Point of No Return (25 page)

She adjusted the few pillows he had then stood back. “Comfortable?”

“Yeah. What . . .”

“Hold these.” She handed him the glasses of whiskey. “Arms resting to the sides.”

When he’d assumed the position, she poured in more whiskey, then stood, hands on hips, looking him over. “I am going to begin pleasuring you in every way I know how.”

His cock heard that and did a happy dance.

“I’ve fantasized about taking advantage of a man,
of you
. Of completely controlling every aspect of the sex, and since I’m not into the tying up thing . . . The glasses.” She squeezed a breast and blinked slowly. The tip of her tongue cruised her upper lip. “If you spill one drop of that whiskey, I will go to that uncomfortable sofa,
alone.
Understood?”

He looked at the glasses and shit, she’d filled them more than halfway. He’d have to be very still. “Can’t we . . .”

“No, to whatever you were going to say. It’s my way or I go away.” She paused. “What’s it going to be, big man?” She bent and licked the tip of his cock.

“Any . . . damn.” He jerked as her lips closed around him. His eyes darted to the glasses, checking for spillage. “Anything you want.” His voice was so hoarse with lust he hardly recognized it.

She bent and swept her hair down his chest, belly, over his dick and thighs, leaving his skin feeling like he’d received a mild electrical shock. Then she rubbed, her hands feeling like fire. He wanted to pitch the fucking glasses against the wall and grab her. He didn’t doubt she would keep her word, and after this no amount of jerking off would satisfy him. She spread his legs, cradled his balls, fingered the strip of skin just behind his nads, and he watched as she sucked him off.

She quickly straddled his body, one hand on a breast and the other between her legs, flicking faster and faster. This was crazy. He wanted to be doing that to her. She kept her gaze on his face even when her body arched and jolted with her climax. She collapsed on his chest. “Take the glasses,” he ordered when she recovered.

“Give it up.” She sat up, her eyes glazed, her body flushed pink. “I’m the one in control and we’ve only just begun.” She swept her hair back. “Unless you want me to stop.”

He did give it up. He wanted her to keep going and he surrendered. For the next hour, he was in sublime torment while she sucked, nipped, fondled and rode him, finally riding him hard until the earth shook for them both.

“Take the damn glasses,” he groaned. “I’m too weak to hold them anymore.”

Honey rolled to a sit and took them. She downed half of one and held the other out to him. He opened and closed his hand until he felt confident of his grip, then took it. Honey had been uncharacteristically quiet. Normally she talked during sex and he loved it. She took another drink.

“Thank you”—she looked at him over the rim of the glass—“for fulfilling my fantasy.” She put her glass on the trunk that served as a night table and stretched out her body against his. “If you ever need help fulfilling yours,” she said and yawned, “I’m available.”

“I’ll let you know.” He slipped an arm around her. She’d already fulfilled his fantasy by being with him.

Chapter 19

Honey snuggled against Jack, who lay on his back, hands tucked behind his head “Know what I was thinking?” he said.

Honey sniffed. “You need deodorant?”

“No, smart-ass.” He propped up on an elbow. “I was thinking about the first time I saw you.” Honey gave him a questioning look. “The moment you swept into that meeting in Istanbul”

“You were asleep when I came in.”

“Well, after you woke me up. You were trailing a cloud of dust like that Charlie Brown character and you looked pissed.”

Honey shifted against him. “I
was
pissed. A chopper ride, a sandstorm, and that arrogant turd, the
acting
station chief, lays into me for being late. Like I did it on purpose.”

“Christ, the way you took him apart was classic.” He rolled to his back and brought her onto his chest. “And you, stalking to the door with him
demanding
to know where you were going. He sure as hell didn’t expect you to say to get a shower and get laid.”

She laughed and rested her chin on his chest. “I didn’t expect you to offer help with both.” She traced a finger through his chest hair.

“Fastest I was ever seduced.”

She raised up. “Seduced?”

“Yeah, seduced. You come into the room riding a dust storm, chew out a turd, wearing a worn T-shirt with no bra and tight jeans that made your . . . eh . . . retreat as exciting as your entrance, then offer sex . . . My kind of woman.” He pushed her hair back over her shoulder. “One thing. When you stopped and asked if I was coming, which by the way, in the sexual way, I almost did, did you expect me to follow?”

She hadn’t, but when she saw him she sure as hell hoped he would. She tugged on his chest hair. “Where’d we spend the next twenty-four hours?” The thought of their first time together was enough to make her wet and she squirmed against the thigh he had pressed between her legs.

He rolled her to the bed and delivered a deep
I want you now
kiss. He was hard in seconds.

She broke the kiss. “Really?” They’d had sex once last night and once this morning.

“My big head knows better. But . . .” He pressed against her wetness. “that other head needs convincing.”

She smacked his ass. “Tell Agent Always Hard to cool it.” Their laughter mingled. How easy it was to slip into a feeling so warm and good that it was unsettling. She coiled her arms around him as if he was broken and she was trying to hold him together. She must have made a distressed sound as she buried her face against his shoulder because he tightened his grip too.

“I know,” he whispered. They were silent for some time. She wondered if he was considering where this was all heading like she was.

“I should call for an update,” Honey finally broke the silence.

“Yeah.” He threw off the covers and went to flip the jammer switch. He jumped back onto the bed, bouncing Honey then burrowed under the comforter as she keyed in the number. Before the first ring was completed, Kara answered and Honey put the call on speaker.

“We thought you’d never call.”

Kara’s excited tone sent a warm surge of adrenaline through her. She levered up on an elbow. “You found something?”

“The mother lode,” Coop said in the background, excitement replacing his usual nonchalant tone.

She and Jack sat up, staring at the phone on the sheets between them. “What?”

“Can I just say Global is going to have one hell of a going-to-jail sale.”

“What do you have?”

“There’s too freaking much here to tell you everything. I need an address to send it.”

Jack swung his legs over the side of the bed and called out an address while pulling on jeans.

“Is it secure? ’Cause what I’m sending is . . .”

Jack nodded on his way down the stairs. “Yes.”

Honey put the phone down and pulled a shirt over her head. “Somebody tell me what you found.”

“This site you got me into is primo. A nerd’s wet dream. Black ops, all kinds of people in there. How come we haven’t used this before?”

Jack shot a look at her. She looked away.

“Coop . . . tell me.”

“Hang on,” Santiago said. “This is gonna blow you out of the water.”

“Jesus, somebody tell me.”

“To begin with, David Bristol ain’t David Bristol.”

Honey looked down at Jack, who stared back.

“I sent the results of the facial recognition search first. You have them?”

A ping came from the laptop. Jack nodded. Honey snatched her jeans off the floor and went to join him. Together they stared at a split screen. A picture of the same man on each side. The left side from a Virginia driver’s license. The right side, a military ID. There were green iridescent lines crisscrossing the two images, marking similarities. A legend across the bottom proclaimed a 99.9 percent probability the photos were the same man. Jack hit a key and the next screen showed two photos of men taken from military IDs and driver’s licenses. They resembled one another but the recog program declared no match.

“Holy shit,” Jack said, clicking back and forth between the screens. “Are these guys related?”

“Nope, and it gets better,” Gunny’s voice said.

“Where the hell is the real Bristol?” Honey said.

“That’s the better,” Coop said. “Sending a file now.”

The next document was emblazoned with
Coroners Report
and an official seal. Jack scrolled through the detailed report of skeletal remains found in a remote Ohio state park months ago. Death estimated to be right before the time Global came on the scene. Cause of death: blunt force trauma to the back of the head, most likely from a fall. ID on the remains based on a wallet found in the clothing as Francis Nelson. Who disappeared around the same time as estimated date of death.

“Bristol and Nelson served a tour of duty together.”

“Flaming fish balls.”

“These guys got into some scrapes,” Gunny said. “Minor stuff except for Nelson. He’s a tool.” There was a pause. “He’d been disciplined, busted down a rank, spent ten days in the stockade. Major,” Gunny’s formal tone garnered her full attention, “the officer who busted him was Saunders.”

She and Jack straightened, their eyes going to the stacks of notes.

“What else?” Jack said, excitement in his voice.

“The two women at Global, sending pics now, have ties to East European and Chinese cyber crime organizations.”

“Coop,” Honey said, her muscles tingling with excitement, “send a list of the high points and everything you have. It will be a couple of hours before we can get out of here. It’s a three-hour drive to the airport, two hours back to DC.”

“Doing it now.”

Pings announcing file arrivals filled the room.

“Auntie?
Ma’am,
are you there?”

Honey jerked around to look at the phone.
Kara calling her ma’am?
“Yesss . . .”

“David Bristol’s bio says he started global with three million in lottery winnings inherited from a great-aunt. We checked with the Indiana lottery. The old lady won a hundred thousand. She took a one-time payment of a little over sixty thousand. Not only that, but her death is sketchy. We checked the online obit. She was in great health, planning a world cruise. It was a shock to friends. With everything else, it seems odd.”

“Yeah.” Honey’s mind hop, skipped and jumped through scenarios. The for-sure things were the real Bristol was dead and Nelson assumed his identity. Anything else was assumption.

Jack looked as gobsmacked as she felt. “We have to sort through this . . . make notes, figure . . .” he said.
“Notes?
Notes.
Son of a bitch
.” He lunged for the backpack containing Becca’s older notes.

“I’ll check in again before we leave here.” Honey ended the call. “What?” she said as he upended the bag, spilling the remaining books on the table.

“The man Becca filed a complaint against. I think it was Nelson.” Jack riffled through the books. “We weren’t looking back far enough.”

“How far?” Honey went for Saunders’s and Ramsey’s older notes.

“A year, maybe year and a half. March, right before Lee’s birthday.”

She searched Saunders’s logs for dates, rapidly scanning pages. “Got it. Two complaints from female enlisted soldiers. Nothing here about an O’Brien.”

Jack scattered Ramsey’s notebooks across the table. Pages flipped like being in a gale force wind. “Here.” His big hand slammed down on a page. “Ramsey met with Becca.” He turned the page. “
Jeesus-h-christ
. He persuaded her not to file a complaint because Nelson had complaints pending.” He turned the page, then planted his hands on each side of the book, leaning over. “Nelson was a short-timer. Ramsey thought the Army wouldn’t do much, better to not file a formal complaint.” He went back to Becca’s notes and shot her a sideways glance over his shoulder. “Becca agreed. I never heard any of this. Only that she had a problem.”

Honey sensed Jack’s anger building. “Ramsey’s advice was sound. Once a woman files a complaint she gets a rep.” She shook her head. “Makes no difference if it’s valid. It can kill a career. Becca did the right thing.”

“Why didn’t Ramsey remember that? Make the connection when they died?”

“Their deaths were reported as a car accident. The name was Nelson, not Bristol. She hadn’t started the review at Global. There was no connection for him.”

He gripped the edge of the table, arm muscles knotted. For a moment, she thought he’d flip it over.

“We know the first part of the why. Bristol-Nelson, whoever the fuck he is, couldn’t risk Becca, or Ramsey and Saunders, showing up at Global and recognizing him.”

“Yeah. But there are pics of him on the net.” Jack laced his fingers behind his head and brought his folded arms close to the side of his face. “Why kill . . .” He grimaced. “Why kill, or take those kids? It’s fucking stupid. Motherfucking demented. Sick bastards.”

That about summed up this fubar, but Honey kept that thought to herself. “Nelson took the girls to keep the people who could out him busy. I can’t explain what happened with your family. I do know if Becca, the colonel, or the general had appeared at Global they would have eventually recognized him. Pictures on the net are one thing. Voice and body language are another. There’s no sinister plot to sell stolen technology. This is Nelson’s plain vanilla attempt to cover murder and theft of the lottery money.”

“You’re right. The simplest explanation is generally the right one.” He went to the laptop. “You’re right about him covering up a murder. You’re right about not selling technology. What the fuck
are
they doing?”

“And how the fuck did Global clear investigating committees with the difference in lottery money?” The adrenaline coursing through her added an edge to her voice.

Jack clicked through the pages on the laptop. “It’s in here someplace.”

Honey headed to the stove. “I need coffee before I dig into that. My mind is racing in a half dozen directions.”