Bad Company (6 page)

Red Maple and dinner was Sally’s way of saying,
You’re special; you’ll always be welcome
, and Cassie felt another surge of relief, just to be here, to be somewhere that felt safe at last.

“We’ll pay,” she said. Then: “
He’ll
pay.”

Sally nodded. “You in trouble?” Always a one to cut straight to it.

Cassie nodded in reply. “I think so,” she said. “Or at least Denny is. I just get to slipstream his trouble, lucky me.”

“Like I say,” said Marshall, squaring up so that he towered over Denny, “you hurt Cassie an’–”

“It’s all good, Marshall,” said Cassie. “Thank you, but Denny’s good. We’re in this together. Just have to lie low and work a few things out.”

“You tell me more you’d have to kill me?” said Marshall.

“Something like that. You really don’t need to know the kind of hole Denny can dig for himself, believe me.”

“Can I just say,” said Denny, “how glad I am to have been able to make such a good first impression?” That twinkle again, that charm, and they were all smiling and then laughing without really knowing why.

“Red Maple, you say?” said Cassie, and Sally turned to the check-in desk, leaned over, and plucked a key from the rack.

“As long as you need, Cass. As long as you need.”

§

Back in the Lexus they followed the rough track as it wound up the hill past the first few cabins.

After two hairpins of the track, Cassie, nodded towards Red Maple and said, “Here we are.”

They parked up in front of the cabin and Cassie led Denny by the hand up onto the porch. Taking his hand, she turned and they looked out over the treetops.

“Even the air tastes different up here,” she said. “It’s so peaceful. So
clean
. Can’t you just–”

He took her off her feet, physically lifting her and sweeping her backwards until they came to a halt up against the front wall of the cabin.

Instinctively, she coiled one leg up around him and his thigh came hard against her so that she cried out – in pain at first, but it was a pain that shifted from stab to ache to throb to something altogether different as she rode that hard thigh.

A hand at the back of her head, controlling and guiding her as his mouth found hers. All that passion – the sexual tension of the last two hours in the car – erupted in that one movement and he was no longer Denny, he was an animal, an exploding ball of need.

She tasted blood in her mouth as their lips and teeth mashed together, and there was pain in her spine from the way she’d been thrown against the wall.

His other hand took her wrist, pulled her arm in, found her hand and the key it was holding. Fumbling to their side, Denny somehow managed to get the key into the lock and turn it. He yanked at the door to open it and then they tumbled inside, almost losing their balance altogether and ending up in a heap on the ground.

He caught her, the hand that had unlocked the door snaking down around her waist. Briefly, he was holding her in that classic romantic pose: tipped back onto her heels, her weight almost entirely on his arm around her waist, the hand on the small of her back, and the other hand, cupping her head.

Then – romance be damned, this was something different – he swept her into his arms and carried her roughly across the living space of the cabin, and through an open door into the bedroom where he dropped her onto a bare mattress and started to tear at her clothes.

Briefly, he straightened, and like the quiet before the storm there was a pause as she lay there looking up at him. Such need in his eyes! Such hunger and passion.

Then he stepped forward, freed the button and zipper of her jeans and yanked them down. Two tugs and they were bunched around her sneakers. He started to untie her laces but she just kicked the sneakers free, toe to heel, so that he could pull her jeans away completely.

As he reached for her panties she pushed herself up, took her jumper and pulled it over her head. Her tee-shirt followed, and she managed to undo her bra but had no time to pull it clear before he was on her.

If there had been a moment of quiet then the storm had well and truly hit now.

He took her by the wrists, pinning her arms up above her head. The weight of his body trapped her as his head dropped to her breasts and he nuzzled the loose bra aside. Stubble and teeth dragged across that tender flesh, finding a nipple and clamping hard so sharply that she cried out aloud once more.

Again, it was a pain that transformed into something else. Each time he bit at her nipple a stabbing sensation went through her body, then the bite became sucking, became a swirling licking, and the sensation shifted into the kind of heat that was growing relentlessly in her belly.

The coarse denim of his jeans was rough against her and she wrapped her legs around his waist, trying to slow him, but she was powerless in the face of his onslaught. Each thrust left her rough and battered and feeling like she was about to explode.

He reached down with one hand, then, and undid the buttons of his jeans, then yanked his shorts down a little so that his manhood sprang out like a ravenous animal.

With no preamble he was inside her and pushing deep in that way of his: filling her and sliding in further until she thought she could take no more and then just keeping going until, at last, she was impaled on his full length and the rough rasp of his pubic fuzz was pressing against her.

He drew back his full length until he had almost pulled clear and then slid fully home again in a long, fast stroke of his body.

That was all it took.

Two hours in the car, playing and talking and bringing herself close to the edge only for him to stop her, or for her to stop herself. Two hours touching him and touching herself, telling him what it felt like for him to do
this
, how it felt when he filled her and they were joined and she lost all sense of anything but the growing tight heat in her belly...

He drove deep and his pubic bone came to press hard on her clit. She pushed up to meet him, clamped her legs around his waist to hold him deep inside her, and then her whole body thrashed from side to side as orgasm took her. A tightening in her belly, a blossoming of heat and sensation and electricity. Waves of muscle-tightening coursed through her body, all focused deep in her belly – in her
cunt
– as it tightened and pulsed around his long hard shaft.

It started to ebb, started to ease, and it was like that first time: had she really, briefly, blacked out just then? Her senses seeped back. The rhythmic grunting he made, the squeaking of the mattress and the iron bed-frame; the musky, sweaty, salty combined smell of them; the metal taste of blood in her mouth...

She put a hand to the back of his head then, slowing him, pressing her lips to his cheek and then working across his rough jaw to the side of his neck. His earlobe, soft and pliable; tracing the cartilage ridges of his ear with her tongue; pressing and probing and flicking.

Almost imperceptibly at first, he started to slow, to draw out those long thrusts until everything had transformed and now it was all about the sensations, about slowness not speed, about moving so slowly that every little gliding, sliding movement was magnified and intensified.

When he was deep, she held him there, clamping him around the waist with her legs. She squeezed and he gasped. She clenched again and it was as if those deep muscles were milking his shaft, drawing him even deeper.

He pulled back. First his head and then at the waist until he had almost withdrawn.

Eye contact. So intimate! So intense!

Those steel-gray eyes with flecks of blue and charcoal.

The connection they made through that eye contact was unlike anything she’d ever known, a summing up of all the unspoken things that lay between them: the magnetic attraction, the empathy, the teasing humor, the sense of kindred spirits. It was a bond that felt years-old, generations-old, rather than a mere 24 hours.

She started to swivel her hips, with only the head of his dick inside her, massaging it with her soft wetness.

And slowly, slowly, he filled her again, that incredibly drawn-out thrust as he slid, glacier-slow, inside her, filling her. He came to press hard, his pubic bone against her clit so that every microscopic movement, every throb and pulse, resonated through that hard, deep contact.

She squeezed those deep muscles around him, made them ripple around his shaft.

His eyes widened. His jaw sagged just a little, his lips parting.

She pushed up to kiss him, tongues meeting in a tender dance, and that first throb came. She squeezed again and felt a pulse deep in her belly, a wet heat, a sense of rushing, filling...

His whole body jerked in that first pulse of orgasm, driving him against her, into her, and then he spasmed again and she felt more pulsing, throbbing deep inside her.

Again, and it was gentler, an aftershock, and she felt that marble rod starting to soften. There was something about that change of sensation, that sudden yielding, that took her by surprise, bringing her right back to the edge again.

Another pulse, a shift, a further softening, and she pushed against him, rolling her hips so that she ground against hard pubic bone. In response to this new sensation she felt a sudden tightening in her belly, a muscular convulsion and climax took her once again. Where her first orgasm had stolen over her entire body, this time it was focused on their wet joining, wave after wave of tightenings as she worked against him until, finally, they were both spent, clinging to each other like the survivors of a shipwreck.

Breathing fast.

Heart pounding.

Unwilling to let go. Unable to let go.

Eventually, she slumped back and he pulled away, out of her, and then rolled over to lie at her side on the bare mattress.

“There’s bedding,” she gasped a short time later, as goose bumps started to pucker her skin. “That cupboard. Over by the door.”

He stood, and came back moments later with a quilt to cover them as he lay back down. For some time they just lay there, tangled, their bodies fitting like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

She thought back to that moment: the shift from wild animal passion to tender and gentle; the eye contact; the sudden sense of the bond between them.

“How did you do that?” she said.

He looked, an eyebrow raised.

“That thing. That thing where suddenly you’re in my head and it’s like you always have been. Or like there’s always been a place in my head just waiting for you to fill it.
That
thing.”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“I don’t even
know
you. Except that you like soccer and old man music.”

She didn’t know him and yet... yet she couldn’t see a future without him in it. Sure, they were all scary futures, but how was it that Denny McGowan was waiting on every single path that lay ahead of her?

I think I’m falling
.

She didn’t say those words out loud, of course.

Instead, she leaned over and kissed him. On the cheek. On the eyelids, forcing him to close those beautiful eyes. On the lips: tenderly, briefly, almost chastely.

She lay back, heart pounding again.

I think I’ve fallen
.

“M
arshall and Sally are an interesting couple.”

Cassie and Denny had dozed, and woken, and in the meantime darkness had fallen. She’d take him outside soon, to share the stars. The night sky you could see from the White Mountains and coastal Maine on a clear night had been a revelation to Cassie when she’d come away from the city a few years back. The way you could see that blanket of pinpricks and then, as your eyes adjusted, there would be more, layer upon layer of them as if icing sugar had been sprinkled across the sky.

“They were good to me.” Marshall and Sally  had been like parents, truth be told. They’d been there for her from the start, no questions asked. After years of shit and worse, Marshall and Sally had been a turning point for Cassie, a sign that things could get better, could be good.

“I don’t think they liked me.”

“Think of it as senior prom night. They’re just being protective. Like Marshall said: you hurt me he’ll break your back, and then some.”

“I got that.”

“Good.”

The bare mattress was rough on Cassie’s skin, but were they really going to move and get sheets?

“Tell me,” said Denny. “What’s the tat?”

He was studying her bare shoulder in the dim light that came in from the window. The tattoo covered that shoulder with bold, dark blue brushstroke script.

“‘Don’t fuck with me’,” she said. “In Chinese. Had it done when I was fifteen. It’s what got me through. Not the tat: the words.”

“Your mantra.”

Was he teasing? No. He was serious, and right.

“Sometimes you need something to keep you strong,” she said. “Like when your father’s put in jail and it just confirms what you’ve known about him all along. When your mom’s too sick to even get out of her bed and you’re the only person there for her. When you’re homeless and kicked out of school and it’s hard to imagine sinking any lower.”

He kissed her shoulder, her tattoo.

“It’s who you are,” he said. “I get it.”

He kissed the tattoo again and then she turned, in his arms, and they kissed mouth to mouth.

“We need to talk,” she said. “We’re holed up in a cabin with nowhere to go and only a roll of cash that’s getting slimmer by the hour. We’ve got the bad guys on our tail and I don’t know how we get ourselves out of this mess of yours. We need to talk, Denny, and we need a plan of action.”

Those futures she saw lying ahead of her and Denny. She need to find at least one of them that didn’t end in violence.

§

He climbed from the bed and stood, a dark silhouette against the window. “This place have supplies?” he asked. “How about you rustle up some coffee while I get our things in, and then we can talk all you like. Hell, we can talk right through the night if that’s what you need.”

She grunted agreement and watched through slit eyes while he pulled his jeans back on, then reached down to the floor for his shirt. He moved like a cat, she thought. That mix of almost overly fastidious and a smooth, sleek athleticism. Strong and precise. And God but she was wanting him again! What had he done to her to make her feel this way?