At Any Cost (6 page)

Perfect, soft, bouncy tits. Absolutely stunning. Magnificent. His heart thudded in his chest as he nuzzled into her, then eagerly took a petal-soft nipple between his lips.

Fallon's hands fumbled at the button of his pants. In the next second, he felt her reach into his black briefs, and her small, warm hand gripped the iron club that was his cock. The sensation was shocking—almost blinding. He grew even thicker in her hand, fearful that he would not be able to control himself. “Oh God …” he groaned desperately into her ear. “What are we doing?”

“I have to,” she said quickly, like it had become a matter of life and death that she have him.

“You deserve better … this is a … closet ….” The last shredded strands of good sense were thrumming, about to sever. If she didn't have the presence of mind to stop them and demand better—a bed, for instance—it was going to happen. Against his better judgment. Against every precept he'd erected for himself. Against all odds.

“I want this. Now. Please. Please ….” She slid her hand over the shaft of his cock and began to pump in slow, methodical strokes that felt absolutely fucking fantastic. “I swear I won't ask for more. Just this.”

He swallowed her words, catching her lush lips with his. His palms slid up the impossibly smooth, soft skin of her thighs until her skirt was bunched over her hips. Tom blindly felt the soaked crotch of the panties, drawing out a moan of pleasure from them both. Fallon needed to be treated gently, but he could no longer be gentle. The new life he'd built based on rigid control and strict denial of all pleasure was a far, distant shore. He'd gone into combat mode. Adrenaline was pumping, and out of control lust was focused entirely on her. Both panting, their bodies were pressed together, hell-bent on fusion.

“Take 'em off,” Fallon breathed, her mouth still grinding against his. “Just pull 'em down.”

Tom took her at her word and peeled the panties down over her hips, so they fell onto the cold cement. Fallon shifted to step out of them, kicking them aside with her witchy looking stilettos. Tom slid his hand between their bodies to the plush wetness of her cunt, and he slid two fingers inside. Fallon shook violently, welcoming him with hot, wet, squeezing slickness. “God, yes,” she muttered against his mouth.

Fallon shoved his pants and underwear down. He no longer cared where they were; he just had to be inside her. Desperately and urgently, with a keen focus he'd never known before. Effortlessly he lifted Fallon and shoved her against the wall. She wrapped her legs around his waist. The engorged head of his cock slid against the hot wetness. The contact was electric. With a slow, gentle thrust, he slid the head of his cock inside and they both froze. Fallon's abs contracted with the shock of his smooth entry. She tightened around him eagerly, her arms and legs holding him tightly. Trembling with his own effort to hold himself in check, he kissed her again and slid all the way home.

Oh, God. Nothing could have prepared him for it. Not memories, not wishes. For one blazingly beautiful moment the past evaporated—only this existed. Fallon's heart fluttering and pounding in her chest, her soft, hitching breath, her thin arms around his neck, soft lips trembling against his. She was so exquisitely soft and slick and sweet that he felt like tears might well up in his eyes. Unacceptable. His body jerked and he buried his face in her neck to hide his expression from her; he didn't want her to see just how lost he was. He began to pound inside her. Hot, hard, deep strokes that were only possible because she was so wet. She was kissing his face, kissing his mouth, breathing half-muttered words that could be prayers or curses, but which he finally realized were his name. Over and over again.

Oblivious to everything but her own careering pleasure, Fallon cried out, and Tom, with the very last vestige of sanity, covered her mouth with his so they wouldn't be heard somewhere out there in the real world. As her tongue touched his, he felt his own inevitable orgasm, which he'd been fighting for what felt like hours, days, years, well up with impossible intensity. He could no longer tell if it was an emotional or physical sensation. Too intense for mere pleasure. Sheer piercing pleasure shot through with terror. When it thundered through him, it felt like a rolling avalanche. All the memories, the missing four years of unanswered desire wrenched everything out of him. It was like running a marathon. In the emptiness formed a great gathering peace that left him dazed and exhausted.

When he came to, Fallon was gently kissing his face, stroking his hair. He willed his heart to slow from the frenzied gallop. He locked his knees by sheer force of will and let his weight prop their shaking, sweating bodies against the wall. Slowly he eased out of the hot clasp of her body, not quite ready for the contact to end but aware of the clock ticking. She staggered to the ladder, and her head flopped backward against the hard rungs, as if she didn't have the strength to hold it upright.

Tom cringed. “You okay?”

She laughed a low, giggly laugh. “I am fucking amazing.”

She looked amazing. Her face was flushed pink and gold. Her new complicated hairstyle was mussed the way he liked it. Her skirt was hitched up over her hips, the pink lips of her pussy visible. Come dripped between her pale, shapely thighs.

“No condom,” he said. He didn't carry them—he had no reason to since he'd given up sex.

“Pill,” she replied.

Tom began to pull up his pants and try to force himself into some semblance of a normal mindset. He noticed Fallon's pretty mauve panties on the floor and handed them to her.

“I could stay like this forever,” she said silkily.

“We're in an office building,” he reminded her, only half joking.

Fallon giggled and worked on getting herself together, stepping into her panties, pulling down her skirt.

Tom waited, tensing, for the self-hatred to come back, for the countersurge of disgust he expected. It was like he'd made a deal with himself that he only just now acknowledged—in order to pay for breaking his own rules, he'd live with the inevitable regret and disgust and rage for not being able to exert control over himself.

But the disgust didn't come. He felt only great, sweeping peace.

At least for a moment.

He had felt that sweet, searing sense of well-being on Paxos after making love with Fallon … but the darkness would creep up on him, tackle him when he wasn't looking.

He expected the same thing to happen. Maybe not right this minute, but soon … and much worse. Here, he had to see her every day. She was his job.

Remember this
, he told himself.
Remember this feeling because you will have to live on it for the rest of your life.

Fallon pat her hair into its normal smooth arrangement and affected a neutral facial expression. “How do I look?”

She looked like a beautiful woman who had just been extravagantly loved by a man. She glowed. Roses bloomed in her cheeks. Everything about her was soft and happy. “You are the most perfect thing I've ever seen,” he replied honestly.

The pink in Fallon's cheeks deepened with embarrassment, which he found endearing. “I meant my clothes. Do I look normal? I feel like I must look like a disaster.”

“You look great,” he said. “You ready?”

She nodded and then in an awkward, adorable gesture, she grabbed his hand and squeezed it. After what they'd just done, the action felt unbearably intimate. He smiled at her and then opened the door, her hand naturally dropping his as they entered society once again.

Did that really happen?
In the state of blissful shock in the backseat of the SUV, Fallon's head was dazed and her body pulsed as if Tom touched her still. She felt the wetness between her legs and shut her eyes, reliving every sensual, crazy, frantic second of it. Oh yes. It was very real.

She felt precious after being deprived of human contact for so long. Her crazy parents, the brutal, exhausting campaign and constant media scrutiny, her brother—the constant fight between love and guilt that she struggled with every day over him—and her career that demanded more than she had. It felt depleted, like she was stalled, perpetually running behind, being buried beneath the garbage of her own life. She barely had five minutes in any given day for herself. But this … this was just for her. Sex with Tom served no greater purpose; it was not meant to assuage any lingering guilt or accomplish anything practical. It was a marvelously selfish act.

And it had felt
so fucking marvelous
. She'd not felt anything like it since Paxos. Not just the exquisitely sharp pleasure which left her weak but the connection, being seen and chosen and cherished by another human being.

Paxos intensified that emotional aspect—the act had a patina of familiarity, of completion. Maybe reconciliation. Not that she harbored hopes that they were now a couple—he'd seemed a little standoffish right afterward—but some of the questions had been answered. He had cared about her. He still did. And the sexual
crash-bang-pow
was still fully in effect.

The SUV stopped at the curb in front of her building on G Street. Tom swung open the bulletproof door for her. She stepped out and looked into his face, startled to realize that he was locked into Secret Service mode.

In the elevator, however, he put his hand at her neck and pulled her into him. He kissed her with a savoring sweetness that made her melt against him. “I don't know who I am around you,” she murmured softly just as the doors opened.

Tom had no reply, which was just as well because the elevator doors opened.

Fallon straightened her shoulders and forced her face into calm, pleasant blandness, trying to get the sex vibe off her as she strode into her office.

As soon as they were in her office, Adam Johnson appeared in her doorway. This was unprecedented. Adam Johnson was the most senior partner at the firm, the direct descendant of the two-hundred-year-old firm's founder. Fallon had never met him; she recognized him only by the enormous portrait that hung in the grand hallway. The warm, dazzled glow Tom had imparted inside her began to perceptibly cool: Adam's presence could only signify something huge, and possibly awful, and so Fallon attempted to brace herself even as a dull, sick ache lodged itself in her stomach and around her heart.

“Miss Hughes, may I have a word?”

“Of course,” she replied, forcing her voice to remain neutral and confident. Meeting Tom's eyes, he discreetly stepped out of her office.

Her spacious office suddenly seemed too small. Fallon felt trapped, like a rat in a cage. Adam Johnson said, “Miss Hughes, while you were on your errand, the police were here to see you.”

“The police?”

“Indeed, they executed a search warrant.”

“Search warrant? For what?”

“I do not know, Miss Hughes. But I assure you that it was an unpleasant intrusion to the other employees of Johnson Sloan Pruitt.”

That was the first moment she understood the police had executed a search warrant on
her office
. Her laptop computer was gone. It had been on her desk this morning and now it was gone. Vanished. Her file cabinet was open, though files were still color coded and in place as far as she could tell in her state of accelerating confusion. “Oh my God,” she murmured. She felt like she was sinking. Her legs were dissolving beneath her.

“We have made certain allowances for you, but if you are involved in some sort of malfeasance, Johnson Sloan Pruitt will not continue to employ you.”

She sank into her chair. “Mr. Johnson, I have no idea about any search warrant. I don't understand what is going on. Do you have a copy of the search warrant?”

“I believe they left it in the custody of the office manager, Ingrid Breyer.”

“What are they accusing me of?” she asked desperately.

“I do not know.”

“Mr. Johnson, I can't imagine what this is about. I've done nothing wrong.”

“If I might offer one suggestion, Fallon, you might employ a criminal attorney. As an attorney yourself, I am sure you are aware that once probable cause has been established for a search warrant, an arrest warrant is not far behind.”

“I did nothing wrong,” Fallon said again, feebly. Her body hurt; every muscle in her body was pulled tight as power lines. Alan Johnson blinked slowly, like a turtle. His patrician bloodlessness set her teeth on edge.

“As I said, Fallon, we will give you a few days to get this straightened out, but we will not continue to employ an attorney who cannot foster trust among our clients.”

A fine perimeter of sweat had broken out at her hairline. She feared she might start to cry. Thankfully, before the tears came, Alan Johnson exited Fallon's office. She looked helplessly to Tom as he came inside. “I did nothing wrong, Tom. Nothing.”

“Let's find the search warrant and see what you're being accused of.”

Fallon's mother had been an actress before she married Preston Taylor Hughes. She had been celebrated in both film and theatre and had won two Academy Awards. It was an inherited ability to act that enabled her to walk calmly through the unnaturally silent office to find Ingrid Breyer.

Since Fallon's first moment of employment at Johnson Sloan Pruitt, Ingrid's response to Fallon had been no more complex than that of bigotry or racism: she hated her on sight. To Fallon, the animus was mystifying. At first she attributed the conflict to political differences since Ingrid was an outspoken, proud Democrat while Fallon was from a Republican family, but that theory was disproved when one of the other associates was seen holding a Rush Limbaugh coffee mug and Ingrid flirted with him like a fourteen-year-old girl. The hostility was very definitely about Fallon Hughes and nothing else.

Fallon found her on the telephone. Ingrid's indifferent gaze flicked over Fallon, dismissed her, and then went back to her phone call. She chuckled softly. “You have no business even considering the idea,” Ingrid murmured. “You have such a lovely bosom.”