Just What the Truth Is (21 page)

I turned the knob and pushed the door open. Micah was sprawled on the ground, surrounded by papers. I blinked my eyes rapidly, trying to get used to the suddenly bright light. “What’re you doing? How long have you been up?”

Micah’s head jerked up. “Oh! You startled me.” He jumped to his feet and rushed over to me, then rubbed his hands over the sides of my arms at a rapid pace. “Did I wake you, honey? I’m sorry.” The words raced out of his mouth.

My eyes had finally adjusted to the light, and I looked around the room, noticing an empty coffee carafe. It looked like a twelve cup. Maybe fourteen. “Since when do you drink coffee?”

He shrugged and shifted from foot to foot. Not like he was nervous, more like he couldn’t stay still. “I get more bang for my buck than with the tea this way. It’s been helping me stay up.”

“How long have you been doing this?” I asked, and then I shook my head. It didn’t matter. “Micah, it’s like one in the morning or something. Can you stop for the night and come to bed?”

Those now familiar arms wrapped around me and pulled me close. I could feel his heart racing, and his breath was hitting my neck in an unusually fast clip. “I don’t think I can sleep just yet.” His head snapped back, and he looked at me. “Hey, can I show you something? I think I’ve figured out how to settle this thing before the trial starts on Wednesday, but I need a second set of eyes.”

I dipped my head forward and kissed his soft lips. My hands found their way to his cheeks, and I stroked his beard. “Sure. But just remember that my last involvement with anything litigation related was in moot court during law school, and the only thing I know about your case is what you’ve told me and what I’ve heard people say here and there around the office.”

He nodded, the pace so unnaturally fast that his head bobbed like one of those ridiculous dolls they hand out at baseball games. “Yeah, okay. So you know how our guy denies that he had an offer to sell the company until
after
the plaintiff had already told him that he wanted to terminate their partnership? But the plaintiff, our guy’s former business partner, claims the offer came in like a month before he ever talked about leaving and that our guy hid it from him and then conned him into selling at rock-bottom price so our guy could turn around and sell it to the buyer and pocket the whole windfall?”

“Uh huh.” That much I knew. Our client had created some sort of irrigation supply company with one of his classmates from graduate school. Ten years later, they were doing really well, and the business partner wanted to get out of the industry. They came to an agreement on price, and our client bought his partner out. A month later there was some shift in the industry, and a bigger company came in and made our client an offer worth ten times as much as what he had spent to buy out his partner. Our guy sold, his former business partner heard about the deal, and litigation ensued.

“So every letter and calendar entry is dated at least a month after our client had bought out his partner. Plus the new owner confirms our timeline. But we keep getting tripped up because of this e-mail we found when we were pulling all sorts of communication during discovery. We were required to disclose it, so we did, and it’s been killing our case ever since.” Micah dropped to the ground and sifted through the papers, finding the one he wanted and then handing it to me. “See? It’s dated thirty-two days before our client bought out his partner, and it says that he was approached by the buyer to sell the company. It even has the offering price. The plaintiff says he wasn’t told about this and, if he had been, he’d have waited a month and sold right along with our client so he could make more money.”

“Okay. So what’d you find?” Honestly, I questioned whether Micah was even capable of logical thought in his current state. I had never seen anyone so hopped up on caffeine.

“Well, the subject line in that e-mail has always bothered me. Supposedly the client was writing to his wife with this great news about how they were going to make all sorts of money. And the subject line is….”

I looked at the e-mail and read the subject line out loud. “One more thing.”

Again with the bobblehead nod. “Yeah. That’s weird, right? I mean, they’re about to make enough money to retire and travel the globe or buy a mansion, or, hell, both, and that’s just one more thing? Doesn’t make sense.”

“Okay. I can see that, I guess. But the body of this e-mail is pretty clear, Micah. So’s the date. And if it came from your client’s computer….”

Micah sat down and patted the spot next to him. “True enough. But it still bothered me, so I met with the IT guys last week and talked to them about their system. Turns out they back everything up at the end of the week in an offsite location. I asked them to find the backup tapes from this time period and send me all the e-mails our client sent or received. Take a look at this.”

He handed me another e-mail. It was from our client to his wife, just like the previous e-mail. It had the same date, time, and subject line. But the body was completely different.

“This is about how he’s going to be working late so he’ll have to meet her at this dinner, or whatever, that night,” I summarized.

“Exactly! Same subject, same date and time, totally different body. So I got to thinking, maybe someone messed with the e-mail after he sent it.” His eyes were wide with excitement, and his pupils were dilated. I needed to hide the coffee maker.

“Is that possible?” I asked calmly.

“On Outlook it is. I tested it. You can go into your sent e-mails and edit one of them, then save it, and it shows up with the same date and time and no way to know that it was changed after the fact. But that doesn’t change anything in the backups they make, because they’re stored apart from the regular system.”

Well, Micah was jittery and high on caffeine, but it sounded like he had made a major breakthrough in the case. Of course he had. The man was a genius. It was one of the things that attracted me to him, along with his drive and determination. But that didn’t mean I was going to watch him work himself into the ground.

“I think you’re onto something. Of course you still need to figure out how someone got into our client’s e-mail so they could change it, but it seems pretty clear that this e-mail he supposedly sent to his wife isn’t real.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was going to do next,” he said as he looked around the room, clearly trying to decide where to start with that task.

I took his hand in mine and tugged him toward the door. “Not tonight, you’re not. You’ve already done the hard part. Tomorrow you can figure out the other details. Right now, you need some rest.”

“Honestly, Ben, I think I’m too wound up to sleep.”

Well, that wasn’t going to dissuade me. I got us to the door and turned off the light. “Let me worry about that.” I turned back and kissed him gently. “I think I’ve picked up some good ideas on how to relax you over the past few months.”

Chapter Twenty

D
ESPITE
his predisposition to work constantly, Micah followed me without any further complaint. By the time we got to the bedroom, his chest was pressed up against my back and he was licking my ear and groping whatever parts of my body he could reach.

“Six,” he mumbled into my neck.

“What?”

“We’ve been seeing each other for almost six months.”

He was right. Our first dinner together had been in early April, and it was already mid-September. In some ways, the time had flown by. But in other ways, when I looked back at my life back then, it seemed like it belonged to somebody else, like I had been somebody else. I guessed in some ways I had been somebody else; I had been the person everyone expected me to be. And now, I was me.

I kept walking until we were in the bathroom, and then I twisted around and pushed Micah’s sweatpants down and yanked his T-shirt off. I hadn’t bothered getting dressed when I had gone searching for him, so that was all it took for us to be skin to skin from head to toe and everywhere in between. Our lips met, and the kiss was instantly intense. Micah’s tongue invaded my mouth, his hands grasped my ass, and that wiry body ground against mine.

“I love you so much,” he panted into my mouth. “Want you all the time.” His hips thrust forward. “I have this reoccurring fantasy whenever you walk into my office where I close the door, drop to me knees, and… oh, hell, I’ll show you.”

And with that, he lowered his body until he was kneeling on the bathmat, and then he nuzzled my groin. He burrowed his nose in the crease of my leg and then dragged it over my balls, inhaling deeply. “Love how you smell,” he whimpered before continuing his exploration. His tongue joined the party, licking my sack and the base of my cock. Eventually, he stopped licking and started sucking, taking first one round orb into his mouth and then the other.

I groaned and clasped his head, holding him close to me. “Micah, ugh, touch my dick,” I begged and then trembled when he did just that, his fingers surprisingly gentle when he traced the vein on the underside of my cock.

He moved his head up and licked my glans with light swipes, ratcheting my arousal higher, but not enough to get me release. I increased the pressure on the back of his head, urging him forward. “Suck me. Please.”

I heard him chuckle before his mouth opened and he swallowed me down, surrounding my dick in wet warmth. He kept his lips gripped tightly around my dick and moved down until my crown was nudging the back of his throat. Then he pulled back up before dropping forward again.

“That’s so good.” I looked down and met his eyes. His lips were stretched wide around my cock, saliva pooling on the sides, slicking his way up and down my dick. His blue eyes were hot with lust, and his hand was wrapped around his own dick, stroking in time with his sucks on mine.

The visual alone almost made me lose it. But that wasn’t how I wanted to cum, so I pushed his head back. He groaned in frustration, which made a new surge of lust shoot through me. I loved how much he enjoyed going down on me, how much he enjoyed every aspect of our sex life. And he wasn’t alone. I was endlessly grateful that his house was on a big lot, because he regularly made me cum so hard that I screamed loud enough to shake the windows.

“I want you inside me,” I explained as I turned around and leaned over the counter, tilting my ass up in invitation.

“Fuck, you’re hot.” Micah’s hand caressed my firm globes. Then he stood and blanketed my body with his, kissing my neck and shoulders.

I rested my cheek against the countertop and closed my eyes. Micah retrieved the bottle of lube we kept in the shower. I heard the cap snap open seconds before a slick finger circled my puckered opening. My legs instinctively spread wider, making room for my lover. One finger pushed inside me, and then Micah’s hand was on my lower back and his cock was at my entrance. We had stopped using condoms the day our tests came back clean, which helped add a certain level of spontaneity to our sex life.

“Ready?” he asked breathlessly.

“God, yes.”

He pushed in slowly, not stopping, not speeding up, just stretching my channel with his thick dick until his balls were squished up against my ass. He hesitated for just a moment, and then he pulled out and pushed back in again, faster this time. I moaned, letting him know that was what I wanted—a hard, fast fuck.

Micah seemed to understand, because that’s exactly what he gave me. His hands gripped my hips as he relentlessly pounded into my body. I loved that feeling, the slight ache inside mixed with the unparalleled pleasure. I enjoyed topping Micah, but being on the receiving end was just as good.

“I’m close, honey. Can you touch yourself?” That gravelly voice was tight with barely tethered restraint.

I pushed back to make room between my cock and the counter, then snaked my hand underneath and circled my dick in a firm grip. It didn’t take much stimulation, not with Micah dragging his dick over my prostate as he pummeled my channel.

“Micah! Oh, God, yes!” I shouted as I shot strings of ejaculate onto the vanity and floor beneath me.

“Ungh, yeah,” he moaned, keeping hold of my hip with one hand and my shoulder with his other as he pushed all the way inside me and stilled.

I looked into the mirror and gasped at the sight. Micah’s head was thrown back, the veins on the sides of this throat were bulging, his mouth was hanging open, and his eyes were clenched shut. If ever there was a picture of ecstasy, it was my lover in the throes of an orgasm.

When his dick stopped pulsing, he collapsed on top of me, his forehead resting between my shoulder blades as he gasped to get air into his lungs. I enjoyed his weight on my body, so I didn’t ask him to move. Eventually, both of our pulse rates slowed, and we got up.

“Okay, that was step one in my plan to relax you. How am I doing so far?”

He rubbed his hand over the top of his head. “Step one? Fuck! How many steps are there in this plan of yours, honey? ’Cause I’m an old man, and any more than what we did just might kill me.”

I put my arms around his waist and gave him a tight hug. “Don’t worry, old man. I’ll give you enough time to recover. You start the bath and I’ll get us some water. We need to get some hydration into your caffeine stream.”