Evan Arden 03 Otherwise Unharmed (13 page)

“Dallas,” she said.  “My father worked for AT&T when I was young.  When my parents divorced, he and my mom split custody while I was growing up.  When mom got an offer for a new job in Phoenix, Dad didn’t want to be that far from me, so he quit his job and moved to Arizona as well.  He started working with the Navajo Nation to set up their computer networks.”

“What does your mom do?” I asked.

“She’s in the financial business.”  Lia took another bite of pizza, chewed for a bit, and then put the slice back in the box.  “I know she works in information security, but I honestly don’t quite understand it all.  She keeps hackers out of their systems, basically.”

I snorted.

“Is that funny?”

I shook my head.

“I just don’t think it’s very successful,” I said.  “There are a lot of people out there who are very good at getting past the security folks.”

“I’m sure that’s true, but she tries.
  It’s pretty good money, at least, so she could afford to set aside money to send me to school.  I still haven’t managed to get a degree anywhere, of course, because that was about the time Dad died.”

“How did he die?”

“Cancer,” she said with a shrug.  “It fucking sucked.”

I watched her closely, noticing her fingers twitch and her eyes blink rapidly a few times to hold back the moisture forming in them.

“You were with him,” I said.

“I had just finished high school when he was diagnosed.  They said he had
maybe a year, but he didn’t make it past eight months even with all the chemo and shit.  I took care of him because there really wasn’t anyone else, and William did all the business stuff while he was sick so we could afford medical bills.”

“So your
fiancé worked for your dad?”

“Yes, for about six years.”

“While you were in high school.”

“We started dating when I was fifteen.”

“How old was he?”

She
blushed a little, and my suspicions about him being quite a bit older were confirmed before she answered.

“He was twenty four at the time.”

“Around here, we would’ve called you jail bait,” I said.

“Only if the parents pressed charges,” she said, and I knew she was right.  If the parents were okay with it,
well, at least one parent, then the law would turn a blind eye.

“What did your mom think?”

“She didn’t like it,” Lia said.  “She didn’t like Will, anyway, and definitely didn’t like me being with him.”

“Just because of the age thing or something else?”

“I think just age initially, but I also think she realized, long before I did, that he wasn’t quite what he pretended to be.”

“
You mean before he threw you out of a moving car and left you for dead?”

Lia glanced at me with dark eyes and then looked down at her hands.

“Something like that.”

“Have you seen him since then?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

She looked back up at and me and bit her lip for a moment.

“He was there at my mom’s house.”

“After I dropped you at the bus station?”

Lia nodded.

“What happened?”

“
The usual,” she responded.  She seemed to want to leave it at that, but I wouldn’t let her.  Eventually she told me the rest.  “He was drunk; Mom was yelling, and I was stuck between them.  The major difference was that I had decided I wasn’t going to do it anymore.”

“Do what?”

“Put up with him and his crap!” she growled.  “He could have really hurt me when he pushed me out of that car, and then he just left me there!  I wasn’t going to listen to him go on about how he came right back and was so sorry and spent hours looking for me—it was bullshit, and I wasn’t going to listen to it!”

She took a deep breath before she went on.

“I told him I’d found someone else.”  Lia glanced at me, seeming embarrassed for a moment.  “I know we didn’t really…well, it’s not like we committed to each other or anything, but for the first time since high school, I realized there were other options out there besides Will and how he treated me.”

She looked up at me, and her eyes began to sparkle with tears.

“It’s all right,” I soothed.  “Go on.”

“He didn’t like that answer,” she said with a shrug.  “He started yelling, and Mom told him he needed to just leave.  She came up near us, and he pushed her away.  Then h
e grabbed my arm and squeezed really hard–”

L
ia’s breath caught in her throat, and the tears that had been building up since I stopped her at the door finally cascaded down her cheeks.  Dealing with crying chicks was definitely not something within my repertoire, so I went with the only thing I could think of—I grabbed the box of tissues from the bathroom and handed them to her.

Lia wiped her eyes and gripped
her fingers around the crumpled tissue as she composed herself.

“
I had bruises there for over a week afterwards.  Mom started yelling—said she was going to call the police—and that made him let go.  I told him we were through and that I never wanted to see him again.”

“What did he do?”

“He laughed.  He said I was his, and nothing was going to change that.”

A tickle in the back of my head
—one that was rarely wrong—told me that I was going to kill that motherfucker someday.

“He still wasn’t leaving, so Mom ran inside the house and came back out with the phone in her hand.  When he realized that she really was calling the cops, he got in the car and left.  That was the last I saw him.”

I tried to clear my head enough to listen to the rest of the story, but it wasn’t easy.  I didn’t know what the asshole looked like, but I had enough of a vision in my head that I could see myself with the business end of my Beretta in his face.  At some point, I was going to have to find a picture of the guy and make all that come true.

Lia continued.

“Mom immediately started quizzing me about the ‘new guy’ and if that meant I really was done with William for good.”

I sat still, wondering just what she might have told her mother about me
, not that Lia knew much at that time—even less than she did now—but it still left me feeling a little uneasy.  I wondered if any other girl had ever described me to her mother.

“What did you tell her?” I asked.

“Not much.”  Lia shrugged one shoulder.  “I mean, I didn’t know much, did I?  I said you were retired from the military, and we had just met by accident.  Once she found out what the ‘accident’ was, it kind of distracted her from the original conversation.  We never really talked about you again until I was leaving.”

Her eyes found mine.

“She told me to be careful,” Lia said.  “She told me that I didn’t really know much about you and that you might not even be who I think you are.”

“What did you say?”

“I told her I would be careful and not to worry.  I didn’t know much about you, but I was sure you weren’t like William.  We both considered that a step up, so that was it.”

Lia stared down at her hands as tears started spilling of
f her eyelashes again.

“And then…and then…” Lia sniffed and wiped at her nose with the tissue again.  “Then I found that cabin and your note, and I just…I didn’t know what to do or what to think.”

Without knowing what else I could do, I reached out and took her hand again.  Lia’s fingers gripped mine, and she leaned against my shoulder.  With one arm around her, I pulled her against my chest and rubbed up and down the top part of her arm while she cried.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered against her hair when she stopped sobbing.  “I didn’t want to leave like that.  I didn’t have a choice.”

“Where did you go?” she asked.

“Back here,” I said.  “My boss told me I had to come back.”

“Your boss?”

Shit.

I wasn’t ready for this yet.  I needed to wait until morning.  It was selfish and probably shitty, but I wanted inside of her one last time before she knew the truth.  There was no telling how she would react, but she seemed like a normal, rational person.  The likelihood of her telling me to stay the fuck out of her life was pretty high.

“Where do you work?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She shoved against my chest and glared at me.

“Who is your boss?” she demanded.

“I thought we were savin
g my life story for the morning.”  I tried to make light of it all and failed.

More glaring.

I sighed.

“His name is Rinaldo Moretti,” I said.  “He’s a pretty demanding guy, and that’s all I’m saying for now.”

Lia kept her narrowed eyes locked with mine for a minute, but I didn’t falter.  Her shoulders rose and fell with the breath she huffed out as she stood up from the bed and tossed the last couple pieces of pizza into the tiny refrigerator in the corner.

“Fine,” she said, “but I want to know tomorrow.”

“I’ll tell you,” I promised.  “I just need a little time to…to
prepare
, I guess.”

She walked back and stood in front of me.  I reached up and placed my hands on her hips as she leaned forward and
placed her lips to mine.  She started with just a quick, closed mouth kiss, but I grabbed the back of her head and deepened it.

Nothing was going to stop me from having one last night with her.

The cool breeze from the ceiling fan chilled my back, which was coated in sweat
after our second session of hard fucking that night.  I swallowed and tried to regain my composure as Lia’s fingernails dug into my shoulders.  As she panted and her body shuddered a final time, her grip relaxed and she brought her arms up over her head, grasping the pillow above her.

“That was incredible,” she said.

I smiled a cocky half-smile and rotated my hips against her again.  I couldn’t move much, or I was going to slip out of her, so I just rocked my hips a little instead of actually thrusting.  I wrapped my arms underneath her shoulders and held her chest to mine as I ran my lips and tongue up her throat.

“Do you have any plans to actually sleep? Lia asked.

Bending my elbows, I slid my hands down her sides and then up her arms until my fingers could grip her wrists.  I pushed them against the pillow as I pressed her firmly to the bed with the rest of my body.

“I was thinking I’d just hold you down here until I got hard again.”

“Such a romantic!” Lia snickered.

She was joking, and even though that was clear, there was something else in her eyes as they tightened just a little as she glanced to the side.  She wasn’t pissed off by the comment, but didn’t all chicks want some level of romance? 
I had no idea how to play the role of an actual boyfriend.  Was I supposed to buy some fucking flowers now?

Where was Nick when I needed him?

I loosened my grip around her wrists and dragged my fingers down the length of her arm until I reached her shoulder.  I circled a spot on her skin there before leaning in to press my lips to it.  I held them there for a long moment and then rolled off of her and stared up at the ceiling.

Lia angled herself to one side and looked at me. 
Her hand rested on my upper arm for a moment before she traced the outlines of muscles from my bicep down to my wrist.  Maybe she needed romance, and maybe she didn’t, but I felt like she deserved something from me—something genuine.  There were questions in her eyes, and I responded before she could ask them.

“You gave me my sanity back,” I said quietly.  “Your presence, your words, your touch, and your body
—they brought me back from someplace I don’t ever want to be again.  The way I feel when I’m with you—like I could spend the rest of my life just looking in your eyes—it scares the shit out of me.  It’s more terrifying than that place I was inside my head.  The best way I can come up with to cope with that is being inside of you, because when I’m there, everything is right.  It’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

Why all of that made her smile and brought tears to her eyes at the same time, I didn’t understand.
  She seemed more happy about what I had said than not, at least.  Maybe I didn’t need to understand it—I mean, I wanted to figure her out, but what guy really knows what’s going on in a woman’s head?

“I’m glad I showed up when I did,” she finally said.

“Yeah, you wouldn’t have wanted to miss that scene.”  I snorted a laugh.

“Not because of that, obviously.”
  Lia turned to her side and propped her head up with her hand.  “I’m glad I was there in time to know what happened to you, so I could help.  If I had showed up a day later…well, who knows how long it might have taken me to figure out where you were?”

I couldn’t help but wonder how everything might be different if she had arrived the day before.  Maybe I wouldn’t have killed Bridgett and gone off the deep end at all
, except that I still would have found out about her betrayal eventually.  What would I have done then?

Probably the same.

It was all the more reason for me to get Lia out of my life, but I couldn’t bring myself to think along those lines.  I was going to tell her everything, and whatever happened after that, happened.  Maybe she would accept it, and maybe she wouldn’t, but I was going to do whatever I possibly could to keep her.

“What are you thinking about?” Lia asked.

I pulled myself out of my head and smiled up at her.

“I’m just glad you were there, too.  I think Mark’s comment about dying from lack of sleep is total bullshit, but I definitely prefer being able to get a little shut
-eye every once in a while.”

She looked at me for a minute and then leaned down to press her lips against mine.  I reciprocated, reaching up to the back of her head and holding her closer so I could get my tongue in her mouth.  A couple minutes of
kissing, and I was ready for round three.

My hands moved over her body, gripped her tits,
then continued down her stomach and to her hips.  My mouth followed, and Lia’s fingers traced the outline of the muscles in my shoulder and back as I licked around her navel.

I pushed her legs apart a bit,
then teased over her outer labia until she was wriggling under me.  With a little more pressure, I cupped her pussy and my thumb circled her clit.  Lia let out a groan, and I moved two fingers inside of her, which made her jump a bit.  When I glanced up at her, the look on her face wasn’t one of pleasure, though, so I stopped.

“You okay?”

“I’m just a little sore,” Lia said with a blush.  Her teeth went after her bottom lip again, so I reached up and pulled it away.

“I can stop.”  I didn’t want to, but obviously I would.  “Take a break for a while.”

“No, don’t stop.  It’s okay.”

Some odd version of a gentleman inside me told me to stop anyway because she was just being nice and giving in
to what she knew I wanted.  The selfish, horny bastard inside of me had a lot more influence over my mouth, though.

“Want me to go slow?”

“Do you know how to do it that way?”  Her beautiful smile teased me.

I didn’t answer.  I just rolled over on top of her, holding my weight up off her skin with my legs out by her sides and one hand pressed against the mattress near her shoulder. 
With my free hand, I traced the backs of my fingers from her shoulder down to her wrist.  I leaned down and kissed the spot right above her heart, trailed more light touches with my lips up to her neck, and then whispered against her ear.

“I will always give it to you exactly how you need it.”

With my hand against her jaw, I tilted her head back and kissed slowly down the front of her throat.  I licked lightly over her nipples, kissed each of them, and then moved to the side so I could better reach her with my other hand.

I continued down her body, moving my lips gently over her
pink skin.  At times, I barely touched her, just grazed the fine hairs of her stomach and below.  My head tilted to the side, and I continued down the inside of one of her thighs until I reached her knee.  I wanted to get her off again—it was a moral imperative—but she’d already said she was sore.

An idea came to
me, and I got up from the bed and extended my hand to Lia.

“Come with me.”

She nodded, wrapped her fingers in mine, and I led her into the bathroom.  I turned on the shower and adjusted the temperature up high.  As the water heated, I grabbed the bath towels and laid them out on the bed.

When I returned to the bathroom and checked the water, i
t was just a little warmer than what was usually comfortable, but exactly what I needed.  I stepped in first, letting the hot water cascade over my back as I pulled Lia in after me.  I kissed her as the water flowed over us, and I reached up to curl my fingers through her hair as I held her mouth to mine.

Without breaking our kiss, I skimmed my fingers down her sides and then around to her front.  I brought them up to cup and lift her breast
s with my thumbs flicking lightly across her nipples.

Lia moaned into m
y mouth, and I kissed her deeply but still slowly and softly.  I explored her body with my hands, pressing my chest to hers and reveling in the sensation of her touch on my back.  I wrapped my arms around her and turned her around slowly until my chest was to her back, and she was facing the stream of water.

“It’s really hot,” she said.

“Is it too much?”

“Not quite,” Lia said, “but close.”

“Trust me,” I whispered against her ear.  My lips pressed to her neck, and my hands moved back to cup her breasts again.  I maneuvered her a little more into the stream of water and dropped one hand down to her stomach.  With circular movements, I massaged her stomach and thighs as the heat from the water penetrated her skin.

Lia leaned back against me and moaned.

“Feel good?” I asked.

“Very.”

With my hand moving between her thighs, I used one foot to tap her legs apart a little so I could reach her better.  I used two fingers to rub gently over her outer lips, then pressed and moved my fingers apart.  As I angled her body into the stream, the hot water began to flow right over her pussy.

“Oh
, shit!”

“Too much?”
I asked.

“I…I…no,” Lia sta
mmered.  “It’s…intense.”

“Exactly.”

I rubbed the outside lightly, but let the hot water do the rest of the work.  Lia began to squirm against me, and her ass pressed firmly against my stiff cock.  I sucked at the top of her shoulder, then kissed down her arm as she pushed back harder until I couldn’t take any more.

Running my fingers over her once more, I shut the shower off, picked Lia up, and carried her back to the bed.  I placed her in the
center of the towels and then crawled over the top of her, kissing her all the way.  When my fingers found her entrance again, I watched her face carefully.

She tilted her head up and pressed against the towel, eyes closed.

“Not as sore?” I asked quietly.

“Much better,” she said with a nod.  Her eyes opened
, and she looked at me.  “That felt incredible.  I didn’t know if I would come just standing there like that, but it felt as good as a massage does.”

I smiled down at her, kissed her stomach,
and then moved up a bit to give her nipples some attention.  The cool air on her wet skin was causing them to constrict and stand up—just waiting for my mouth to warm them again.

With m
ore moans from Lia, I ran my tongue over each nipple and then took the first one in my mouth.  I sucked lightly and then ran my tongue all around the edge.  My hands continued running up and down from her hips to her shoulders until Lia was writhing under me again and squeezing my forearms tightly.  My fingers made their way back between her legs, smoothly parting her lips and making way for the head of my cock.

She shivered as I took my cock in my hand and ran it up and down her folds a few times before centering on her opening.  I moved my hips forward extremely slowly, and I watched as her body opened to me and enveloped me, tip to shaft.

Exquisite.

I buried myself in her, hel
d there for a long moment, and then slowly pulled completely out.  Lia groaned in protest, but my cock was right back at her pussy, pushing down inside of her as slowly as the first thrust had been.

“Jesus, Evan!”

I looked up at her, and my skin warmed to see her laid out before me like that.  I could see my cock sliding back out of her, watch her face tighten in protest as I slipped back out, and hear her soft moans as I filled her again.

Perfect.

Because my brain must hate me, it chose that moment to remind me that this could be it—this could be the last time I would be inside of her like this.  Once morning came, and I told her everything, I had to be prepared for her to walk out on me.

This had to count.  Mean something.

I tightened my ass and moved deeply into her, pulled back, and out again.

“Please, Evan!”

“Please what, baby?”

“I need you…in me…please!”

“You want my cock?”

“God, yes…”

I glided back inside of her, but only about halfway.  I pulled back to just the tip and then went back in halfway again.  Over and over, the top of my cock rubbing against the inside, back set of nerves connected to her clitoris.  After nine strokes, I buried myself totally and Lia cried out.

“Evan!  Oh my…my God…”

I pulled out, ran my hand across her stomach, and then slid back inside halfway.  More short strokes—eight this time.  After the eighth, I penetrated deep, pulled nearly out, and then back in deep again.

“Holy shit!”

“Hush,” I whispered against her skin as I pulled back out again.

“Evan!”

“Hmm?”

Her chest rose and fell, and her desperate eyes captured me.

“What are you doing to me?”

“Hush,” I said again. 
“Just feel.”

I repeated the action, seven short strokes, then three long and deep.  I pulled out
; I started over again.  Six short, four long.  I felt the muscles in my thighs tighten and my balls threaten to explode, but I refused to give in.  I was going to make this one last.