She ran her hands along his shoulders, pushed back the shirt. “You’re so strong,” she breathed.
“I work out.”
“What do you press?”
“Oh, two hundred. Two-twenty if I’m healthy.”
“You’re unhealthy?”
“I tend to get wasted.” He nodded toward the pipes. “That, booze, girls. I’ve lived in Asia too long, done too much — too much work.”
“What is your work?”
“Classified.”
She laid her head against his chest, drew herself, catlike, close to him. “That’s exciting.”
“What do you think I do? What’s your guess?”
“You — let me see — you’re very strong. But you’re also smart.” She whispered. “You’re a government assassin.”
He chuckled. “You kept my gun.”
“You can’t bring a gun in here. It’s against the law.”
“I thought the law didn’t apply to you.”
“My law.”
“How did you get so rich?”
“My great-great-great-great — let’s see, five greats — one more — great-grandfather was Lord Baltimore. He owned Maryland.”
“That’ll do it. But I still want my gun back.”
“When you leave.”
For a moment, he looked, she thought, kind of like a wild animal. He was hair-trigger; she knew that. Up close like this, he seemed even more dangerous.
She stretched, lying half in his lap and half on the bed. When she stopped, the edge of her hand was lying against his erection. She said, “Uh-oh.” Then, “Can I be a bad girl?”
“Be a bad girl.”
Very lightly, she touched it. Then she snatched her hand away. “Oh, it’s huge!”
He swallowed. He was trembling a little.
She felt more intimately. “It can’t be as big as it feels.” “Have a look,” he whispered.
“Shall I?”
He was too big around the waist for the pants, so they were only three-quarters zipped. She opened them. He came out, bobbing, the glans gleaming in the soft light.
He was huge. She pressed into the tender glans with a fingernail, then held the enormous thing in both of her hands. She drew off the pants. He shuffled out of the shirt.
She had not seen a male so beautiful in years. His muscles were fabulous, his skin lustrous. His face was purest masculine poetry, chiseled and hard, but with the complex, haunted eyes of somebody who had led a dangerous and uncertain life.
Whatever, he was a lovely specimen and he was going to make a sumptuous meal. She was actually a little jealous of Leo. What a great first supper!
A few minutes before he was brought in, she had gone down and checked the furnace next door. All was in order. Under the bed was the black overnight case that she would carry his remnant in.
But all that was for later. Until Sarah returned, she would continue to play with him. She needed that book. If Sarah did not find it, then this creature would discover that Foggy Bottom could be used for more than just games. There were some very serious implements there, and she knew just exactly how to apply them.
She stroked his chest, made a ring around one of his nipples with her finger. She touched the puckered wound on his shoulder. “This hurt?”
“A little. It’s healing.”
She remembered how good it had felt, seeing that knife dig in. If there had been a little more room for her backhand, she would have sliced the arm off.
“What happened?”
“A client became upset.”
“Very upset.”
“Very.”
She kissed the corner of his mouth, but drew aside when he tried to kiss her back.
“You know, Miriam, I have to be honest with you. This is the nicest night of my life.” He looked her up and down. She was still wearing her sheer nightgown. “You are — oh, gosh — so much more than you seem. I mean, please don’t take this wrong, but you’re just a kid, and this place is really deep, here. That girl that took me around — she said it was sacred and I thought she was a complete moron at first. But I started realizing what you were doing. And I want you to know this — I agree with it.”
“Thank you.”
“You came up with the whole concept?”
“Yes.” She took his hands to her bodice, put the ribbons in his fingers. Then she drew his hands slowly apart. As she did so, the ribbon came away and the gown fell down her shoulders like drifting smoke.
“Oh, my,” he said. Her breasts were gracefully full, curved just right to fit the cup of the hand. He raised his hands. But he dared not touch. They were like some kind of perfect art, a porcelain dream.
She took his hands to them. When they lay in his rough palms, the nipples became erect. Gooseflesh dusted the pink areolas.
“Oh, Lord,” he said, watching this. He bent to her, laid his lips on that sweet skin of hers. Up close it had the texture of a child’s, absolutely smooth, as if life had not yet touched it.
Christ, he ought to ask for her driver’s license. But he wouldn’t, because if this was a minor, then God had made this kid to boogie and he was sorry, but she was gonna boogie tonight.
Her lips hung slack in a way that said she was real interested and real ready. He kissed her, which was awful nice. But he was careful, because he had a thing about him that had not always gone down with women, although the whores pretended to love it, of course. His tongue was kind of — well, rough. No other way to put it. He had a cat tongue. He went deeper, though. Couldn’t help it. The kiss itself was luring him, so sweet was her mouth. He just loved kissing this woman. Oh, wasn’t she a woman? Nice!
He wanted to touch his tongue to hers, but she didn’t seem to have one. It was way back in there. ’Course it was. She was probably scared to death.
But then he did, and when he did, she arched her back and cried out so loud it broke the kiss.
“Sorry!”
She threw her arms around him and latched onto him with her legs. She kissed him and kissed him, and he thrust his tongue into her mouth and her groaning and crying made him wild for her. She loved it; she loved the way he was.
She was haunted by how much he reminded her of Eumenes, who had been not only her husband, but her only Keeper lover. Power like this was something she had not tasted in eons. He was like the roaring oceans of the world, the flames of the stars, a tornado, a typhoon.
She locked her lips to his and opened her mouth to him, and he thrust in and rested in the kiss. Even though he had not yet entered her, she came to climax, came again and again beneath his sweating, eager body.
She looked at him, drinking him with her eyes. Never had there been a man so beautiful, never so filled with raging sexuality, never so — so — there were no words to describe it. No words.
They rolled and he was under her. The opium had done perfectly: he was ready, but he wasn’t going to explode.
He let her sit on him, felt her take his penis in her two hands. Her cheeks flushed as she stroked it, loved it, kissed it, and licked it. It wasn’t human, it couldn’t be — because it was going to fit her and they did not fit her. They were wasted, small creatures in their sex, not like a real man, a Keeper man.
He was — but this was impossible. They didn’t interbreed. She put that stupid idea right out of her head. He was a lucky accident, is what he was and that was all he was.
She wanted to taste of him. She wanted to know his every intimate truth. He excited her, truly, despite the hate that flapped in her heart.
“Hey,” he said, lifting his head and kissing her hard. “You’ve got a tongue like mine. We’re two cats.”
It was true, and this was getting very strange very fast. “We’re made for each other,” she said carefully.
He slid to come from beneath her. She knew what he wanted and responded instantly, with delight. She was never on the bottom, but with him yes. Yes. She belonged under him. It felt meant to be. She shifted her weight.
r /> His huge form dominated her. Gazing into his eyes, she spread her legs.
“Okay, baby,” he said,“this one belongs to me.” On that word he pushed into her.
The world turned black. Then a dam burst. Thunder rumbled in her head. Thrusting at him, she screamed out his name, “Paul, Paul, Paul!” as he pumped deep and withdrew, pumped deeper and harder, lingered then drew back, thrust and pumped, thrust and pumped.
It was as if she had become a single, blazing point of pure pleasure that was racing out through the universe at a million times the speed of light.
Then he rested upon her, and the feel of his surprisingly great weight on her body was the most wonderfully natural feeling in the world. He felt so much like Eumenes it almost broke her heart.
His loins surged, and the pleasure became a fiery comet that went straight through her. He slid himself almost all the way out, then plunged in again. He held her down, and she enjoyed the illusion of being helpless — oh, for the first time in years and years and years — and it was just so damned awfully wonderful. It wasn’t scary — or it was, but that was part of the enjoyment. He was slow with her, and precise with her, sliding in and out, in and out while she shook her head from side to side and arched her back and yammered his lovely name.
It was just like being under Eumenes, having all her power stripped away by his greater power, and being free in bondage to him at last.
While he thrust, Paul drank her with his eyes. Not only did she look wonderful and taste fabulous and feel great to touch and hold, she had a very special instrument down there. This lady could use those muscles, yes, she could, to kiss the shaft and compress the tip in ways that not even the most skilled whores of Bangkok or Seoul or H.K. could even dream about.
Oh, my stars and bars, thank God for that pipe, he thought, or I would’ve come and been done in the middle of stroke one.
As it was, he went slow and careful while she kissed his chest and bit his hairs and licked his nipples. She cried out, she trembled like a branch in a storm, she pumped while he pumped, faster now, yelling, grasping his buttocks, pulling and pushing him. He was riding this filly, for sure; he was bigger than he’d ever been, and it felt better than it ever had.
Miriam was screaming, her eyes frantic and amazed.
She shrieked; she bellowed.
This was a damned thing, a very damned, damned thing! Because she was feeling a fire blazing inside her, and she knew what that fire was.
No Keeper woman who had felt it ever forgot it, the alarming, painful, delicious heat that told her she was about to conceive. But her egg wouldn’t drop for a human! And it mustn’t!
No, no that must not — not —
But the process went on, and she went helpless with it, a speck of a woman lost in a restless, living ocean. He was the storms above; he was the lightning striking her tortured waves.
The lightning, it seemed to her, was alive. And if so, then — well, then he was fertile!
Oh, stars, what was happening?
She had never dreamed that any human male would trigger this response in her body. It was her egg, her last egg, and it was moving within her, she could feel the searing delight of its journey.
She had not had a Keeper man in millennia, but she had wanted one always, and now suddenly this enormous body surging above her — that dear, powerful face, those driven eyes — this was a Keeper!
Paul was pouring with sweat, his thighs working, his every muscle singing with the amazing pleasure of this long, long session. Every thrust touched the shivery edge of climax; then as he pulled back, she loosened her muscles and they started again.
He’d never been in a state of pleasure this intense for this long, and things were happening to him that had never happened before. His heart was thundering harder than he could ever remember. Even his skin was tingling with pleasure, especially where it was in contact with her. Electricity — real, humming juice — seemed to be passing between them.
Again he thrust into her. Then he paused, drinking in her perfect flower of a face, her lustrous, joyous eyes.
She screamed. She had screamed a lot for Paul, but she really screamed now. She could feel the egg. Definitely. It hung in her, touching the mother lode of nerve endings, and where that egg touched that womb, a million dancing needles of sheer, tickling, joy sent their prickles marching out through her every sizzling nerve.
Paul was on fire with the sweet fire of the angels. Look at her pure, dear face — she was an angel! Oh, look at those eyes, those gray pools of innocence — she was the maid of Solomon’s fancy. He pressed himself hard against her, thrust harder, and then as if molten gold were speeding in his shaft, he came roaring and yelling and laughing; he came as he had never come before or thought you ever could come. He came in pleasure and in love, in dear love,which had caught his soul afire.
She felt his semen speeding into her like a great flaming fire, a sweet sun — and she knew that it washed the egg, and it went screaming through the wall of the egg and sped down to the center, where slept the waiting shadow.
She threw her pelvis forward and arched her back, and they hammered at each other, squeezing the last demanded juice of the pomegranate, the last starry flower.
A burning wave snatched Miriam up and away, filling her with wonderful fire, shocking her more than she had been shocked since the pyramids reflected the sun, since she had opened her eyes to the eyes of her Eumenes and managed to murmur to him, “It feels like a boy.”
Paul collapsed onto her chest, and they both burst into tears like two scared schoolkids.
Miriam Blaylock and Paul Ward had just conceived.
She was crying for the little baby that lay now within her, its cells already waking up. She was crying for she had no idea what that baby would be — Keeper, human, alive, dead, deformed — only that it was her second and it was her last.
“I love you,” he said, “oh, my God in heaven, I love you!”
She looked scared, and he touched her dear eyes to wipe away the tears.
“Miriam,” he said. He suddenly felt awful. “Please never make me leave you.”
She gazed at him, her eyes slow and contented. “I adore you,” she said, and there was such reverence in her tone that he wanted to cry. Maybe somebody would want a broke-down old CIA officer after all. And maybe that somebody would be this wonderful, special girl.
Miriam slid out from under him and drew his head down into her lap. With loving eyes, she gazed at him. Then she bent closer, kissing the tip of his nose and then his lips, and then the pulsing vein in the curve of his neck. She lay her mouth there for a moment, then withdrew.
Paul felt her sucking his skin a little. It was a nice sensation.
Suddenly he jumped away from her.
There, across the room, stood the woman from the limo, the woman who had blown him on the dance floor.
Miriam got up, went to her, and took her hands. Sarah nodded her head, and Miriam burst out laughing. Her laughter pealed out again and again, and it was so pretty and so full of fun that he started laughing, too.
“How long have you been in here?” Paul asked her.
“Since you started.”
“You sure got an eyeful.”
Sarah shrugged.
“May I know your name?”
“Sarah.” She nodded toward Miriam. “I do her books.”
“You let your accountant in here when you’re — ” He chuckled. “To each his own, I guess.”
“It was lovely,” Sarah said. “You’re a very lovely man.”
The look in her eyes, though, did not suggest that she was pleased with what she had seen. In fact, there was something real on edge about this lady.
Then another one came in through the wall.
“Oh, hey,” Paul said as the girl who’d shown him the club appeared. He got his pants on. Not that one more naked male would matter to this crew.
Then he saw that she was blushing like a tomato. She had a funny littl
e silver thing in her hand. A strange knife.
“What’s that?”
It disappeared into her jeans. “Sorry, Miriam!”
Miriam went to her. “This is Leo. The three of us run this club together. Leo’s the granddaughter of General Patton.”
“He was my mother’s cousin.”
He threw on the shirt, started buttoning it. “General Patton, Lord Baltimore, Morrie McClellan, and Prince Philip. Not to mention Ben Stiller, who was in your place earlier. Lotta names to drop.”
“Lord who?” Sarah asked.
Miriam smiled at her in a way that told Paul she was being made to shut up. Which meant that Miriam’s story about Lord Baltimore was a lie. Which meant that she felt a need to conceal the origin of her wealth. Interesting.
“We’re going home,” Miriam said, her voice rippling.
“We are?” Leo’s eyes flickered toward Paul.
“I’m in love,” Miriam shouted. She raced back to the bed, threw herself at Paul, kissed him hard, then flounced back on the bed, pulling him with her. She said, “He’s the best lover in the world.” Then she was convulsed with laughter, peeking out from beside his big chest at Sarah and Leo. “Am I being naughty?” she chirped.
“Naughty is not the word,” Sarah purred.
“What do I do?” Leo asked.
Paul said, “I think we fell in love.”
Sarah suddenly smiled. “I’m so glad.” Then she said to Miriam, “Miri, it’s four. Can I let the staff go?”
“Is the house clear?”
“Ready for the nighthawks.”
Miriam lay back in his lap, her hands folded behind her head. “Leo, tell Luis to get the car ready.” She gazed up at Paul. “I’m bringin’ my baby back home.”
The two women went out without a word.
“They seem kind of upset.”
“Pets don’t like surprises.”
“Am I a pet?”
“You, my dear, are a great big beautiful man!”
They got dressed and went out of the little room, then through the kitchen to the rear of the club. The Bentley limousine he’d seen on Houston Street stood there gleaming in the predawn glow.