He licked her in long strokes, again and again, like she was the sweetest ice cream he’d ever tasted and he could never get enough. His tongue explored every crease, lingered for long minutes at her clit until she was clawing the table in search of relief.
But there was none, only more of the torturous pleasure that went on and on. His thumb pressed against her from the back, entering her at the same time his tongue thrust inside her pussy like a spear.
She screamed, bucked frantically against him, rode the orgasm out as wave after wave of pleasure crashed through her. And still he wasn’t done. His face was buried between her thighs, his lips and tongue and breath coming at her again and again until sanity was only an abstract concept. Until the world around her ceased to exist and Byron was the only steady thing in it.
She was going beyond individual orgasms to a place where the overwhelming pleasure went on and on and on. She twisted desperately, tugged at his shoulders, begged for him to end the torture with the satisfaction of his thick cock within her. But he only laughed and continued to push her and push her until she was sobbing, mindless, an animal driven by the sweet, hot edge of pleasure-pain and the promise of completion.
Her body was no longer her own. It was under his complete control, enthralled, desperate, dying. In those moments, she would have followed him anywhere, done anything, been anyone he wanted her to be. That he only wanted to bring her joy—incredible, mind-boggling joy—was the biggest turn-on of them all, after everything she’d suffered at another man’s hands.
Byron spiked his tongue, swirled it inside her before pulling out and going for her clit again. As he did, another wave snuck up on her, slammed through her, and she knew she couldn’t take any more. She pushed him away and into the discarded breakfast chair. Then dropped to her knees in front of him, unzipped his jeans and took his glorious, incredibly hot cock in her mouth.
“Fuck, Lacey,” he groaned, his hands fisting in her hair as she got her first taste of him. He was delicious and it was her turn to tease, her turn to swirl her tongue down and around him until he was breathing in great shudders, his lower body arching off the chair, desperate for something more. Desperate for everything she had to give him and more. “Have mercy.”
But there was no mercy in her, nothing but the driving need to take him as high as he had taken her. She slipped her mouth down the hard length of him, lingered at the base for a moment as he slid down her throat. Then pulled back with a long, lingering swipe of her tongue.
“Don’t tease, baby.” It was a gasp, sweat pouring off him as his body shuddered beneath her. “Please, just do it.”
But she couldn’t. She wasn’t ready for it to end yet, wasn’t ready to see his passion-glazed features go lax with satisfaction. She wanted him as needy as she had been—and still was. She had to have him as desperate for her as she was for him.
And so she continued her ministrations, slipping and sliding over him. Relinquishing his cock for a moment, she slipped farther down his body to take his balls in her mouth, to lick them with gentle strokes of her tongue that had him arching and pleading much as she had done only minutes before.
The power was a beautiful thing, the understanding that she could drive this beautiful specimen of manhood to insanity and beyond a joy that she never wanted to give up.
“Do it!” His voice was harsh, his hands tight and unyielding in her hair as he pulled her up. He was beyond gentleness, beyond thinking, and she loved him this way. As she licked her way back up to where he wanted her, she noticed the clear drops of fluid on the head of his cock and nearly whimpered in desire. Finally, she had driven him beyond control, to the brink of an orgasm he refused to take without her.
But the choice wasn’t his anymore. She was in control now, and his body would give her what she demanded.
Licking the pre-ejaculate off, she dawdled for a few long moments over the sexy length of him as he writhed beneath me, his hands in her hair a snare she had no wish to escape. “You have to . . . Lacey, please . . . I can’t . . . Baby—”
There it was, the note of surrender and desperation she had been waiting for—the same desperation that he had evoked in her time and again. Even as he’d done it, she’d wanted to give him the same thing and was thrilled that she’d been able to. Thrilled that he’d let her.
With a secret grin, she swallowed him whole, sucking him all the way inside her. She used her mouth and tongue and throat on him, lightly scraped her teeth across his great length. It was that moment of combined pleasure and pain that did it, that sent him careening over the edge he’d been clinging to with battered fingers.
With a hoarse shout, he arched up, thrusting again and again against her seeking mouth. And then he was pouring into her with long, brutal jerks of his hips, and she was loving every second of it.
His orgasm went on and on and on, until nothing existed besides him and her and the fire that burned between them.
When it was over and Byron finally pulled out, he was still semihard, his strong body trembling as wave after wave of sensation swept through him. She held him as he recovered, her head resting on his stomach, her arm around a powerful thigh.
They stayed that way for long moments, and a sense of peace she’d never felt before stole through her. Her body was content, her mind at rest.
Her eyes started to close. Then he was shifting, pulling her up and into his arms and then walking down the long hall to her bedroom, where he tucked her under the covers before climbing in behind her.
She cuddled up to him until she was sheltered in the curve of his arm, then slid into sleep, perfectly happy for the first time in a very, very long time.
Chapter Seventeen
The next time Byron woke up, it was to find Lacey climbing out of bed beside him.
“Hey, what’s the hurry?” he protested as he wrapped a hand around her wrist and held her in place.
“We’ve been in bed half the day.” She shot him a sweet smile. “And, thanks to you, I have work to do, which I’m sure you do as well.”
The warmth in her eyes startled him—and turned him on. But even as his cock hardened, he knew it was more than physical. That she made something come alive in him that had been dormant for far too long—maybe his whole life; he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that being with her felt right in a way nothing had in as long as he could remember.
“Oh no,” she said with a laugh, as she tried to pull her wrist away from him. “I know what that sexy, heavy-lidded look in your eyes means. And seriously, I have to work.”
“Really? What does the look mean?” He started to exert a little pressure on her wrist, to pull her back into bed with him, where he could touch her, kiss her, hold her. Where he could just be with her.
“It means that I am not getting in that bed with you. It’s noon. We’ve slept half the day away.” She reached for the controller on the nightstand, flicked on the TV and watched for a second as the newscaster droned on about the city’s rising crime rate.
“See, the midday news is already on.”
Byron glanced at the clock, shocked to realize that she was right. He hadn’t been in bed at noon in he didn’t remember how long. But now that he knew how nice it was, he was going to make a habit of lingering in bed every once in a while—as long as Lacey was in there with him, that was.
“Well, then, ten more minutes won’t matter,” he said, as he gave a sharp tug that made her tumble back onto the bed. Another tug and she was cuddled into his chest, exactly where he wanted her.
“Now, see,” he said after a minute. “Isn’t this nice?”
It was. Nicer than Lacey wanted to admit, and more worrisome than she knew how to handle. She was getting attached to Byron in a way she’d sworn she wouldn’t, and she was deathly afraid that it would shatter her when he left.
But all she said was, “It feels guilty.”
“Guilty? About what?” He leaned to the side, tried to get her to look at him, but she refused to lift her face
from his chest. He waited for a while, long seconds that ticked by in slow motion. Eventually, he must have figured out that she wasn’t going to answer him, but he didn’t let her go; just cuddled her more closely against him.
She knew her refusal to answer bothered him, but she didn’t know what to say. How did she explain that she felt guilty about being with him? About breaking every promise she’d made to herself? Telling him would only hurt him. Besides, worrying about it now wouldn’t do her any good. She’d just have to keep her chin up and hope for the best, because she couldn’t stand the idea of shattering all over again, not after she’d spent so long picking up the pieces after she’d left Curtis.
Closing her eyes, she drifted along, listening as the newscasters reported new construction in the ninth ward and tests being done on the Pontchartrain levies. She was paying more attention to the feel of Byron against her—long, lean and so comfortable that she never wanted to move—when she felt Byron stiffen. Jerking her head up, she stared at the TV with blurry eyes.
“What’s the matter?” she asked sleepily.
“Sssh. Listen.”
“In other violent news,” the newscaster said with just the right touch of chagrin and nonchalance, “the Mardi Gras Madam’s body was discovered in the middle of Jackson Square this morning. The police say nothing has been confirmed, but they believe Veronique Rosen was the victim of a mugging turned nasty. Her body was taken—”
An ugly buzzing started in her ears, and Lacey grabbed on to Byron as the world around her started to spin. “I just had lunch with her a couple of days ago.”
He looked at her sharply. “Did she tell you anything about the escort service? About the girls?”
“No. She told me to leave things alone, not to push. That someone was going to get hurt if I didn’t back off.
“I didn’t listen to her. I kept pushing, kept investigating. That’s what I do—poke and prod until something comes loose.” She stared at Byron with stricken eyes. “Is this my fault? Did I do this to her? She didn’t talk to me, didn’t say anything, but maybe someone thought—”
“Don’t go there, Lacey.”
“How can I not go there? She warned me, told me someone was going to end up dead. I didn’t believe her.” She was having trouble breathing.
Byron sat up, gave her a little shake. “It’s not your fault.”
“It is. It—”
“No.” He pulled her up, made her look him in the face. “It’s not. She chose to live her life a certain way. Yes, you talked to her, but that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t have ended up like this anyway. You told me yourself she was scared to death of someone, and that she was a serious junkie. It’s a miracle something didn’t happen to her sooner.”
“But I pushed it, pushed her. And now she’s dead and I—”
“And you are going to try to get justice for her the only way you know how—by finding out who did this to her and the other girls. Now, let’s take a quick shower and get dressed. Then I’ll help you get started weeding through those numbers you mentioned that you found.”
“Don’t you have your own work to do?” Her voice was shaky, but at least the walls had stopped spinning. Byron’s pep talk had calmed her down, gotten her to focus.
“I’ll get to it. But”—he cast a grim look at the TV set and the newscaster who was blithely continuing on with the day’s stories—“at the moment, you’re a hell of a lot more important. I think we need to get to the bottom of this and quickly. Before you become the story on tomorrow’s newscast.”
Hours later, they were still searching, but this time at Byron’s apartment and on his very fast, wholly tricked-out computer. When she’d been poring over the evidence files she’d managed to finagle from the NOPD, she’d found strings of numbers the police had done nothing with during their investigation. She’d been determined to find out what they meant, but hadn’t had a clue where to start.
When she’d showed them to Byron, he’d poked around a little and proclaimed them bank account numbers. Which is why they were now sitting here with his friend, Mike—a tall, beautiful, African-American man who ran a computer-security firm—as the two men tried to unravel the miles of security codes built into the banking sites they’d traced the numbers to. Curses were flying left and right as they tried to hack the network.
“Come on, you son of a bitch,” Mike muttered through clenched teeth as his fingers flew over the keyboard. “Let me in.”
“No, don’t go there. Check out that piece of code down—”
“I’ve got it.” More typing. “Now, let’s see what this baby can really do.”
Lacey watched them in bemused silence, shocked at just how much enjoyment the two of them were getting out of pitting themselves against a security program. When Byron had first mentioned bringing Mike in, she’d been more than a little leery—after all, the last person she’d talked to about the case had ended up dead, and she couldn’t handle it if someone else died while trying to help her.
But Byron had been insistent. Mike was the best of the best, a retired super-hacker who now made his living keeping others out of places he’d spent years breaking in to. If anyone could find a back way through the security and find out who the accounts belonged to, it would be Mike.
He’d been right. They were making progress—already they’d identified two of the feeder bank accounts as belonging to a U.S. senator who had professed to be “the moral choice” in the election he had just won, as well as a high-placed Washington lobbyist. And from the amount of money flowing into their accounts, it looked like they were actually involved in the ring somehow. Besides regular monthly deposits in the tens of thousands, each also had a few large deposits of over a hundred thousand dollars—a well as a couple of big withdrawals.
She couldn’t help wondering if those big additions and subtractions had more to do with the buying and selling of sex slaves to rich perverts than it did with the thousand-dollar-a-night fees Crescent City Escort Service charged.
As she took notes on how to follow up, Lacey’s stomach was in knots. God only knew what else they were going to find before this was done. But she knew whatever it was, was all bad. And she’d brought Byron—and now Mike—more trouble than she’d originally imagined possible.
Besides, what was she going to do with this information when she eventually got it? Write a book, obviously, but the stuff they were talking about was really heavy, criminal stuff. She needed to find out who to call, who to report this to. Right now, all she knew was that it needed to be someone not from New Orleans or Louisiana or D.C. Someone who wasn’t involved.
Because, as things were unraveling, it was becoming more and more apparent that she’d been right about the human-trafficking ring, right about the sex slavery. She’d been going through the pictures from the strip club one at a time, trying to match them to the photos she had of the girls who had been reported missing from Canada and Mexico.
She’d found three so far besides Anne Marie, all from Canada—Beth Coulter from Toronto, Michelle Donovan from Windsor and Stacy LaRue from Quebec—but she knew she’d find more. These bastards had been doing this for a while—definitely since Katrina, but maybe before it. And with a lot more girls than the fifteen she’d managed to track; there were probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of girls they’d managed to kidnap in the past four years. The fifteen who had turned up dead were their failed experiments—girls who, for whatever reason, had been more trouble than they were worth.
Girls who were easier to eliminate than sell.
Her stomach turned as she tried to puzzle things out. At one point she’d run out to the nearest drugstore and bought a map of the U.S., and had begun to map out places and times and dates the girls were taken, followed by the times and dates their bodies had been found in and around New Orleans.
For a brief moment, she’d played with the idea of taking this to the FBI and praying that she got an agent who wasn’t on the take. But when Byron traced one of the ba
nk account numbers to the NOPD police commissioner, she gave up. There was just no way to know who was involved with what—not right now anyway, and maybe not ever.
From what she could see, the only other option they had was the press, and she was prepared to take that option if she had to. But before she went to them, all her ducks had to be in a row, and she had to be able to lay them all out—with evidence. Otherwise, she and Byron and even Mike would be the ones to pay the price.
The idea that these girls were being triply victimized—first by the bastards who took them and sold them, second by the men who paid for them and third by the system that allowed it to go on—was infuriating, maddening, so awful she could barely wrap her mind around it.
Her thoughts were interrupted when Mike called a dinner break around eleven, and the three of them stood around Byron’s kitchen island, eating roast-beef sandwiches and talking about anything but what they’d spent the entire day doing. The reality was too disturbing, too disgusting, but as they looked at one another, there didn’t seem to be much else to say. What did a baseball score mean when weighed against the agonies these girls had suffered?
Soon after midnight, Mike left, promising to come back the next day after work. Lacey had planned to work after he left, but as the door shut behind him, she dissolved into hopeless tears.
“Lacey, baby.” Byron pulled her into his arms, onto his lap, and rocked her much like he would a child. She felt so small in his hands, so fragile, and he wanted nothing more than to take her pain away. Yet that was impossible; she was crying like her whole world was crashing in on her and there was nothing she could do to stop it.