Nailed (Marked For Love #1) (2 page)

He might be the shame of the Collier clan, but he had the respect of those who preferred a more subtle, less violent information-collection method. And he was damned good at what he did.

"Wynnie...are you still there? Do you have everything you need?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"What about a sweater? I heard it gets cool there in the evenings. That mountain air, you know."

"I'm fine, Mom. I promise." He scribbled notes while she rattled off the names and background information on the other car owners, gave her his love, and rang off.

It was dark outside; time to get moving.

Chapter Three

The sun had finally set when I stepped outside dressed in battered Sketchers, cutoff sweats, and a tank top with no bra. The barest hint of a breeze lifted damp pieces of my freshly washed hair and struggled to blow away the day's heat. A near impossible battle.

From the open window, Clyde meowed his protest of my desertion. You'd think he'd have gotten used to it after a year. Every night after dark, I walked the complex, greeting the occasional swimmers, and the few people who sat outside drinking beer, and I listened...and watched. My guilty secret. I refused to name it, to call it what it was.

I'm sure people who smoked crack said the same thing, but the first time had been an accident. Eight months ago, I'd been walking the back of the complex, working off nervous energy, the edge that had ridden my back ever since I first ran. The fear, the paranoia it had taken me nearly two years to shake, and even now, another year after, I still couldn't completely let my guard down.
Where was I? Oh, yeah...walking.
I'd rounded the corner and spotted a couple in a parked car. It had been fall, still warm in the evenings, but they'd had the windows up, and a hint of fog had obstructed my view. The movement of the car had said it all though.

Inside, a topless woman had been riding Dinky Smith like she was going for the Triple Crown, her ginormous breasts bouncing happily.

I'd been helpless to move, a prisoner of my body, of my need, of my own frustrations and loneliness. There I stood after two years of celibacy, watching Dinky Smith have something I couldn't...sex...intimacy...affection.

Call it whatever you'd like, the weight and depth of it all had almost killed me that night.

That had been a Wednesday. I'd gone out on Friday, to Busters, and picked up a tourist, thinking if I fucked him, I'd never spy on Dinky again.

I was wrong.

I found myself lying in wait for him (he apparently
liked
having sex in cars). Then I found myself following him, watching him. He'd never caught on...I'd been real careful. And, you know, he wasn't the brightest lightbulb in the package. The legality, or illegality, of what I was doing was irrelevant when held up next to the Big Picture.

Trust me on this.

After a while, the weather turned colder, and I'd gotten bored with Dinky. I found myself drawn to casually peeking in kitchen windows—a dark hoodie could hide a multitude of sins.

Anyway, the windows were huge, forty-eight inches wide and sixty inches off the ground. I'm 5'5" and that made us a perfect match. Not to mention,.

Then came the bedroom windows, listening, straining my ears in the dark to hear couples fucking and fighting.

Anyway, tonight was Thursday, and Darcy McKnight's boyfriend was coming over. Normally boyfriends were no big deal, but Darcy was cheating on her husband, Chris, and for the record, she wasn't the only cheater at Marquez Terrace.

Chris was a long-haul trucker who came in on Sunday and left first thing Wednesday morning. Darcy wasn't dumb enough to have her boyfriend come on Wednesday; she waited a day. No one ever told on her; no one dared. Chris was a giant who'd probably kill the bearer of bad news.

Guess you could say we had our very own
Don't Ask/Don't Tell
policy.

And besides, Darcy's peccadilloes weren't worth dying for, but her boyfriend Brad was.

He came by around 9:00 every night, slipped in her front door when most people were ending their day, and, well, Darcy had a bad habit of leaving the kitchen curtains open, and the window too.

My stomach was a tangle of excited nerves as I spotted Brad slipping into Darcy's apartment, the open door briefly spilling lamplight on the sidewalk. I walked the upper floors at a steady pace so as not to raise suspicion. Then I took the stairs, greeting Old Homer, who sat in a lawn chair he kept just outside his front door.

"Gonna be a hot one tonight."

"And sticky too," I said, pulling my T-shirt away from my body and fanning myself for effect.

Hands shoved deep in my pockets, I walked the front of the U-shaped complex, then circled around the back, taking my time. I knew already that Brad's truck was parked at the convenience store half a block down, and the owner was a friend of his.

The front of the complex faced the street with the complex's sign and the pool blocking the view of just about anyone from the road. An old SUV sat on the gravel shoulder across the street. Probably overheated, which was a common occurrence around here in the summer.

Down the side of the building I went, rubber soles silent on the hard-packed earth. I stopped at the back corner of the building to catch my breath and listen. All I could hear was the sound of the occasional cricket, the buzz of a mosquito that I swatted away, and someone's radio playing a Mexican radio station…all of that over the excited beating of my heart. God help me, I hoped Darcy never got caught.

One last glance over my shoulder, and I turned the corner, keeping a casual, steady pace. Three windows down, I stopped, my back pressed to the brick wall, and listened.

An immediate, "Oh, Brad!" prevented me from peeking in the kitchen window. It sounded like they were standing at the kitchen sink right under the window, though I knew they weren't. It sounded like he was spanking her with the spatula again.

For sure.

And trust me, Darcy didn't mind. I sent up a little prayer of thanks as my curiosity got the better of me. I turned my head, raising up on my toes to find her bent over the little wooden kitchen table she'd refinished last summer, her bare-naked ass in the air, shining a sassy red.

Brad wore a faded black T-shirt stretched tight across his broad shoulders and nothing else. I could see straight through to the living room where his jeans and boots and Darcy's clothes were scattered about. His muscular legs weren't very tanned. Brad wasn't the kind of man to lay around in the sun. His forearms were tanned, though, and his hands were huge and probably callused. His ass was lily white, two perfect, muscular half-moons, and his dick was beautiful. Hard and thick and strong, jutting out at an angle from a dark nest of pubic hair.

Beautiful enough to make me take my truck in to his garage every three thousand miles for an oil change just so I could watch him work and fantasize about his cock.

I'd tested the waters, flirting a bit to see what he'd do, and he'd responded, but I always seemed to chicken out when it came to asking him to dinner. Call me a chicken, call it self-preservation, but I'd reluctantly decided that fucking tourists was a safer bet for the time being.

Once Darcy's ass was nice and red, he fucked her from behind. I stood there growing hotter by the minute, my pussy throbbing as I watched his cock disappear between the cheeks of her ass. She squealed and chattered like a fucking angry squirrel.

"Brad, Fuck! You're so big!"

"You like that?" he asked, mashing his hand into her hair and holding her head against the table. "Huh, you little slut?"

"Oh yes!"

"Better than your fucking husband?" he panted.

"God, yes! I love your cock. Fuck me...fuck me more!"

"Little dirty girl."

He'd call her a whore and tell her what a bad girl she was every single damn time, and I never got tired of hearing it. My hand slid up my thigh, into the leg of my shorts to massage my pussy lips, but that wasn't enough. I slid my middle finger deeper, circling my clit faster and faster, my lower lip caught between my teeth, my shoulder pressed into the brick wall. My toes curled, I closed my eyes and stroked myself, listening, imagining it was me.

Until a nonsexual sound penetrated my lust-filled brain. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut a moment in frustration before opening them again and licking my lips and slipping my hand out of my shorts.

I knew better than to act suspiciously. Instead, I moved slowly, turning toward the parking lot and scanning for movement. I didn't see anyone, but I'll be damned if it hadn't sounded like a cough. Maybe it had come from an upstairs apartment, but I wasn't about to risk getting caught with my hand in the proverbial cookie jar. My happy interlude was over.

I backtracked to the corner of the building, detoured out into the middle of the parking lot, and continued my walk, slowly scanning the gloomy perimeter for signs of life. Nothing, no one, nowhere.

That feeling of unease that had ebbed and flowed the last couple of weeks, that same one that had finally subsided over the last year or so, had grown worse lately, leading me to believe it was almost time for Bonnie James to disappear and for someone else to take her place.

Chapter Four

Wynn ducked down behind the car, his night-vision goggles gripped in one hand.

A Peeping Tom. He'd nearly gotten busted by a damned Peeping Tom. He knew she'd been watching someone having sex. Even from this distance they'd been hard to ignore, their moans and dirty talk drifting out the open window and across the parking lot. And if the Peeper's body language was any indication, she'd really been enjoying herself.

From what he could tell, The Peeper was pretty, petite, compact. Her dark brown hair had been gathered up in a sloppy ponytail, but it would probably reach the middle of her back. She had a curvy ass, full hips, and high breasts.

She wasn't his quarry, but she'd proved to be an interesting diversion.

He stayed put as she doubled back and passed no more than six or seven feet from where he was hidden between a pickup and a beat up, ancient SUV, before disappearing from view. He eased to his feet, adjusting his erection and waiting until she disappeared around the far side of the building. He waited a few minutes longer to make sure she didn't return, then slipped from his hiding place and crossed the parking lot to the window she'd been looking in.

Inside, the couple was on the couch, the man's legs splayed out wide, the woman on top of him, her hips wiggling, her curly blond hair bouncing in time with her movements.

Peeping Toms and perverts.
Grinning, he silently stepped away and circled back around to the front, his pace slow so he could memorize what was where and give his blood time to cool.

He imagined Julie Burt in one of those apartments, sleeping peacefully, lulled into a false sense of security, assured that no one knew where she was, fully unaware that trouble was about to arrive on her doorstep.

***

The following morning, Wynn took a few more passes through town, stopped to eat at Cherrie's Diner, and chatted up the waitress. Spending the day sitting outside the apartments was a big no. The last thing he needed was some small-town, tin-star-toting deputy getting a bead on him, so he'd bided his time, hiding in his hotel room until sunset.

If there was one thing Wynn had learned from his years on the job, it was that bars and greasy spoons were hubs of activity and gossip. He'd struck out at Cherrie's but hoped to have better luck at Busters, Cielo's only bar.

This late on a Friday night, the place was packed, the parking lot full of dusty pickups and an assortment of cars, the mouthwatering smell of the barbecue pit outside permeating everything. Inside the corrugated tin building, there was one bartender, two pool tables, and a jukebox with a dance floor no bigger than a postage stamp.

He nodded at the swarthy Mexican at a crowded table who caught his eye as he took a seat at the bar. A woman resembling Wynn's peeper sat with him.

"What'll it be?" the bartender asked. He was tall, gray-headed, and just starting to run to fat, a slight potbelly visible under his white T-shirt, which was covered with an ugly plaid short-sleeved shirt—the kind you'd get at Wal-Mart.

"Scotch and water." Smiling, Wynn pulled some bills from his wallet and set them on the bar top.

He sipped his drink while watching the group behind him through the mirror. The cute Peeping Tom—what did you call a female peeper?—was behind him, dressed in snug-fitting Levi's and an equally snug fitting tank top. She sat sipping at a beer and trading rapid, off-colored yet good-natured insults with the Mexican who'd eyed Wynn earlier.

The bar was filled with an odd mix of what looked like tourists, people dressed like him in khakis and expensive but casual polo shirts, and the locals, many of the men dressed not much different from the bartender, many of the women dressed a lot like the hottie behind him, and locals seemed to outnumber the tourists by three to one.

He saw more than his fair share of short, chubby women, even a few blondes, but none of them were Julie Burt.

Wynn couldn't afford to be distracted. His career and his place in the family depended on it, but oh what a distraction his little voyeur would be. If his father knew what he was thinking...He pushed that thought away as the waitress appeared at his elbow, slid another drink at him, and nodded toward the pretty brunette. She raised her bottle in a silent toast, and then slid off her bar stool and joined him.

She was tanned and fit and healthy, not the fitness club, tanning bed healthy either, but the kind brought on from hard work and semi-good living. "Where you from?" Emerald-green eyes twinkling, she leaned into him, an inviting smile on her face.

Wynn liked a take-charge kind of woman, and he had a feeling she didn't deal in bullshit. "Oklahoma City."

"You're a long way from Oklahoma City."

"Vacation."

Her laughter drew a censorious stare from the bartender.
Interesting.
"This ain't no vacation, sugarpie.
Cozumel
is a vacation.
Italy
is a vacation.
This—
" she shook her head, "—ain't no vacation."