S HIS COCK filled my mouth and I let him in to stretch my throat, the sense of him, the thought that we could be together lit me inside. A warm, dizzying rush came over me. Light and tender, his fingers ran through my hair and they trembled as he held himself back.
Pressing down, pushing myself farther, and taking more of the impossible width of his throbbing pole over the back of my tongue and past the roof of my mouth, my need for him grew even greater.
What we had been through, the way he had protected me and cared for me, the way we operated together, moved and worked as a team, it was more than the experience and instinct of two people in combat.
Our coming from different sides of the street, our opposite approaches, the way we saw everything from the two facing shores, it made us something more than one agent and one professional muscle.
What muscle, though. My fingers shook as I trickled them over the contours of his rolling stomach muscles. While my soft, wet throat stretched to take in more of his hard, tangy, hot pole, my heart banged at the pulses and waves in his huge body. The man was unlike any I had ever known.
Even as I sucked on him, I was torn, wanting him deep inside my soaking pussy and at the same time, desperately needing to drain him dry, to gobble and swallow every salty drop of his seed.
I pressed farther. My nose nuzzled at his stomach. The scent of him made me draw breath so hard, it made a moan in my chest. The taste of him was dark, rich and bad, in the best possible way. When I pulled my lips back up the length to nibble and suckle on the head of his cock, he groaned and the cords of muscle in his pelvis clenched and flexed.
“Vesper,” It was hard to hear him and his voice was just a groan. I’m a good listener, though. “You’re so fucking beautiful.” His mass swelled against the tightening walls of my neck. “I can’t stand the thought of losing you.”
Shaking my head was all that I could do. I wanted to tell him, Don’t! Don’t do it. Don’t lose me. As I dove harder onto his cock, I was saying the words. But it could only have been vibrations in my neck and the flutter of my tongue on the top of his shaft. Still, I was saying it. Don’t let go. Keep hold.
I love you.
My old habits held on hard. As I said the words, in my core it felt good to say them, but all the better that I knew he couldn’t hear me.
His fingers gripped in my hair and yanked. Upwards. He dragged my face, dripping, smeared wet, up to his, “You what?” His eyes blazed. “You say that, after you fucking sent me to jail.” His face glowed with anger. And pain. There was a twist of anguish . He shook me.
“You sent me to jail. Why, because you love me? To keep me somewhere you knew I would be, was that it? What kind of a perverse game are you playing, you treacherous little fuck?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t send you to jail.” My eyes filled with tears. I couldn’t stop them. My head shook. His fingers tightened in my hair as he got angrier. “I kept you out of jail.”
His face reddened. “No. Now you’ve gone too fucking far.” His fingers clenched, pulling my hair tight and his hands shook. “I know you law enforcers see black as white but that’s just fucking insane.”
I had to tell him now. It could be the end of my career. Then end of my life as I knew it. But he had to know.
“Look,”
“No, you fucking listen to me,” he was raging, “After all we’ve been through, and after all you’ve put me through, I’ve had it with your bullshit. I thought we could have a farewell fuck, get lost for a few minutes and move on. I’d let what you did to me go and we’d both move on. But you, with your deranged fucking fantasy…”
“STOP!” I slapped him. Right across the face. He didn’t deserve it, but it felt good. Frighteningly good.
“Listen to me, alright.”
He was starting to move, “I’m done listening to you.”
“Not yet.” I was still. I wanted to slap him again, but I was worried where that would lead. I might not want to stop. The fire in his eyes caught me and set me alight in my pants.
“Listen. The reason you didn’t go down for two murders,” I was going to tell him. I shouldn’t I mustn’t. But I had to. He had to know. “You got a plea bargain from the DA because the forensic evidence got contaminated.”
“Yeah…” he was still angry. But he was listening now.
“The gun barrel, your gun barrel, the barrel that gave the conclusive ballistic link to the two killings, got mislabelled. Somewhere. Somehow. In between the ballistic lab and the evidence locker, that barrel and another got switched.”
He was quiet.
“It got corrected, the mistake was fixed, but the fact that there was a doubt about the security of the evidence meant the DA’s case was weak.”
He was taking it in.
I said, “That’s why he offered you a deal.”
I saw the understanding dawn in his face.
“If you’d consented to one visit, if you’d agreed to see me, I could have told you not to take the deal. To bargain harder. I don’t know if he would have abandoned the case against you completely, but he would have either had to go with a much lower sentence, or risk going to court and losing.”
“He could have taken the gamble.” His voice was sullen.
“It was an election year, Horse. He may have taken the chance, but he had a lot of reasons not to.”
His head went back and the flame danced in his eyes again. “So, Special Agent Vesper Cross, you’re saying that I could maybe have saved myself, if only I’d agreed to see you. That you were my guardian angel. Even though you were the one who arrested me.”
I waited. He had a lot to process and he was angry. Understandably. I made my voice quiet. But it was hard. All I wanted to do was shake him. Hold him. Make him understand. Right then I knew. If I didn’t know it before, I knew it then. This man of fire was everything I wanted. Everything I shouldn’t have, everything I should keep a mile away from, but I needed him so bad.
“No. I could have dropped you the hint, and I would have tried. I thought hard about it at the time. It would have been hard.”
“But I could have gotten a better deal.”
It wasn’t an easy thing for him to hear, and a part of me wanted to just let it go, to leave him not knowing. But I couldn’t stand him thinking I’d been responsible for him going away. Not now. Not any more.
“You could.”
“And,” he was calmer now, “how did that chain of evidence get broken?”
I could hardly get my voice above a whisper. “Someone broke it.”
“Deliberately?”
I nodded. Just once.
“How can you be sure? How do you know that?”
I pulled his face toward me. “How do you fucking think, you dumbass mountain critter? How could I possibly have known that for certain?”
“You…?”
“The precinct evidence locker was manned by a Sergeant… No, I won’t say his name. I’m not going to implicate anyone else. A sergeant in the evidence locker had made a mistake in some evidence they were holding as part of an FBI investigation. It happens. Somebody,” I looked up at him, “Somebody promised the sergeant that it could be fixed, in exchange for him letting m… somebody… take out two gun barrels. Without signing for them. Just for half an hour. I… somebody told him they would just take pictures. Take some measurements.”
“Somebody.”
I nodded.
“When the mix-up with the labels was found out, the sergeant knew that he could explain it, but he would have to admit to his own error, and to letting … somebody take the two barrels out of the locker.” I looked in his eyes. “That was too much of a risk for the old sergeant. Anyway, for him, the mix-up wasn’t that big of a problem.”
“But it would be for the DA?”
“Honestly? When you wouldn’t see me, I tried to think of a way of communicating it to you, but I couldn’t. Not without giving myself away.”
His chin lifted, “And you couldn’t risk that.” There was some of Horse’s familiar sly, smug grin. I really did slap him then. And I had been right. It really did feel way too good.
“Yes, you dope. Because that would have meant him seeing that a deliberate and provable attempt had been made to contaminate the evidence against you. What kind of a deal do you think you would have gotten then?”
I still had a hold of his cock, “if you’re still thinking of a farewell fuck,” I was angered now, “then as far as I’m concerned, we did it. It’s done.”
“What?”
I was near enough to smell the dark sweet spice of his breath. “I put myself out over the line for you, Horse.”
“That’s great. But why didn’t you just stand up and say, ‘I know he’s innocent’?”
“With what, Horse? There was evidence against you, and none in your favor. Your story was, while the Bonaventura twins were being shot to death with your gun, you were dozing in a freezer.”
He was going to speak but then he stopped himself and he hesitated. Then he said, “But you saw the guy who did it. He must have run right past you.”
“If he had, Horse, I’d have stopped him. I heard something but I couldn’t ever be certain what it was. Not for absolute certain until just now, when Paul Butler admitted that the kid who did it had been dropped in the Hudson.”
“But you knew, right, you knew that I was innocent. You did, right?”
“I believed it, Horse. I had a strong instinct about you.”
“You believed in me.”
“You could say that.”
“And you risked your position, your career, everything on that?”
“Since you put it that way, I did. Yes.”
“Then you’re right,” he rose beneath me. “A farewell fuck is out of the question.”
He kissed me. The world span inside me. Light, air, wind and currents all spun up and around as he held me. And we kissed. So close. With warmth and tenderness. And a rising urgency.
He pulled back. His eyes were down. “We can’t have a farewell fuck.” He reached for my pants. “Not now.” He hauled my belt open and began to work my pants off. “Not now. Not ever.”