The Damaged One (8 page)

“Sorry.” He ran his hand over her head again, pressing her hair against her skull.

She looked up at him. “I feel like I’ve known you forever,” she whispered, touching his lips with the tip of her finger. “How is that possible?”

“I don’t know.” But a part of him agreed with her. There was something about her that made him want to forget. When she was in his arms, when she looked up at him like that, he just wanted to forget.

He reached between their bodies and guided himself inside of her. She sighed, face again pressed to his neck. Her breath was so hot against his skin, her body so perfect in the way it sat against his. Just like the night before, everything flew from his mind—the heat of the shower, the water pouring down over his back, the past, the future—there was nothing but her, but the feel of her body and the taste of her skin.

She kissed his neck, ran her lips over the rough stubble that darkened the skin of his throat, chin, and jaw. When she reached his lips, she let him kiss her for a moment, let him catch just the most fleeting taste. Then she leaned back, her hands replacing her lips as she explored every inch of his throat, his face, as though she were a blind woman seeking to see him for the first time. He pushed her hand away with a flick of his head and buried his face against her neck, her collar bones, licking away the moisture on her skin as he worked his way down to her breasts.

She cupped his face in her hands, groaning as he bent low and took a nipple into his mouth once more. Another nipple, a soft nibble. And then he couldn’t. He had to move, he had to feel that friction that only a woman’s body could truly provide.

He moved slowly at first, wanting to prolong the agony of her touch. Her ass was in his hands, her thighs, so tight, were flexing as she rolled her hips in time with his rhythm. Their rhythm. Her breasts rolled, too, as though they had a mind of their own. Her nipples seemed to look up him, laughing with the glee of her pleasure. Her lips parted, a soft moan that seemed to last forever falling as though from that cliff, that precipice he fell from each time he touched her.

“You drive me crazy,” he whispered as he picked up his pace, thrusting so hard against her that he could feel the soft plastic of the shower wall flex and bend beneath them. He didn’t care. He wouldn’t have cared if they broke through the wall and landed on the floor. As long as he was inside her and he could continue to feel this amazing pleasure, this plunge toward release.

She shifted her hips slightly and cried out, muttered, “There. Right there.” And then her muscles tightened, her body clenched, and he knew exactly what was happening. This time the movement of her cunt muscles pushed him toward his own end, pulling at him so roughly that he almost didn’t need to move to feel that friction that would push the tingle in his balls into the agony of orgasm.

He thrust once, twice more. Then he buried himself as deep inside of her as he could as her thighs tightened around his hips, stopping him before any further movement made her orgasm too intense to handle. Not that it mattered. He emptied his balls inside of her, crying out
, his voice rose to a crescendo he had never heard himself make. It was extreme, the insanity of her orgasm mixed with his.

It was a full minute before he came back to earth, before he felt her hands stroking the sides of his face. He looked down at her and couldn’t help the sudden smile that burst across his lips. Her hair was a mess, her eyes wide with emotion, her lips swollen from their earlier kisses. She looked such a mess, it made him think of a stupid television commercial where a husband told his wife she was a mess, but a hot mess. Stupid, but funny.

She caught the amusement in his eyes and started to laugh, the movement of her diaphragm making her cunt jerk against his cock.

“Don’t do that,” he moaned even as laughter began to spill from his lips, too.

She just wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling herself higher up against his body, her laughter music her suddenly found himself swaying to.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed so hard.

A week passed before he had a second chance to hunt out her computer. They spent nearly every night of that week together, but Toby rarely wanted to sleep. He wasn’t sure how she did it, spending all day at work and then all night tangled up on the couch or in the bed with him. They did get some sleep over the weekend, but he was so exhausted most nights, searching through documents on a computer was the last thing he wanted to do. Even if it had answers for Jackie.

He felt guilty. Maybe it was that that kept him awake last night. But when he went in search of her computer, he couldn’t find it. He searched every cubby hole of that damn warehouse, but it simply wasn’t there.

He’d waited too long.

He was pacing in the middle of his hotel room, his phone pressed to his ear.

“I know all that,” he barked as Foster stumbled through a background check he had run on Toby. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Her father is incarcerated in the U.S. Penitentiary at Beaumont for attempted murder.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“She was twelve when it happened. Had to testify.”

“She was a witness?”

“No. She was the vic.”

Augustus stopped pacing. “Her father tried to kill her?”

“Tried to suffocate her with a pillow.” Augustus could hear Foster shuffling paper, all that infernal paper he always had on hand. “She pretended she was dead and waited for him to leave the room before she climbed out a window and went for help.”

“Hell,” Augustus muttered under his breath. “Anything else?”

“Not really.” Another sound of shuffling paper. “I have her admission essay from Texas Women’s. Briefly outlines her father’s crime, but only where it relates to her decision to become a psychologist.”

“Nothing that might lead us to the dealer?”

“Not yet,” Foster said. “I’m still checking into her former roommate and a few friends she had on campus. Thought one of them might have some idea.”

“Not if Jackie was her only source.”

“It’s possible. Or he could have been a patient. I’ve been trying to check into that possibility, too, but the university’s been pretty resistant.”

“I met one of her patients,” Augustus said. “If the others were like this guy, we probably have a pretty long list of suspects.”

“I’ll stay on it, if that’s what you want.”

“Yeah.” Augustus sighed. He had hoped Foster would have something he could go on, something that would preclude having to go through Toby’s computer again. But it was obvious she was their best lead. “Stay on it. Let me know if you get anything.”

Augustus switched off the phone and tossed it across the bed,
watching it bounce onto the floor. He began pacing again, trying to decide what his next move should be. Dave had been calling him almost daily, begging him to come back to the office. With Augustus gone and Dave constantly in and out as he attended conferences and meetings and whatever else, there was little supervision over their small rag tag bunch of software designers. Dave was convinced they were paying a group of people for very little or nothing.

Then there was Fontaine. The closer she got to her due date, the more motherly she got. She texted Augustus at least twice a day, wondering where he was and when he would be back, making him promise he would be in LA for her delivery. He kept reminding her she still had months, not days, but that did little to ease her worries. It only seemed to make them worse.

He still hadn’t figured out how he was going to tell Charlie and Fontaine about Jackie. He knew they would be heartbroken, but he also knew that, like him, they had been expected it for a long time. They were older when they escaped Houston all those years ago. Charlie was twelve, Fontaine nine. They remembered the johns, the pimp, the smell of heroin cooking on a spoon, the high that left all the adults in their world zombies on the couch. They knew what drugs did. They’d had a front row seat their entire childhoods.

It was a miracle the two of them had escaped that particular genetic inclination. Charlie had struggled with alcohol in college. Fontaine liked sweet desserts a little too much. But they had both skirted that particular viper pit.

If only Jackie had.

Augustus sometimes wondered if he had cursed her. He remembered when his mother first began to show with her last pregnancy. He
lay awake nights, a twelve year old boy, praying that his mother would miscarry. There was already so much to do, getting Charlie and Fontaine dressed and ready for school in the mornings, walking them home in the afternoons, doing homework and figuring out what to feed them for dinner. And all that on top of his own school work, his own hygiene, his own empty stomach. It was too much. How was he supposed to care for an infant, too?

He had even prayed that the hospital would see that the baby was addicted to the same drugs their mother used and they would take her away. Maybe they would even check out the rest of the family and realize that things just weren’t right. Maybe they would all be saved. Better to be separated and placed in clean homes with good food on the table every night than what they had at the moment.

But it didn’t work out that way. The state couldn’t have cared less about any of them.

Augustus was left with another mouth to feed, another life to protect.
But he had failed that, too.

He couldn’t fail her again.

“Have you ever been married?”

Augustus ran his hand down Toby’s naked back, enjoying the feel of his fingers sliding slowly over each subtle bump. “No,” he said, kissing the top of her head lightly. “Have you?”

“No, never came close.” She shifted a little against him. “I wasn’t exactly the kind of girl guys wanted to marry, I guess.”

“What does that mean?”

“I was…wild,” she said, giggling at herself. “I don’t know. I had a difficult adolescence. I was a little promiscuous in high school.”

“Really?”

“Well, do two guys count as promiscuous?”

Augustus laughed. “I think it has to be at least half a dozen to be considered promiscuous.”

“I guess I wasn’t that bad, then,
by your definition.” She slid her hand over his chest, her fingers lingering on his nipples. “But I was acting out and doing things I shouldn’t have.”

“What changed?”

She shrugged. “I realized I just didn’t really like it and it really wasn’t proving anything.”

“And then what?”

She scraped a nail over his nipple, trying to distract him. He grabbed her hand and pressed it flat against his chest. He wanted to know.

“Then nothing. I was a good girl after that.”

“But you dated.”

“I dated. I went to frat parties. I even went with a girlfriend to one of those speed dating things once.”

“And met a lot of nice guys.”

“I did.” She rolled on top of him, balancing her chin on her hands where they lay against his chest. “But none of them felt…” She hesitated, her eyes searching his. “None of them felt right.”

“Hmm, tell me you aren’t one of those women who’s waiting around for her soulmate.”

“No, not soulmate.” She leaned forward and kissed his chin. “Just…right. I don’t know how else to say it.”

“And then I came along.”

“And then you came along.”

He ran his hands along her ass, slipping his fingers between her legs before sliding them back up her back again. “You have an amazing ass.”

She laughed. “Very profound.”

“I’m afraid it’s the best I’m capable of. You exhaust me.”

“Making up for lost time, I guess.”

She rolled off of him and climbed out of the bed.

“Where are you going?”

She glanced at him over her shoulder. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

He watched her walked toward the kitchen, just as happy to watch her walk away as he was to see her coming. He rolled onto his side, stretching his sore muscles as he listened to her run water in the sink. He was hoping she was making some sort of food. He had come over for dinner, but somehow they had never gotten to that part of the night’s entertainment.

When she didn’t come back right away, he climbed out of bed and padded across the floor to her. There was a pot filled with water on the stove and a package of potatoes on the counter. A little sustenance is better than nothing, he thought.

Toby was leaning on the counter, her eyes intent on something in front of her. He didn’t see it at first, but realized she was using her laptop. Scrolling through emails, it looked like. He came up behind her and slid his hand over her hip.

“What are you doing?”

“I was expecting an email from Doug this morning that never came. Just thought I would check and see if he sent it later.”

He pressed a finger to the edge of her screen, pushing it back slightly so he could see the screen better. “Nice,” he said.

“Not top of the line, but it does what I need it to.”

Augustus leaned closer, sliding a hand under her waist as he rested his chin on her shoulder. “I could hook you up with a Macbook, if you want.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. There are some perks to being a software designer.”

She giggled. “I suppose.”

“And a different email program. You should really use something with a better firewall than that. Anyone could hack your email.”

He had. Several times. Once from her laptop and a couple of times from his.

“Why would someone want to hack my email? It’s only notes to my mother and business stuff.”

“You never know. Hackers like to use real email addresses to send bulk spam.”

“Hmm, I’ll try to remember that.” She straightened up, forcing her body tighter against his, as she clicked the lid down on her laptop. “I was hungry,” she said as she turned into him. “I hope you like mashed potatoes.”

“At this point, I’ll eat just about anything,” he said.

She laughed again as he drew away from the laptop, distracting her long enough that she left it where it sat.