Nightfire (21 page)

So instead of ripping her clothes up or tossing them to the floor, she left the closet as it was, neat and organized.

All of this was so easy to walk away from.

Her hands started trembling again as she pulled a card out from a hidden pocket in the lining of her purse, since their rooms were routinely checked. Most of the girls had the number memorized and so did Consuelo, but she loved the card so much she kept it because it was so beautiful.

A normal visiting card, cream-colored, with only a number and a stylized bird in flight.

Freedom
.

There was a rumor that one of the people at the other end of that number was Chloe’s brother. If that was true, Consuelo could only hope he wouldn’t blame her for the attack on Chloe. Whatever the man’s decision, he was now her only hope.

She punched the numbers in and waited, trembling. When a quiet female voice answered she said, “I’m in trouble. Can you help me?”

Chapter 15

La Torre

Coronado Shores

“A
re you hungry?” Mike asked. “I never fed you.”

Chloe was in a sex coma. She barely understood what he was saying. More than hearing the words, she felt his deep voice reverberate in his chest and, since she was lying naked on top of him, reverberating against her chest, too.

“Are you?”

That luscious sound was words, presumably meaning something. She should be paying attention to them, instead of relishing those utterly male bass tones.

Mike rubbed his chin against her hair. He had the beginning of a five o’clock shadow and her hair caught in his beard, pulling a little. The tiny bite of pain brought her back to reality.

He’d said something . . . food!

Chloe was just about to answer that food was the last thing on her mind when her body spoke for her. Her stomach rumbled loudly.

He laughed and, after a second, so did she.

“Apparently, I am hungry.” And she was—ravenous. Wow. All of a sudden. This explosion of entirely new feelings had masked it. She lifted her head from his chest and smiled into his eyes. “What’s on offer?”

Was that voice coming out of her mouth really hers? It was sultry, husky. Mike smiled, took her hand and moved it over his groin.

His penis was still iron-hard, slicked with their juices. Chloe lifted her eyebrows. She was exhausted but he seemed to have this nonstop battery. She didn’t want sex right now, but still . . . her hand curled around him instinctively. She felt him thicken even more, moving in her hand.

Like Prince Charming kissing Sleeping Beauty on the lips and bringing her to life. Only the other way round and using another part of the anatomy.

Mike’s breath came in on a hiss and his eyes narrowed. The sound felt like pain, and a couple of hours ago, Chloe would have lifted her hand, startled, wondering if she’d hurt him.

But now she knew better. She wasn’t hurting him.

Now her face creased in a knowing smile.

“You’re not going to get fed anytime soon if you keep that up,” he said, the corner of his mouth lifting.

“Men really are different from women,” Chloe mused, looking down at her hand caressing his penis. She pumped her hand slowly, down, up, down, and felt blood coursing through it. It was dark red again, the enormous bulbous tip a plum color.

His penis was the most fascinating thing in the world. She’d been to the Tate, the Louvre and the Uffizi and nothing there could compare to this.

“Well . . . yeah.” Mike arched his hips a little, to put himself more deeply into her hand. His tone was—
duh. Yes, men and women are different.

“I mean, we aren’t quite so . . . blatant in our desire. It’s not so easy to tell that we’re turned on. And, well, we have a turn-off switch, too. I’m not that experienced, but you don’t seem to have that switch at all. I’m all tapped out and you’re still raring to go. Sort of like the Energizer Bunny.”

It was a feeble joke, but she did expect him to laugh. Instead, his face grew somber and his hips stopped moving. He placed his hand over hers, stopping her movements.

“I—” he began. “It’s not—” He stopped, clenched his mouth tightly. Some strong emotion was working in him. His throat moved with unsaid words.

How Chloe understood that, needing to say something but not being able to. How many times she’d wanted to say things and choked them back down her throat? If human anatomy were like plumbing, her throat would be clogged with black, unsaid words.

She lifted her hand away. Mike wanted to say something and couldn’t. It was cruel to distract him by sex.

She sat up and covered herself with the sheet. It wasn’t modesty. Mike had feasted on her breasts, he knew every inch of her. But instinct told her that this was a moment for talk, not sex.

His throat clicked and she took pity on him. She picked up his hand, examined it. Actually his hand was almost as fascinating as his penis, and had been the source of almost as much delight. His hand was definitely a sex organ.

And beautiful.

Large, rough, calloused. Immensely strong, big veins popping on the backs. The epitome of male hands. Utterly different from hers.

She curled her fingers through his. A gesture of affection, rather than sex. Meant as support, not arousal. “There’s something you want to say, Mike?” she asked gently.

He looked away, jaws clenched, then huffed out a breath and swiveled his head back to her.

“Yeah. There is.” He stopped. His throat worked, muscles moving. This was obviously hard for him. Chloe understood hard. She waited.

Another long breath whooshing out of him. His fingers tightened around hers. “I guess now’s as good a time as ever to say this. It’s hard because it’s not pretty. I-I’ve slept around a lot, Chloe.”

She smiled. His beautiful face was so solemn, so serious, as if imparting a state secret.

“I know, Mike. Ellen and Nicole told me, and, well, Harry, too. They, uh, they were quite clear that you . . . messed around. A lot.”

Messing around.
It was a delicate way to put it.

“But not in the last six months.” He said it belligerently, as if she was going to deny it. “Not since the day I met you.”

After that, he just shut down. The silence in the room grew heavy, then oppressive. He didn’t say a word.

His body was speaking, though. Every muscle was in high relief, a body in complete lockdown. What he wanted to say was painful. It was entirely likely he didn’t even have the words for it.

She laid her other hand on his chest, right over his heart. His thumping heart.

“You have something to say, Mike. I can tell. And it looks like it’s hard for you. But I’m not in a hurry. Whatever it is, it can wait. Maybe tomorrow—”

“No!” He breathed in, said it more quietly. “No. I need to get this out.” He looked down at his lap, at where his rigid penis reached almost to his belly button. So stiff you’d have to pry it away from that flat, muscular abdomen. “So here it is. I have a strong sex drive. Which most people think is a good thing. I’m male, relatively young, healthy. Strong sex drive kind of goes with the whole package, right?”

He was sweating. A drop of perspiration rolled down his cheek and dropped on his chest. There was such tension in him, like a tuning fork quivering. Chloe had no idea how to relieve him. Her only gift to him could be stillness, and attention.

She nodded.

“Wrong.” The word came out through clenched jaws. “In all these years, it’s never been good, never been clean, healthy fun. It—it didn’t feel healthy, it felt sick. It was more than an itch I had to scratch. It was like—like on a regular basis some terrible poison accumulated in my body and I could only expel it through my dick. There was this tension that would build and build and I simply couldn’t stay put. It was like being possessed. I’d just have to go out and do something about it. And without even planning it, I’d end up in some bar. Exactly the kind of bar a woman looking to hook up with someone goes to. I don’t know . . . I think maybe I gave off some kind of special vibe or smell or dog whistle or something because five minutes in the bar and some dame comes up to me. Regular, like clockwork. Five minutes, ten, and a woman’s drinking my beer and telling me her address. I learned a long time ago to recognize a working girl. Paying for it was going too far, even for me. But anyone else was fair game as long as she wasn’t married or seeing someone else. That was another line I drew. But that leaves a lot of women in the game. I was like this grenade and someone had pulled a pin. So I’d grab the fuck du jour—” He stopped, fixed her in his intense light blue gaze. “Sorry, but that’s exactly what it was. I can’t whitewash it.”

He was vibrating beneath her hands. She kept her voice quiet and low, exactly as if speaking to a distressed animal. “It’s okay, Mike.”

He shook his head sharply. “No, it’s not okay. Not even close to being okay.” He drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “So . . . I’d go off with the woman, mostly to her house because I didn’t like anyone in my place. And we’d fuck. And fuck and fuck. I could keep it up for as long as I had to. Once, I heard we lost two guys I’d trained with. IED in Iraq. Went out, found myself three women and fucked for twenty-four hours straight. I was like in a daze. I’d had too much booze, yeah, but it wasn’t that. It was like—like if I drank enough, if I fucked hard enough, long enough, I wouldn’t—”

His throat clicked again. His entire body now was one huge stress signal. His eyes were red, breath wheezed in and out of that barrel chest.

“Die,” Chloe said, and he jerked.

“What?”

“If you fucked hard enough, long enough, you wouldn’t die.”

It was the classic addiction story. God knows, she’d heard enough of them when volunteering on the hotline and at the shelter in London. The means changed but the mechanism never did. Drugs, alcohol, sex. Those were the classics but there were others, too. Some had foot fetishes, some had to spend money until they were bankrupt and still kept on, some cut themselves . . . she’d seen it all and she’d heard it all.

The story was always the same, when you dug down deeply enough. Addictions were like a wall between you and the void. Until you discovered that the addiction
was
the void.

Chloe’s body couldn’t handle alcohol well. Otherwise, she wondered whether she would have become an alcoholic, simply to fill the massive emptiness at the heart of her life.

Mike’s case was so clear. He’d seen his family being slaughtered when he was just a young boy. They were dead and he was alive. He did what he could to keep from remembering that, every second of every day.

“No, of course not. That’s not it at all.” Agitated, Mike threw back the covers and stood up. Every muscle was tense. His veins stood out, as if his body was even now pumping blood to the extremities, readying himself for battle. “I fucked and drank so I wouldn’t die?” He made a sound of disgust deep in his throat. “That’s crazy. I’m not crazy.” He pointed a trembling finger at her, eyes wild. “I’m
not
crazy!”

“No, of course you’re not.” Chloe pulled her legs up to her chest and put her arms around her knees. She understood the reaction. She wasn’t afraid of Mike, not in any way, but instinctively, her body was curling itself up in the presence of a strong, agitated male. “I didn’t say that. You did.”

Mike paced the room, long, fast strides. He pushed his hands through his hair, which was already mussed from their lovemaking. It stuck up in sweaty spikes. He was even more aroused than before. It seemed his entire body was in agitated movement except for his penis, lying like a rock against his flat abdomen.

He was buzzing, agitation almost visible on his skin.

Chloe watched him pace back and forth, wishing she could help, knowing that she couldn’t. He had to work this out for himself. Everyone did. It was the one big lesson she’d taken away from her work in crisis centers and from her own therapy. You could be helped, but the real work—well, you had to do that yourself.

Mike was resisting.

“I wasn’t afraid I was going to die if I didn’t fuck. That’s crazy talk. But there was something there, something really dark and uncontrollable. This . . . thing would build up in me and I’d just explode if I couldn’t get it out. Except in battle. Dodging bullets took me right out of myself. In combat, I’m the Man. Cool as ice. Fucking Sniper-Man, with nerves of steel. I once hunkered down in a hide in my ghillie suit for three days to get a shot. I knew I’d have a window of about a minute in those three days, so I didn’t eat, drank very little, always kept on eye on the scope, and didn’t sleep. Didn’t budge an inch. My heart rate slowed down. Didn’t give my dick a thought. Came back Stateside and it went up and stayed up.”

“I’m really sorry about your family, Mike,” she said quietly, and he stopped with a jolt and swayed, as if shot in the heart.

Had she overstepped the bounds? For a second, she wondered. He looked like a wild man, with his hair sticking out all around his head, red eyes holding back tears, humming with tension.

“You know?” His voice was rough, hoarse.

She nodded.

Mike was frozen for a minute, two. Then he scrubbed his face briskly, as if just waking up. When he lifted his hands from his face, his cheeks were wet with tears.

“Oh God.” He sat down abruptly on the side of the bed next to her. The mattress dipped with his weight. He pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I see it. Almost every night. I see it, over and over again. Sometimes I just hate the thought of trying to sleep, because then I’ll see it in my nightmares, you know?”

“Yes,” Chloe whispered. “I know.” Her hand lingered over his naked shoulder, then landed, lightly. She could feel him quivering under her hand, as if his very flesh couldn’t stand to contain his thoughts. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Mike stared at the ground for so long she decided to get up, give him some space. His hand caught hers. “Don’t go.”

She settled back down, waited.

They sat there like that, Mike staring at the ground, for almost an hour. Chloe didn’t mind. She was used to waiting. Sometimes it seemed that her entire life had been waiting. And, in a way, it had. She’d been waiting for this.