pleasure. He stretched her, filling her with his hard flesh, making
himself a part of her.
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“You’re so fucking tight like this.” He ground the words out as
she felt his hands split her ass cheeks. His fingers touched the plug, making her shiver. She sank her fingers into his shoulders as he gently eased the plug a little ways out. Nerves she’d never felt before sprang to vivid life.
“Oh, Stef, that’s amazing.” She breathed out as he fucked the plug
back in.
His voice was low, guttural. “I can handle you, love. We don’t
need a third. I can fuck you the way you need it.”
He pulled on the plug as he thrust his dick up, proving his point.
Jen was filled with him. She’d never been so full. She sank onto his
cock and forced herself back up, riding him like the stud he was. She
found a perfect rhythm that had the plug and his cock in exquisite
parallel. When she lowered herself on his cock, he pulled the plug out to almost the rim of her anus, firing off every nerve in her rectum. He pushed it back in when she rose, the feeling of fullness unrelenting.
Every movement brought her closer to that magic place only Stef
had ever taken her to. She fucked him with abandon, seeking her
pleasure with every bit as much passion as she’d given him his.
“That’s right, love,” Stef said, his motions becoming wickedly
wild. “Come for me. Come all over my cock. Make me feel it.”
She felt the command in her clit. He pushed up with his pelvis,
grinding against her, and she went flying. The orgasm rushed over her
like a wildfire sweeping through her veins. She cried out as she fought for every second of pleasure she could get.
Stef’s body stiffened under her hands. He shook as he came, his
gorgeous face contorting with pleasure.
Jen fell forward into the circle of his arms. Without hesitation, he
held her close, their breaths, bodies, and heartbeats one.
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Chapter Twelve
Stef had to breathe deeply to get his heart rate down. His blood
pounded languorously through his body, satisfaction invading his
veins. Jen was wrapped around him, and the world, briefly, seemed
utterly perfect to him. She’d submitted in the sweetest way possible.
She’d accepted everything he’d given her with grace and a gorgeous
sexuality that floored him. He was the one who screwed it up.
Why had he thought he could walk away from her? He’d never
been able to do it. Even when he got the slightest bit away from her,
he’d come running back every time. The minute he’d seen her face
fall, his heart had clenched. He’d made it to the door, but he’d shut it again, knowing he’d never be able to leave her alone and miserable.
God, he loved her.
His hands tightened. He let the truth wash over him. He loved
Jennifer Waters with his whole heart, but he’d never be able to keep
her. She was too talented, too young to commit herself for her whole
life. She needed to see the world and everything it had to offer.
Maybe in ten years or so she could make a decision, but until then he
had to be unselfish.
“Stop.” Her head had come up, and she stared down into his eyes.
There was a plea there. “Can’t we have a few days? Just a couple of
days where we don’t fight or think about the future?”
She could read his fucking mind. This time around was so
different. Since she’d come back to Bliss, she’d been focused on him,
his moods, his thoughts. It made him feel like the center of the
universe. God, he couldn’t deny her. Not when it was everything he
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wanted. He would have to let her go soon enough. What was a few
days of paradise?
He smoothed back her hair and pulled her close, loving the way
their bodies were stuck together, their juices mingling. She would
walk around the rest of the day with his cum in her sweet cunt. He
pulled her head down. “Of course, love. I want that, too.”
He let his lips play against hers. He loved how soft she was. Her
that was all he could give himself. Otherwise, he would take her.
Already the impulse was there to brand her as his. He had a sudden
vision of working with her curled at his feet. Her skin was so
porcelain, so perfect, that she could be his palette. He could have her stretch out when he was ready and use her torso to mix his paints. He
would bend down when he needed to dip his brush in, and as for
inspiration—all he would need to do is look down.
He shook his head. He was already going to that innately selfish
place where all that mattered were his own needs. He would put it out
of his mind for now. He had plans for Jennifer. When those came to
fruition, he would have long years without her. He should enjoy
himself while he could. He took a long, last drag from her lips. “What do you want to do today, love? Do you want to watch the
snowboarding? Or we could join in the snowman competition.”
A smile of pure pleasure crossed her lips. It did odd things to his
heart. “We could kick everyone’s ass, Stef.”
He laughed a bit. “I don’t know. Henry and Nell have been
practicing.”
Her pretty mouth went down in a frowning pout. “Well, of course
they’ve been practicing. What else do they have to do? How do they
live? I mean it, Stef. They don’t have jobs. I seriously doubt that
protesting pays. So how do they maintain that cabin of theirs?”
Stef grinned. He couldn’t help it. He knew something no one else
knew, and he wasn’t going to tell. If Nell and Henry wanted to write
crazy erotic romance that mirrored some of the things that happened
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in town, more power to them. The only reason he knew was he’d been
the one to find them a lawyer to set up their LLC. Bliss was lawyer
free. It was written into the town’s charter. Stef had very quietly
helped the pair out, and now he would be silent as the grave. “I guess they’re just lucky. Maybe Henry had some family money.”
What they had was a pseudonym and an e-publisher. They had
made more money off their crazy polyamorous romances than Stef
would have believed possible. He knew that because he’d also let
them use his accountant. Henry and Nell had asked him to show some
discretion, and after reading their latest, he’d decided it was best for the peace of the town if he honored their request. It would make Max
and Rye crazy that their adventures had been fictionalized. But it was hard, because he so wanted everyone to know just how filthy Nell’s
mind was. Nate had once described her as a Disney princess and
Henry as an asexual college professor.
Jen shook her head. She settled against him again. “Maybe.”
He let his hands wander on her deliciously curved backside, and
his brain moved on to more amorous thoughts than the snowman-
building contest. He squeezed her ass. God, he couldn’t wait to fuck
her there.
There was a loud knock on the door. Stef spun his head around.
Couldn�
��t he get a fucking moment’s privacy in this town?
“Stef? Seriously, take a goddamn break! We gotta move,” Max
yelled from the other side of the door. Stef knew it was Max. Only
Max could make Stef want to punch him with the sheer sound of his
voice.
“Go away!” Stef yelled back.
“Can’t, Stef.” Now Callie’s voice split through his skull.
“We should start charging,” Jen said.
“I might start killing.” Stef’s little family was making him crazy.
He squeezed her ass one last time and kissed her lips sweetly before
she slid off him. He was reaching for his jeans as he looked at the
door. “This better be good.”
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“It’s bad,” Callie said.
“We’re supposed to take you to the clinic,” Max chimed in.
Stef did up the fly of his jeans and felt his curiosity rise. “Why?”
“Because the Doc is doing an autopsy, and Nate thought you
should see it,” Max shouted through the door.
“Get dressed,” Stef barked at Jen. His every nerve was awake,
alive, and afraid.
* * * *
Twenty minutes later, Stef stared down at the body of one Cindy
Pope, aged twenty-one. There was no way he could mistake the
resemblance between the dead girl and his Jennifer. They were both
brunettes, roughly the same age and build. If a person just glanced at the two, they might think they were the same woman.
“I wondered why there was a backpack in our trash bin.” Marie
shook her very sensible head. “Teeny had gone out to take the paid
bags out, and she found a very nice pack. And still full of her things.
Such a shame.”
“Well, it wasn’t aliens.” A no-nonsense voice spoke up. Stef
turned to see a slender, petite female of maybe sixty years pursing her lips. She wore comfortable working clothes, and her long, steel-colored hair was in a braid that went halfway down her back. She
stood beside Mel, her arms crossed over her chest. “They use lasers.”
“Yep.” Mel simply nodded his agreement and stared down at the
woman like she was a font of knowledge.
Dear god, Mel was in love. Heaven help everyone.
“So, no laser, Doc?” Stef would leave the actual professional
opinion to the man in the green scrubs. As far as he could tell, Caleb Burke might be just as certifiable as Mel, but at least he’d gone to
medical school.
“Nah,” Caleb replied. “It was a knife.”
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No shit. Stef felt his stomach turn. The girl was just a kid. She was lying on a slab in a clinic in a town she hadn’t been born in. A sick
feeling came over him, panic threatening. He’d known this wasn’t
over. How the hell had they caught up with her? “Same as Renard?”
Caleb’s face was a grim mask as he looked back at Stef. “I believe
so, though I didn’t see that body personally. From the way it was
described to me, I have to think it’s a possibility. There’s no
hesitation here. It’s clean. Mel and his friend, Cassidy Meyer, found her in the river out by 285.”
Mel let his hand drift to the small woman’s shoulder. “We were
out on the alien highway. Our group was securing the recon platform.
Cassidy here was making sure the telescope was working. That’s
when she saw the poor girl. We knew it wasn’t an alien thing right
away. They would never kill a fertile, young female. They would
probe her.”
The woman named Cassidy, who Stef deeply feared Mel had
probably met on the Internet, nodded her agreement. “She’s a prime
specimen for their fertility experimentations.”
Nice. He’d found someone as crazy as he was.
Dr. Burke turned on the couple, his hand out as though seeking to
ward off further paranoia. “Rachel is fine. I promise.”
Cassidy waved her hand. “I know that, Doc. I don’t worry about
it. I gave birth to two alien babies, and they’re just fine. Sweetest boys you ever saw. They both went into the Navy. Did their country and
their mama proud. One of them has some weird ideas, but he’s a good
man. They like beets, though. Couldn’t get enough of them when they
were boys. We should tell Rachel to stock up.”
“Cassidy raised some fine kids. You wouldn’t ever know they’re
half alien,” Mel said with a proud smile.
“I think that’s all we need, Mel,” Nate said, walking into the small
room that currently served as the Bliss County Morgue. He was a
familiar, welcome figure of authority. “And you, too, Marie. I
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appreciate everything. Logan can take the rest of your statements.
Y’all go on. Enjoy the festival.”
In a few seconds the room cleared, and Stef was left with Caleb
and Nate.
“Is this what I think it is?” Stef couldn’t help the tight, almost
violent way the question came out of his mouth.
Nate sighed. “I don’t know. I have to think we should consider the
fact that what happened to Jennifer in Dallas is connected to this. We haven’t had a murder in Bliss County since…well, we’ve had several,
but they were mostly self-defense. This is very different.”
Caleb pointed to the body, his finger gesturing to the line of her
throat. It was split neatly, the skin blue from the cold of the river and the fact that she’d left life behind hours before. “It’s a professional job. Neat, surgical. He didn’t do more than he had to do here, but look at her stomach.”
Burke pulled back the drab blue sheet that covered the girl. Her
body was a map of blue and purple bruises.
“He beat her.” Stef couldn’t imagine it.
“He tortured her,” Caleb corrected. “There’s a systematic pattern
to the bruising that tells me he was very controlled when he did this.
There’s nothing that hints at someone who was out of control. He
didn’t touch her face. He went for soft parts of the body. He knew
what he was doing.”
Nate was staring down at her wrists. “She was tied up.”
Stef flinched at the chaffing on her wrists. She’d been tied too
tightly. Caleb turned the wrist over. The underside was perfectly
smooth.
“I would assume she was tied to a chair,” Caleb said clinically.
“Look, I’ve never worked forensics. I was a surgeon, but I know the
human body, and I know a little about interrogation techniques. If you asked me, right now, I would tell you that this young woman was
tortured. Given the relative restraint of the violence, I would suspect that the man torturing her was a professional in search of something,
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information most likely. When he couldn’t get it out of her, he sliced her throat in a manner that would result in a very quick death. He then tossed her body in the river, which is sitting at roughly fifty degrees.
That kind of cold masks time of death, and due to the depth and speed
of the water flow, we can’t know where the crime took place. If
Teeny hadn’t found the pack, we wouldn’t know if she’d been here or
somewhere upriver.”
“Logan and I have a grid to search all along the valley. Zane’s
down there now with Rye Harper. If we find anything that could tell
us where the dump took place, it could help.” Nate’s eyes had taken
on that steely look he got when he was doing serious police work. It
wasn’t hard to remember Nate Wright had once been a top DEA
agent. Zane had been the same. Bliss might be a small town, but it had its share of veteran law enforcement.
The door to the clinic’s waiting room opened, and one of those
former law enforcement employees walked in. Laura Niles looked
slightly flustered, an adjective Stef almost never used for the cool
blonde. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes narrowed as they
honed in on Nate.
“I have been looking all over the town for you, Sheriff.”
Nate’s eyebrows climbed his forehead under the brim of his
Stetson. “It’s been a long morning, Laura. Actually, I’m glad you’re
here. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions. You used to profile
for the FBI, right?”
Laura had been one of their top profilers until an incident that
caused her to walk out on a high-paying job. She’d found her way to
Bliss, and now the Harvard-educated psychologist rang up tourists
buying gas at the Stop’n’ Shop. She ran her perfectly manicured
hands through her blonde hair, and if she had any problem standing in
a room with a corpse, she didn’t show it. She’d barely looked down at
the body, but now she let her eyes roam over it, a cool
professionalism falling over her like a cloak.
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“You want my opinion about this?” She stared at the body as
though it was a thing rather than former housing for a soul. Stef
couldn’t quite wrap his brain around it, but then he hadn’t worked for years in a job where death was all around him. Laura, he’d
discovered, had made a name for herself by hunting serial killers. It
wasn’t surprising that she’d learned to distance herself.
Nate nodded, and the doctor stepped aside, allowing Laura access
to the corpse.
She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke, her tone was
academic, far from the bright, friendly tones he associated with Laura.
Even her husky Southern accent seemed to fade in favor of a flat,