Honey Moon (8 page)

Thank all and any deity who watched over fools that there were no monsters in sight, just strong-looking men and women smiling and chatting in every corner. A shiver went through her, nerves raw and skin itching, and she swallowed hard. She’d curl into a whimpering ball later
.
Difficult as it was, despite the horror churning within over what had almost happened, she—girl with agenda—needed to snap herself together.

The woman wearing a bright pink hat who’d held the door tsked. “Caffeine is a powerful addiction, young lady. Is it really that bad?”

She forced a smile. “It is. Um…maybe I could buy you a cup? I’d love to talk to someone.”
And borrow your wrist phone to access the Net after pretending mine’s broken
.

If there wasn’t an ‘arrest and interrogate’ flag beside her name yet, there would be after she clicked on links to the latest terrorist sites, connections with the means and know-how to guide her toward purchasing what she’d need to get on that shuttle. The Net was free worldwide, but there wasn’t a single web strand of cyberspace that Big Brother didn’t have eyes on.

The woman returned her smile and nodded. Jenna headed for the automated machine while her new friend grabbed a table.

Twenty frickin’ dollars for two small coffees? Guess she hadn’t been in a café in a while. She sighed, glancing at her wrist phone as she scanned payment. Her jaw dropped.
Am I hallucinating? What the hell?
Way too many zeroes. She blinked hard, then again, but the number didn’t change.

How? Banks never made mistakes—not in this day and age.

Occam’s razor—the theory that the simplest answer was most often the correct one—still held true, and a jolt of warmth hit her. Sam had transferred over a hundred grand into her account. Most likely all he had. The sort of thing a kind but doomed man would do.

The heat within her birthed into a sizzling ball of starlight, crackling from head to toe.

She set one of the coffees down at the table of a shabbily dressed man, nodded and hurried on to join the woman with a pink hat. She’d tell her she’d seen the light regarding addictions, but hoped she could borrow her wrist phone to get online. Pretend that hers wasn’t working.

After all, who needed a cup of Joe, or any other guy not named Sam, for that matter. Jenna had more than enough energy to fuel herself for forty-eight hours of relentless preparation then some.

Chapter Five

In his cubbyhole of a single’s apartment, Sam powered up the com-desk and wished he lived in a future where he could hit an app that’d function to hook a caffeine drip directly to his arm. So much to do, and he’d forgotten to grab a cup before coming home to a depressingly deleted lair. On the fifty-sixth floor, in the low-rent skyscraper on the outskirts of the metropolis he’d taken a suitcase to five weeks ago, and not a single bean of salvation from fatigue in the dump.

With a heavy sigh, he tapped in the complicated security code and opened a fresh page on his blog. The sun was going to rise in less than six hours, and launch day would begin. He had little time and much to do to implement Plan B.

The problem? His head whirled. Emotions in turmoil with the schoolboy funk of feeling as if an arrow had hit, smack dab into his chest. He’d perform better if he took a moment to yank out the stench of Cupid, allowing himself to concentrate on becoming a hardened criminal without distraction.

A search pulled up hundreds of images. He picked a pair of swans standing nose to nose, heads dipped with long necks forming the sappy image of a heart and feet posed on crisp snow beside a dappled lake. He loaded the image and began to type.

Do I—a male in my prime with potentially thousands of lovers—have the
cajones
to admit I wish to evolve—to pattern my future like the lowly three-to-five percent of the animal gene pool? That the aftermath of a ten-minute encounter showed me the path of a monogamous Mexican gray wolf is my true desire? A French angelfish is another example, as is the black vulture. I’d not ever be shunned by my fellow bone-pickers because I’d never betray the partner who shares my nest.

History has shown few humans—and even fewer animals—have a mate-for-life mentality ingrained in their genetic code. As of three hours, twenty-two minutes ago, I can honestly say I no longer fantasize if there’s anyone able to make me aspire to sign my name on that short list.

Love at first sight—is it possible?

I sit and reason and my heartbeat stutters—hell yes—and my dick squirms—not sure, but fuckin’ why not?—while flashes of memory push my blood to return south. I grow harder and harder, and logic becomes more and more of a struggle as cock agrees with heart.

In the lesser times of yesterday, I was a simple, solid XY type who stood firmly disillusioned with sons, brothers, fathers and uncles everywhere. Not once in my enlightened past was I duped to believe that Santa Claus, a God born of a virgin, fresh maidens awaiting my virtual dick in a paradise or halls of Valhalla or any of the romantic notions sentimentalists have yammered about for eons were possible. I’ve belched and laughed in a reclining group of males, sports on the twenty foot ceiling and wall screens, and platters heaped with charred meat doused with globs of heart attack inducing—genetically modified to be a murder weapon—Red Savina habanero sauce. Fists at the ready to defend my right to scoff at the parade of commercials, I thought myself immune to things that lesser schmucks fall prey to, as portrayed in so many lovey-dovey ads on the sidelines of televised events.

Love at first sight? Nah. I’m not wrong in thinking that’s bull. It took more than my eyes drawn to a curvaceous form I could lift and hug in one arm. It—that instantaneous and hopeful and wondrous attraction labeled love—required first whiff, first words, first touch, first kiss and first time with my back to a restroom wall and her legs clamped round my waist.

Ungodly provocative, she smelled of vanilla, strawberries and cream accented with specks of nutmeg. The color of tree bark, overturned sod, melted dark chocolate, her beautiful eyes spilled with emotion—doubt, lust and intelligence.

Her fear—downcast gaze, white knuckles, trembling lower lip, hand fumbling for a weapon—sliced through every defense I’ve built within thirty years of life as a guy destined to posture on the pinnacle of the food chain. Her worry made…
makes
me yearn to be a better man. I gave in to a worried urge to spank her. Not that hard, but the awareness I should do more, shake her and not stop until common sense reminded her she really should pepper spray the fuck out of a stranger with his back to the only exit, went poof as my cock grew achingly more insistent.

It should have required the stamina of an overused bull elephant, but it was damn easy to hold my growling dick in check because that fear, her uneasy acceptance I could do as I will, made the myth of love at first sight futile and potentially impotent if the attraction isn’t—I mean
wasn’t—
reciprocated.

If it—sex—was only an itch, a means to make a living or a way to deal with an aroused guy without getting bruised then flee to shower and forget, I wouldn’t be pondering the validity of love sonnets in this moment.

In
that
moment—my hand close yet not plundering, my cock swollen and drooling but confined—I waited. Kept the brutish impulse to strip clothing and feast with love at first sight upon every exposed inch of her reined in, until she took the lead.

Once she did, it was too late to care about clothing in the way. I can still feel in my bones—my favorite one throbbing anxiously as I sit here and remember her confident grasp and stroke of my cock as she freed me from my boxers. Joy, joy, joy was mine when her fingers told me she was in as deep lust as I.

The glue that took the encounter past impulsive male-female chemistry, beyond a fast and furiously hot fuck, was when I jerked my gaze from her hand teasing my thrilled cock to see the intelligence sparkle from those sweet brown eyes. That spark within her expression—confirmation she knew what she wanted and that it was me—rocked me to the core, and she fucked my brain before she satisfied my dick. I was amazed to find myself humbled before I even penetrated her.

Love at first touch was a two-way street and I could tell the reason she’d been frightened, the purpose for the encounter no less, was no longer something she thought about as she gave consent. I felt the wetness in her panties, muscles quivering in her thighs making it clear when she said yes she offered much more than slam-bam-thank you-move on. Her caress of my cock promised every dream of true love an experienced man, suddenly rendered a schoolboy, could imagine.

I hitched her skirt up farther, tore off panties and held skin so soft and silky I worried I grasped her too tightly. My rough hands must have imprinted on, bitten into the deliciously rounded cheeks of her ass that fit so ably between my sweating palms. I drove in and out of moist, tight heaven, holding her weight with ease, and she mewled, made erotically soft gasping noises against my chest and into my mouth. Sweat dripped down my back, her wetness clung, squeezed and held to me as we took rutting to a level I’d never felt before.

I never wanted it to end.

Inevitable climax is a manic drive all life pulsates toward. Serotonins exploding and neurons rocketing with ecstasy as hormonal fluids and semen gush free is the end goal, yes.

But in that unique encounter, I spent myself in magical bursts of mental doors opening into the realm of actual soulmates. A red-blooded, thickheaded man is typing the following words with all earnestness. I ejaculated into not only her, but the land of happy-ever-after. The chemical draw, covalent bonds formed when I plunged in balls-kissing-ass deep, then those magnetically charged bonds bending as my cock withdrew against her clamping muscles, left me wishing I could freeze time. Hold to a fucking moment of spontaneous combustion, an impossible attraction of fitting together that I’d never achieved before.

I yearn to recapture that moment when two bodies became as close as they could possibly be without devouring the other. Before my erupting cock and her contracting warmth and spasms warned the cliché is true, that all good things must cum to the end.

And once the haze of satisfaction lifted, damnable reality intruded to rip apart bonded souls from both sides and within the rainbow. Grounded here on a lonely Earth, I must find her—have her again. See if it—
she
—is as real, life changing as I think she is.

Sweetheart—are you out there? Reading these words? I want you. Your lips on my mouth, my chest, my cock, my ass, then resting over my heart. I want to hold and have and have and have you safely in my arms for a lifetime. I want to cherish you. Until death…

Jesus, Dexter, snap out of this.
He jerked his hand up to slap himself upside the head and slumped. He was parted from the woman whose name he didn’t know, and not by death or a prison cell—yet. There wasn’t a damn thing a good man would do about it. His hands wilted over the com-desk as his dick followed suit to sob against his thigh.

What the fuck was he playing at? Christ almighty. His dick wept for a love at first plunge that had lasted all of ten frickin’ minutes? He snorted and scrubbed his face, wiping away tension while his hand shot out to delete every maudlin word.

His stomach clenched as he erased all but the picture of the pair of swans. Beneath that, he slapped up a disclaimer saying sorry, but he was closed to comments until further notice. For the first—
fuck it, shut up
—time he logged out of his blog so he’d not even know how many readers attempted to comment.

He couldn’t leave the woman clued in to this unsubstantiated conspiracy any means to persuade him he should risk her neck as well. Super-idiot had to fly solo. He glanced at the time—12:05 a.m.—and damn soon. Activating every spyware safety protocol he knew, he began surfing.

Two fourteen a.m. and Sam closed out. He hadn’t paused until he had what he needed, despite his growing thirst. He pushed to his feet, walked two feet and opened the mini-fridge. Bypassing the glittering bottle of Cristal, fresh in 2030 from the polluted vineyards of France, he grabbed the second most expensive item in the place—a quart bottle of Russian vodka.

Some things never seemed to change. Pockets of snotty Americans pretended as if borders to Mexico and Canada still existed, shoddy product from Asia filled discount stores worldwide and the priciest, most lethal alcohols came from the UKE, United Kingdoms of Eurasia.

Cool and sharp, the gulp of liquor slid down to hit his gut with a splash of acidic courage. He set the bottle on top of the mini-fridge and wiped his brow. His hands clammy, a shallow inhale filled his lungs with the stench of fear. The musk of a moose about to have a pack of wolves—mated pairs working side by side—launch into his hindquarters then his throat, settled about him.

He sighed. He had many regrets, and the most recent one was washing his face and hands before the numbing hours online. He raised his right hand beneath flared nostrils, drew a sharp breath and swallowed hard. Not a trace, a single sugar and spice whiff of the most beautiful woman, remained on the fingers he balled into a fist.

Stop thinking about her, asshole.
He had to forget women, the woman, the one, love at first sight, taste, feel—tight and wet and perfect…
shut up.
He grasped the bottle and downed another swig. Time to concentrate on the guy—Roger Moore, who resided at 1515th St, 76-18—he’d mentally drawn a red circle around, after scanning his wrist phone to take a large chunk out of his primary bank account.