by Adira August
“I hate you for walking into that room with armed killers and making me wait, helpless to save you, wondering if they’d shoot you on sight. I fucking hate you for making me feel what I cannot stop feeling.”
He straightened. He was shaking. “I let you do it. I could have stopped you. But Hank armed you and I trust his judgement. Because Henry Eustace and I have been to hell and back together. I let you because your plan had the best chance for success. I let you because you were incredibly brave, and loyal and smart and every goddamned thing I fell in love with. I let you. But your loyalty wasn’t to me. Or to us.”
He backed away from her. “And even though I let you, I still hate you. And I still want to beat you until you know the pain I know every night when I watch you enter that room in my nightmares and bullets tear into your body. I wake up and I want to beat you until you love me the way I love you.”
He pulled out his phone and switched it on. “I’m at Avia Rivers’ condo. … Yeah. I’ll be out front.” He put the phone away and moved to the door with a bleak look at her.
“You asked everyone but the one person who knows. The one person you should have trusted. You didn’t kill Hank, Avia. It’s impossible.”
He turned away from her and opened the door.
“Why impossible?” she asked.
But he was already gone.
“WILL YOU JUST PLEASE listen to me?” Nicky Hart tried to not shout at his husband.
Jag shook his head with a stubborn Dom look on his face. “I do not take our daughter out of school and run away from danger I do not understand.”
“You know I can’t tell you certain things.”
“Yes. And I accept this when we marry. I do not like it, but I accept it. We do not need so much money to live this way with your military in our life!” This was followed by a rapid string of words in Italian.
“DID YOU GET THAT?” Hunter whispered to Cam as they stood outside Nicky and Jag’s front door.
“I think he’s saying they came here to escape big brother.” Cam shrugged. “Or he’s going to flog somebody. My Italian’s pretty spotty and Jag’s really pissed. Sounds like our club night is cancelled, though.” Cam stepped away from the door.
“Wait.” Hunt put a hand on his arm. They heard Nicky shouting, the words clear even through solid oak.
“I can’t stop him! He’s going to go and it’ll get us killed! For the love of God just once do what the fuck I want!”
Cam sighed. Hunter knocked loudly and opened the door Nicky always left unlocked when Hunt and Cam were expected. Through the foyer and into the large living room, they heard nothing.
Jag and Nicky, silent and angry, were both watching the doorway where Hunt and Cam appeared.
Cam went to Jag. “Beer?”
“No. This isn’t -” Nicky looked from Cam to Jag.
“Mr. Hart.”
Nicky whirled around to find Hunter right next to him.
“Since when do you call me-”
“Mister Hart,” Hunter interrupted, firmly in alpha cop mode. “If you don’t mind, Sir, could I have a word?” He gestured toward the front door, his attitude declaring his intention to be obeyed.
Nicky strode past him outside. Hunter followed, grabbing a jacket off hook in the foyer, hoping it was Nicky’s.
Outside, Nicky paced the wide turn-around where the driveway ended near the house.
“Let’s walk and talk,” Hunt said.
“I don’t have anything to say, Detective.”
Hunter ignored this and put the jacket on him one arm at a time, as if he were a child. “Whatever’s happening isn’t something we can change in the next ten minutes.” He pulled up Nicky’s zipper and straightened the collar.
“I can’t tell you.” Nicky’s voice was tight with what Hunter identified as fear.
“Oh, I know that. Not what I had in mind.” He took a few steps down the drive. “C’mon. I’ll tell you a cop story.” It was dark, but the crushed marble of the drive shone in the moonlight, their path easily visible. Nicky followed.
“How’s Riham doing?” Hunter asked about their Syrian refugee foster child. He knew the search had been on for her family for a while.
“Perfect. Beautiful. Funny. Smart.” Nicky answered. He heaved a sigh, head down as they walked.
“It’s important. Family is,” Hunter said. “Last year, back in September, I had this case. Rich businessman. Murder suspect. We get the word to be careful, he’s protected by an important Senator, military connections, all that.”
Nicky’s head came up. Hunter was talking about Ben.
Hunt looked away into the woods that lined the mile-long access to the young billionaire’s home. “But they also told us it wasn’t the suspect that was so important; it was his genius of a brother. If we had to take the businessman down, if the case was good, as long as the younger brother was okay, well, they’d probably let us have him.”
Nicky had stopped. Hunter walked back to him. “Turned out he was a good guy, the suspect. Likes rescuing people. Fixing things. Fixed my car, one time. He’s a man who uses his power to help. And control. But power corrupts, as they say. Makes us arrogant.
“Funny thing,” Hunt went. “The real power? The power to make a phone call and have Generals and Senators leaping to attention? That resides with the little brother hardly anyone’s ever heard of.”
Even in moonlight, the sudden look of realization on Nicky’s face was apparent.
“Thanks for the talk, Mr. Hart. You take care of Riham.” Hunter walked back toward the house, texting Cam to meet him out front.
Thursday, March 9th, 2017
“Do you think he meant it?” Talli had the phone propped on the windowsill over the sink as she washed up.
“I knew he had nightmares he wouldn’t tell me about,” Avia said. “And I think he feels the way he said. I didn’t know it was every day. I hate to think of him alone with that.”
“So he didn’t scare you?”
Avia sat on the edge of the bed to pull on her stockings. Talli was propped against her bedroom lamp. “Oh, yeah, he scared the crap out of me! But that’s just instinctive response. Ben would never really hurt me. Never. I know that.”
“You’re going to go see him, aren’t you? That’s why you’re up at some ungodly hour. For you.”
“I’m going now,” Avia said, hooking up her garters. “But I want to ask you something.”
“The name of a couples therapist?”
Avia slipped on her pumps. “Do you think he loves me more than I love him?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“You asked, Sister.” Talli dried her hands. “And you should be glad. If he didn’t, a powerful man like that? Even you’d get swallowed up.”
Avia buckled a soft leather belt around her waist. “And what do you think he meant by it was impossible for me to have killed Hank?”
“Am I the Ben whisperer, here?”
“Please? You were conscious, what did he mean?”
Talli sighed and carried Avia over to her kitchen island where a basket of clean kid clothes waited to be folded. “I don’t know. He died of stroke not directly from an injury. Maybe he has a history of stroke or something. I mean, he wasn’t hurt that badly.”
“Are you kidding, he was shot in the heart!”
Talli shook her head, separating socks. “I don’t think so. I remember Hugo calling Hank’s name and saying ‘You’re okay let me get this off’. I thought it was body armor under his shirt, but maybe it was just a black t-shirt. When the EMT’s showed up from the helicopter, Ben was there with Hugo and Hank was talking to them and the EMT said it looked like something nicked the … sub-something and Hugo said no it’s the axel-something because he could feel it.”
“Axel-something?” Avia was exasperated.
“I was busy wondering if you were going to die. Go watch the video or whatever. But, Av, people get strokes from appendectomies, you know?”Talli turned car
toon-printed pajama bottoms right-side-out.
Avia picked up her phone. “Thanks, Sister. Gotta run, I have a couple errands before I see Ben.”
BENEDICT HART scrolled through the news feed forcing everything else from his mind. Everything else being-
knock-knock
Avia stood in his open office doorway, her bag slung over her shoulder. The sight of her lit something in his chest. He stopped scrolling.
“It’s seven-thirty-three,” she said. “It’s still my turn for two more hours. And a half.”
He didn’t answer, distracted by the fact she wore the exact same clothes she’d had on the first time he met her: a silky white blouse, a long camel skirt and a soft black leather belt. But she hadn’t been carrying a purse.
“May I come in?”
“What’s in the bag?” He wanted to keep her waiting, keep her in frame, keep the moment unspoiled by whatever agenda she’d arrived with.
“Towels.”
Towels. “What are they for?” He was impressed his voice was steady.
“One’s for my knees.” A flush, highlighted by the vee of her very white blouse, bloomed on her chest and spread up her neck.
His suit pants were strangling his balls. The desk hid the distended length of him the wool blend stretched over.
“One is to protect your chair. And one to protect your clothes.”
“My clothes?”
“If I can’t swallow fast enough.”
His cock throbbed and he knew his briefs were soaking up precum. The flush pinked her cheeks. He wanted to pink her other cheeks. He wanted to feel her body against his. Bury himself in her. Make her beg. Make her come. He wanted …
“What do you want?” he asked.
“To please you.”
He looked back at the screen and started scrolling again. Stock projections, commodities prices, troop movements, weather warnings, election results. He got control of himself.
“Why?” A glance. She looked confused.
“Because you like it.”
“Why?”
Avia frowned. Ben read a report on coal availability in Venezuela in which he had zero interest.
“Because this is what I’d do if I wasn’t afraid.”
He stopped scrolling. One hand gripped the chair arm tightly to keep himself from rushing across the room and scooping her into his arms.
“What are you afraid of?”
She shrugged. Her eyes welled. “Everything. All the time. Unless I’m with you.”
It took less than four seconds to wrap her in his arms.
“IT COULD BE BOOBY-TRAPPED,” Diane Natani told Carol Twee. The two women considered the large white paper sack stencilled with the Kincaid Family Bakery logo propped against the office door.
“Bombth don’t thmell good.” Twee crouched down, carefully unrolled the top and peered inside. She squealed and flashed a huge grin up at Natani. “Apricot!”
They took it inside and Natani made coffee. Twee arranged the variety of breakfast pastries from the bag on two paper plates. “Oh! A note.”
“There’s a note, where?” Hunter Dane asked, entering behind Cam, who went straight to his lab table cum desk. “Where’d all this come from?”
Twee read the note and handed it to Hunter who read it aloud. “‘Sorry for the intrusion by the self-centered, arrogant ass yesterday. Avia Rivers’ … There’s something else scribbled here”—he squinted—“‘The organic blueberry muffins are for Mr. Snow to thank him for not allowing her to make a bigger idiot out of herself than she did’.”
Everyone looked to Cam who was frozen in place turning pink.
BEN AND AVIA LAY ON A CEDAR-FRAMED chaise lounge under a blanket. The sun was bright as always, but a steady breeze from the north swept steadily across the terrace, a harbinger of spring snow.
“We were both messed up right after and we just stayed together, all the time,” she was saying. “You’d run along the wall where I could keep you in sight. I’d sit in your office while you worked, and read. You stopped traveling. But then, after a while, you got better and you had to leave for days and you started taking meetings at the Tech Center again. And I was just here. With no job and nothing to do but try not to think about what happened.”
He kissed her hair and brought one hand to his lips. “We never talked about it.”
“No. Not at all. Either of us. To each other, anyway. But we changed. Slowly.”
“You got more demanding.”
“And you got more controlling.” She look up at him. “Which is saying a lot, actually.”
He smiled, but it was full of sadness. “I’m so angry—what a weak word. I’m enraged. All the time.
“At me?”
“At many things. And you, because you terrified me.”
She rolled onto her side, one hand under her head, the other on his chest.
“You want to wrap me up and cage me around so you can go to work and not worry about me and come home and have me waiting. But you don’t want that, Ben, you really don’t. Because if I could do that, I’d be some other woman, not a woman you love or respect. And then you’d stop caring if I was here or not.”
He turned on his side, mirroring her. “Why did you come here this morning and offer me sex?”
“I told you. When Talli heard how afraid I am and I didn’t know what to do, she asked me what I’d do if I wasn’t afraid. So yesterday I dragged you out of the palas. And that went well until it didn’t. And this morning I did what I’d do if we were like, you know, normal.”
“Because if we weren’t either monumentally pissed off and or terrified you’d suck me off while I scanned the news and answered emails?”
She waggled her eyebrows at him. “You betcha. I never get to do stuff for you, and I haven’t used the ‘my turn’ thing before. I know your morning routine and I just really wanted to. Besides, I had a lot more in mind than plain old fellatio.”
“Did you?” He checked his watch. “It’s still your turn for forty-five minutes. Want to pretend we’re normal?”
“GEO! WHEN DID THIS COME?” Janet “J.J.” Johnson yelled through her open office door to her assistant.
“It was there when I came in,” he called back.
A clear plastic one-gallon gift jug of Chocolate Heaven treats sat on her desk. She opened the gift card stuck to the lid.
I’ll be at Stinky Pete’s at five-thirty if you’ll let me treat you to dinner, margaritas and an apology. A-
She didn’t need her former ace reporter’s name spelled out. She shut the office door and checked her calendar.
BENEDICT HART scrolled through the news feed without processing a single thing that appeared on his screen.
knock-knock
Avia leaned against his doorframe, her bag slung over her shoulder. “Did you get my email about the bras?”
“I did. I forwarded it to Hugo to send to the appropriate V.P. to pass on to his product development manager.”
“I thought I’d show you how this one works, myself.”
She walked slowly toward him while she unbuttoned her blouse. She put the bag on the floor by his chair.
He glanced up as if barely interested. But hooks twinkled from the depths of rose-colored lace—her bra opened from the front. He forgot to pretend to look at the monitor.
She unhooked the bra and the sides sprang apart with her breasts, the cups just managing to cling and keep her nipples covered.
He swiveled his chair toward her.
“I’m actually running behind here, Avia. I need to get back to work.”
“I see.” She bent over, her breasts falling forward, and pulled him to his feet. She slid his suspenders off his shoulders. “Give me just a minute and I’ll have you right back to your keyboard, Sir.”
It took two for her to drop his pants to his ankles and spread a towel on his chair. Every movement was a tease, her breasts gleaming between folds of cloth, the bra cups sliding a little, but never coming all the
way off.
When she pushed on his chest, he sat down again. He kept his hands on the chair arms so he didn’t throw her down and pound her into the floor.
Sinking to her knees on a folded towel placed in front of the kneehole, she used the arms of the chair to turn him toward her.
“Can you reach your keyboard, Sir?” she asked, spreading his knees apart, pulling his chair forward until the edge of the seat pressed her belly and the insides of his thighs were against her ribs.
“It’s fine,” he managed, his voice almost normal, his cock a mast rising above the swells of his thighs.
She slipped the blouse and bra off and rested her breasts on his pubes, one on each side of his rigid shaft that kept giving little jerks. Ben clutched the arms of his chair more tightly.
Fishing a lube packet from the pocket of her skirt, Avia squeezed some of the clear substance over each of her creamy mounds. Smoothing it over herself, her thumbs rubbed over her nipples until they furled. She scraped them against the base of his cock just above the nest of pubic hair.
A high, breathy moan escaped her and she took her tits in hand and squeezed her nipples until they were distended and dark red. She rubbed them harder against his hot shaft, teasing herself. Her eyes closed, she bit her lips, panting, taking her pleasure from him.
Precum flowed down the side of his very rigid, aching dick, and she smeared it around the base with her breasts. His thighs gripped her so hard he wondered he didn’t crush her, as bolts of heat and electric need shot through him from a molten core at the join of legs and body.
Avia leaned over him and clamped her slick mounds around his erection. He groaned so loudly he was afraid Hugo would hear from his office across the hall.
He started to tell Avia she’d left the door open, but at that moment she bent her head and her hot, wet mouth sucked the drum-tight head of his dick. His hands plunged into her golden waves, hips flexing. His shockingly red cockhead disappeared between her breasts and emerged to be sucked between her lips, her tongue flicking over him before he found the firm, curved roof of her mouth and could go no further.