The Set Up (27 page)

The tomboy might be inside her still, but she’s definitely all woman.

Everything about her is sweet and I want to lick, suck, and taste every part of her.

She whimpers again, and this time she pulls away from my mouth as if searching for the air to breathe that I’ve stolen.

I know how she feels.

I should slow down.

I just can’t.

My lips aren’t ready to leave her sweet skin and I dive for her neck.

Her head falls back and I drag my mouth down her throat, licking, nipping, and sucking along the way.

Her fingers dig into the muscle and bone of my shoulders. “We should stop,” she pants.

My body tight against hers, I straighten and look her in the eye. “Let me come inside.”

Trying to catch her breath, she manages to say, “You have to go.”

Another press against her—my body, my lips, and I think my soul. “I want you so much.”

“Jasper, I want you too. More than anything, I want you, but you have to go. Everyone is waiting for you back at your place.” The voice of reason rings in my ear, all soft words and warm breath. And fuck if that doesn’t make me want her even more. “The police are probably still there. You should get back before they leave.”

Reality rings loud.

The police.

My fucked-up situation that I don’t want to dirty her with, and just like that, I push her up and back over the wall. This is not the time to let anyone inside of me, especially someone as untainted and good as Charlotte. The truth is she might want me, but I’m not good for her, not right now.

On a sigh, I drop my forehead to hers. “I’ll call you,” I say again, but unlike the last time I said it, this time I’m more than certain it won’t be soon. First I need to get all this shit over with the police.

“I know you will.”

I force myself to push away from her.

She grabs my hand. “You broke your promise.”

My gut twists.

“You said you wouldn’t kiss me again, and you did,” she says with a smile.

I take her chin in my hand and look her right in the eye. “That, Charlotte Lane, is simply not true.”

She gives me a disbelieving smirk and places her finger over my lips. “You said you don’t lie.”

“I didn’t. Let me clarify.”

“Go on.”

“I never said I wouldn’t kiss you again, I said that if you wanted me to promise I wouldn’t, then I wouldn’t. There’s a difference.”

“You got me there.” She smiles softly, opening her door. And then once she’s brought the bike inside, she leans against the edge of it. “Good night, Jasper.”

In the midst of all the shit going on in my life I shouldn’t be smiling, and yet I can feel my grin widen. “Good night, Charlotte.”

I will call you . . . as soon as I can.

DETOUR

Charlotte

I DISCOVER I
don’t need coffee to wake me up.

My life is upside down and still the feel of his body against mine is all I can think about. The promise of the depths of pleasure almost too much to imagine. Places I know I’ve never gone but want desperately for him to take me.

The faintest of light streams through my bedroom window and my eyes pop open. Lying here, restless, unable to sleep, I’m thinking of him.

I know I should get up. My to-do list is endless. I have to look through the help wanted section to find a job, any job, so that I can pay my rent next month and have a little money left to eat. I have to go to the pharmacy. I have to make certain all of my files are untouched on my computer. And then somehow tell the police they mixed up my papers with Eve’s, but first I want to go through her things thoroughly and catalog them. I’m not a detective, but perhaps something will lead to who might have wanted to kill her. I could also see if those emails she sent Cole are still in his in-box.

So yes, I should get out of bed. Start the list that might take me days to complete, but I can’t because the memory of the sound of Jasper’s groan slides through me over and over and all this pent-up desire I feel for him needs to find a release.

I’ve masturbated before, but I’ve never done it picturing a particular man’s face. Never done it because I had to. Because I felt like I might explode if I didn’t.

And that’s just how I feel now.

Lifting my T-shirt and sliding my panties down, my hand finds my clit already wet with desire for him. Quickly spreading my legs, I rub small circles around myself over and over, applying more and more pressure with each pass. Sweet tension curls inside my belly. His face flashes before me. The way he looks at me like I’m the only one in the room. I think of how I like it when he looks at me like that. How my skin feels beneath his touch. How the stubble grows on his face as the day goes on.

Breathless, aching, body burning for release, I’m on the edge but can’t get over it. I find the need to go farther than this and I start to fuck myself with my fingers, something I’ve never done. Faster, and faster still. In and out. Circling my clit with my other hand. In and out. Circling my clit again. I picture him doing it. Him wanting to bring me to the brink and make me tip over.

Writhing now, my body burns with a fire that only an orgasm can douse.

His touch, I imagine it against my naked body. His rough hands on my skin, all over me. His wet tongue drawing a line down my neck, down my chest, and oh, yes, right there. Then I picture his hard cock in my hand, thick and long just like I remember seeing it. However, this time it’s not in his hand, but rather in mine and ready to plunge inside me. Like that, yes, just like that. My body tightens and tenses. He’s here with me. My hands are his. The thought makes my clit jump and spasm, and then finally a bolt of pure pleasure radiates through me as I dive into the darkness. Into the light. Into the abyss that is Jasper Storm.

I shake in silence, gasping, feeling boneless but nowhere near sated. Only he can do that for me. Sadly, this is something I already know.

Play with fire and you’ll get burned.

Still, I can’t help myself. I’ve had sex with only four men. Two of them were while I was in college. They were my age, nothing special. Sure, I felt a mild attraction to each of them in different ways. I’d called them boyfriends, but they were never quite true boyfriends. That’s when I scratched college boys off my list. The sex was mediocre at best anyway. Done quietly in dorm rooms while roommates slept. Nothing to write home about. Not that I had someone to tell anyway. My aunt would never understand. She’d loved one man her entire life and never wished for another.

The other two were slightly older men I’d met while they were staying on the island. The sex was better but not great. One was separated and the other divorced, or that’s what they told me anyway. They were both transients just looking for sexual companionship, and that worked for me, but they, too, left sooner rather than later. One to return to his wife; the other because he didn’t want to be tied down to one person. That’s when I crossed older men off my list.

Young, single men didn’t come through the bed-and-breakfast very often. So I gave up. On men. Relationships. Love. After things sputtered out twice in college and two more times after that, male companionship wasn’t at the top of my list.

Remembering that, remembering how I seem to drive every man in my life away, I try to push Jasper aside.

Listen to Jake,
I tell myself. He wasn’t lying.

Even if you get him, you’ll drive him away too—you’re too needy and it makes you unlovable.

With that sobering thought, I hop out of bed and struggle to start my day. To keep busy, I grab my laptop and sit on the couch with the list of things I know regarding the explosion.

Which is still very little.

When I first arrived in Detroit two months ago, it took some time to get the courage to go to the storage unit. When I opened it, I was overwhelmed: there were hundreds of boxes of files, some dated, others not. Laneworth Automotive had been in business nearly ten years before it burned down, and every piece of paper that passed through it appeared to be in that storage locker.

Work at
The Detroit Scene
had been demanding, so I hadn’t spent as much time going through the boxes as I would have liked.

Time no longer the issue, I begin searching for the names of people who investigated the plant explosion. I try not to look at my phone while I’m performing this tedious search. I try not to wonder why my phone is not ringing as I open file after file until I find what I’m looking for. It doesn’t take long before I’m lost in my work. Having jotted down the name of the fire marshal at the time, as well as who the DA and the police commissioner were, I go in search of finding where they are now. The Internet offers an avalanche of information and by noon I know the police commissioner of twenty years past has moved to California, but I’m unable to find anything further about him. I also know Harold Klein was the DA back then, but he has passed away. And finally I learn that the fire marshal recently retired and now lives in Florida, but has an unlisted phone number. A big fat zero is what I have.

Soon enough I find myself doing something I know I absolutely should not be doing—logging into Cole’s email. My email account at
The Detroit Scene
has been disabled but I’m still able to log in as him. He has yet to change his password. Probably doesn’t think someone with as
naïve a skin
as mine would ever do anything like that, or he simply just forgot.

Once there, I notice that all three messages from Eve are still in bold font—Cole has yet to read them, or any of his recent emails for that matter. Either too busy, not at work yet, or maybe really distraught over Eve’s death. Then again, for the last two months he has depended on me to read his emails, print them out for him, and let him know when he needed to log in. So it probably totally slipped his mind.

Nervously, I open the first email. It is date-stamped 8:15 p.m. last Friday. She was still in the hotel room with me then. I start to read it. Immediately, I want to close out of it, but I don’t. Eve starts the message by addressing Cole as
sir
. My best guess is it’s meant to be some sort of dominant/submissive acknowledgment and not a courtesy.

They were still playing sex games.

Eve’s first line only confirms what I had suspected about why we were staying in the hotel, and she sounds angry that Cole was unable to be there that night.

I know for a fact that he had to go drop his wife and kids off at their lake house more than two hours away on Friday night and was planning on returning to Detroit early Saturday morning for the groundbreaking ceremony.

Moving on, she tells him she’s going to be very bad and will gladly accept whatever punishment he feels he must deliver to her for disobeying him. However, breaking their rules is necessary.

Rules?

What were their rules?

The dirty talk must have progressed to more.

Finally, she closes with a statement that rocks me. She tells him she is not suspending the exposé, but rather is going in search of the material needed to finish it.

Exposé?

Had Cole planned to print negative information about Jasper?

Was that the story she asked him for in the personal email of his that I had previously read? It had to be! And he must have given it to her, which is why their relationship had progressed.

The exposé had to be what Eve was talking about to me that night. And then I can only assume that even though Cole killed the story, she planned to write it and post it despite the fact that she had been told not to. Perhaps she didn’t know Cole was being paid for his services, or knowing Eve, she probably didn’t care. She seemed to have her own vendetta, and as petty as it seemed to me, she was obviously driven by it.

Moving on to the second email, I read it fairly quickly. This one contains the pictures of Jasper’s mother’s house and a short dictation of the conversation Eve had with Mrs. Storm. Surprisingly, it is the same information she relayed to me. There is no closing to her email. She was simply pushing information his way.

Finally, I open the last one. It is time-stamped 2:45 a.m. on Saturday. The message reads, “This is what you missed out on tonight.”