Page 43 of Plain Sight

It’s especially satisfying because it’s a record I got from the frat-boy house the other night, spirited away on a jump drive and sent off to a company based in South America to un-encrypt and send back to me. So it was worth getting punched in the face and chased out of the house.

“I was agreeing with you,” I lie.

“You don’t know what I was saying.”

I’ve changed my mind. Kirk is an asshole.

But when I look him in the eye, he looks back at me from behind his glasses with zero judgment. My man was only stating the facts. I think it’s the cut on my face and my still-swollen lip that’s making him feel bold, and I can’t say I mind, as long as he’s not trying to be a dick.

The cut on my cheek stings. My still-swollen lip throbs. They’re on double-duty, keeping me awake and relatively focused on giving the impression that they don’t hurt, which in turn makes me even better at my job.

“Touché,” I tell Kirk. “Run it by me again.”

He runs our to-do list by me again.

“Yep. I still agree.” I click through a series of emails he’s drawn my attention too, numbers sliding around in my head. “Yes on the first property. No on the second. Third needs a grant and more infrastructure. I want to be involved in that one.”

“Do you?” Kirk asks. He reminds me of Dev Madden, except Kirk is a brown-eyed, bespectacled redhead and Dev is blond with blue eyes and a smile that belongs in magazines. Dev Madden got out of grad school when Mason started Phoenix, unless he was lying about that to throw me off the scent of his personal life. Kirk got out of grad school last year, I think. Or the year before. Recently. “Or do you want me to be involved on this one until they’re ready for you to be involved?”

“That’s the ticket. What’s next?”

“Lunch with your brothers.” Kirk looks carefully down at his tablet

“Lunch with my brothers and Dev and you, Kirkland. Come with us. Dine with the bosses. See how the sausage is made.”

“I make the sausage,” he says absently, but his face is red.

I fucking found Malcolm Walsh. I’m going after him tonight.

All I have to do now is kill time.

Washing Lily’s hair in the shower isn’t killing time. It’s…breathing time. Or slowing it down, like syrup. She’s so fucking bright like this, all shining red hair and pink cheeks and the gorgeous curves of her body.

I run my fingers through the slip of her hair and toy with one nipple, then the other, then slide the pad of my finger under the curve of her breasts.

“You’re softer here,” I tell her. It’s true. The shape of her is subtly different. It’s too early for her to be showing, but my cock jumps from imagining her with a round belly. Fuck. Fuck. That’s my baby inside her. Doing this to her. Changing her. My baby. That makes me outrageously hard. And hot. So, so hot.

I don’t deserve to see her like that.

No—not tonight. I can’t think about that tonight. I find her nipples with the pad of my thumb.

Lily shivers against me, smiling with her eyes shut. “I’m sensitive there.”

“Oh,” I whisper. “So I shouldn’t bite them?”

“Maybe if you bit them, like, really carefully.”

“Like this?” I bend down and drag my teeth over her shoulder, then over her chest, and Lily arches for me so I can take her nipple gently between my teeth.

“Mmm.” I get my tongue into the action. “Mmm.”

I work the last of the conditioner out of her hair with one hand and put the other to her waist, bringing it slowly down to the slick, sweet flesh between her legs. Lily tips her head up, practically demanding to be kissed, and yes. I’ll do that. Time melts when my mouth is on hers. Time doesn’t matter at all.

She gasps when I push two fingers into her heat and find her clit with my thumb. Lily’s an angel, and angels deserve orgasms, so I give her two of them like that until she’s all melty like time, her eyes around my neck like we’re middle-school slow dancing in the shower and one of her feet propped on the shower shelf. Lily rocks herself into me, my cock sliding over her cunt, until I take myself in hand.

“I’m so tired,” she says, but she watches my fist move between us. “Are you going to come all over me?”

“Want me to?”