Page 31 of The Turning of the Tables

He began to fuck me harder, faster, his hands coming to grip my hipbones, to pull me to him even as he pounded into me. It was punishing, the force of him pressing into the back of my throat and pulsing through my cock with every thrust.

I braced myself against the desk, dropping my head and closing my eyes, giving myself over to simply feeling him. Memorizing the sensation of his hands on my hips, his cock stretching my ass, the sound of his rasping breath and soft growls.

And then his rhythm faltered, his hips hitting mine hard enough that I could hear the slap of skin on skin, feel each thrust pushing breath from my lungs. And then he buried himself in me, his forehead pressing against my back, his moan and a faint pulsing inside my body telling me that he was coming, one rough hand reaching to grasp my cock and pull a second, shuddering orgasm from me with a few strokes, his own, still-twitching cock inside me.

I hadn’t broken Rule Two.

I’d obliterated it.

8

ELLIOT CRANE

Thanks for the help yesterday.

Did you want to see it come together?

SETH MAYS

I’d love to—kind of busy at the moment, though.

Work.

Sorry.

No problem.

I’ll send pictures.

I’d like that!

He did send several,the first of the chalked outline on the table, then later ones as he carved out the channels along those lines, and then more as he pressed in the inlay. Not right away, of course, but over the next several days. The last one he sent—the inlay finished, althoughunvarnished—was quite possibly the most beautiful piece of furniture I’d ever seen. Not that I’ve seen a lot of beautiful furniture, but holy shit that table was gorgeous. And it wasn’t quite done.

I wanted to go over to see it in person—to see Elliot—but I was kept busy by a combination of work and helping Noah scrub the everloving shit out of the apartment because of spring cleaning.

Or something.

It’s Noah’s apartment, so I go along with it.

It was also probably better that I didn’t see Elliot again—because regardless of the fact that I’d agreed to not develop feelings for him, I had, and I needed to break off whatever it was we had before things got any worse.

But on that particular day, I’d started off getting dragged to a crime scene a little after seven in the morning—earlier than I usually went to work, but not so early that I felt like a scrap the cat had dragged in. I was, however, a little annoyed that I kept getting called to crime scenes the morning after Elliot had done his best to make sure I couldn’t walk a straight line.

I mean, okay, Icould. It just took concentration.

The bigger problem was the fact that the strain from managing to stay standing meant that my knee was throbbing and my back and wrist ached even more than usual. Add to that the fact that I’d already been having a shit pain day and had thrown a table around for several hours, and I felt like I’d been run over by a truck.

This would have been much less of an issue if I’d been in the lab where things like stools could alleviate pressure from both knee and back. Instead, I was currently—stupidly—crouched outside next to yet another body trying to keep my expression from showing just how much pain I was in.Nobody likes a whiner. Not like there was anything anybody could have done about it, anyway.

The dead don’t care about the pain of the living.

The victim—blunt force trauma to the skull, it looked like—had been found on Belle Isle just off one of the trails on the hilltop. Normally, this would have led to a quick discovery, but it had absolutely poured a handful of nights ago and a small mudslide had washed out the trail on one side, so the park people had just closed the whole thing.

Tierney was betting that it had rained shortly after the victim had either been killed or dumped, which meant that our killer thought the victim would be discovered more quickly than it had been. Or the killer had panicked and just run, leaving the body where it fell.

With the rain and mud and the intervention of wildlife like crows, vultures, and rodents, the body was a bit hard to identify—and the evidence was absolute shit.

It looked like a rock—probably—had been used as the murder weapon, and it could have been one of several appropriately-sized specimens nearby, which Quincy was currently putting into boxes, since the evidence baggies were neither large nor sturdy enough to be used to collect softball-plus-sized rocks. Rain had washed away any obvious traces of blood, although we’d be spending a lot of quality time with Q-tips going over every tiny crevice until we either ran out of rocks or identified the murder weapon.