Chapter 14 #2
That doesn’t mean shit. I get hard when I’m roughly handled, that’s mechanics. It doesn’t mean I want to be groped. His brain is way too addled to grasp that as a concept though.
“You might think this is for you, you egotistical maniac, but it’s not. You don’t turn me on.”
“Who else would it be for? There’s no one else here, and that thing you staged with Ronnie was laughable.
” He gives a throaty cackle. “No, this is definitely for me.” He squeezes in a way that’s far too vicious to ever be pleasurable, then he brushes his thumb over the all-too sensitive tip of my cock.
Jeezus, fuck! Too much of that and I will come, much as I’m revolted by the notion.
“It’s not for you,” I repeat.
“Liar.”
“I’m not lying.”
“You’ve been bombarding me for weeks with messages about this. I’ve lost track of how many times you’ve got me to swear to adhere to the plan and ignore whatever you said once we got to it.”
“Adam, I did not ask you to stage dragging me into a toilet and assaulting me. What the hell have you taken that would convince you that was even likely?”
He rears back a little, and his brows furrow as he tries to unravel that mystery and provide an answer. I think maybe I’m making headway, but then he just shrugs. “Did you want some?”
“No.”
“It might help you relax.”
“No.”
“I’ve always preferred fucking face to face.”
That’s what he insisted upon with Whit. Christ, his mind is all over the shop.
“Adam, please. It’s bad enough that you blew up my car.”
“Huh? You’re so full of shit, Drake. You’re not pinning that on me. That was all your plan. You did that to yourself. I told you at the time that I thought it was unnecessary, but you were adamant that the letters weren’t being taken seriously enough, that you needed to escalate.”
Wait, he admits to knowing about the letters, but thinks I’ve been sending them to myself, and that I wired my own vehicle to blow? His head is more screwed up than I imagined. “Adam, how have we been communicating?”
“Text,” he mumbles, while cautiously fingering my arse. I’m not sure why he’s stopped being quite so aggressive. I suspect it would be foolish to think I’m getting through to him.
“Would you show me them?”
“Later.”
“Now,” I insist, and I risk raising my head enough to look back over my shoulder. He’s not looking at me at all. He’s looking down at his own cock, which is limp in his hand, and in absolutely no danger of entering my pucker. “Show me them now.”
“I thought you wanted to screw.”
The circularity of this conversation would be laughable, if the situation wasn’t so horrid. “I changed my mind. I don’t want to. Looks like you’re not really into it, either.”
“What? Yeah, sorry. You probably should have picked a better actor for the role. I prefer being done. It hardly ever works out for me the other way around.”
The likely issue there is the cocktail of substances he has circulating his blood stream, but as it’s something I’m right now thankful for, I settle for silence, and wriggling my wrists as a hint that he might like to release his grip.
The moment he lets go, I zip up, and get to my feet. He’s a strangely sorry figure, still kneeling, and sporting his limp dick. “Show me the texts.”
It’s as he’s rising, and he’s fishing about in his pocket for his phone, that the door is booted in. The stubby little bolt is torn free of its housing, and the door wallops Adam on the back of the head, causing him to drop like a stone at my feet.
“Dylan.” Kira barrels into the lavatory hands raised ready to karate chop her way through legions of ne’er-do-wells, and Ronnie follows her holding one of those artisanal tankards aloft, presumably with the intention of clobbering someone.
“Are you—”
“You’re okay, thank God.” I wrap both arms around Kira and hug her tight.
“Um, yeah, fine. Are you fine?” She pushes on my chest, to get me to arm’s length, but I’m not ready to let go. Adam could have done any one of a thousand things to her; even now the possibilities are rushing through my head. The fact there are no marks on her, is a genuine relief to me.
“I thought he’d… He said he’d taken you out. I didn’t know what to think.”
Her brows bunch into V’s in the centre of her forehead. “He sicced Rosie on me. I had to pry her off like you would a limpet. What happened in here?”
“He bundled Dylan into here.” Ronnie digs the tip of one pointy-toed heel into Adam’s prone body. “I’m sorry we didn’t get here sooner, it took a while to find her.”
Her presumably meaning Kira.
“Did he assault you? Hurt you, or threaten you in any way?”
My silence clearly irritates my erstwhile bodyguard, as her foot drums impatiently against the floor. I don’t want to relive the past few minutes providing a blow by blow account, funny that?
“I think it was him, the notes and such like. He seemed to think we’d been communicating and that I’d asked him to do all this. We haven’t been. Up until tonight, I haven’t seen him since the gala dinner.”
“I saw him just a few minutes before your car blew up. He was with that woman, the one whose daughter had a go at you before your speech at the dinner. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but if you reckon he’s behind everything, that puts a totally different spin on things.”
Kira produces a pair of cuffs from some sort of holster on her thigh and fastens Adam’s hands behind his back.
She checks his pulse, and gives his broad chest a prod, whereupon he groans, and it’s concluded that he’s all right.
A couple of other All Star’s security personnel arrive along with Howard Falchard, and they unceremoniously cart Adam off, half carrying, half dragging him between them.
It’s a while later when Kira comes upon me outside in the yard at the rear of the club, where I’m sat sitting beneath the staff smoking shelter.
There’s a lingering tang of nicotine in the air that even the weather can’t erode.
Rain drizzles over the cobblestones and pools over the blocked drain. Her image shimmers in the water.
Kira’s still wearing her party dress, the side of which is split to the thigh, and opens to reveal her leg as she squats down before me. I avoid meeting her eyes, far too aware of what her presence is doing to the speed of my heartbeat.
“You’ve not said a whole lot. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. They’re going to need a proper statement from you, Dylan.”
I should be grateful she’s here to talk business, yet I crave the warmth of her embrace. Is it so wrong to want somebody to hold me?
“I’m not going to the station tonight.” The last visit was far from pleasant and the memory of it far too recent. I’ve no desire to spend hours staring at a Formica tabletop while responding to variants on the same four questions.
“They need evidence to put him away. All they can do at the minute is hold him on suspicion.”
“Tomorrow,” I plead. Things always look better in the daylight.
Right now, I simply want to sit still. If I do so for long enough, maybe the thoughts inside my head will stop churning and settle into some sort of quiet.
Adam holding me down has stirred up a quagmire of memories I don’t want to deal with.
“It looked ugly when I arrived, and from what Ronnie said—”
I chew at the inside of my cheek, fearful of what she might have learned from Ronnie. Slowly, I raise my gaze, and a charge shoots between us that we both fight to hide, but it can’t be hidden. It’s there plain as the drizzle rolling over her brow.
“What did Ronnie say?” I ask.
For sure, more than Kira’s going to admit to being told.
“That you’d been dragged off against your will, and you were in danger. Is that not what happened, Dylan?”
I scratch at my scalp. “Nothing else? Ron didn’t say anything else?”
“About?”
I hate how she keeps twisting this back so that I’m the one doing the talking. “About us?”
Her chin dips. Her eyes are bright and knowing when she looks back up. “Maybe one or two things, but I’m guessing you’re not much in the mood to talk about those right now.”
I’m not desperate to, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
On the other hand, I’ve more space in my schedule to talk about them than I have for chat about what exactly happened in that bathroom with Adam.
Fact: I don’t want to relive those moments.
Fact: I’m going to, night after night, most likely for years.
“I’m sorry I’ve been a dick to you,” I say, because I owe her that apology, even if I’m not ready to bare my soul about anything else. In any case, I want her companionship. The night doesn’t seem nearly so dark with her sitting nearby.
She gives a sharp little sniff, and then shoots me a quick smile. “It’s pretty much what I expected of you.”
Great, so I have a reputation for being a prick. That makes me feel so much better. I bow my head again and turn away from her to watch the rain slide over the filthy cobbles.
“I didn’t mean that quite how it came out.
” She reaches out and strokes the skin right above my collar.
It tickles when she brushes the fine hairs there.
“What I mean is that you don’t know the whole picture.
I didn’t want to be assigned to you the night of the gala dinner, but Howard didn’t want to put any of the guys in your path.
He figured with your reputation for turning—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I interrupt her, not needing to hear about how I supposedly corrupt straight guys, and turn nice family men into screaming queens. “I’ve never fucked anyone who wasn’t wholly on board with that.”
“I didn’t say otherwise. I said Howard didn’t want to assign one of the guys to you, so I got handed the task.”
“I get it. You didn’t want to be saddled with a prick for the night either.”