Piet had neither eaten nor drunk anything. He hadn’t even used the crapper. He’d spent the entire three and a half hours tapping away at a computer, staring ferociously into the monitor. Out of curiosity, Montez had stopped to look on his way to the bathroom, but all he’d seen had been a grid and some numbers flickering on the screen.
He was sick of the silence, sick of Piet acting as if he didn’t even exist, but he didn’t dare complain. He just hoped Piet hadn’t lost his touch. He had no idea what he’d been doing for the past eight years. Crocheting, for all he knew. Maybe Piet couldn’t track any more, maybe—
“Got it,” he said softly.
Montez shot up. “What? Got what?”
Piet slid the monitor around and Montez stared blankly at the screen. It looked like one of those kid games—connect the dots. There were about ten dots in a cluster and four outlying dots. All the dots were different sizes.
It made no sense to him. He lifted his eyebrows.
“She’s a woman on the run,” Piet said. “She’d keep a basic level of preparedness, and I imagine that would include keeping her hands free. So if she had a cell phone, I imagined she’d have Bluetooth technology. A hands-free headset and mike.”
Montez shrugged. So?
“Bluetooth emits a radio signal, which can be tracked over time. It’s called snarfing. What you’re seeing is tracks of the Bluetooth signal, over time. So these are the places she’s been over the past three months, which presumably is when she acquired the prepaid. The size of the dot indicates the number of times she was at a specific site and the time spent there. The larger the dot, the closer the connection to her.”
Christ. Montez bent forward to look at the dots. Now if only—
As if in response to his silent request, Piet punched a button and the dots were overlaid over a map. A street map, Montez saw. Of Seattle!
All of a sudden he saw it. He was looking at a map of all the places Ellen had been over the past months. She had kept her life simple, in a tight spiral around Larsen Square.
Piet tapped the dots, starting with the largest one. “That’s where she rented a room. That’s a bar that plays jazz two nights a week, called the Blue Moon. She was there almost every night until recently. Probably working, until she started selling so big. That’s a food market, that’s a bookshop, that’s an Internet café.” He tapped a large dot. “And that’s a boardinghouse with three rooms. Two men and one woman. One of the men is a traveling salesman who rents the room because it’s cheap by the month, but he’s only there six or seven nights a month. The other man is a sixty-year-old librarian. And the woman?” He pulled up a photo from the DMV. She was young, pretty, blond. “Name’s Kerry Robinson, but the ID doesn’t really hold up that well, so I think we can assume it’s a fake. And she works at the Blue Moon. I think she’s Ellen’s friend.”
Montez looked at Piet with new eyes. Fuck, the man was good.
“So I guess we’re going straight to the woman.”
“No.” Piet shook his head. “First we resuscitate the agent, make sure he’s found. Then we pay a visit to Kerry Robinson. First her agent, then her friend. We’re going to rattle Ellen Palmer’s cage and smoke her out.”
San Diego
Ellen stepped into Harry’s apartment warily. There was a completely different vibe here, now. Something had changed up at Sam and Nicole’s place. The air had become somehow supercharged.
Harry placed a huge, warm hand to the small of her back and urged her gently forward, as if she were reluctant to enter. Well, maybe she was.
She was so tense it was a miracle her muscles weren’t twanging. Her heart was pounding, but she couldn’t tell why. Her limbs felt heavy; the air was thick and hot.
Harry moved slightly away from her into the room and she nearly fell forward, as if he had a huge force field around him that generated its own gravity. He was at a sideboard. “Do you want some whiskey?”
Did she? She wanted…something, that was for sure.
“Um, yeah.” Her throat was tight. Her voice was scratchy. She cleared it. “Thanks.”
The gurgle of whiskey was loud in the silence. Harry walked over holding two glasses and pressed one into her hand.
She looked up at him. How could he get more handsome by the hour? How was that possible? In the penumbra he was just magnificent, a golden god looking at her with heat in his golden eyes.
She brought her glass to her mouth and he his, then she hesitated when it was at her lips. They both hesitated. Finally, Harry put his glass down without tasting the whiskey.
“That’s not what I want,” he whispered.
Ellen set hers down too, blindly. “Me either.”
They stepped forward, both of them, and in a second she was in his arms, which was easier for Harry than it was for her.
She wanted—oh so badly—to embrace him, but he was so tall and his shoulders so broad, it was impossible. And then it didn’t matter that she couldn’t fit her arms around him because he was kissing her and she blew up in flames.
He didn’t have any problems, though. One arm was around her waist, one big hand cradling the back of her head, covering it. It was a good thing that hand was there, because her neck muscles went lax.
His mouth was eating her up, tongue stroking hers, and every time their tongues met, heat flashed through her and all the muscles in her lower belly clenched, hard.
Harry lifted his head, slanted his mouth, and it was like another kiss altogether, longer, hotter.
He tasted of the wine they’d had for dinner and the chocolate mousse for dessert and sex.
He slanted his head again, lightly bit her bottom lip, and she moaned.
It was as if she’d flipped a switch. Harry stiffened and tightened his arm around her and she could feel everything, his hard chest muscles, lean belly and huge, erect penis. Heat flashed everywhere in Ellen’s body. She just lit up from the inside, this small nuclear detonation that melted her insides, made her legs weak. It was entirely possible that Harry’s arm around her waist was the only thing holding her up.
So much power and heat, she instinctively wanted more of it, stepping even closer to him, feet between his, the heat becoming a furnace where their loins touched. Her tongue touched his in a silky stroke and she could feel his penis lengthen.
This time it was Harry who moaned. “Bed,” he groaned, when he lifted his mouth from hers for a second and she nodded enthusiastically and pulled his head back down to her.
There was some rusty sound coming from his chest and it took her a second to identify it. Laughter. Grim Harry Bolt was laughing.
She smiled beneath his mouth.
Still kissing her and kissing her and kissing her, Harry bent at the knees and lifted her up in his arms—the stuff movie scenes are made of. But Ellen didn’t know of many men who could do it like Harry. He simply lifted her in his arms as if she were weightless and carried her away with no sense of strain at all. Not even his breathing changed.
No, wait. While moving in the darkness through the seemingly endless rooms, Ellen lifted herself up a little by tightening her arms around his neck and bit his mouth lightly, running her tongue over his lips, and oh, yeah, his breathing changed.
Lifting a full-grown woman in his arms didn’t do it but bumping the sexuality up a level sure did.
It was a good thing his house was mainly empty because Harry wasn’t looking where he was going, he was kissing her with his eyes closed as if to savor every aspect of her mouth.
They reached the bedroom and he gently put her on her feet, holding her shoulders in his big hands.
Ellen slowly opened her eyes, hands curled around his sides. Under her palms, she could feel the hard, lean planes of muscle moving as he breathed.
They looked at each other, the soft waves of the ocean coming through his open French windows like the sound of the world breathing.
Harry looked almost in pain, his face drawn, deep grooves bracketing his mouth. He huffed out
a breath. His light eyes almost glowed in the penumbra as his hands tightened on her.
“Okay. I don’t know how we’re going to do this. If I’m not in you inside of five minutes, I’m going to die. My heart will simply explode, and it won’t be pretty. But the thing is this—I haven’t had sex in a couple of years, which creates two problems. One, I don’t have any condoms. If I had any condoms in some drawer somewhere they’d be powder by now. And two, I can’t promise to pull out because I’m going to come the second I’m in you. It won’t mean anything because the way I feel right now, I will stay hard for the next ten years, but I don’t have any control over anything right now.” He huffed another breath. “What are we going to do?”
Ellen didn’t answer right away. He had on a white shirt, which he’d put on to go upstairs to dinner at Sam and Nicole’s. She had the impression a white shirt was about as formal as he ever got. She couldn’t even begin to imagine him with a tie. Good, one less thing to worry about.
She reached around and ran her hands slowly up his chest, savoring the feel of him, hard and lean and perfect. He wasn’t wearing an undershirt, and as her hands moved up, she could feel male nipples under her palms and she stroked one with a thumb.
Harry jumped. There was no other word for it. His breathing rate increased.
“Ellen?” The cords of his neck were standing out and his jaw muscles were tight. “Did you hear a word I said?”
“Hmm?” Up, up, until she came to the top button of his shirt. She undid it, then the next one and the next one and the next one. Until his shirt hung open, coming together only under his belt.
Oh. It was enough to make her slack jawed. There wasn’t a pirate in any romance novel who could even hold a candle to Harry with his shirt open. His chest hairs were a mat of curly, dark-blond hair that covered his pectorals, thinning down to his belly button. There had never been a chest like this in the history of the world. Even his scars were beautiful.
“Ellen?” He sounded strangled now.
She brushed one panel aside and saw a hard male nipple with a light copper aureole around it. Moving forward slowly, as if in a dream, she nuzzled it. When she licked him there, just to see what he tasted like, he jolted again.
“For Christ’s sake, woman,” he gritted.
Delicious. He tasted absolutely delicious. Salty and sweet, at the same time.
She smiled up at him. “If you’re worried about disease, it’s been much longer than two years for me. So I guess we’re both disease free. If you’re worried about performance, believe me, whatever you do, you’ll be better than me. If you’re worried about pregnancy, I had to go to a doctor a couple of months back. I had stopped having my period because of stress. I was prescribed a series of shots, one a month, to regulate them. As a side effect, they’re contraceptive, too. My last shot was ten days ago, so—”
His eyes had widened as he listened.
“Christ,” he breathed, eyes fixed on her face. “Bareback.”
It took her a second to realize what he meant. “Oh, um, yeah.”
He exploded into action, reaching behind her to take the pins out of her hair, hands moving down to unzip her dress, tugging her panties down before it had had time to pool at her feet, pulling her shoes off, lifting her out of the dress, placing her on the bed, ripping his own clothes off—the bottom buttons of his shirt pinged all over the empty hardwood floor—and coming down on top of her.
Ellen barely had time to register what was happening when he spread his knees, strong hairy thighs opening her legs, reaching down to open her up, and she felt the huge, hot, hard head of his penis and then his hips tightened and he moved hard inside her, shaking and sweating. He barely made it all the way inside when his penis swelled and he exploded inside her, every muscle tight as she felt the hard jets of semen in splashes of warmth inside her.
He was holding tightly to her head, kissing her hard, groaning into her mouth, hips rocking back and forth as he continued spurting inside her and it went on and on, until he finally collapsed on top of her, hot and huge and heavy and sweaty, breathing like a bull.
“God,” he breathed then jolted. “Your shoulder!”
He lifted himself up on his elbows, looking appalled, and Ellen pressed down on his neck. “It’s okay,” she said softly. “It doesn’t hurt.”
With a deep sigh, he settled back on her, broad chest bellowing, as if he’d just run a marathon.
His breathing gradually slowed. His face was buried in the pillow next to her head.
“You should be singing ‘Rocket Man’ about now,” he said into the pillow, his voice muffled.
Ellen smiled up into the ceiling. “Well, something tells me you’re not done yet.”
He was huge inside her. Climaxing hadn’t made him soften a bit. His orgasm had had a fabulous effect, though. He’d pumped so much moisture into her that she was able to accommodate him. That first entry had been painful. He was large and she hadn’t made love in a long time.
Harry turned his head on the pillow and smiled at her. “Oh man,” he breathed, the words a little slurred. “I’m not ever going to be done. Gonna stay right here the rest of my natural days.”
She took in a deep breath, or tried to, anyway. The man weighed a ton. It didn’t make any difference, though, because who cared about breathing when there were all these fantastic sensations flooding her system?
His back alone was a source of fascination. Huge, broad shoulders, lean, hard planes of muscle that she could follow with her fingertips, one by one. She cupped the ball of his shoulder, pressing hard with her fingers, unable to make any kind of impression. If he weren’t so warm, she wouldn’t believe she was touching human skin.
Power hummed just under the skin, the kind of power she’d never felt before from a human being. An otherworldly energy, a life force that thrummed up through her fingers, just by touching him.
And it was an incredible aesthetic experience, too, because the man was so ripped. She traced her fingertips and then her palms over his shoulders, his back, following the powerful lines of the muscles. Amazing, just amazing, that any man could be so strong. Over the shoulder blades—steely muscles over bone—along the deep indentation of his spine, the strong muscles wrapped around his ribs. She sighed in deep contentment when she reached his backside, digging in her fingernails, which here too failed to make any kind of dent, and raking them up over his butt.
That had a real effect, as she felt his penis ripple and swell inside her.
“You like that,” she murmured against his shoulder.
“Mm.” Harry smiled lazily and turned his head just enough to kiss her shoulder. One big hand ran slowly up her rib cage and cupped her breast, thumb circling her nipple. “I like everything.”
His thumb made another slow circle and her vagina contracted, hard. “You like that, too.”
Ellen barely had enough air to speak, because the rush of heat had incinerated her lungs. He wasn’t even moving and it was the best sex she’d ever had.
“Yeah.”
“What else?” he asked, nipping her earlobe, moving his mouth lower to scrape his teeth along her neck. Goose bumps broke out all over her body and she contracted again around him.
The neck! The neck was an erogenous zone! She ran the palms of her hands up and down the hollow of his lower back while he licked the area behind her ears and she contracted again. Behind the ears…who knew that was erogenous? When he breathed into her ear goose bumps traveled over her skin again, and when he raised himself up a little on his elbows, face suddenly serious, eyes narrowed until only a golden slit showed, and licked her ear, she contracted again. And again.
She could feel his breathing pick up against her ear and could feel against her hands the bunching of the muscles in the small of his back as he started rocking inside her. Small movements at first, each sparking off a wildfire of sensations, then one long, deep plunge, and another, and she stopped breathing, stopped moving, because in another second…
Her entire body contracted around him, arms and legs clinging, her sheath clenching tightly around him over and over again, the pleasure so intense it was electric, almost unbearable, his movements sharp now, his penis rubbing right against a concentration of nerve endings, each one going off like a little firecracker…
The bed was creaking, slamming against the wall, and they were both sweating, every molecule of their bodies conspiring to make them cling together, everything so intense she wanted to scream, but she couldn’t because he was kissing her so hard, tongue deep in her mouth. Each breath she took she breathed in Harry, every move she made brought him closer to her, his chest rubbing against hers as he worked inside her, hard belly slapping against hers, so that it was as if his entire body were making love to her, from his mouth to his toes.
Closer, she wanted even closer, to all that power and strength and heat. She held him even more tightly, entwined her legs around his, and bit him on the jaw in her excitement.
It was as if she’d shifted a gear in him. His entire body gave a kick and his movements inside her grew faster, stronger, the friction burning her up. The large base of his penis ground against her, against the flesh that had become supersensitized, sensations so intense they hovered on the knife’s edge of pain, and she could feel another orgasm coming, speeding toward her like a freight train. She stiffened, back arching, breath caught in her lungs, and hung there, shaking, on some kind of plateau, and then she simply exploded, contractions sharp and fast around him.
He exploded, too, movements hard and strong, erupting inside her until her entire body was marked by him, inside and out.
It was simply too much, sensory overload. Lungs bellowing, heat pulsing in every cell of her body, she saw stars behind her closed lids. The craziest cliché in the book and it was true.
Her muscles slowly settled, grew lax, her breathing slowly coming back to normal. They were plastered together by his sweat and hers and her entire groin area was wet with his semen and her excitement.
It had never really occurred to her how…how earthy sex was. How incredibly intimate. The sex she’d had up until now had been polite, even a little remote. Now she felt Harry’s skin as her own, his breaths as her own.