The Lion's Den (Faraway Book 2) (11 page)

“I’ll try a few.”

I left her alone after that. I couldn’t hang over her. Well, I could, but I didn’t want to unnerve her, or worse, make her not like me. Meredith and I had never had a first date. We’d never had a time when we were getting to know each other. We’d been together and trying to figure out how that should work almost the entire time. This was new territory, and I was eager to impress her.

I watched the clock on my computer from eleven fourteen
A.M.
until eleven forty-five, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d seen her legs crossed about an hour before and had to talk myself down from going out there and throwing her on top of the desk. At lunch, I was going to talk to her about wearing jeans to work. I wasn’t going to survive many more skirts.

“You ready?” I stuck my head out my door.

Meredith was reading the case files that were new since she’d been gone. She held the file up to me. “Did this pharmacy perp work alone?”

“As far as we know. He didn’t give anyone up, and he disabled the security cameras as soon as he entered the building.” He’d been whacked out on drugs for most of the interview. We were waiting for him to detox before we took another run at him. “Why?”

“I was just looking at the list of stolen items.” She turned the pages in the file, finding the one she was referencing. “Oxycodone, hydrocodone, and methadone.” She turned to the next page. “Syringes, eye drops, gauze.”

“And?”

“And nail polish.” I watched as her mind sifted through the details.

I took the file from her hand and read the list myself. “Interesting.”

“Very, very interesting. I already love this job.” She was beaming with pleasure. Meredith had found a place to use her mind. The one she’d left with the Department of Justice when she’d quit to raise her children.

“Let’s go to lunch.”

We walked out, leaving Officer Schlichter there until Daniels returned. Between the two officers, there shouldn’t be anything to worry about at the station, and Meredith and I could take a long lunch. It was something we’d never have done before her accident.

“Want me to drive, or are you going to take me in the police cruiser?” Sex dripped from her lips. She was tormenting me. I stopped moving. My heart raced in my chest. Hope burst in my mind. She remembered. I swore she did, but she was as innocent as she’d been when she walked in that morning.

“You can drive,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I could control myself with her near the hood of my car. I climbed in the Escalade she hated and buckled my seatbelt. Meredith did the same, but before she started the car, she turned to me.

“Did I like working for you?” She was smiling, playing with me the way she always did with Daniels.

“You did,” I said and smiled back at her. She was impossible not to be happy around.

“Don’t lie. Because I’ll ask the others, and they’ll tell me.”

“I would never lie. You told me you loved me.” I turned away and stared out the window. I knew she was smiling, half-laughing at my words, but I couldn’t see her. Or I couldn’t let her see how much her words had meant to me.

Brad Walsh

“I LOVE YOU,” DHARMA SAID.
She looked like she may cry, which was impossible because Dharma only had one emotion—need. The declaration, words of adoration spoken by people all over the world, sent terror to my bones.

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing I should respond but completely void of the words she hoped to hear.

She unbuttoned my shirt and slid it off my shoulders. With the hem of my undershirt in her hands, she said, “I love you. You can’t be surprised. We’ve been together almost two years.” She lifted my shirt up and over my head. Her fingertips trailed down my stomach to the top of my pants.

I didn’t need this right now. Meredith was just coming around. We were talking again and spending more time together. She still hadn’t remembered anything significant, and I’d lulled myself into the safe idea that she never would. The more time I spent with my wife, the less time I had to spend with Dharma. And that was taking a toll. Dharma was used to getting whatever she demanded.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Dharma.” I kept my hands by my sides.

She slipped two fingers into the waistband of my pants and moved them back and forth, playing with the hair above my dick. “You couldn’t hurt me, Brad,” she said, and a twisted unease invaded me. I was supposed to be at a work happy hour. I was supposed to be ending things with Dharma. I was
supposed
to be starting a new life with my wife. “Unless I asked you to.”

Dharma stroked my dick through the fabric of my pants, and it hardened. She could look at it and make it hard. I’d stuck it in every hole on her body. She begged, she teased, she’d bitten me once. She was like a dirty movie that played for me whenever I turned her on, and Dharma was always on. She reached lower and cupped my balls, and I opened my mouth for more air. I was here to end this.

“Wait here.” She took her hand away, and thoughts of my family registered in my mind. “I bought us something.” Those thoughts were replaced by butt plugs, ball gags, anal beads, and nipple clamps.
Fucking Dharma.
She emerged from her bedroom carrying a tripod with a small camcorder hooked on top of it. “I want us to make a movie.”

My head shook before I could form words. It was unquestionably a bad idea. No pictures. No movies. I wasn’t a fucking idiot. I was older and wiser than her. By about fifteen years.

“No?” She wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t listening. “How about this?” She pointed the camera down toward the couch and pulled me over near it, but out of the line of the lens. “How about . . .” She kissed my neck and unbuttoned my pants. I held on to the tension. No video. No pictures. “I make a video of me, and you just watch?”

Dharma took my nipple between her teeth and bit it as I watched. I winced, and she released it, soothing it with her soft tongue as she caressed the top of my dick.

Just watching can’t hurt.

She pushed my pants down and then backed me up until the back of my legs hit the couch. She forced me down and away from the camera angle before taking off the suit she’d worn to the office. She left on her garter belt and hosiery. She wasn’t wearing panties.

“No underwear today,” she said to me and the camera. “It was a problem. I was wet every time you walked by.” I stayed quiet, but my hand reached for my dick and I stroked it. I lifted it up, freeing my balls, and rubbed them too. Dharma watched. She moaned and inhaled deeply at the sight of me jerking myself off, so I slowed down. She wasn’t the only one who could tease. Her eyes darted to mine. I would pay for that.

She moved slowly. She was a bitch. She played with her clit and stuck her fingers in herself and then pulled them out and put them in her mouth. She sucked them and watched me before turning toward the camera. My dick throbbed in my hand. Dharma grabbed her breasts. She pinched her nipples and then dropped one hand back to her pussy. She moaned with her lips shut, the way she always did before she came.

Fuck it.

I climbed between her legs and fucked her until I came so hard I thought it would come out her mouth.

I dropped my head to her chest, keeping it shielded from the camera.

Dharma ran her hands through my hair and said, “I love you,” and a chill ran down my back.

Things hadn’t gone as I’d planned with Dharma. They hadn’t gone as planned with Meredith either. We’d been home from the shore four days, and every minute I was with her in our house, I watched her. I needed to know if she remembered before she did. I filled the quiet with the memories I wished she’d recall. I used the time after the kids went to bed to talk. To remind her of how much we meant to each other.

“Isn’t this nice?” I asked Meredith and poured her a glass of wine.

“It’s nice . . .” I felt this same hesitation from her a hundred times before. Things weren’t as perfect for Meredith as they were in my mind.

“What?”

“It’s just you don’t always seem like you hear me,” she said taking the glass of wine I held out for her.

“Of course I hear you. I hear every word you say.”

“Sometimes you go on the defensive rather than really listening to what I’m saying.”

“Like when?”

“Like right now.” She kissed me lightly on the lips to soften the blow.

I pulled her close to me. “Okay, Meredith. You have my full attention.”

Meredith studied me. She was considering her next statement too much. “We should sell the house,” she said, and the surprise I knew was on my face was no act. It came out of nowhere.

“What house?”

“This house.”

“You love this house,” I said. How could anyone not? It was beautiful.

“No.
You
love this house. I don’t like it at all. It’s too big. Too sterile. I want something . . . warm.”

I took a deep breath. I wanted her. I wouldn’t lose her, and getting her out of the house might help stifle her memory. But what the fuck? I loved this house.

“Okay. Start looking for a new house.”

Meredith hugged me, and I pulled her close. I rested my chin on her head and wished we could stay in this one moment forever. Without the rest of the world fucking things up. “Thank you. You have no idea how much this means to me,” she said.

I kissed her. She had no idea how much she meant to me.

Chief Vincent Pratt

THE SUIT HANGING ON THE
coat rack in my office was a dark cloud over my day. I’d wear it to the school board meeting tonight to watch Vincent Jr. get his student of the month award, and then I’d have dinner with his mother and my parents. They’d all wonder what was wrong with me, and question why I couldn’t be the same man I was two years ago. My father was going to pull me aside and ask if I wanted to talk about it. He’d tell me how much they loved Lynn and how worried they were.

I listened as Meredith packed up her things. Even if she never spent another day with me, I couldn’t stay with Lynn. It wasn’t fair. Lynn deserved someone who couldn’t be away from her the way being away from Meredith was breaking me. She deserved more than I’d ever given her.

“See you tomorrow, Chief,” Meredith said as she stuck her head in my office. I could only see half her body. One slender leg atop a gray high heel was enough for me to want to attack her. She wore a wrap dress that was perfectly professional, but her body made every piece of clothing seductive. She could be wearing jeans and an oversized sweater, and if she walked by me, I’d become aroused.

“I’m right behind you. See you tomorrow.”

When she turned and walked out, I exhaled a huge sigh.

When is this going to end?

What if it never ends?

I pulled up Google, and for the hundredth time searched amnesia. I had read so much about it I could diagnose and treat it myself. I wanted to climb inside her brain and know what she was thinking. She was always jovial, kind, and professional in the office. She treated me the same way she treated the other officers, and it was agony.

After a half hour of reading the same unhelpful articles, I stood and closed my office door. I changed my pants, but looked at the rest of the suit, which annoyed me for some reason it wasn’t a part of. I pulled the plastic up and over the shoulders of my shirt and jacket. The dress shirt was starched crisp and the dry cleaner had ironed the cuffs to perfection. It was rough against my shoulders. As I struggled with the button on the cuff, my office door opened and Meredith rushed in.