“Do you know either of the women in these pictures?”
“No!”
He was looking at her, at her hair. Oh, heavens. He said gently, “Here’s the thing, Beth. You meet a guy who gives you a very high-power credit card on your first date, and within days he is detained for questioning about his missing ex-wife, who has bled all over his place, and as soon as he’s released, he vanishes. But you’re still using his credit card.”
His voice hardened. “You gave me a fake address and a fake phone number. That is okay with random dorks you meet in a bar, Beth, but it doesn’t fly with the police. Being a hot little number doesn’t actually cut you any slack at all.”
She sucked in an offended breath. “How dare you!”
“Want to tell me about the fake address and phone?” He wasn’t letting up at all. She covered her face with her hands. Gentle again, he said, “You’re a rookie at prostitution, aren’t you, Beth?”
Shame stabbed her to the heart. She covered her head with her arms.
“Here’s what I think happened, Beth. You met Mrs. Saunders and heard all about her ex-husband fucking around with money. She got you to entrap him. You got his credit card. You and your friends trashed his place and left those pictures, I’m guessing for the girlfriend to find, and yes, you were right, she did set you up to meet me at the art gallery. Maybe Mrs. Saunders paid you to do those pictures at her ex-husband’s little love shack. Maybe you’re getting paid via the credit card. But then Saunders murdered his wife, and the whole thing blew up in your face.”
Beth shuddered with every sentence he spoke. It was all so very close to the truth. And so shameful.
“You’re a nice kid, Beth. You have no clue how this world works, do you? I’m not going to bust you for using the credit card. Saunders isn’t around to complain about the charges you’re running up, so I guess you haven’t broken the law there yet. If he’s skipped for good, that’ll be AmEx’s problem. But I will ask you this.”
Embarrassed to be hiding under her arms, she sat up. Meeting his eye was the hardest thing she could remember doing since the divorce.
Detective Doyle leaned forward. His craggy face softened. He put his hand over hers, sending her heart into double-bumps and making her lower body flood with heat. “If he contacts you again, let me know. Here’s my card.” He slipped it between her first two fingers, a gesture that felt indecently intimate.
She glanced around the restaurant. No help anywhere in sight.
He stood, took her chin in his hand, and tilted her face back until she made eye contact with him again. “Don’t panic, Beth. You have friends.”
Then he got up and left, sticking her with the bill for iced tea.
She stood and whirled to glare after him, feeling on the edge of tears and offended by the casualness of his touch, only to find that he had gone only a few feet away. He put up his hand. His phone was in it. The simulated snick-sound of a camera shutter closing told her that he had just taken her picture.
“Hey!” She swiped at him, but he backed away, grinning, and strode out of the restaurant.
Why on earth had he done that? Other than to photograph the face of his second-best suspect in a possible murder case, a woman heretofore without identification or history or any known address or phone. Beth put money on the table, gathered up her bags, and went to the ladies’ room, ostensibly to pee, but actually, she realized to her humiliation, to see what Detective Doyle had taken a picture of.
To her shock, the face of old-Beth, Blake’s Beth, looked back at her in the ladies’ room mirror. She looked younger than she had in ten years, but she was very definitely, identifiably Beth Saunders.
Oh boy, was she in trouble.
To Beth’s unspeakable relief, Jee sailed into the restroom. “Okay, what happen—oh. Oh, shit,” Jee said, looking at Beth’s face in the mirror.
In a small voice, Beth said, “I freaked out. I think it happened when I covered my face. I was feeling—” Could she say it? He called me a prostitute. He showed me those horrible pictures. And I was so ashamed that I lost it and forgot what I looked like. No, Jee would probably chop her head off. “I was feeling intimidated.”
Jee rolled her eyes. “Do you remember what you want to look like? The face that goes with your new body?”
For a horrible moment, Beth couldn’t. Once again she was Mrs. Blake Saunders, an upright and respected member of North Shore social circles, a mover and shaker with influential charities, a poised business hostess, the mother of two perfect children, the wife of...oh, right.
Wife of that crooked, slack, middle-aged, betraying weasel.
“Do I have to do this for you?” Jee said, eyeing her.
Beth nodded dumbly. Save me. Undo my slavery to hellish slutdom. Bring my wayward husband back. Make this policeman go away. Jee was so utterly competent that Beth felt it all might be possible.
Jee moved behind her. “Look into the mirror.” Beth obeyed. Jee passed her hands over her face, stroking, pinching, smoothing, pulling. Her fingertips brushed Beth’s eyelids.
Beth closed her eyes. The woman’s touch was soothing. She felt herself relaxing. It wasn’t so bad, really.
“Open. Is that right?”
Beth looked. That perfect young face, the one she’d fantasized having in high school, was back. She looked barely twenty-one. No wonder Detective Doyle thought she was too young for prostitution. The word rang in her head again, and she cringed.
Jee put her hands on Beth’s shoulders and pinned her with narrowed eyes, in the mirror. “Now take a good look. Memorize yourself. If this face isn’t really you, you can develop a new one back at the Lair, where we have time and privacy to help. But you have to get home, and you have to not look like your dead self doing it.”
“Beth Saunders isn’t dead—” Beth began to say.
“Yes. She is. Are these your shopping bags? Let’s get out of here.”
Beth looked over her shoulder all the way down to the street. Maybe she was paranoid, but she’d never been questioned by the police before. And sure enough, just as Jee had hailed a cab and was piling shopping bags into it, she spotted Detective Doyle standing on the street corner, not fifty yards away.
“Ssssh! Jee! That detective is over there. Omigod, now he’s getting a cab! Jee, he’s going to follow us!” she squeaked.
“Don’t panic. Get in. He’s seen me with you before already, no big deal.” Jee sounded insanely calm.
Beth ducked into the cab. Inside, she twisted to look through the back window.
“And don’t look behind you. You look like an idiot.”
“What are we going to do?” Beth whispered.
“Congress Hotel,” Jee said to the cabbie. She lowered her voice and spoke in Beth’s ear. “We’ll go in the front door of the Congress, run through the hotel, lose him by the time he gets into the lobby, and leave by one of the alley exits. It’s time you got some street skills, babe.”
“No,” Beth said. “I don’t want him thinking you’re in cahoots with me.” She leaned forward. “I changed my mind. Take me to Navy Pier, please?” she said to the cabbie. “I’ll do this. I’ll lose him at Navy Pier.”
“And if he catches you?” Jee said.
“Then,” Beth smiled, thinking of Detective Doyle’s appreciation of her spurious youth and beauty, “he’ll catch me. But he’ll have to work pretty hard if he wants to keep me.”
Jee grinned back. “Now you’re talking like a pro. What’s the plan? Fuck him into an embolism? Break his neck while he’s thinking with the little head?”
“Uh, no,” Beth said, blinking. “I had more in mind just, uh, distracting him with sex.”
“It’s a start.” Jee pulled back and looked her up and down. “You sure you can handle this? You kinda lost it with him back there.”
Beth growled, “I’m sure. I’m a sex demon now. I have resources.”
Jee lifted her eyebrows. “You go, girl.”
It took everything Bet
h had not to keep looking behind them to see if Dective Doyle’s taxi was still back there. At Navy Pier, she got out and handed a dollar bill in through the window to Jee, in the vain hope that Doyle would think all those shopping bags she’d been carrying belonged to Jee, that Jee was not her roommate, that—oh God, the worries went on and on. She took off on the long legs she had invented for herself, striding out along the Pier, threading between hordes of tourists.
She had one and only one goal: find a room where she could, in complete privacy, shove Doyle up against a wall and bang his brains out.
Oddly, the prospect was not a hundred percent icky.
This slutty body must be rubbing off on her.
The white bulk of a cruise ship rose ahead of her. Blake’s company had once hired one of these ships for a company party out on the lake. Perfect. There had to be a million little rooms she could lure Doyle into. And once in one, he wouldn’t get out until she was ready, she decided grimly. She wondered if Jee had really meant that about breaking Doyle’s neck. With all the adrenaline coursing through her, Beth felt it could be done. By somebody meaner.
She paid her admission and sprang up the stairs to the deck.
Two hundred or so other pleasure-seekers were milling around on the boat already, most of them trying to get to the observation deck above. She slithered between them, seeking a way downward. Down below, there would be closets, employee restrooms, machine rooms, offices, bilges, anything. With her plumber’s help, she’d learned just how unfussy men could be.
And how unfussy she could be. That thought, like a treacherous voice from hell, reminded her that she, too, had been completely satisfied with their tryst.
I’m a terrible person.
She opened a promising-looking louvered door. Broom closet, as she’d expected. But the floor was entirely occupied by a vacuum cleaner the size and shape of R2D2, and the walls were hung with so many brooms and mops that there wasn’t a clear spot big enough to lean a medium-sized, middle-aged detective against.
As this thought, Beth blushed until the tips of her ears burned.
She shut the door and moved on.
Locked, locked, all these rooms were locked. Dammit!
She heard footsteps behind her.
With a gasp, Beth tiptoed down the corridor and turned the corner. Then she realized she wanted him to hear her and follow her. Then she realized she didn’t want him to find her until she had found a suitable room. She wrenched at doorknobs along the passageway as she scampered past them in her flat sandals. They were all locked.
Further down the corridor, she could see another door with louvers in it. She loped to it and wrenched it open, just as those leisurely footsteps turned the corner.
Beth hurled herself through the louvered door and pulled it shut behind her.
This was a bigger closet than the last one. Good, good. She shut her eyes tight, willing them to get used to the dimness, and opened them an instant later to find the room brightly lit by horizontal strips of light. Her heart hammered.
The approaching footsteps were as loud as her heartbeat in her ears. He was almost here.
She looked around wildly. Rubber rain slickers hung from hooks on the walls. She considered hiding under one of these slickers, just as the footsteps stopped outside the door.
A shadow blocked out much of the light coming through the louvers. “Beth?” came Detective Doyle’s calm voice. “Come on out. I won’t arrest you.”
Silently Beth scrooched down, slithered behind a slicker hanging from a hook, shuffled backward, tripped over something on the floor, and fell on her ass onto a a row of rubber boots lined up against the wall, making a huge, thumping clatter.
The doorknob turned and the door opened. “You okay in here?” Doyle said mildly, and turned on the light. He looked down at Beth sprawled awkwardly on the floor with her succubus-long legs going every which way. His lips twitched. He smiled. Beth glared at him. Then he laughed.
That’s enough, she thought, and sprang up.
He was really quick. He grabbed her by the wrists as she came at him and flipped her against the wall, “Mrs. Saunders,” he breathed, as he jammed his thigh between her legs and tangled her ankle with his leg. “Beth. Please. Let’s talk.”
In the light from the dangling bulb his face looked harsh and battered. His mouth was inches from hers. His brown eyes turned smoky.
Her blood sang, Wow, he’s strong! She pushed her pelvis back against his—goodness, the police came fully armed these days—and as he closed the distance between her mouth and his, she slowly straightened her leg where it was bent around his, trapped by his leg.
Instead of kissing her he grunted. “Ow! Hey!”
“A little late to complain about the rough stuff,” she murmured, but she let up. She didn’t want to break his leg. She wanted to get at that gun in his pocket.
A bead of sweat ran into the corner of his eye. She leaned forward, noticing that they were eye to eye, which meant he was almost as tall as she was...maybe the same? Then she licked the sweat off his eyelid.
Goodness. She could taste how horny he was. Her bones melted.
He must have felt her weakening. He jammed her harder up against the wall. She stopped pushing, stopped resisting, almost slid to the floor on a pile of rubber boots, but he pressed hard with his full body and took her with his mouth. The world swirled, okay, the closet full of rubberized rain gear swirled, but it was pretty swirly swirling. Beth forgot about everything and kissed him back.
Things proceeded briskly after that. He pulled up her skirt and gave her a thorough butt massage, which made her come in her panties. He shoved up against her, which rammed his gun against her holster through her dress in a satisfactory manner and made her come in her panties again. He bit her on the shoulder through her dress, making her come in her panties a third time.
She reached for his belt buckle and he slapped her hand away.
“Hey!” she said, pulling her mouth away from his to say it.
“Oh my God,” he gasped. He thrust her against the wall and backed away from her. This time he was the one who tripped over the rubber boots and fell on his ass.
Beth leaned on the wall, panting for oxygen. Holy moly, this body was susceptible. It wasn’t so bad when the guy was Reg, or some dork of a plumber. But when she wanted the man? Oh dear God.
He looked up at her where she drooped against the wall like a wet noodle, and laughed. “That wasn’t even the main event.”
Beth looked down at him under her eyelids. “You have no idea,” she said throatily. “Are you going to bring me the main event, then?”
Detective Doyle scrambled clumsily to his feet and brushed himself off. “Ahem. No, I’m not.”
“What?” She couldn’t believe her ears.
“Police Academy lessons in the first week. The way to handle a hooker is, you refuse to let her finish the job.”
Her jaw dropped. “Hooker—you—oh!” She stepped forward, intending to punch him on the arm.
He flinched back in mock fear, cringing and holding his hands up to his face. “I take it back, I take it back!”
“You’d better.” Her legs were still wobbly with multiple orgasms. She let herself sink to the floor. Maybe if he was still keyed up, she could pump him. For information. Pump him for information.
Her interrogator settled himself comfortably on a pair of hip waders, facing her. His pupils were dilated. “For the record, Beth, I don’t think you’re a hooker. Those friends of yours, definitely.”
She tried to give him a shocked and incredulous glare. It probably didn’t work.
“In spite of the textbook hooker body and the let’s-do-it smile, I think you may really be Mrs. Blake Saunders.”
Beth’s tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth, dry and speechless.
“You see,” he said, hitching up his trousers and disposing himself more comfortably on the hip waders, “this isn’t my first hinky case. You know Da Mayor recently esta
blished the Hinky Policy, don’t you?”
She shook her head. “Hinky?”
“You know. Weird. Goofy. Strange. Magical.” he whispered. “Hinky.”
She shook her head again.
“The Hinky Policy goes, ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell, cope.’ This may or may not make my job harder, case by case. My home division is Homicide, see. In this case it means that, if I can prove that Mrs. Blake Saunders is not dead, then I don’t have to put her husband in jail for killing her. I don’t have to dig up enough evidence to arrest the husband’s new girlfriend. I don’t even have to try to corner this hot little number who flits in and out of Blake Shanley’s life with Blake Shanley’s credit card and who doesn’t really have an apartment at the Doral. No matter what her fake card says. I’d love to skip all that. But I’ll need a little help.”
Beth felt her throat tightening. “I can’t tell you anything,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to. Just let me make an audio record of you claiming to be Beth Saunders and give me a tissue sample, hair or blood, anything with DNA that will prove your identity. Audio, not video. That way nobody will know what you look like now. Believe me, Beth,” he said, reaching forward and joggling her knee, making her want to jump on top of him. “I would much rather have a non-homicide than a homicide.”
“Even if you could have found someone to pin it on?” she said, feeling impolite for saying it. None of her habits of good manners seemed to be working in this situation.
“Even then,” he said seriously, but with a twinkle in his eye. “The paperwork is a hundred times worse.”
She laughed at that, and he smiled back, and she felt better. “No. Thank you, but no.” In that moment she realized that there were no rules. No good manners, no bad manners. There was simply and solely this moment, whatever this moment was.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 17