Authors: Caitlin Falls
Blake froze with a spoonful of luscious pudding halfway to his mouth. “What did you say?”
“I said he was messy.”
He sat the spoon down, “The office looked clean. Did you straighten it up?”
“Oh no, the cleaning crew must have last night.”
The cleaning crew that left the building at a certain time because nobody was allowed overtime. The crew that would have been gone before Pitt had even come into Jenna’s office. “Jenna, who cleans your office?”
She was perplexed by the question and it showed on her lovely face. “The cleaning crew I suppose. I’m not very messy, though.”
“Did anyone come in to clean your office last night, before or after I left?”
“No, why?”
Tom’s office was clean, and so was Jenna’s. They had both been at the building long after the cleaning staff left it, so there was no way that the staff could have cleaned those offices. That could only mean one thing—the killer had cleaned it.
But what person would clean Jenna’s office on a regular basis, night after night? Obviously someone cleaned it, or perhaps she was truly not very messy and it seldom needed attention but either way…something was very wrong with that picture.
“Jenna, have you
ever
had anyone in cleaning your office while you were working late?”
“No,” her forehead wrinkled. “The crew works late so I assume they just wait until we all leave.”
Excitement coursed through his veins. It was the same feeling he used to get when he was right on the heels of a murderer, and it hit him just how much he had missed that adrenaline rush, that nerve tingling gut feeling of doing something right.
Why had he left the force? To help rich people catch their husbands and wives cheating? To catch thieves working within companies? Was that what would make him happy and proud in his older years, the memory of the time he had climbed up a penthouse balcony to photograph a man bedding his mistress or the memory of the wrongs he had helped set right as a cop?
He had needed to set things right, because as a kid all he had seen was wrongs. His mother had worked at the truck stop in their tiny town, and her life had been a series of hard luck stories and bad men. She was a hard drinking, heavy smoking woman who taught her son to read and write, exhorted him to run out of that town as fast as his feet would let him and died at the hands of a brutal man whose name she had never known.
It had been a robbery gone bad; a needless and senseless crime. His mother had taken on an extra shift just to make sure that her then seventeen year old son had good shoes for his senior year of high school. Blake had blamed himself for that, he had wanted to take on extra hours at his own job but his mother had refused to let him. She had known that he needed to spend more time hitting the books and courts if he was going to get an academic or basketball scholarship.
The year after her death had been a dark one. He had lived with the owners of the truck stop, whom he had known his entire life and stopped playing sports, stopped caring about his grades and stopped daydreaming about being a professional ball player and became obsessed with things like honor, crime and the need to fix things.
By the time he had graduated he had decided to join the military, fired up about the chance to do the right thing, to protect his country and joining the police force had been the same thing all over again—a chance to make things right so nobody else would know what it was to see their life destroyed by a senseless crime.
He had walked away from that, and for what? To keep from betraying a man who had forgotten why he was in there in the first place? He had owed Kevin, in Iraq Kevin had saved his life, and he had not wanted to repay that by turning him in to Internal Affairs—but he should have.
Those were all things to ponder but right then there were other issues looming closer. Jenna had just ignited a spark in his thinking. There was a connection there somewhere; he just had to find it. “What did Pitt want when he came to your office?”
“We share a couple of accounts. What I mean by that is that—it is a complicated system but basically no single person has entire access to an account’s information. We all have certain parts we play: some people get the clients in the company, set up the accounts, some people have other jobs. My job is to manage certain financial aspects of an account and to oversee the work done by my department. Tom’s job was to set up funds transfers between hedge and other deposit types.”
Blake had no idea of what she meant but he could see a clearer picture. “So every person in the team has part of a file. Does anyone have full access?”
“No, they are deliberately done that way because of an embezzlement…” she broke off, her eyes going wide. “About a four or five years ago there was an executive who had been setting up Ponzi schemes and funneling money out of client’s accounts.
“After he was caught the board set up the new system to keep anyone from doing it ever again. It almost killed the company and the owners, Dunning included, had to come out of their own pockets to make restitution.”
“What happened to the exec who was stealing?”
“Jail, of course. There was a lot of grumbling and, to be honest, it is part of the reason why I am not very well liked.”
“Why would that lead to you not being liked?”
“I am the one who figured it out and turned him in. His father had been one of the original founders and was still there, and after that the new rules went into place—nobody likes them very much, they feel like they are being told that they cannot be trusted and it rankles I understand it but I had to tell, I had to.”
There it was, a large piece of the puzzle. “What was his name?”
Jenna thought for a moment, her finger tapping into the table. “Jason Dean. Oh, this is odd—my secretary used to be his father’s secretary before he was retired. I actually occupy Dean Senior’s old office, or I did until today. I never thought about that until just now.”
Blake did not believe in coincidence, and there was too much of it here. He had an uneasy feeling, one he could not put his finger on but this felt familiar somehow. Jenna had finished eating and so had he but neither of them were sated. They both knew that they wanted each other, Jenna could not stop looking at his long fingers, wondering what they would feel like inside of her and at his mouth, that mouth had kissed her so passionately, so fully that she had felt like it was the first kiss she had ever known.
Blake asked, “Would you like to come to my apartment?”
“Yes.” It took a millisecond for the admission to trip right off her tongue. Damn, she should have played a little coy at least. Or maybe not, it was obvious he was used to being direct, and she liked that. He was nothing like the men she usually dated—driven, work-oriented men who chattered on and on about the same things she dealt with every day and their issues and problems, none of them had ever seemed to take her seriously but Blake—there was something very different about him.
Yes, they came from different worlds. That was glaringly obvious, maybe that was what was so attractive about him.
The ride to his apartment went far too quickly, but not quickly enough. The bike elicited the same responses from her body and when they entered the cramped foyer of his building they forgot everything except each other. Their bodies collided as they staggered into the elevator, which was mercifully empty.
Blake’s hands drew her even closer, they ran up her blouse, wrinkling the silk as he kneaded her breasts. Jenna gasped and wriggled closer, her pelvis tilting up and toward him as her back arched outward so that he would have a better angle.
The elevator door opened to reveal a startled young couple who grinned and stepped back. “We’ll catch the next one,” the man chuckled and then the door shut again. Jenna was too aroused to even feel embarrassed. As soon as the doors swung back shut she was kissing him again, her lips fused to his and her hands clutching his strong back.
The doors opened again, that time to reveal his floor. Blake picked her up, her legs wrapped around his waist, and he carried her down the hall to his place. He shoved her back against a wall, still kissing her while trying to get the key into the lock. Jenna began to giggle but stopped as soon as the door opened and he walked over the threshold. He used his foot to slam the door closed and they stumbled to the couch, too eager to care about making it into the bedroom.
Blake was on fire for her. He tossed her across his bed, her back hit the mattress and all the air escaped from her lungs. Her foot lashed out and knocked over a water glass he had neglected to take into the kitchen. Blake swore. Laughed and dove onto the bed, his fingers fumbling at the buttons of her expensive blouse.
Jenna, realizing that if she did not remove her clothes she stood a good chance of forever losing her them, freed the buttons and tossed the blouse to a chair that sat nearby. Her skirt followed and she lay on the bed wearing only her stockings, heels, bra and panties.
“Holy shit,” Blake whispered reverently, “You are trying to kill me with those damn stockings.” Before she could protest he had yanked her shoe off and crowed, “Cuban heels! I knew it.”
“You know stockings,” Jenna said in a husky voice.
“I know sexy.”
Jenna could not argue that, and she did not want to, either. His hands tugged at her bra, freeing her breasts from its lacy confines. They spilled out and he took those globes into his hands, squeezing gently and then using his thumb and forefinger to tweak them until they stood up in rosy little peaks that drew his mouth’s attention.
Jenna groaned, her heels digging into the mattress as she raised her body to his. His mouth came back and she was drowning in the desire he engineered within her with his long and impassioned kisses, his cunning hands and his soft words, breathed into her shell-like ears.
Her fingers went to the buttons on his jeans and she undid them, freeing his prick from the denim. It filled her hand—hot, heavy and so hard already—Jenna whimpered, wanting to feel him inside her, needing him to fill her up completely. His prick throbbed below her touch and she grew bolder, sliding over him and down until her mouth was near his black pubic thatch.
Her breath stirred that hair and he hissed out a low breath as her tongue came out and licked at the pearly drops of pre-come there. That salty goodness filled her mouth and she hummed as she licked around the head, then gently pressed her tongue against the tiny circumcision scar, making his hips buck and thrust into her face.
She took him down her throat, sucking hard and applying more pressure by using her hand to squeeze along the shaft as she bobbed her head up and down. Blake let out a feral growl that told her she had found a weakness in him and his fingers tangled so deeply into her scalp that his nails left small burning trails there.
The sides of her mouth ached, his dick was so large and wide, and she had to fight to breathe around it. The smell of his body rose into her nostrils and she inhaled it greedily as she flicked her tongue out and swirled it in circles while she swallowed his dick once more.
“Holy fuck that feels so damn good,” Blake ground out. “You are going to pay for it too.”
She hoped so. Her mouth lifted away from his wet cock, her saliva glistening on the engorged and throbbing head and bowed her head lower to his balls. Her tongue stroked them, then she suckled on them while her hand kept pumping on his member.
Blake finally shouted, “Dammit stop before I come!”
She wanted him to come, but she was not ready for him to come just then, she wanted to feel him buried deep within her slippery tunnel when he came, she wanted to feel his seed splashing against her walls.
She mounted him, her ass slowly sinking as she put her hands on his chest for balance. He responded by grasping her hips, tilting his own and helping her to glide all the way down. A sharp but small pain hit, she had to wiggle around a bit to get comfortable, the angle of penetration was incredible and she was concerned she might not be able to take that but his fingers found her clit and stroked it, sending her into quivering spasms.