for you, Dee Dee. You don’t exactly ingratiate yourself with folks. Not as far as I can tell anyways.”

  She sends a withering look my way. I’m sure she’s had dudes’ balls retracting inside their bodies with that look. “I’m not in the business of making friends. I’m in the business of ensuring that the streets of this country are safe. If I have to rub a few undesirables up the wrong way in order to achieve that, then I say all the better.”

  “Jamie’s not going to help you. He doesn’t have anything that can put Ramirez away. If he did, he would have brought it to you a long time ago.” This is the absolute God’s honest truth. I snagged the camera footage of Sophia being dragged into the side street by Raphael last year, but that’s literally all it shows. She’s on the street one minute, Ryan appears the next, and then Raphael is having both of them dragged kicking and screaming into the alleyway after that. Maybe that’s enough to arrest Hector with, but he’s a smart motherfucker. He wasn’t actually there when Ryan was murdered.

  The only real evidence Jamie has against Ramirez is a person—Sophia—and there’s no way he’s willing to put her at risk. Not now. He was all for it back when we bought her from Julio, but now that they’re an item it’s pretty much impossible. He knows how unsafe it would be for her and her family.


  There are plenty of files sitting in Jamie’s office that contain incriminating information about the Mexican cartel boss, but there’s nothing damaging enough to put him away. Ramirez always has other people to do his dirty work for him. Lowell shrugs her shoulders, pouting a little. “Well, I’d like to hear that from his mouth.”

  “And like I said, I don’t know where he is.”

  Lowell arranges her face into an ugly smile. She points over my shoulder, behind me. “Funny that. I believe I can see him heading this way even as we speak.”

  I turn and see that she’s right. Jamie’s heading down the hill from his cabin, bee-lining for us at a frightening speed. He looks seriously pissed off. Carnie’s hot on his heels, following after him.

  I grin back at Lowell. “Good luck, lady.” I take three large steps back to make room for Rebel as he pitches up in front of the compound gate, breathing heavily. “I didn’t think the DEA paid social visits,” he says.

  “Oh, we do. Only when we’re feeling magnanimous, though. Only for people we take a special interest in.”

  “And how do we remove ourselves from your special interest list, Denise? We don’t really like people showing up here unannounced. It makes our club members…twitchy.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you have nothing to be twitchy about. Right?”

  I hang back, waiting to see how Jamie plans on handling this situation. He’s way more diplomatic than I am normally, but can tell by the way he charged down the hill toward us that he isn’t in the mood to be cordial today. “Cut the shit,” he snaps. “What do you want?”

  Lowell glances at her partner, who appears to be just about as vacant and useless as a human being can be and still qualify for the title. She sighs heavily, shoving her thumbs into the waistband of her dress pants. “I just want to do the right thing. I just want Hector Ramirez to be handled in the correct way. Now, I hear from multiple sources that you’re a good guy. That you like to do the right thing too. You were deployed out in Afghanistan for two tours, weren’t you? How does a guy go from serving his country to breaking her laws in such a short space of time?”

  “If putting Ramirez away is your primary focus, Denise, maybe you should spend more time pursing that goal instead of Googling my ass. I’m sure that would be far more productive use of tax payers’ resources and effort.”

  Lowell scowls. “I have minions who do my Googling for me. It’s really no skin off my nose. And besides, I get the feeling that leaning on you will get me Ramirez in the end. Call it intuition.”

  “You can call it whatever the fuck you want. Are we done here?”

  “That depends on whether you want to talk to me about your uncle,” Lowell says. Jamie’s hands twitch, but aside from that he shows no sign of annoyance or recognition.

  “I don’t have any uncles.”

  “But you did, didn’t you? Your uncle Ryan was murdered last year. He was found down a back alley in Seattle. Didn’t take much digging to discover he was presiding over a murder trial that Hector Ramirez was being prosecuted for. Ryan ended up dead, and the case was dropped. I found that highly coincidental.”

  Jamie folds his arms across his chest, staring Lowell down through the wrought iron bars of the compound fence. “I hadn’t spoken to Ryan in years. I had no idea he was involved with Ramirez. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some business to take care of.”

  “Tattoo shop business? Or gun running business?” Lowell smiles a sickly sweet, innocent smile that makes my fucking teeth itch. I’m sure it has an even more unpleasant effect on Jamie, since he’s standing that much closer and she’s aiming the smile at him. He takes three deliberate, slow steps toward the gate and stops right in front of her.

  “Fuck. You. Denise.” With that he turns around and walks away from her, heading in the direction of the workshop and barn. Lowell watches him go, eyes slightly narrowed, thumbs still tucked into her waistband. She only turns away when Jamie’s disappeared into the building beyond and she can’t drill holes into the back of his head anymore.

  “We’ll be back,” she says lightly; I’m assuming she’s talking to me, but who the fuck knows? Who the fuck cares? She can come back here as many times as she likes. She’ll never find guns here. She’ll never find drugs. It would take her twenty years to get inside Jamie’s office, and even when she did, she’d only find a few burnt out servers and three destroyed hard drives.

  There’s only one thing Agent Denise Lowell might come across that could cause us problems, and that’s Sophia. Hopefully, that will never come to fruition. Hopefully Lowell never lays eyes on the girl again, otherwise our shit will seriously be fucked up, and my best friend will likely be arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Better hope and pray it doesn’t come to that. “You should get a pet, y’know,” I tell Lowell. “It’d be calming. Give you a reason to actually go home at night.”

  She angles her head, glaring at me. “Thanks for the concern, Preston, but I have enough on my hands as it is. I don’t need a dog under foot, pissing and shitting all over the place when I have you.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SOPHIA

  “Pack a bag.”

  I nearly jump out of my skin when I hear Jamie’s voice behind me. I didn’t notice him entering the clubhouse. Ever since Carnie burst into the cabin and told us about our DEA guests, I’ve been holding my breath, worrying about what’s going to happen if Lowell decides she wants to come on in and make trouble. A part of me has been ready to duck out of the back exit and jump on my bike, burn off down the dirt road that leads back toward civilization, head away from the compound and from my friends here simply so that my presence doesn’t cause issues. Carnie told me to ‘stay the fuck here’ though, and despite how badly I wanted to run, I managed to do as I was told, keeping out of sight until the DEA cars sped off down the long dirt track back in the direction of town. Now, down in the compound, Jamie looks like he’s about to go on a killing spree. My stomach is doing backflips as he storms across the clubhouse toward me. “What?”

  “Pack a bag. We need to get out of here.”

  I can’t be hearing him right. Surely he can’t actually be suggesting we leave Freemantle? “I can’t go anywhere, Jamie. I’m not leaving my dad here.”

  He makes a frustrated growling sound; when he reaches me he takes hold of me by the wrist, pulling me toward the exit. “We have six days, sugar. Six days before anything bad happens to your father. That gives us six days to go figure this shit and get our asses back here.”

  “You’re trusting Ramirez to stick to his word? Are you mad?” He has to be if he’s being even remotely serious right now.

  Steel and ice flashes in his eyes. The cold blue of his irises seems even colder as he sighs, guiding me outside. “Sophia. I don’t trust him, no, but he’s not going to do anything, believe me. He wants to be holding the pliers when it comes down to it, and he wants an audience. Ramirez loves to fuck with people. He’s not going to break the rules to his own game. Not when it’s so much more satisfying to have us scrambling, trying to figure this out.”

  A sinking feeling low in my gut tells me this logic is madness. I want to yank my arm free and confront him in the middle of the court yard, ask him if he’s really being this naïve, but Shay and Keeler are standing in front of the workshop, watching us, and the last thing I want or need is Shay cat calling at us as we fight in front of them. I’m liable to try and claw her eyeballs out of her head.

  “Where the hell do you think we’re going to go?” I hiss. “You told me when we first met that Maria Rosa’s the only person crazy enough to go up against Hector, and in case you haven’t noticed we’ve had her locked in a fucking basement for the past six months.”

  In the distance, plumes of orange dust rise up from the horizon—Lowell and her DEA friends still high tailing it back to their base. Jamie heads in the direction of the cabin, anger pouring off of him in palpable waves. “She was our best bet, sure. She wasn’t our only
bet, though. There’s someone else.”

  I don’t like the sound of this someone else. Anyone powerful enough to take on the Los Oscuros cartel has to be seriously dangerous themselves, and undoubtedly into some really fucked up, illegal activity. “Who, Jamie? Who the hell are you talking about? And why am I really worried right now?”

  He slows, his urgency abating ever so slightly. Letting go of my arm, he scrubs his hands over his face, groaning. “Perez,” he says. “Julio Perez.”

  My head starts spinning in the most disconcerting way. “Julio Perez? The man you had collect me from Ramirez? The man who sells women? The man you despise?” I can’t comprehend what’s going on in Jamie’s head right now. He has to be desperate to even consider this move. He hasn’t told me much about the tense nature of the relationship he shares with Perez, but I do know he has something on him. Something bad. Information on one of those hard drives that could put Perez away for a really long time. The last time they met, when Jamie came and took me from him in the middle of the night, Julio swore he was going to find a way to free himself from Jamie, and at the time I got the distinct impression shooting him in the back of the head wasn’t something Perez had ruled out.

  “He’s not likely to be too happy about doing me a favor,” Jamie says through gritted teeth. “He hates me, but he hates Hector more. Los Oscuros poses direct competition to both his skin trade and his drug trafficking. If he can get Ramirez out of the picture, his income goes through the roof, especially since he has connections in Mexico.”

  “But he’s not going to do anything that gives you more leverage over him. That’s just madness, Jamie. He’s gonna tell you to go fuck yourself.”