The Pleasure Trap (21 page)

And even though her quick attitude seemed insufferable when they were in the thick of the storm, he found that he loved that about her as well. She wanted no one else to possess him. Know him. Have him.

He loved her.

Graham Walker was in love. Glancing back at her again, he smiled into his drink.
I love her.

“Hi there. Long time no see,” the redhead said with a conspiratorial wink as she walked past him to stand at the bar. “White wine spritzer, please.”

Once her drink was handed to her, she gave him another hot look before crossing the room to take her spot by her husband's side again.

Graham frowned into his drink and looked at Kingston and Davin as they shared another glance. “Is there something the two of you want to get off your chest?” he asked.

“There sure is,” Kingston said, surprising Davin, who choked on the frosted glass of beer he was drinking. “Right this way.”

More than curious, Graham followed the men until they reached Kingston's office.

“Did my wife...
hire
you?” Kingston asked as soon as he shut the door.

“No,” he answered simply, before turning to Davin. “And yours either.”

They both looked relieved.

“Those three are thick as thieves, and when Aria mentioned what you do—”

“
Used
to do,” Graham corrected him smoothly.

“It's been nagging me. That's all,” Kingston said, dropping down into the chair behind his desk. “Aria and I had a rough patch a year ago and... I just needed to know.”

“Me too, man,” Davin added. “You're strutting around here and all the women are sneaking glances and licking lips and all kind of shit when their husbands aren't looking.”

Graham actually smiled. “Understood . . . with me
strutting
and all.”

The men all laughed.

“We better get back before we're missed,” Kingston said, rising to guide them back out of the office and down the stairs.

When they reached the bottom of the steps, the redhead was just walking out of the guest bathroom. She stepped in Graham's path before he could follow the men back into the den. “I definitely need to give you a call and make an appointment,” she said.

“I'm out of business,” he said, attempting to sidestep her.

“Hello,” Jaime said, walking up to them to place her hand on the small of Graham's back.

The redhead did not miss the subtle hint. She instantly stepped back. “Cheers to you,” she said, raising her drink in a salute before she walked away with one last look at Graham over her bare shoulder.

“You are determined nobody else gets this dick, aren't you?” he asked before taking another sip of his seltzer.

“Glad you know it,” she said, taking the glass to have her own sip before she walked over to rejoin her friends.

Graham hated to check his watch when they hadn't even been there for a solid ten minutes, but the crowd of mostly forty-something couples was not his speed. He had outgrown the steady bass of the club, but sitting around discussing the latest TV shows or the newest wonders at their jobs was a mindfuck for him—and not in a good way.

He walked onto the porch with his drink and looked out at the tranquil neighborhood. He'd much rather be on Jaime's couch—or his—watching a movie or catching up on the latest news.

“Renee, would you check the chicken for me?”

He looked over his shoulder in surprise, and through the blinds covering the window he saw Jaime, Renee, and Aria moving about the kitchen. “Why didn't you hire a caterer?” Jaime asked.

“Because I'm no Jessa Bell with a need for the absolutely perfect dinner party.”

“Do not bring up
that
bitch.”

“Yes, she's gone, and this last year has been fucking fabulous without her living in Richmond Hills.”

“Can you believe she opened a business to help women catch their men cheating?”

“Skanky pot meet skanky kettle.”

“
Exactly
.”

The ladies all laughed.

Pleasure turned from the window and moved down to the other side of the porch to try and avoid eavesdropping.

“Now why would I need a caterer when I have my two best bitches to help a sister out,” Aria said, using tongs to move string beans from the oven roaster and onto a platter.

“Well, this bitch could've saved the work, ordered in, and enjoyed dessert with my man later,” Jaime said.

Graham turned to walk back into the house.

“Your man?” Aria said distastefully.

Graham froze.

“Yes, my man,” Jaime said with a sharp edge to her tone.

“Do you think it's the best idea to try and make a man-whore a husband?”

Graham flinched.

“Who said anything about getting married?”

“I hope the fuck not.”

Graham's jaw clenched as he sat the glass on the chair and descended the stairs. He didn't stop until he climbed into his Jag and eventually pulled away without looking back at Richmond Hills at all.

Jaime

 

 

That had been two days ago. Those two days hadn't seemed like forever until the last twenty-four hours of it was spent in the hands of some lunatic claiming to know him and once love him.

Graham's head hung lower than it had during the whole ordeal.

She had called. He hadn't answered.

Now he was facing death. He would never get to tell her he loved her. Never even get to tell her how her flip comment to her friends had stung him to the white meat.

“God's will
always
will be done, motherfucker, no matter how much you run and hide.”

Graham closed his eyes as tension radiated across the breadth of his shoulders. He was sick of her. Sick of being tied up. Sick of not knowing when, where, and how it all would end.

Just sick of the shit.

“We were meant to be, and we will be, whether here on earth or burning together in hell.”

He raised his head and eyed her as she tilted her head this way and that while she crouched lower until their eyes were level.

“I knew from the first moment we—”

“Fuck you,” he told her coldly.

She jumped to her feet quickly and snatched up his face with a tight grip on his chin. “You said fuck me when you ran and hid from God's plan like a little bitch.”

Graham's eyes widened a bit.

“God's will always, always, always will be done.”

“You thought
He
wouldn't lead me right back to you?”

“Quinn,” he said, more a statement than a question.

“Try again, motherfucker,” she snapped.

Graham sat up straighter in his chair. “You try again, bitch,” he said coldly.

She whirled again and pulled his cell phone from her back pocket. “No, the bitch is Jaime,” she snapped. “And a begging bitch at that. ‘What did I do?' ‘Why are you mad?' ‘Answer your phone.' ‘Call me.' ‘I love you.' Whine, beg, whine. Dumb bitch.”

Graham's gut clenched. Jaime had texted that she loved him? She'd never declared that to him before. And he had held back on his own feelings for her.

“She never has to beg me for anything,” he stressed, wanting to push her to reveal herself. “When she wanted me, she got me . . .
Quinn
.”

“You swear you're so fucking smart... but I'm smarter, you dick-whore,” she snapped, turning to fling his cell phone across the room and into the fireplace.

“Not smart enough to know when a man doesn't want you,” he volleyed back.

She froze for a few tense seconds before she reached behind her for the knife and unsheathed it to point at his chest. “It doesn't matter what you want. It never did,” she said, cocking her head eerily from side to side as she also rotated her wrist.

“Your crazy is showing...
Quinn
.”

“Maybe if I take away the one thing you love so much, you could love me instead, the way God wanted it?” she asked.

Her voice was so low that he had to read her lips to be clear on what she said. As he did, his heart filled with fear for Jaime. “Hurting her won't make me love you,” he said.

She rocked her head three more times—right, left, right—before she lowered the knife to aim at his dick. “You don't love her any more than I thought you loved me,” she said. “
That
is the only thing you love.”

Graham's instinct was to close his legs to protect his dick, but he couldn't because the binds had his legs spread. His
privates
exposed. Unprotected.

She reached up with her free hand and snatched off the ski mask to throw at his chest.

Graham eyed her. He hadn't really believed he was right until he looked into the face of the one woman from his past who he had loved like a sister. The one woman whose ties to him were not based on sex. The woman he really hoped it would not be.

“Why are you doing this, Quinn?”

“God's will be done,” she said, using her thumb to stroke the carved wooden handle of the knife.

“Don't be mad at my dick... Quinn.”

“Yours ain't the only dick I've seen, trust me,” she said with a giggle that quickly escalated to a full out laugh that was high pitched and inappropriate. Maniacal.

Graham was looking into the face—the poster child—for crazy. He felt a true chill to his bones.

Gone was the woman he thought he knew.

She raised the point of the knife to her own throat, pressing it so that she pierced the skin just enough for a dot of blood to emerge as she ended her laugh with a whimper and a tear fell down her cheek. “Why don't you understand? Why don't you get it? What is wrong with you?” she asked, her face truly incredulous.

Graham kept his face blank. “Wrong with me?”

She raised her free hand and lightly smacked her palm against her forehead as she closed her eyes tightly with a grimace. “I told you I loved you, and you fucking moved. Changed your number. Said fuck your friendship. Fuck your pussy. Fuck everything,” she said, with another chuckle that was more tears than joviality. “You took everything I offered you on a platter and shitted on it before you kicked me to the curb and ran like a scared little boy.”

Graham hardly recognized the woman before him. He watched, almost in fascination, the disturbing swings in her mood and her affect as she continued her tirade of how he'd denied her love. She became unhinged right before him.

“But God is so good because he led me right back to you
again
,” Quinn said, turning to ram the knife into the back of the sofa as she ran her fingers across her scalp and grabbed her hair into her fist. “God knows what is in my heart. He knows our destiny. Nothing could keep us apart. Even when they locked me up in that place . . . that . . . that bad, bad place I figured out if I just played along they would set me free and we could be together.”

Graham felt a moment of sadness. This woman was nothing like the friend he once had. This woman standing before him was her truth, and the woman she'd presented to him was a façade. She hid her crazy well.

“You don't even appreciate everything I did over the last year to find you. Like pretending to give a fuck about what book your mother's book club was discussing.” Quinn reached for the hem of her shirt and jerked it over her head and down the length of her arms. “But you don't give a fuck that it took me months pretending to be her friend just to keep up with your life. Just to know where to go to find you. To watch you. To see you.”

Graham stiffened, not giving one solitary damn about the sight of her breasts in the sheer white bra she wore. This woman had latched onto his mother like a tick or a leech. “My mother better be okay,” he warned her even as he felt his threat was futile.

Quinn eyed him with wide eyes. “I never hurt your mother, Pleasure. She likes me. She really likes me,” she said, with an odd lilt to her voice. “I'm sure she told you about her new friend Janice.”

Pleasure's shoulder slumped. She had. He'd had no idea his mother had invited crazy into her life because of him. His parents had heard of Quinn but they'd never met her, and it would be no hard feat for her to pretend to be somebody else.

“See, when she actually led me right here to you, when she dropped a package off at the front desk, that was nothing but God.” She kicked off her shoes before she worked her hips back and forth as she took off her jeans. “You were back in my life again. I would sit outside your building and play in my pussy while I dreamed of lying in your bed with you. For months. I love you so much.”

“And for the longest time not one woman came to your apartment. No one,” she said, kicking away the jeans like they offended her. “You fucked plenty of women. I know. I followed you. But not one ever came to your apartment. I was special because I knew where you lived, just as God wanted. Only me. Just me. Until that bitch.”

He shook his head a bit in disbelief. “You were the only woman I didn't want to hurt, Quinn,” he lied. “I fucked everybody else, but you were the only one I cared about.”

In nothing but her sheer lingerie, she came over to stand between his open legs. “Liar,” she snapped harshly, spittle flying from her mouth and landing on his face. “And that's why you are going to die, because you were made for me and
only me
but you just won't be obedient.”

“If I didn't care, I—”

“Shut up with your lies!” she screamed, the veins in her neck distending.

And then she smiled and laughed a little as she turned this way and that before him. “I paid good money for all of this,” she said, smacking her ass and reaching up to squeeze her breasts. “Me and God used to laugh at how you didn't even recognize me.”

He leaned back from her.

“What's the matter, Graham, feeling fooled again?” she asked with a light laugh. “Even now, you think you know, but you don't. Like I said, you so fucking smart you dumb.”

He frowned deeply.

“Best surgeries and hormones a man can buy, ain't it?” she said, pulling down the front of her panties to reveal a small keloid-covered scar on her shaven pubic area. “I finally became the woman God meant me to be. Hallelujah!”

Graham went still as stone.

“Allow me to reintroduce myself. I am Quinn, formerly known as Lionel, bitch. Did you miss me?” she asked. More high-pitched laughter filled the air.

Graham went numb. He had to. If he reached for his first emotion at the mere mention of Lionel, he would let anger and hatred push him to hurt himself to try to get free to hurt him. Or her. Whatever. None of it had ever made sense, and now he was really lost.

Quinn was Lionel?

Graham hadn't seen any signs of his molester in the person before him, but he continued to study Quinn's face, looking for some sign that what she said was true and not just more of her crazy.
But how would she know about Lionel? No one knows.

“When my parents moved, I thought that day in the closet was the last time I would ever get to be... close to you.”

Graham's eyes filled with menace as a coldness that scared him began to chill his body. It was awareness that he was capable of murder. Without the restraints and the last of the drugs inhibiting him, he could easily snap Lionel or Quinn or whoever's neck in half and then drop the dead body to the floor with less care than a hunter gives its animal prey.

Quinn lightly stroked her scar as she walked across the floor to stand in front of her reflection in the windows. “All my dreams came true,” she said in hushed tones with a sad smile, as a tear raced down her cheek. “I always knew I was meant to be a little girl and look at me now. I put every bit of that insurance money from my father's death to good use. What you think?”

Graham was releasing short and heavy breaths in a valiant attempt to release the angry pressure building inside him as he lowered his head and glared over at Quinn until his expression was vicious.

Quinn looked over her shoulder at him. “My parents had no right to choose for me whether I was a boy or girl. They had no right to cut my hair and shove me in boy's clothes because I had a dick and a pussy,” she said, her eyes glinting with her madness. “It was my body, and God blessed me to be able to choose. I was one of the lucky ones.”

“After what you did to me, do you really think I give a fuck about anything concerning your worthless-ass life?” Graham chewed out, his chest heaving as he strained against the ties until his feet and hands felt numb.

“Oh, cry me a fucking river,” Quinn snapped in annoyance. “Boo hoo fucking hoo. I touched your dick and made you touch mine. Big deal. You try having your cousin force you to suck his dick—
and swallow—
for a year straight before he finally decides my ass was better than my mouth for another two.”

“So because your cousin made you his fuckboy, that gave you a right to mess with me? Huh?” Graham roared, his heart pounding loudly like furious stomps on wooden steps.

Quinn swiped away her tears and laughed. “I shoulda made you my fuckboy when I had your little soft ass in that closet,” she said with a taunting and malicious glint in her eyes before she licked her lips with the swiftness of a lizard's tongue.

“Try me now,” Graham warned ominously.

She laughed. “I don't want you. You are no longer a part of God's plan for me. So you gotta die,” she said with simplicity and a shrug of her shoulders.

“I can't tell if you've been stalking me since I was six.”

Quinn laughed as she walked back over to him. “Is that what you think? Man slut, please. There were plenty of little boys before and after you. You were not on my mind until after I got my surgery and the Lord saw fit for us to meet again. And at a gym of all places. Once I recognized you, I just knew that it was fate and that you were the man I prayed to the sweet Lord above about. You didn't see me but I saw you. I followed you. I watched you day after day until I found just the excuse to be near you.”

Graham tried to maintain his grasp on sanity by fitting the puzzle pieces together. The clues he'd missed.

Quinn suddenly joining his art class.