Out of Control (13 page)
“Hey,” Ken said in greeting, interrupting Johnny midsentence. “What do you guys know about multiple orgasms?”
Both Johnny and Sam turned to look at him—Sam with the bleary eyes of the sleep deprived. He looked shell-shocked and confused—and as if he might’ve actually forgotten what an orgasm was.
“I’m wondering what it’s like for the woman.” Ken got more specific. “Is it like riding one big perfect twenty-minute wave? Or is it like catching an excellent string of three or four smaller but equally perfect waves?”
Johnny laughed. “Surfing as an analogy for orgasm. I like that. Kowabunga.”
“Three or four?” Sam repeated, interest returning to his bloodshot eyes, as if he were waking up. He laughed. “Ho, WildCard, you’re shagging a woman who comes three or four times inside of twenty minutes?”
Count on Starrett to bring it down to the crudest possible level.
“I didn’t say that,” Ken countered stiffly. He hadn’t brought this up to engage in a locker room discussion of last night’s exploits.
“You didn’t have to.” Sam laughed again. “Holy shit. Who is she?”
Yeah, like he would tell. “Look, asshole, I’m not shagging anyone.”
“Ah. Right. Forgive me. You’re making beautiful, respectful love to the Orgasm Queen of the World. Congratulations, man. Is this normal for her, or is there something important that you’ve discovered about women, that you need to teach the rest of us mere mortals?”
“I think you really need to ask her about it,” Johnny advised, pretty much ignoring Sam. “Women’s orgasms are different from men’s. With us, it’s over when it’s over, right? With a woman, if you do it right, you can keep it going for a nice long time.” He smiled the smile of a man who knew. “But I don’t think that necessarily qualifies as a multiple orgasm.”
John Nilsson had been married for nearly two years, and he and his wife, Meg, were so freaking happy, at times it seemed abnormal. Ken and Sam both tried their hardest to be sincerely glad for the guy, but it got a little hard to deal with at times—for Ken, because he was so relentlessly alone, and for Sam because he’d been roped into a loveless shotgun marriage when a former girlfriend, Mary Lou Morrison, showed up four months pregnant.
The situation was made worse by the fact that Sam was crazy in love with someone else at the time. And probably still was.
And Ken was one of the very few who knew Sam was hung up on FBI agent Alyssa Locke. Despite the fact that they claimed to despise each other, Ken had come across Sam and Locke in a serious liplock right before Mary Lou had dropped her little bomb and detonated Sam’s life.
“So who is she?” Sam asked again, persistent son of a bitch.
“I was speaking figuratively,” Ken lied.
“He’s such a fucking liar,” Sam said to Johnny. He turned to Ken. “Why the big secret? Jesus, you’re not seeing Adele again, are you?”
“God, no!”
“Well, that’s good. Even if she came every sixty seconds like a clock, you’d still be better off a hundred miles away from her.”
“I was just looking for information,” Ken said. “I was with Adele for so long and . . .” He wasn’t like Nilsson or Starrett. Before Johnny got married he’d been a real ladies’ man. And Sam had never suffered from lack of female company either. But in his entire life, Ken had been with a grand total of four different women—including Savannah—and the first one had been back in high school, before Adele even, and didn’t really count. “I was just wondering if there were any rules that I don’t know about.”
“Rules?” Johnny repeated. “Like . . . ?”
“Don’t do it in animal masks while swinging from a trapeze until the third week of the relationship,” Sam suggested. “That’s a rule I always followed religiously—along with the one about not having sex in her parents’ kitchen in the middle of a black-tie party. Broke that one once—got into real trouble.”
Ken ignored him. “Like, there’s a rule—it’s unspoken, but it’s definitely a rule—make sure the woman comes first, right?”
“Oh, shit,” Sam said. “Really? Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all these years.”
Ken continued to ignore him. “But what do you do if the woman comes right away? I’m talking right away. And then she comes again, and you know if you keep going she’ll come a third time, except by then you’re completely crazed because she is so freaking hot and . . .”
The expressions on both Johnny’s and Sam’s faces would have been funny as hell if this weren’t so important to him.
“And I think I just got the answer to one of my questions,” Ken had to laugh anyway. “I’m guessing that it’s not one in every four women who can—”
“No,” Sam said emphatically. “Try one in four hundred.”
“You’re in uncharted territory. You’re going to have to make up the rules as you go along, man,” Johnny told him.
“That is one very dangerous thing to tell an operator whose nickname is WildCard.” Senior Chief Wolchonok and Team Sixteen’s commanding officer, Tom Paoletti, came out of Paoletti’s office. “Do I need to know what this is about?”
“No, Senior,” Johnny said. “Karmody’s got it handled.”
“You got something for me to sign, Chief?” the CO asked Ken.
“Aye, sir.” Ken handed him the papers, and Paoletti took out his pen, motioning for Ken to turn around and give him his back to use as a table.
“What’s up?” Johnny asked.
“Two weeks leave, Lieutenant,” Ken said as Paoletti signed.
“Well, all right,” Sam said.
“He’s finally taking a vacation.” The senior chief turned to Ken. “Don’t just stay home and watch TV. Go someplace good. That’s an order, Chief.”
“No worries, Senior,” Sam drawled. He grinned at Ken. “I happen to know Chief Karmody’s going someplace really good.”
“How old are you?”
Molly smiled. Jones had been asking her questions like this ever since they’d sat down to dinner. Too blunt, too personal, too rude.
She’d answered them all.
She didn’t have a favorite position when making love—she liked them all.
She didn’t wear lipstick because she’d traded the last of her makeup—except for one bottle of nail polish that had fallen behind her bookshelf—to a neighboring village in return for beads to sew on a wedding dress for one of the young women who worked with her.
She was born in small-town Iowa and her mother lived there still.
She’d first had sex at age fifteen—much too young for most girls, but she’d never regretted it. The boy had been killed in a car accident several months later, and yes, she loved him still. A dead boyfriend was a hard act to follow, even now, all these years later.
“I’m forty-two,” she told him now. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-three.”
He was much younger than she’d thought. “Tough age.”
“No tougher than thirty-two was.”
“Really? You’re not having a Jesus complex?” she asked.
He laughed. Despite his scruffy growth of beard, the lank hair hanging in his face, despite the scowling badman attitude and the fact that he needed a shower, his laughter transformed him. He had no doubt been a remarkably beautiful child.
“Yeah, right,” he scoffed. “Me and Jesus—we’re so much alike, people often get us confused.”
“Sometimes people—men in particular, for some reason—experience a sense of impending doom in their thirty-third year because that was when Jesus died. The thinking is, ‘I’m not even half the man He was, so why should I be allowed to live longer than He did?’ “
“If that’s the case, I should’ve been hit by lightning when I was seven.” Jones laughed again. “No, I don’t spend much time thinking about Jesus. It’s not my thing.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Nope.”
Molly nodded, took a sip of her coffee. He’d answered that awfully quickly. “Why did you leave my tent without saying good-bye?” It was her turn to ask the blunt, personal questions.
He didn’t hesitate with this one, either. “Because I wanted to fuck you, and that didn’t seem like a good way to repay you for your help.”
“I see.” Molly set her coffee down, glad that she hadn’t been taking a sip when he’d said that. Years of working in unusual places and dealing with unexpected people and situations enabled her to sound as cool and matter of fact as he’d sounded, when in fact her heart was racing.
She knew it. Despite their age difference, this attraction she felt wasn’t a one-way street. When he’d ogled her back in the bar, that had just been for show—an attempt to frighten her away.
But what he’d just said now smacked of a raw honesty.
“I don’t know. That might’ve been a perfect thank-you gift.” She managed to lift a casual eyebrow. “Are you any good at it?”
He laughed at that. He’d been trying to shock her with his language, and she’d managed to turn it around on him. Score.
“Yes,” he told her. “I am.”
“Well, I’ll certainly keep that in mind the next time you get the flu.”
He shook his head, still laughing. “You are so full of shit.”
She gazed at him across the table. “Takes one to know one, Mr. Jones.”
Out of all the things she’d asked and said, this made him most uncomfortable. “Look, don’t call me that, all right?”
“Well, if you told me your first name, I could—”
“It’s Jones,” he said.
“Your name is Jones Jones?” Molly shook her head, enjoying his discomfort. “Sorry, I don’t believe it. If you want me to call you anything other than Mr. Jones, you’re going to have to give me a first name. And I have to be frank with you. I’m not going to have sex with someone I know only as Mr. Jones. I mean, talk about awkward. ‘Mr. Jones, kiss me there again . . .’ “ She laughed. “I’m sorry, there’s not a chance of that happening.”
His gaze was unwavering in the candlelight. “So if I tell you my first name, then you and me—”
“Thank you so much for the box of books,” she interrupted him sweetly. “I read them all in about three days. I wrote you a note—”
“I got it. Go back a sec, will you?”
She leaned forward. “Actually, let’s go back to the day you left my tent after being so sick. After vomiting on my running shoes. Doing diarrhea on my sheets and in my bed. After all that, you were finally starting to be pleasant to be around, and you just left.”
He pretended to be absorbed in peeling the label off his bottle of beer. She suspected that if the light were any better in here, she would see that he was blushing. There was no doubt about it. He absolutely hated his memories of her washing him clean, particularly now that he knew she wasn’t a nurse.
He glanced up, but he couldn’t hold her gaze. “I sent you new sheets.”
“And they were very pretty, thank you very much. But that was unnecessary. Sheets can be washed. Didn’t it occur to you that if you really wanted to fuck me, as you so eloquently put it, you’d have a better chance getting what you wanted by sticking around? By visiting in the evenings? By occasionally dropping the word please into your speech? By smiling at me, oh, every few days or so?”
He put down the bottle. “So you’re telling me that if I tell you my name, if I come to see you, if I say pretty please and smile . . .” He gave her a big fake grimace of a grin.
“And mean it,” she interjected.
“You’ll have sex with me.”
“Don’t forget the shower and shave.”
“Check,” he said. “Shower and shave.”
“Very important.”
Jones laughed. “You’re completely conning me, aren’t you? Jerking my chain.”
Molly shrugged. “Maybe. You want to hear a fact?”
He was staring at her mouth again. “Absolutely.”
“All those things . . . ?”
“Yeah?”
“If you don’t do those things,” she told him, “you definitely won’t have a chance with me. I’m an old-fashioned girl. I like being courted before being fucked.” Molly pushed back her chair and stood up. “It’s time for me to go. I’m staying with some friends from the local church. They’re picking me up, they’re probably already outside, and I don’t want to keep them waiting.”
“Stay with me tonight,” Jones said, still sitting back in his chair, but looking up at her as if he wanted to eat her alive. All sense of banter was dropped from his voice. It was thick, vibrant with desire. “Please,” he whispered.
Somehow Molly managed to smile. “My oh my,” she whispered back. “The P-word puts in an appearance. Maybe the man can learn.”
If he had been anyone else, she would’ve kissed him. But Jones was far too magnetic, far too attractive. She didn’t trust herself to get that close. Instead, she slowly backed away. Blew him a kiss from the distance.
“Good night, Mr. Jones. Sleep well. And thank you, again, for saving Joaquin’s life.”
Savannah looked so completely different when she opened the door of her hotel room that Ken froze.
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