In a way, Mariah Porter was almost to be pitied. After Justin broke it off with her, she began to find herself less in demand as a model, passed over for women even younger and even thinner. She felt as though she could never be young enough or thin enough to compete, and her perfect man no longer wanted her. It had all preyed on her mind and driven her to become a predator.
Only a prison especially designed for metamorph offenders could hold Mariah, with her shocking powers. The scandal would rock and perhaps sink Bio-Shapers, which would be the end of the careers of Owen Coleman and dozens of other people when the word got out and stockholders abandoned them.
But well before that, in less than a day, the word of what happened spread quickly through Ambrosian City during the deliberations and the nominating process, and there was considerable attention on Justin from the media and the rest of the two-bodied elites. Fortunately, as he was no longer the owner of Bio-Shapers, he was liable for nothing. However, there was still the matter of him and Suzanne.
On returning to the Premier after leaving the Chalet, Suzanne did not want to sleep with Justin in the suite to which they’d checked in. Justin understood and put her in the only available single room on the floor immediately below the top floor. As she pulled herself together, he faced her questions.
He explained to her what she had already pieced together about his former ownership of a group of biotechnology firms that he had broken up and sold off in the way of corporate raiders, and how someone in one of those companies, Bio-Shapers, obviously knew Mariah from their past dealings with Justin. And so the cast-off bed partner and the cast-off company came together and created a monster. All of that, Suzanne had essentially figured out.
What Suzanne really wanted to know was why Justin had told her none of this. And he explained to her as best he could that he did not want Suzanne to worry herself about some vindictive female from his past, and that he thought that if Mariah wanted to cause trouble she would come after him and not Suzanne. He explained to her that he had excellent security back in Los Angeles, and that he had Mack watching his back, and that neither of them suspected the full extent of Mariah’s mutations.
He admitted that they had underestimated Mariah and had never guessed that she would strike in Ambrosian City at that time, when it was filled with the wealthiest and most powerful members of the morph community and she would bear the greatest risk. He had underestimated how truly vengeful Mariah was, and how much she would dare, and what his former “lover” had truly become. He conceded that he had failed to anticipate what might happen with Mariah out there, ready and willing to do any awful thing to strike at Justin for turning her out of his life.
Justin’s only defense was that the only thing on his mind that was any importance to him was the way he had begun to feel about Suzanne. With his heart as full as his bed for the first time in his life, he had failed to think about anything else. He took the blame and shouldered the responsibility for everything that Suzanne had been through.
He brought in a doctor to care for her. The doctor found her in a state of mild post-traumatic stress and ordered complete rest for her. They were fortunate that it was only a “mild” case, under the circumstances. Justin let her have the room while he kept the suite, and he let her be with full access to all of the hotel’s amenities and anything else she wanted, and had Mack watch over her, while he attended to the Leaders’ Council and all the questions from the Leaders and the press.
All the while, however, Justin could sense that there was more to Suzanne’s depression than just the ordeal of being abducted by a murderous woman-turned-metamorph. He had the unshakable feeling that it was not just the physical danger and not just the awful experience of having to shoot Mariah to save him and herself that made her pull away from him. There was something else, something more—and something he needed very much to know: for whatever it was, his entire future and Suzanne must depend on getting to the back of it and sorting it all out.
The surest sign of something wrong was a subtle one, an unspoken one. Staying alone in that single room, Suzanne had taken off the “engagement” ring, the rented ring that was the token of their pretend promise of a life together. She’d put it on the nightstand, that ring that was worth tens of thousands of dollars but symbolized a lie. Justin had grown to think of that promise as far more than a pretense now. His heart shriveled at the feat that perhaps she did not.
So it was that after a couple of nights they had slept apart, Justin came to Suzanne to ask her to open up to him. She sat on the bed in the room on the lower floor, and he stood across the room, not putting himself in her space, as much as he ached to be in that bed with her. And he asked her, gently but directly: “Suzanne…what did Mariah say to you when she had you chained up in the Chalet? I need to know. Whatever it was, you can tell me—anything, I mean it. Please just tell me. Let me try to fix it. Please.”
Suzanne shut her eyes and Justin could tell that she was shuddering inside. “Can you please not remind me of that part—the part about being…chained up? I don’t want to think about that. Please.”
“I’m sorry. I won’t bring that up any more. I’m sorry you were ever in that situation, or any of what happened. I’ll say it a thousand times if I have to, Suzanne. I’m sorry and I’ll do anything to make it up to you. I just need to know what she said. What did she say to you that’s making you pull away from me now? If none of that had happened, we’d be together in bed upstairs this minute. We’d be doing things—beautiful, sexy things—to each other. I’d be showing you how much I love you and need you. If Mariah said something that’s keeping us apart, I need to know. Nothing should ever keep us apart, Suzanne.”
She opened her eyes again and the sadness poured out of them, a sadness that Justin thought would kill him. “She didn’t say anything that wasn’t true, Justin,” Suzanne said. “Even before she called out to you who we are to each other, she’d already guessed it. She just didn’t know she had at first.”
“Who we are is two people in love,” Justin said.
“Who we are,” she reminded him, “is a man who hired a woman because he only liked the part of a relationship that happens in bed, and a woman who makes her living that way.”
“That’s how we started out. That’s not who we are. Suzanne, you love me. And I love you. You’re not someone I hired any more. Goddamnit, you were only someone I hired that first night. Every time since then…,” his voice nearly cracked, “I’ve only been paying Ginny because I can’t stand to think of another man getting near you. I want you out of that business. I want you in my bed. Only my bed, as the woman I love, not as someone I hired.”
“Justin, is that all we are?” she asked. “It’s all we’ve ever done. It’s been the best—better than I ever thought I’d have, better than I ever thought anything could be with anyone. But it’s all we’ve done. It’s all you ever really wanted from all the women you’ve ever been with. And except for one boyfriend in school, it’s all I’ve ever had with any man. Justin, I’ve spent years being paid for it, and being paid not to care who the guy was or to ignore it or look the other way for it or have a reason for it not to matter—what he looks like, what kind of body he has, whether he’s married or has a family or a girlfriend. But…is that really all we are?”
“You know better than to even ask that,” said Justin. “Tell me this. How do you really feel when we get naked and get into bed together? How do you feel when we touch each other and go down on each other? And when I slip my cock into you? My God, when I fuck you—I know how it is for me. I want it to go on forever. I’ve never had it feel with anyone the way it feels when I fuck you. If I lost that…I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t know what would happen to me. And I don’t want to find out. How is it for you, Suzanne? Tell me.”
In the face of that question, Suzanne’s words utterly failed her. There were nothing but tears. For Justin the tears were as good as words.
He said, “Right now I think I would kill or die, I’d go through a thousand Mariahs, to be in that bed with you. I don’t just want to fuck any more. I want you, Suzanne. You. Only you.
Look at me. This is how a man looks when he knows you belong to him and nobody else. The thought of any other man, my kind or yours or anyone, touching you makes me want to rip him to pieces. You are mine, goddamnit!” He pointed to the ring on the nightstand. “If I have to make that a real engagement ring and get you in front of a preacher, I’ll do it. With you, it’s real. It’s love and it’s real.”
Justin studied her reaction to that and found her just sitting like a statue and staring numbly at him. A statue, that was the way she looked. Suzanne at that moment was frozen before him like a work of art, the loveliest, rarest, most precious work of art he had ever seen. How could he reach the warmth, the passion, that he knew lay behind that numb facade? He slumped his shoulders, despairing of the idea that after a life of the most spectacular success in the world, he could actually fail at the one most important thing, the thing that meant more than any transaction, any deal, any acquisition.
“I don’t want to be who I’ve been any more, that guy who just fucks around from woman to woman. I’m asking you if we can be something, you and me,” he said. “I’m asking you if you can let us be something. Think it over.” Again he studied her, waiting for some reaction, any reaction. Again she sat still and silent and numb. Justin’s heart crumbled. He had to get out of there now before his own tears came. After all of this, he could not stand to let her see his tears of defeat, tears such as he had never shed in all his life. He turned to leave.
“There’s still time,” he said, his back to her, on his way to the door. “Think about it.”
His hand was on the door handle and his heart was turning to dust when he heard her voice, clear but halting and faltering, behind him: “Justin…wait.”
Still touching the door handle, he looked over his shoulder and saw her approaching him, slowly at first. But when he turned all the way around, she broke into a run.
Suzanne hit him like a speeding car. He fell back against the door and his legs buckled just a little, but he flung his arms around her and gathered her up in an embrace that was as much a “bear” hug as if he were in his other body. The kiss was a kiss for the ages. It went on for long, aching minutes; a kiss of the deepest need in all the world.
With don’t let me go in her eyes, Suzanne thrilled him beyond any words by taking her arms from around him and going right for his belt buckle and his zipper. At once she had his trousers open and took hold of the mighty, throbbing trunk they contained. Justin’s heart came back to life and wept for joy. Sucking at her lips, he answered her gesture by slipping his hands under the hem of her dress, pulling down her panties, and feeling at the already slippery-wet curtains of flesh between her thighs. He kissed her again, deeper, slipping his fingers where he wanted to put the huge and straining hardness that she was fondling.
The clothes flew everywhere, across the room, from door to bed, until Suzanne lay under Justin on the bed, her legs encircling his waist, and he mounted her on all-fours, fucking and pounding her as hard as he’d done that first night, bringing back all the passion and desire they had ever felt, banging and hammering away all the desperation and uncertainty through which they’d just come. With every thundering stroke of his immense and livid cock inside Suzanne’s quivering, tightening wetness, Justin banished all the fear and uncertainty from their lives forever.
“I love you,” he grunted like a beast. “I! Love! You!” He matched every word with a hard beat of his dick. Suzanne moaned, almost weeping again, under him, feeling the meaning and returning the feeling.
Feeling his climax about to hit him, Justin came up on his knees, still pounding his hardened flesh into her, and thumbed her clit, bringing her along with him. The shared orgasm felt as if it would tear them both asunder. The torrent of cream that poured from his monster cock into her womb was like the pouring of his soul into hers. They collapsed together in a wet, hot fusion of bodies and selves. With the rejoining of their bodies, Justin and Suzanne felt their love sealed forever.
They lay curled up and entwined together for an unguessable time. Kissing her tenderly, Justin said, “There’s no other man in the world now, Suzanne. No other man’s body, no other man’s dick. Not for you. Not ever. And no other woman for me. Ever.”
“I know,” she said, kissing him back. After a little silence, she said, “I think Ginny is going to be upset with us.”
“Because you’re quitting,” he said.
“Because I’m quitting. Because she’s going to have to find another ‘best girl.’ There’ll have to be a new Telegirl in the stable now. Ginny will be upset. She’ll be happy for us, but she’ll be upset.”
“She’ll get over it,” Justin said. “It’s business. She understands it’s business. And you’re under exclusive contract now.” He kissed her long and hard.
Suzanne let him roll her onto her back and put himself half on top of her, playing with her breasts. “If it’s not going to be a cash business any more,” she said, “we’ll have to work out new terms.” She gave him a seductive little smile.
“Terms?” he replied wickedly. “I’ll give you terms. You’re getting it three times a night and twice every morning, minimum.”
“Only three?” She arched her eyebrows naughtily.
“Minimum,” he repeated. “Negotiable, option for more. And no goddamn quickies.”
“Sounds like we’re ready to close a deal,” she said.
He slid his hand between her thighs, which were sticky from what he had done once to her tonight and would do many more times yet. “Open your gorgeous legs and we’ll close the deal all night long.”
Suzanne spread her thighs and Justin climbed fully onto her again. And she slipped into pure bliss as the bear entered her cave once more.