Chapter 5
5
JACK
“You’re going where?” Dax asked, his voice coming through my SUVs hands-free calling.
The week before over pancakes, after taking out Thorndyke the fucking Trafficker, we looked up what “Tbr” meant. We quickly ruled out Total Bed Rest and Total Business Return for To Be Read. The t-shirt made perfect sense, but because of the randomness of the search, I’d had to tell Dax the full story about the flight. About the woman. About her shirt. The sexy book. All of it. Not all of it. I left out the way her tits had stretched the letters on her shirt. Or how she blushed when she learned I’d been reading over her shoulder. Or how she told me her fantasy was to get railed.
Yeah, railed.
I’d imagined that every day since and my obsession wasn’t getting any better. My dick got hard every time I thought of her, and it was sick of my hand. Maybe it was because the life of a hitman was boring. Or that my life wasn’t all people imagined. A sweet glimpse of innocence and filth in one lush, feminine package and I wanted more.
I wanted my hands on her. I wanted my dick in her.
I gripped the steering wheel with one hand as my dick got hard… again, then shifted gears with the other as I blinkered and slowed down onto the highway’s off-ramp. “Coal Springs.”
I was pulling into the small town an hour from Denver, nestled quaintly in the mountains. Based on the cars with various license plates, tourists seemed to have flocked to the picturesque Main Street for overpriced, handmade ice cream, chainsaw-carved bears, and views of the Rockies. The banners on every ornamental light post pronounced this was the “Quaintest Town on Earth.” Vibrant flowers overflowed from hanging baskets and… was that a crossing guard at the intersection?
It was like I fell into a Disney movie set that got a shit ton of snow in the winter.
The crime rate had to be nil, and I was probably the only murderer in town.
“Coal Springs? Why?” Dax prodded.
I followed the directions from my SUV’s display onto a side street.
If a woman said to him, I want to get railed, he’d volunteer for the task. This specific woman who’d said that to me was different. She was so far out of my league. Like Mary Poppins, except she read graphic sex scenes .
Disney plus librarian did not equal a hitman’s girl. Or fling. Or anything.
Yet, I was still on my way to the library.
“Wait… it sounds like you’re already there. Hell, you’re going to visit the librarian you told me about last week, aren’t you? The one from the plane. Miss Tbr. Do you even have time for this? Aren’t you supposed to be turkey hunting this week?”
Shit. Yes. He meant Turkleman from Texas. “Yes,” I muttered. “And yes, I’m in Coal Springs for Miss Tbr.”
“Did you at least have Nitro look into her?”
Nitro was our go-to IT guy. His home office looked like a command center for NASA with more monitors than I could count, multiple keyboards, and a high-tech chair. Dax and I had been to his place once. I leaned against his desk, hitting some button that probably took down the Federal Reserve, and we weren’t welcomed back. Ever. Now we did business over phone calls and encrypted emails.
Nitro could find anyone, change anyone’s grades on a transcript, resolve any IRS debt, and from what I heard, he took over the tracking of Santa from NORAD last December.
I didn’t know his real name. I knew better than to ask.
“I don’t need him to look her up on FAA flight records,” I told Dax. “There’s one library in Coal Springs. I figured that out myself.” Unlike Turkleman, whose info I got back from Nitro, one quick internet search was all that was needed to find the Coal Springs Public Library. Based on the sign out front and the GPS voice from my dash, I’d arrived. I pulled over across the street from the entrance and parallel parked .
The library was an old brick building. Two cottonwood trees flanked the front entry along with a bike rack and a bulletin board with town notices and community flyers.
“It should be easy to find the hot librarian now that I’m at the library.” I checked the time. A little after five, which was when the place closed. Hopefully, I hadn’t missed her.
I wanted to see her face again. To see the dark color of her eyes. Watch how I could make her blush. Breathe in her soft scent without Joey Brains’ farts killing us.
“Have you heard yourself lately?” he asked.
My eyes roved over the entrance. All was quiet. “What?”
“Call up the service, tell them about your new hot librarian fetish and get it out of your system.”
I had zero interest in anything he just said, and I hadn’t made use of the exclusive agency of escorts in recent months even though they took care of me without questions, entanglements, or expectations.
I didn’t have a fetish. I had a hard-on that wouldn’t quit for one woman who just happened to be hot and a librarian.
I wanted her. Whatever her name was. I wasn’t going to remind Dax of that fact because he’d be even more hellbent on steering me away.
I hadn’t stopped thinking about her since the plane. About the book we’d read together, whether she’d finished it–of course she had–and touched herself imagining the character Colin fucking her like he had the heroine in the book. Maybe she moved on to that werewolf storyline she mentioned.
I wasn’t telling Dax that I looked up romance book plot lines this morning over coffee. That the shifters she mentioned had big bites and bigger dicks. If my librarian wanted a real dick, not fiction, I volunteered. I’d bite, too, if that was her thing.
“I’m not into roleplay,” I told him, looking into my side mirror as a slow-moving minivan passed. Were they scoping out my librarian? Did I have to follow them and kill them? Fuck. Wait. This was Coal Springs, and the speed limit was twenty-five. There were no bad guys around here. I saw the stick figure stickers on the back window that indicated that whoever was driving had too many kids. And a dog. Was that a turtle, too?
“I want the real thing.”
“What? A date? So you’re going to… what? Walk into the library and ask to sign up for a library card? You don’t think she’s going to freak the fuck out when a guy from a flight she was on tracked her down to her place of work? A guy who read over her shoulder? There’s a term for that. Stalking.”
“I’m not stalking her,” I muttered, feeling called out.
The library door swung open and out came an older woman. Gray hair, pink pants, floral shirt. Then she followed. Dark hair, long like I remembered. The jeans and t-shirt from the plane were replaced with a blue dress that fell to her knees. There was some kind of pattern on it and the cut was loose, probably meant for comfort and keeping cool, not for ogling her gorgeous tits or perfect peach of an ass.
Sitting across the street and checking her out, I was totally stalking her .
Dax grunted as I watched her turn toward the door and lock it. “She’s a librarian from Coal Springs, the town that has the annual North Pole parade in December with candy canes and dreidels decorating the lampposts. You sure she’s the one you want?” He had a valid point, but I didn’t have to like it. I couldn’t help an obsession, especially seeing her again now in person.
I had no idea why this woman got me all crazy and made my dick hard. It would be simpler otherwise, but no. I wanted her.
“Yes,” I gritted out through clenched teeth. My hand itched to open my door and go to her, except she wasn’t alone as I imagined.
“Fine, say she doesn’t care that you’re a stalker. What are you going to do on your first date when she asks what you do for a living? Lie?”
She turned around and her gaze cut across the street and toward my SUV.
Shit! I ducked so she couldn’t see me. Slumped low in my seat, my heart pounded. What the hell was wrong with you? I asked myself as I stared at the trident emblem steering wheel, angry at myself. You drove all this way! You came to see her and now you’re hiding like a fucking coward. Dax’s words were fucking with me.
“I told her the truth on the plane,” I muttered, trying to come up with an excuse to validate why it was okay that I was in Coal Springs and also sitting here hiding. This position was not comfortable. The bottom of the steering wheel was wedged in my chest.
I was met with silence and for a second I thought the car’s hands-free system had cut out .
“You told her you were a hitman.”
“Yes.”
“You said, I’m a hitman.”
“Pretty much.”
“And she believed you?”
I frowned. “No. We were talking about romance novel tropes.”
“What the fuck?” He was laughing at me. I could hear it.
“You heard me.” I clenched my teeth. I was not repeating myself. I peeked out the side window. She and the older woman were walking toward the small parking lot on the side of the building where two cars were parked. The other woman went up to a new mini-SUV while my obsession unlocked a small, older model sedan. White. That was a terrible choice for Coal Springs. Not four-wheel drive and with the snow in the winter? No one would be able to see it. It was a four-wheel death trap. She’d need a new vehicle before it snowed.
I could follow her home. See where she lived. Make sure her place was safe.
If not, she’d need a car and a new house.
“Do you even know if she’s married?” Dax asked, nudging me from my thoughts.
She waved to the other woman–fuck, her smile was pretty–then climbed into her car. “She mentioned a cheating ex.”
It still made no sense, anyone cheating on her. I wasn’t sure if I should kill him or send him a fucking fruit basket for being a dumbass. Definitely the first option.
“I gotta go make popcorn.”
The other woman drove off first. Then my girl followed, looking both ways as she came out of the lot, then turned toward me. I ducked again until I heard her car drive past. “For what?”
“For when you call me later and tell me what happened. Either you’re going to get kneed in the balls or arrested. Or both. If you need to get bailed out, can you make sure it happens before six because I have plans tonight.”
“Fucker.” I ended the call. Was I as dumb as Dax thought? Probably. We didn’t date everyday women. Hell, we didn’t date. Period. I had tons of enemies; friends and relatives of those I’ve killed. If they knew who I was, where I lived, I most likely would be dead. Anyone I cared about would also be dead.
I was dangerous in more ways than one. For a woman in my life, or bed, a service that was more transactional than anything else was the safest way to go. No one who wanted me dead would kill an escort solely because I spent a few hours with her.
Was I being selfish coming here? Hell, yes. But I couldn’t help it. This feeling was insane. Irrational.
A craving.
Except I was a total pussy, hiding from her. What if she saw me and wanted nothing to do with me? Fuck, I sounded like a seventh grader in the cafeteria at school. I needed to get my shit together. I didn’t come to Coal Springs to be like this. I knew firsthand that wasn’t the kind of guy she craved.
I needed to spin this shit around. I took a deep breath.
“I want her,” I said to myself in the quiet confines of my SUV, which meant I was going insane. I never talked to myself. “I’m going to have her. Find out her name. Make her smile. Make her come. Once I get my fucking balls back.”
Because I could kill a man and sleep like a baby afterward, but it seemed I couldn’t stalk a woman without acting like an idiot.