Justin (3 page)

Braden could afford to be optimistic. He’d paired off with Elisa not long after Justin’s return. Justin was glad for him, but their happiness gave him a lonely feeling. Justin had lived with a woman on Sirius—Shela—for fifteen years, and they’d been lovers and best friends. He missed her like crazy.

Justin needed to change the subject. “What’s it like for your lady, living with you and your jokes all the time? Who ever heard of a cheerful Dom?”

Braden grinned. “Hey, she loves me. Anyway, isn’t that what level twos do? Spank and laugh?”

“Fun and games. Whipped cream and furry handcuffs.”

Braden shook his head. “Boring. Fake bondage.”

“Bondage-Light,” Justin corrected. He pushed himself out of his chair. “I’m outta here. Judith has cut me off, and I need some sleep.”

“Take it easy out there,” Braden said, expression serious. “Brianne can’t always be around to cover your ass.”

“Don’t worry. I learned my lesson.”

Like hell he had.

Braden watched with a skeptical look as Justin said good night to Judith and got himself out of the bar. Justin had taken the apartment next door to the bar—with Judith’s help—a tiny place, but there he could shut out the world and get some peace.

Justin went inside, stripped off, showered, dried himself, and landed facedown on his bed. The excess ale sent him quickly to sleep.

He dreamed of a patroller with pretty eyes and sexy ankles threatening him with a gun loaded with whipped cream. He was naked, and so was she.

The whipped cream dripped coolly across his back and down his body. He felt a hot tongue licking and licking, teeth on his ass, as she ate the whipped cream from him, dollop by dollop.

Then the patroller with the big brown eyes turned him over and smiled at him, right before she wrapped that beautiful mouth around his cock.

She suckled and stroked, tongue tickling the underside and driving him crazy. Justin got harder and harder, his hips rocking as she suckled him. Gods, it felt good.
Harder, baby, harder.

Justin wanted to taste her in return. He’d spread her legs, dribble the whipped cream across her pussy, bury his face in her, and lick her clean.

In his dream, he heard the click of handcuffs, felt the familiar velvet of his lined ones around his own wrists. She put the loaded whipped cream gun against his temple.

“No, Shareem. I do this
my
way.”

Her way meant squirting whipped cream all over his chest, then licking down to his cock. Swirling her tongue around the tip, the heat of her mouth closing around him. Squeeze, suck.
Yes
.

Come. I want to come.
Justin wanted to mark her with his seed, so she’d know she belonged to him.

And then she’d arrest him. She already had him in cuffs. Maybe she’d swat his ass, making it sting, before she cooled it down with whipped cream. Then she’d lick him again. He’d like that.

Justin would break free, and he’d catch her when she tried to get away, and do it all back to her . . .

A heavy buzzing cut through his dream. What the fuck? Maybe the whipped cream gun was overloading.

Another buzzing, sharper, more insistent. It shattered the dream like glass, and the pleasant sensations vanished into smoke.

Justin opened his eyes. He found his hand around his throbbing cock, his head pounding just as hard. He peeled his aching hand from his penis and reached for his hangover pills.

Another buzzing. The front door.
Shit.

Justin rolled out of bed, pulled a tunic over his nakedness, and stumbled into the front room. He slammed the door open. “What?”

He’d expected Braden, or maybe Rees. What he got was his sexy patroller, Deanna, who walked right in past him.

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“Come in.” Justin said to the open door. “Make yourself at home.”

Deanna looked around the small living room strewn with Justin’s clothes and other junk. Shela had always yelled at Justin to clean up, but without her to motivate him, Justin had lost interest.

“You
live
here?” Deanna asked.

Justin let the door slam. “No, I stand in the middle of this room for the hell of it.”

Deanna peered into the corner kitchen then at the alcove that led to his bedroom and bathroom.

“It’s very small.”

“It’s claustrophobic. But I didn’t have a choice.” Few wanted to rent to Shareem. He’d been lucky to get this.

“My superiors came down hard on me about you,” Deanna said. “Getting a call from on high to let you go embarrassed them. So, they’re taking it out on me. Unless I can prove I had good cause to arrest you, my promotion is off, and I might even be demoted. I make another mistake, and I’m out.”

Stupid Bor Nargans. They trained their patrollers to be major pains in the ass, and then got mad at them for doing their jobs?

“Not your fault, sweetheart,” he said. “Shareem are shitheads. Everyone knows that.”

She shot him a wry smile. “I don’t think that will be good enough for my superior.”

Her voice, even agitated, was sexy. Maybe she really did have whipped cream in her stun gun.

“What do you want me to tell you? That I went there to climb through a woman’s bedroom window to ravish her senseless? So you can arrest me for real and make it stick?”

“I’m not going to arrest you at all. I only need to prove that you were let off because of favoritism, not incompetence on the part of the patrollers. Particularly incompetence on the part of Patroller First Class Deanna Surrell.”

Justin never thought he’d feel sorry for a patroller, but with his mind full of the dream, Deanna’s dismay aroused Justin’s sympathy.

In the three months Justin had been back on Bor Narga, the patrollers had followed him, carded him, harassed him, watched him. They’d done the same to his friends. They were a body of condescending, sneering bitches in coveralls.

Deanna’s uniform was tight on her body, and again she wore her dark hair in the severe bun all patrollers did. But with her eyes holding anger and worry, she looked almost human.

Justin gathered up clothes from the couch, dumped them in a corner, and gestured to the battered sofa. “Sit down.”

She sat but scooched to the end of the couch when Justin sat right next to her.

He laughed. “Are you afraid of me?”

“No.” Her eyes betrayed the lie. “I have my stun gun.”

Justin went hot. “Did you load it with whipped cream?”

“What?”

“I had a dream about you last night. You and furry handcuffs.”

Now panic warred with her interest. “You put me in handcuffs?”

“No.” Justin stretched his arm across the back of the couch, letting his fingers dangle an inch from her shoulder. “
I
was in the handcuffs. I guess deep down I wanted to play some games with you.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“In my dream, you locked my hands around my bedpost, and you bit my bare ass. Then you squirted whipped cream all over my cock and sucked it off.”

Deanna’s eyes went wide, and he sensed her body warming. “I could arrest you for even saying that to me.”

“Little tease. Did you bring real handcuffs? Maybe I could turn the tables and put the cuffs on you.”

“I’m warning you, Justin. I can throw your butt in jail just for talking to me like this.”

Justin leaned closer, his blood heating in a way it hadn’t in a long, long time. “Then my friends in high places will get me out again, and you’ll be back here in my apartment trying to save your job. Full circle.”

Her anger flashed. “That doesn’t mean you can get away with anything you want.”

“Sure as hell sounds like it to me, sweetheart.” Justin moved his fingers closer to her, letting them rest a fraction of an inch from her coverall. “If it makes you feel better, it’s programmed into Shareem that we can’t touch a lady until they give us permission. We can cajole and talk and promise, but until you say yes, we can’t do anything.”

Deanna let out a breath, warm on his hand. “That’s true.”

“So you’re safe from me, Patroller. Don’t worry.”

Justin didn’t mention that he’d learned to break that programming during his years on Sirius. He’d had no intention of forcing a woman, but Shela, a workaholic, had kept ignoring Justin’s blatant hints that she should start a sexual relationship with him.

Shela had been so good at playing hard to get that Justin had trained himself to make the first move. He’d spent nights of sweat and pain before he’d convinced his body to let him do it. And he’d done it, to Shela’s surprise and delight.

“So as soon as you want me to get the furry handcuffs, you tell me,” he said.

“No.” The answer was clipped.

“Damn, I hate when a woman is all business.”

“Live with it. And tell me why you went to the Vistara.”

Justin propped his elbow on the back of the sofa, head on his fist. Keeping your hands near your face distracted people, he’d learned. They didn’t watch your eyes.

“See, Patroller, the reason ladies like Shareem is . . . we’re discreet.”

Deanna’s gaze sharpened, and Justin could almost feel the click of the cuffs. “You’d go to jail to protect this woman’s identity?”

“Why not? I already have once.”

“She must be some woman.”

“Must be, yeah.”

Was that envy in her eyes? He hoped so. His patroller wasn’t bad. Now if he could get her to take down that bun of steel and relax.

“So you did go up there to visit a woman,” Deanna said.

“I never said that.”

“She invited you?”

“Never said that either.”

Deanna folded her arms, which pushed up the cleavage that would show if she undid the coverall. “What you’re telling me, Justin, is that you violated two warnings to stay out of the district in order to meet an unknown woman at an undisclosed place. You should have explained to her that you weren’t allowed to go up there.”

Justin rubbed the wall next to his head. “See, the tricky thing is, if I tell you I went to ravish a Vistara woman, so yeah, you were right to arrest me—then I’ll be back in my boring cell. It’s not in my best interest to help you.”

“But I
order
you to help me.”

She sounded so desperate that Justin laughed.

“Tell you what. I’ll level with you.”
I’ll sort of lie to you.
“I went back up to the Vistara because the last two times I was there, I saw this patroller in the train station. She had pretty brown eyes and hair the color of midnight. I wish she’d let her hair down. I bet it would be beautiful.”

Deanna’s eyes softened for a fraction of a second. “Don’t bullshit me, Shareem.”

“No bullshit. I bet your hair really does look good.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He let his smile go sensual. “Take your hair down. I dare you.”

“No.”

Justin leaned forward a little, looking straight into her eyes. “You take it down, and I’ll tell you who I went to see. Promise.”

*** *** ***

Deanna chewed her lip, very aware of Justin’s large, warm body inches from hers. No foot-thick plasti-glass to protect her now.

He was different from what she’d thought he would be—he was smart, with a sense of humor that was almost playful. But the blue filling his eyes as he watched her reminded Deanna that he’d been created in a factory, not born, not quite human.

Would it be worth it to do what he said? He wasn’t asking for anything sexual, only for her to release her hair. Deanna did that every day when she got home from work anyway. It might be worth it to get a straight answer from him.

She reached up and touched the clasp that held her bun in place. Justin leaned toward her, as though Deanna taking down her hair was the most important thing in the world to him.

Deanna slowly released the clasp and let her hair, fine and straight, tumble past her shoulders.

“Beautiful,” Justin said, voice low, gaze only for her. “Like the swaths of silk I see in the markets. Black silk.”

Deanna’s breath hitched. “It’s only hair.”

Justin stretched his arm across the back of the sofa, again stopping shy of touching her. She swore she could feel sparks between his fingers and her skin.

“It’s beauty,” Justin said. “Why do you hide it?”

“I can’t do my job with my hair in my face, can I?” Deanna meant to sound stern, but her voice cracked.

“You wouldn’t need your stun gun. All you’d have to do was smile, and the perps would drop at your feet.”

What was he talking about? All
he
had to do was smile, and he’d have women on their knees.

Justin was smiling now, the little twitch of lips that warmed his eyes and made Deanna’s temperature jump to scalding level. This was dangerous.

Justin reached out and wound his finger through a strand of her hair.

“Stop that,” she said.

Justin took his time about obeying. He smoothed the lock with his fingers, tugged it gently, and finally released it.

“It feels as beautiful as it looks,” he said.

Deanna shivered, a deep, soul-licking shiver. “All right, I did what you asked. Now, tell me who you went to the Vistara to see.”

“Okay, I lied about that part. I’m not going to tell you.”

“What?” Deanna shoved him aside and jumped to her feet. “But I did what you asked.”

He opened his hands. “I’m Shareem, sweetie. I seduce. It’s what I do. And I wanted to see what you looked like with your hair down.”

“Why?”

“Because I knew you’d be damned sexy.”

Deanna’s throat tightened. She could almost believe him when he said it like that.
Sexy
. No one had ever called her that. No one would ever dare.

But Shareem were masters of seduction, and seduction involved lies. Shareem weren’t supposed to be able to lie . . . but Justin had done it. He’d promised to tell her what she wanted to know and then reneged. Look at him, lounging on the sofa like a decadent god, daring her to take him down for being what he was.

Deanna started to wind her hair back into its bun, but she dropped the clasp, which clinked on the bare floor. She dove for it at the same time Justin came off the couch and reached for it.