I slid my hand lower down, over his warm sac, squeezed it.
“Should I lick you?” I asked him.
His eyes shot open. “Since when did you become this confident and powerful tease?”
I grinned, massaging his warmth below, feeling my own tension climb inside me. I shrugged. Balmy sweat had formed all over my own skin. My breathing had deepened. And, to be honest, I think I was starting to lose consciousness a little...
“I learned from the best.” I met my lips to his. I licked his upper lip, then his lower one, my hand below working on a mind of its own, lifting, dropping, pulling, pushing.
When he pulsed violently suddenly, a high-pitched whimper escaped me.
Some of his ooze eased out onto my thumb. I used it to lubricate the motion, still lifting and pulling, ever kissing him up above, feeling his manly chest heaving and breathing powerfully.
I eased away from him, sat back on my knees, lifted my tee off.
He pushed himself up ravenously, eyes aiming for my breasts but I pushed him down. With my right index finger, I waved No, back and forth.
I unclipped my bra, eased my hands over my swollen breasts, rubbed a thumb over each of my nipples.
Conall groaned, every muscle on his body hard now. His eyes were desperate, hungry. I could see the battle within himself, stopping himself from jumping on me and taking me.
“You’re torturing me, Leora.”
“My, how the tables have turned,” I said, making my voice as husky as I could.
He licked his lips.
“I’m not going to wait much longer,” he warned.
The words sent an erotic spear through my stomach, and I almost let him take me right then and there. But I managed to keep myself under control, and managed to squeeze out a lusting smile.
I moved backwards on my knees so that I was positioned just below his cock. I grabbed it with my right hand, looked him deep in his blue eyes. I lifted. “Tell me more,” I said.
I pulled.
“I...I...I...want it to be the biggest software house in the UK. And that’ll only be the start.”
“Mmmmm.” I bent down so that my lips were just above his shaft. It pulsed once. “Keep talking.”
“The money he’s given me will go into building offices, filling the need for jobs in under—”
I licked him bottom to top.
“—Oh, God!”
I stopped. He knew what to do.
“—underprivileged areas. And I have other plans...not all—”
I put him inside my mouth completely. Oh, God, he tasted incredible.
I started bobbing. He stopped talking.
“Leo, honey.” His hands rubbed through my hair. “Please don’t stop. Please don’t... I really don’t fucking know what else—Oh, my dear Lord God FUCK. Oh, yeah, Oh...”
I moved my head faster, loving the feel of his stretching skin under my lips. He grew even more under my lips, got harder, jerked. I moved down deeper. I was so turned on now that I wanted to feel him burst in me.
With my other hand, I found myself, started rubbing frantically, up, down, left, right. Rubbing and pressing, and sucking him above.
“Oh, God, Leo, God. Oh— I’m gonna—”
He lifted his ass off the bed instinctively, shoved his cock deep into my mouth and then stopped himself. I threw my hands under his ass and lifted! I was still OK. I could still take him further in. When I felt the final thrust, I lifted my head away, saliva dripping from my smiling lips, and I pumped his fucking cock for dear life while his come spilled all over himself and he writhed and twisted wildly under my hand.
When he was done, he grabbed me by the waist, threw me down on the bed and thrust his hand deep into me while he kissed me. It was only a few motions of his fingers before I was screaming with satisfaction.
-6-
Afterwards, he said to me: “We should talk finances more often.”
“Oh, God, please no!”
-7-
And there it was again, the threat, right under my nose—an entire conversation, now practically forgotten. And I missed it. I missed it like a dead rat in a sewer, stinking, rotting in the sun—it was that obvious.
They say you shouldn’t blame yourself for things you didn’t know—but I should have known! Conall and I had been through too much for me to believe, naïvely, that the universe was through with us.
It wasn’t.
And we were merely whistling past the graveyard right now.
CHAPTER EIGHT
-1-
I’d confronted the Hungarian Mafia.
I’d faced a South American Drug Lord.
I’d dealt with men storming our home with guns and disarmed one of them and broken his nose and toes.
Conall’s father would be the worst of them all.
-2-
Dani and Kayla and I had our usual late-Saturday-Morning Starbucks meeting. Alex also joined us this time.
We were in London, just outside Victoria station. The Starbucks on the street corner there is about the size of a cupboard, which barely has enough space for two pairs of shoes. Alex—tall and muscularly slender that she is—smooth-talked a few horny guys into giving us a table. Dani fluttered her eyes, Kayla sucked on her Frappuccino’s straw like...you know.
We got the table.
Alex then rested her elbow on the table and put her chin on her palm, openly displaying her wedding ring to the now forlorn boys who were standing around, holding their drinks, not quite sure what to do.
One of them looked at Kayla, smiled. “Engaged, sorry,” Kayla said, displaying her own ring at him.
Then he looked at me. I stuck out my own hand. “Engaged, sorry.”
He then looked at Dani, who’d started sucking her own straw like...you know. She looked up at him, extended her ringless fingers. The boy smiled. She said, “Getting fucked like a rhino on crack by my boyfriend. Sorry.”
I spat out my coffee. Alex almost spat out hers.
The guy said, “Oh, bugger this!” and stormed off with his friends.
“Speaking of rhinos,” Dani said, “you two really do make a lot of noise at night,” she said to Kayla.
Kayla and Brad were now shacking up with Dani and Freckly Troy in Conall’s cottage in Crawley Down—what had once been Kayla and Brad’s own apartment only a few months ago. There was just no point staying near the UE at the moment.
“Jealous?” Kayla replied.
Dani rolled her eyes.
I looked at Alex and we sniggered at each other, both feeling a little embarrassed. Whereas the Victoria Station Starbucks is far from the Geriatric Starbucks in Seaford where we once used to hang out at, it’s still England.
We got a few looks.
“Have you set a date?” Alex asked Kayla.
“No, and it’s pissing me off! Brad and Conall have this business plan going and Brad’s now becoming a geek and he wants to save up money and give me a princess’s wedding and blah blah blah. I think I’m just gonna grab him by the nuts and elope somewhere. We have the license already.”
None of us knew at the time that Kayla would almost end up doing just that. And sooner than we thought.
I pulled out some wedding magazines and gave them to her. Kayla gave them a cursory look and said, “Nah, I think I’ll get married in black tights and a bustier.”
She probably would.
Kayla briefed me on Bettina’s latest antics. She really was going to town about us. The stories had escalated to ones of sleeping around, random blowjobs, general slutty things.
My grip on my filter coffee tightened.
“Just forget her,” Kayla said.
I looked over at Alex. She looked as angry as I felt.
“I could drive there and punch her in the nose if you want,” Dani said. She made a fist.
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think Trey will be able to get you out of prison for a second time!”
“He didn’t get me out the first time! Her pr
ovocation was caught on camera.” Ah, yes, London—second only to New York in its Big Brother watchfulness of its citizens. Cameras everywhere.
The girls spoke about boys and positions and there was quite a bit of pressure on Alex to divulge penis-size and general performance, but Alex didn’t divulge anything.
“At least tell us what the man does for a living! Is he really MI6—or is he something else, higher up?” Kayla asked.
Alex said nothing.
-3-
Nighttime. We were at the West-End Boys get-together at the Red Light Diner. Luckily none of Bettina’s cronies were around to start shit.
All the girls had picked up on my silence throughout the day. We’d gone shopping in London, had fish and chips together, and all the time I’d been quiet. They’d asked, but soon forgotten about it.
Alex didn’t. She kept prodding me. And, like last weekend, eventually got me outside.
I told her about Conall’s father.
Her response? “Oh, fuck.”
That didn’t do much to raise my spirits.
-4-
“You’ve met him?” I asked her on the sidewalk. The temperature was definitely dropping and I held a faux-fur coat close to my body.
“Only once.”
“And?”
“He’s a bastard. It’s all I can say. He never liked me, thought I was no good for Conall, thought I was a bad influence. Never mind that it was his other son that turned out to be the bad influence on me!”
“Francis.”
“Yes. It’s hard to believe those two are twins. Francis is scum. He really is. He’s bad news.”
“Did you two...ever...?”
Alex rubbed her hands together, blew into them. She nodded almost indiscernibly. She sighed deeply. “Does it really count when you’re both so high you’d fuck an animal?”
“I guess not. Conall doesn’t know, in case you were wondering.” When Conall had first told me about Alex, he’d mentioned that he hadn’t known if she and his brother had ever hit it off.
“I had wondered. Thanks. It would... Well, I knew back then that he liked me—Conall. It was more infatuation, I think. He was young, naïve. I was the older woman.” A little under a year ago I would not be able to have this type of conversation with Alex. But I knew now that her love for Conall had always been similar to the love siblings hold for each other. And she was there so much for me after my own...ordeal...that I feel she can talk to me about anything now.
“Well, as the years rolled by, and as I got into the drug scene, well, Francis was there. We hung out. We did coke, Es, whatever. And, well...” She sighed deeply. “We fucked. That’s as romantic as it got. It was one time.”
“I see.”
She put her arm around my shoulder, held me closer. “You’re really a special person, you know that, Leo?”
“Huh?” I looked up at her. “Th—thanks?”
She smiled, gave me a kiss on the forehead, held me away from her at arm’s length. “Now, this Bettina, seriously, do you want me to break her kneecaps?” She kept on staring at me. She was being serious!
“Uhm, no, no! God!”
“You say the word, babe. She sounds like she needs a life’s lesson!”
“My God, you— I— No!”
“Fine. But I will. You just say the word.”
All I could do was laugh—a deep laugh that came from all the way deep down in my chest.
Suddenly Bettina and her lies didn’t seem so important anymore.
-5-
There was no bar brawl tonight, no flashing cameras. We parted ways and said goodbye to each other and moved on.
While Conall and I were walking to the train, we ran into his brother.
Literally, ran into him.
CHAPTER NINE
-1-
We were turning a corner when Francis Williams was suddenly there, and Conall, who had been looking down at me, smiling, walked into him.
Conall stopped, looked up. And then his grip tightened around my fingers.
They started to hurt.
“Francis,” Conall said.
Francis sniffed. His nose was red. His eyes were red. He’d put on even more weight. The sharp resemblance to Conall that I’d once thought was there the first time I’d seen him at that penthouse party in NYC last year, was all but gone.
His skin looked clammy, he was bloated.
It’s the first time I realized that identical twins could look so...unidentical.
Francis, although he shared the same eye-color as Conall, had dull eyes, lacking luster or shine. Dead eyes. His hair was markedly longer than Conall’s now, down to his shoulders. And messy.
And he looked, simply, heavy. A heavy mind. A heavy conscience. Take your pick.
“Brother,” Francis said.
We stood there awhile, neither of us moving, no one saying anything, only the sound of the wind and an occasional car driving past. The street was otherwise silent. We were in a less-traveled corner, on our way to the train station.
“Well,” Conall said, “it was...nice...seeing you.” Conall edged me to the right, to go around Francis.
Something told me this was no coincidence.
Conall stopped abruptly!
Francis had grabbed his arm, and was holding tightly!
Francis’s other hand was in a coat pocket! The coat pocket was bulging. There was something else in it!
My skin went cold.
“I need to talk to you,” said Francis.
Conall said nothing.
“I said I need to talk to you!” Francis was talking through clenched teeth.
Conall gritted his own teeth. “Then talk, brother. But talk fast because you are holding me and my fiancée up, and I’d hate to have to make her wait yet another thirty minutes for the next train. You know how possessive I get of the girls in my life...”
Double meaning, I’m sure.
“Oh, come off it, Con!” Francis was angry. Conall had struck a nerve.
“Francis—”
“I— I— I didn’t want it to come to this...“ I saw Francis’s hand move in his pocket! “...But—you leave me no choice.”
“Conall,” I warned.
Conall stayed cool. “If you’re talking about that blooming pistol in your pocket, you know I’d have that off you in half a second if I wanted to. Have you taken the safety off? Do you even know how to operate one of those things?”
Francis’s eyes flicked to the ground, then back up at Conall. Was that shame in his eyes? Desperation?
My bladder started to feel weak. Sure, I could disarm a guy pointing a gun at me—Trey had taught me how to do that. But one in a pocket? What would I grab?
Francis’s dull blue eyes flickered under the white street lights.
“Are you done, Francis?” Conall asked, his words sounding like venom.
Francis’s jaw started to work, as if he were getting ready to cry.
“I— I— I need some...money...Conall. Please, brother. Please.”
Conall heaved in a breath.
“You need help.”
“NO. I NEED MONEY!” Francis was right up against Conall’s face now, screaming!
“Francis, shout at me again, and I will disarm you and break one of your fingers while doing it.”
“You were always daddy’s little boy. You were always his favorite! His business was supposed to come to me!”
Conall waited.
“Answer me!” Francis shouted.
Conall waited.
“ANSWER ME GODDAMN—”
And then it happened.
So fast! I didn’t even see it!
I just heard two grunts! Conall’s hand left mine! It felt like I was drifting out in a gale wind!
And then it was over!
Francis was on the floor, blood coming from his nose.
Conall held the gun in his hand.
And Francis was screaming. “You broke my finger, you bastard! YOU BROKE MY FINGER!” The
words echoed back at us from the building across the street.
Conall took out his phone, made a call. “Trey? Yeah, I’m holding what’s very likely an unregistered firearm in my hand. Looks like a”—he turned it in his hand, looked at it—“Kimber model. Nine mil. ... Sure. ... We’ll wait.” He gave Trey our location.
“YOU BROKE MY FINGER!”
Conall put the phone down. “You’re lucky I didn’t break more than that. And if you weren’t my brother, and if I didn’t have a lady present, you know I’d be kicking you on the ground now.”
No, baby, go right ahead and kick him, please. You have my permission!
Sobbing, from the ground: “You...broke...my...finger...”
Conall turned to me. “You OK?”
I swallowed, nodded.
Conall held me close to him.
Trey arrived. He got out of his car. When he saw who was on the ground, he said, “Oh, bloody hell!”
Trey was cocking his leg back to kick Francis on the ground but Conall put a hand on his best friend’s chest, shook his head.
Trey seemed disappointed. “You got the weapon?”
Conall gave it to him. “The safety’s on. There was no harm.”
I looked at Alex in the passenger seat. I was shivering now. She started to get out but I shook my hand at her and mouthed that I was OK. She smiled back at me. Her eyes flicked down to Francis. She hadn’t seen him before that point. I don’t think she wanted to see him either. She put her elbow on the car window, and rested her forehead on her palm. She pressed her fingers into her eyes.
“Go on with Trey and Alex, Leo. I’m going to wait here until my brother gets some medical attention.”
“No, I want to wait with you.”
After Trey left, Conall phoned for an ambulance.
It was ten minutes before they arrived. Francis kept wailing and complaining that Conall had broken his finger.
I almost kicked him on the ground myself.
-2-
“Just hold me,” I said to Conall in bed.
Deep South (Naive Mistakes #4) Page 7