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Now Connie straightens up, holds out a solitary cookie, heart-shaped to perfection but not with a cookie-mold, like she actually spends the time to hand-shape each cookie, make each individual cookie the best it can be, an artist obsessing over her creations.
And suddenly I understand why she’s in debt, behind on her payments, about to lose her business.
“How many cookies do you throw away from each batch?” My eyes widen with pleasure as I bite into the thick sticky-soft cookie that’s still warm, the chocolate chips rich and lustrous, the dough fresher than the blood on my scraped elbows. “I’m guessing you toss about twenty-five percent of each batchbecause they didn’t come out perfect, didn’t bake just right, are slightly the wrong size or shape.”
Connie stares, then blinks, her round cheeks blushing red as she eyes me with a mix of curiosity and confusion. “How . . . how do you know that?”
Still munching on what has to be the best cookie I’ve ever fucking eaten, I shrug my muscular shoulders, crack my thick neck, then grin wide with a mouthful of hand-made chocolatey sweetness. “Because you’re an obsessive perfectionist who’s terrified of making a mistake, of being anything less than perfect. But perfection is impossible, so then you sink into hopeless despair, call yourself a failure, say stuff like that cookie-crumbling nonsense. And all the while you’re throwing away perfectly good cookies that just don’tlookperfect, aren’t perfect from the outside but are absolutely perfect from the inside.”
Connie stares at me, her mouth hanging open for a long moment, then clamping shut. She swallows hard, blinks and looks down, curls a strand of her beautiful hair behind her left ear—which I notice isn’t pierced. “I . . . I don’t know what to say,” she stammers softly, her eyes darting left and right as she stares at the floor.
My crumb-covered lips curl into a smile. “Perfect. Say nothing. That’s all I want from you. Oh, and hand me another cookie, will you?”
Connie touches her hair again, absentmindedly reaching into the open carton and pulling out another perfectly shaped cookie. She watches me as I chomp it down like the starving beast I am. Then her eyes widen and her lips part and I almost smile when I see that her stunned silence was short-lived and I’m about to be assaulted by another stream of word-bullets that are most certainly finding their mark in my heart, breaking through the armor around my soul, pulling me into the crumbling world of this perfectly shaped cookie named Connie O’Connor.
A world that feels warm and loving.
A world that I desperately want to be a part of.
“So here’s the part where I bargain for my life,” Connie says suddenly, the fear subsiding in her eyes, a brightness shining forth now, like maybe she sees that I’m already crumbling into mushy warm crumbs myself. “How about we make a deal?”
Polishing off my second cookie, I wipe my fingers on my jumpsuit, then glance down at her and chuckle. “Not sure you’ve got anything to offer, sweetheart,” I say with a grin, dragging my dark gaze shamelessly down past the swell of her breasts, the round of her ass, the V of her crotch before grunting and flicking my eyes back to her pretty face. “Well, nothing I can’t just take if I want. When I want. How I want. And believe me, baby, I’m gonna want.”
Panic flashes in Connie’s eyes, and it occurs to me that this is the first time that it occurred to Connie that I might want . . . her.
How the fuck can that be right?
Surely a gorgeous babe like Connie has hound-dogs barking all around her, sniffing and snorting for a taste of her sex. And surely any woman being held hostage by an escaped convict is going to immediately know what that sex-starved beast wants.
He wants what every man wants.
He wants woman.
“Um . . . what?” Connie stammers now, clearly shaken by the unmistakable implication that although it isn’t clear whether she lives or dies today, it’s pretty damn clear I’m going to fuck her either way. With all that talk about fate, she has to know that my wood-hard stick is gonna be stirring her cookie dough before our little story is done. “Take . . . take what you want? Do you mean . . . um . . . are you going to . . . ohmygod, I hadn’t even thought of that, hadn’t even considered that you might want to . . . to do . . .that! To me!” Her face pales, her gaze darting down to the obscenely peaked crotch of my bloodstained orangejumpsuit. She’s starting to panic now, like she’s some clueless virgin who has somehow made her way through life without realizing that men think about pussy all day, every day. You open up a man’s brain and translate all those neural networks into words and you’ll just get a thousand pages of, “Pussy! Pussy! That pussy! This pussy! Her pussy! Your pussy! Pussy. Pussy. Pussy!”
“All right, listen, go ahead and tell me about your deal,” I say hurriedly when I realize that her mind is going to unravel and she might start screaming and then I’d really have to break her neck. “And you can relax, sweetheart. I was doing time for murder, not rape. That’s not my thing. Besides,” I add with a wink, “these cookies are so good they took the edge off my craving. Fuck, they’re almost better than sex.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Connie says softly, blushing at the compliment.
I frown. “Why wouldn’t you know? Haven’t you tasted your own cookies?”
“Of course I have,” she says, then goes quiet as her blush turns a darker shade of the deepest embarrassment. “I meant . . . um . . . forget it.”
“Wait, you mean you’ve never had sex?” I blurt out the question with an incredulous snort. “But you’re, what, twenty-five years old? How the hell did you fight off all the guys who must have been after your beautiful body? You been locked up somewhere, sweetheart? You been in prison too?”
“Something like that,” Connie mutters, her face darkening with not embarrassment but just plain darkness, a deep-seated rage that resonates with the same juvenile anger that’s festered in my own damaged psyche for years. “Look, you want to hear my offer or not?”
“Sure, go on, sweetheart,” I say with a sigh, crossing my arms over my chest, my broad body completely blocking her path tothe door. The sides of the truck are stacked with cartons, so she can’t get to the side walls to pound on them. And I’m pretty sure any screams would be muffled low enough that nobody would notice, especially not with the February winter winds blowing wild outside. “I’m listening.”
“All right,” says Connie, brightening suddenly like her mind and moods change faster than the wind. “So the way I figure, the prison Warden is going to call me sooner or later, just like he's going to call the drivers of every outbound vehicle from the prison to make sure you weren’t stowed away in one of the delivery trucks.”
My condescending smile vanishes when I see that despite her disarming innocence, this woman isn’t dumb, might even have something interesting to say. So I grunt and nod for her to continue.
“Now, maybe they’ve already got you on camera sneaking into my truck at the loading dock,” Connie continues, her face bright and earnest, more like an excited girl trying to solve a puzzle than a scared woman bargaining for her life. “But considering we left the prison a while ago and my truck isn’t surrounded by cops and troopers, maybe those loading dock cameras aren’t working or weren’t pointing the right way or—”
“The camera was within reach of the ventilator shaft where I was hidden,” I say softly, not sure why it feels like we’re becoming a team, are somehow on the same side even though it’s pretty fucking clear that she’s my captive, would be a hundred miles from here if I weren’t standing in the way, imprisoning her so I can stay free. “I turned it to point away from the loading dock. They won’t have me on camera getting into your truck, but the timing will narrow it down to any trucks that left after the camera was moved.” I shrug. “Quite a few trucks come in and out of that loading dock in the mornings. And they still can’t be sure I even made it out of the prison. So yeah, they’llprobably call all the drivers first, then send cops or troopers to do a physical check of each vehicle, question the drivers in person to make sure they aren’t accomplices.”
“Perfect,” says Connie, drawing a gruff eyebrow-raise from me. “What I mean is, you can’t hide in my truck for too long unless . . . unless I cover for you.”
