Trading Down (Winner Takes All, #1) (4 page)

She put a hand on his, where it lay on his thigh, and said, “Honey, tonight’s no kind of a night for two warm bodies to be sleeping in separate rooms.”

§

Undressing before him was suddenly a different thing, a self-conscious thing. He’d ripped her clothes off, he’d buried himself in her, buried his face in her. But now, tugging free the long flannelette shirt she’d pulled on, and watching him watching as she undid each button, it was something new. Like a first time.

And that reminded her of his unguarded comments about all the firsts, and the moment was broken. She snatched at the remaining buttons, tugging them free, and then the shirt was on the floor and she was all too aware of the chill in the air.

He was stripped to his waist now, loosening his belt.

Such a good body. He must be a sportsman, an athlete. You don’t get a body like that through good breeding alone.

As he shucked his pants, she removed her skirt and started to roll one hold-up down her leg.

When he pulled his shorts down his long dick sprang free, semi-hard, belying any hint of the gentleman about him.

“I...” He looked down, away, awkward.

She slid the second hold-up down and kicked it free, then slipped out of her thong and rushed under the bedspread.

He got the light and then climbed in, leaving space between them.

How had it ended up like this? Such a horny, intense evening...

A fold of bedding separated them.

“Get you anything?” she asked.

Silence. For a moment she thought he was sleeping again, but then as her sight adjusted to the dark she saw the glint of his eyes as he watched her.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I am. It’s just... I’m out of my depth. I don’t know where to turn next. Can’t keep running for ever.”

“There really some guys after you?”

“Yeah. Bad debts with the kind of people you don’t want to be owing money. Things have been a bit up and down lately.”

“That roll of hundreds? Couldn’t you pay them off with that?”

“Down payment only,” he laughed. “Pound of flesh costs much more these days.”

She reached out, fingers sliding under the bedding and finding flesh, the flat of his belly as he lay on his side, facing her.

Stroking his abs with the back of her knuckles, savoring the feel of hard muscles, the rasp of belly hair, the way it thickened as she stroked downwards... the way sometimes when she let her stroke linger she came up against the hardening base of his dick.

“There’s a way,” she said, as she took him in her hand and felt that hardness increase. “There’s always a way.”

Tugging at him, feeling the skin glide over that hardness, she started to work his shaft in long, slow strokes, switching her grip so that his length was up against his belly now.

“You think?” he said, and then fell silent as on the next upward stroke she slid her thumb across the wet head of his dick.

He rolled onto his back, and she pushed the covers down with her feet, relishing the sudden bite of cool air, and the new freedom of movement.

She took her hand away, spat on the palm and then put it back, flat of her hand against his shaft, stroking lightly along its length.

If this was a first, his one night with a cheap waitress, then it was going to be one Hell of a memorable first.

She curled her fingers around him and kept stroking, the lubrication coming from a mix of her spit and his juices now.

She licked her fingers now, and then pushed lower, cupping his balls, pushing back behind them, fingernails scraping at that tender skin, finding the parting of his ass, the dark opening. Gliding her middle fingertip around that puckered hole, she teased him, and then she found the centre, pressed, felt that sudden
give
as he opened up to her and her finger slid home.

Knuckle-deep, she crooked that finger just a little, seeking out the sensitive spot where she could press on his prostate, knowing she’d found it when his body jerked, he grunted softly, and his balls retracted against the flat of her wrist.

Pulling back until she was almost free of him, she started to thrust her finger, hitting that spot again and again.

Another first for him?

She didn’t know. Didn’t care any more. It was all about what she was doing, about his responses, about the effect his responses had on her as that heat sparked in her belly once more.

She needed more than this. She needed him inside her again.

She slipped her finger free, and he groaned, and then she was on him, straddling him, the length of his shaft against the parting of her labia, his balls against her ass.

His hands found her breasts as she hung over him. He started to squeeze and knead, finding her nipples and pinching so hard she gasped and wanted to stop him but didn’t, couldn’t, it was too delicious a pain.

Swiveling and rolling her hips, she drew herself along his length, taking a sharp intake of breath as she hit that bulbous end and it slid against her clit, and then she was sliding down again, down to the base of his shaft, her labia enfolding him just as her mouth had earlier.

She had wanted him inside her again... she’d needed so much to be filled. But then the moment took over and she was sliding faster against him, as urgent and needy as he had been before.

She lowered her head and kissed him, driving her tongue deep and that was all it took to tip her over the edge. Almost immediately, her body tensed, her belly, her pussy, taken over by that abrupt tension, and she pushed down hard on him, throbbing hard as another orgasm took her. Then, as she pushed down against him, she felt a surging sensation in his shaft, a pulsing, a big thrust of his entire body, and then hot juices filled the space between them, pumping again and again until he was spent.

W
hen she woke up, sun was angling in through the blinds, the storm was gone and so, too, was Denny McGowan.

She sat up, and surveyed the room.

Her clothes were on the floor where she’d left them, but his were gone. The small towel she’d used to clean his juices from her body last night was still screwed up in the corner where she’d tossed it away. Everything else was in its place. She looked at the little table by the bed, half-expecting to see one of those hundred-dollar bills there, but there was not.

She checked the time. It was past ten, and she should be up in Bangor by now, laying in supplies for Pappy’s. She never over-slept, but then, last night she had not gotten much sleep. She listened for sounds of the kettle coming to the boil, a clanking of cups, but no. Nothing.

She showered, threw on some jeans and a sweater and a big warm coat and headed outside.

No sign of him. He really had just walked on out of here, just as he’d walked into her life last night.

§

When she had climbed into the little Nissan and eventually fired the ignition, she half-expected to pass him on the track down to the highway, or on the highway itself.

But no. There was no sign of him. The place was deserted save for a couple of logging trucks on the highway.

She came to Pappy’s Lobster Bar and almost drove on past, but she really should call in to check on supplies given how distracted she’d been last night.

There was a moment before she saw anything out of place when she started to sense that something was wrong. A moment when maybe she should have thought back to some of the things Denny had said last night, back to her first impressions that he was Trouble and she shouldn’t have anything to do with him. Then she stepped up to the entrance, looked down, and it was too late to go back.

The glass in the lower half of the front door was broken as if it had been kicked in, shards of glass lying just inside.

A break-in.

She should go out back, down to Lou’s trailer. That’s what she should do. Go for help; make sure that Lou himself was at least okay, then let
him
deal with it.

Not tug tentatively at the door and then step inside, avoiding the worst of the broken glass, and step right into the middle of–

§

The tall, broad-set dude in jeans and a leather jacket and with what looked like a Glock handgun trained steadily on her chest was the first one she saw.

“Hey,” he said with an Italian accent. “We got company. Hey, Al, we got company, an’ she sure is a pretty one.”

Second dude was shorter, even broader but it was still all muscle. He had a balding head and intense, staring eyes, and a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.

“Can’t you read the signs?” said Cassie. “No smoking. Will you just put it out?”

“And she’s funny, too,” said the big guy. “You want I should ask her some questions?”

Shorter guy – Al – was still staring at her. “She fits the description,” he said, almost to himself. Then, to Cassie, he said, “You the one? Your name Cassandra? You find yourself a bit of fresh Boston Irish last night, did you, huh?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Cassie. “And you’re still smoking that thing.”

Al reached for his cigarette with a flourish, took one last deep draw on it, then tossed it to the floor and ground it out with his heel. “That better?” he said, and she wasn’t at all sure that it was, the way he looked, the way his eyes wandered slowly over her body.

“You mind we ask you a few questions?” he said.

“Ask away, but I don’t have long.”

“Dennis McGowan. You know the guy? About so high, dark hair, puts on a stupid Irish accent and has a thing for low-life trash with the hooker look. You know the guy I mean?”

She shrugged. She wasn’t going to let his words get to her; there was plenty else already to be scaring the bejeezus out of her, after all.

Al was about her height when he came to stand up close. When he put his hand to the side of her face like a lover would. When he ran the backs of his knuckles down her jaw, her neck and then across the swell of her breasts, which were not protected well enough under that old, baggy sweatshirt.

“You do that one more time and I’ll have your balls on a plate, you hear?”

Her voice was low and even. She might have been reading a football report out loud for Lou while he cooked. It was a normal, everyday kind of a voice to be threatening some armed hoodlum’s manhood with.

“She has fight,” said Al, turning towards his big buddy. “I like that in a broad. I like it when it takes a two of us to hold her down, to beat that fight out of her before we get what we want. You understand that, Miss Cassandra Dane? Or you want to do this the hard way?”

She bit down on her lower lip. Her mouth had gotten her into trouble long before now.

“Good, good. Now, Denny McGowan. He still back up at your place? That was going to be our next port of call in any case. You see we’ve done our homework. We know all about you two cozying up last night and let me tell you one thing, a piece of friendly advice: Denny McGowan is not the kind of guy you want in your life, you hear?”

§

“And tell me, why would that be?”

They turned, Al and Cassie, as one.

Where a moment before, the big dude had been standing to one side, watching them with his gun held steady on Cassie, now he had Denny McGowan behind him, an arm so tight around his neck that his head was twisted backwards and sideways, and the hand that held his gun was trapped in the vise-like grip Cassie knew only too well from the night before.

And then, in a single flowing movement, Denny did something with a knee or a foot that made the big man’s legs buckle, and he went down on the floor, apparently unconscious – what had Denny done to him? Clearly more than just a foot to the back of the knee – leaving Denny standing back with the big guy’s gun, now trained on Al.

“I do hope you weren’t giving my friend here some bad advice, now, were you?”

Al ignored the question. Instead, he said, “Don’t be an asshole, McGowan. You can’t run forever.”

“Maybe I don’t want to run forever. Maybe I’m just picking and choosing where I turn and fight.”

“You want to dig yourself a lonely and a deep one, just go ahead. But don’t waste me and my buddy. We’re just part of a bigger picture, Denny. All you’d get would be two bodies to dispose of and the cops on your tail, too. Now where’s the sense in that?”

“More sense than we let you go. You want to tell Cassie what you’re planning to do to the owner of this place and his good wife once we’ve gone?”

“The thought had never crossed my mind.”

“You’re not going to get the chance, anyway, because once we’ve got you tied up in here we’re going to get everyone well clear and the owner is going to call the cops about the break-in, and the next people you see will be dressed in blue.”

§

She didn’t know how to tie knots tight enough, but they were enough to hold Al and his big buddy in place while she and Denny swapped over and he re-did them.

Outside, Cassie went down to warn Lou and Marie, and make sure they set off safely into town in their SUV, while Denny gunned the engine of the two hoodlums’ Lexus.

And so, she came to stand there in the parking lot by her little Nissan, while he sat in the driver’s seat of the Lexus, turned to face her.

“So are you going to hop in, then?” he said.

That would be a fool stupid thing to do.

“And go where?”

“Out of here. Wherever the road takes us. I don’t know. I don’t really care, right now, but I know I didn’t come back here just to save your sweet ass and then leave you again.”

“Are you trouble? I mean aside from all this. Are you
real
trouble?”

He shrugged. “Some would say it’s my middle name, but I think that’s a wee bit harsh.”

“Am I better off without you?”

“You very probably are.”

And then he smiled. It was a smile that gave away that he knew just how much of a game this was, that minds had been made up long before now. It was a smile that said
What the Hell?
and one that just that cracked his face and put a sparkle in his eyes.

It was a smile that said,
Yeah, so your life has been one long run of bad luck and worse choices, so why should things be any different now?