Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
“Fallon, you said so yourself, we have too many unresolved issues between us.”
“Not for this. Never for this. I love you, and I want to make love with you. You told me you loved me, was that a lie?” Her hazel eyes were almost green as they stared up at mine with such agonizing want.
“No, that’s the one part about me that you will never have to worry about. I adore you. I love you. You are the other half of my soul…”
She stroked her thumb over my bottom lip. “But?”
“But, you’re right, I’m fucked in the head. Just like you said.”
She jerked backward, shocked. “I never said that!”
“You did. But it’s okay. I’ll get myself together. For you.”
I pulled off my t-shirt and dropped it. Then I pulled down my jeans and briefs and stood before her naked. My cock bobbed right in front of her face. She circled it with her fingers and pulled me closer, toward her full pink lips.
My head dropped backward as I was enveloped in the hot, wet cavern of her mouth. She traced the head of my cock with her tongue, swirling along the edge, coaxing my response, as if her life depended on it.
Fallon sucked me in deep. Then deeper.
She made a soft noise as I hit the back of her throat. I pulled back… out.
“No,” she protested. “I want to do this for you.”
“If you keep that up, I won’t be of any use to you,” I teased. “Arms up.” She obeyed me blindly, and I pulled her tank off her body. Dropping that, I then knelt in front of her, pulled off her sleep shorts, and spread her thighs.
I took a deep breath and smelled her apple body wash mixed in with the heavenly scent of her musk. So good. I couldn’t wait another second. I parted her folds. Wet, pink perfection. I had to take just a moment to stare. I shuddered at the lush beauty laid out before me. It was like a banquet. God, I needed a taste.
Fallon began to squirm. I moved my hands to her hips in order to hold her in place but immediately remembered her bruise.
“Stay still,” I murmured against her inner thigh as I placed one, then two kisses against her satiny flesh.
She squirmed again, then I placed my hand on her soft belly, loving how it felt compared to my more muscled body. As soon as she settled, I helped myself to one long, slow lick.
She tasted so good. So very, very good. She was squirming again, but I gave up trying to stop her, because now she was lifting to get closer to me. Using my thumbs, I opened her up even more and pierced her core with my tongue.
“Michael,” she shrieked.
She liked that.
I did it again and again.
When her fingernails dug into my scalp, I felt like I had won an award. I moved to take her clit between my lips and suck it while laving it with my tongue, then I pushed two fingers inside her and she screamed. I think it was my name, but I couldn’t make it out.
I was pretty sure she had one more orgasm in her, so I crooked my fingers, and found the right spot inside her and grazed against it.
“It’s too much,” she wailed.
I circled her clit with my tongue.
“It’s too much,” she whimpered again.
I continued to rub inside her, then I rasped her clit with my teeth and she let out a much softer cry, but this one sounded more joyous.
As I positioned her onto the bed, determining how I could take her without hurting her shoulder, arm or ankle, I pushed a pillow under her hips, then cocked out her left knee so that she was spread for my entry.
“Oh yes,” she murmured. She reached out to touch me to guide me home, but she winced.
“Let me run the show, Fallon. I don’t want you to be hurt.”
“You could never hurt me,” she said as she looked up at me. Her eyes were glazed with passion. If she’d said that, I knew she was out of her mind with want.
“I won’t hurt you again, I promise.”
“Now, Michael. I need you so much.”
I pressed my length inside Fallon’s body, and once again I felt a sense of homecoming. I nuzzled her neck with kisses. I whispered endearments and praised her beauty and kindness.
“Move,” she begged.
I did, slowly and surely, I savored each movement as I revelled in her tight clasp. But all too soon, I felt the fire shoot down to my lower back, like lava. I was so close.
“Yes love, come for me,” she whispered.
That wasn’t good enough. She needed to come with me.
Sweat burst across my lower back, as she clenched around me. Nothing. Not one thing, had ever felt better than Fallon’s lush flesh clamping down on me. I watched her closely and saw she was reaching for her pleasure again. I swiped my thumb against the tip of one of her breasts and she arched up.
She was going to burn me alive.
“Michael,” she cried out. I saw tears drip down her temples as I buried myself deep inside her, our bodies twisting together, trying to get even closer. I yelled out my release the same time as she did, and still we pressed against one another, as if we were trying to wring out that last bit of pleasure that we could from one another.
She was asleep by the time I left her. I got up and got a washcloth to clean her up, then covered her and wrapped her up under the covers the way she liked. I put on my clothes and went to the living room to wait for Zarek.
Zarek had asked me if I knew what I was doing when I’d left him there to watch over Fallon. I assured him that I did.
I did the speed limit as I drove the seventy-three miles into Knoxville, flashes of Fallon standing up in the lobby of the hospital earlier that day with a bandage on her forehead and her arm in a sling.
A worse memory—the moment I found Fallon gasping for breath amid crushed geraniums, positive she was going to die. Die as I was forced to watch the life drain out of her, the same way I watched when my father squeezed the life out of my mother. Strangling her.
A horn honked behind me, and I realized I was no longer doing the speed limit, I was ten miles below. I sped up and took the exit I needed to get to Sid Martin’s apartment. The closer I got to his address, the worse the neighborhood got. Roan had told me that Sid was working as a sanitation worker at a sausage plant outside of town.
It was ten o’clock when I got to the dilapidated one-story apartment complex. I shuddered. Each unit looked to have a door and two windows. It looked like some motel built in the forties that had been converted into the saddest apartments I’d ever seen. I pulled in and parked my truck under one of the two parking lot lights that worked.
In my walk over to the apartment that was Sid’s I saw two drug deals go down. I ignored them. But it made me realize that around here you would probably be able to find a friend of a friend of a friend who sold exotic animals.
I was careful not to walk directly up to Sid’s apartment, rather, I came around from the side. Both of his windows had sheets over them, and I could see part of the duct tape that held them closed.
Classy.
I pounded on the door from the side, ensuring I couldn’t be seen through the peephole.
“KPD,” I yelled. “Open up.”
I knew from the file that Roan and Simon had put together that Sid worked the night shift, therefore he should be up, getting ready to clean out meat drippings from grinders and drains. Oh joy.
I pounded again. “Knoxville Police Department. Open up.”
“You already cleared me,” Sid was saying as he opened the door.
And there he was, the monster from my childhood. Sid Martin. My father.
The man who used to tower over me, with a voice like thunder that would roar through our little house, making Mom and me tremble. The man who broke bones and split lips.
“Mikey. Nice of you to stop by.” Sid smiled.
How could a monster have a white smile like his? I stared into his gray eyes and I saw them dance with mirth.
“Thought I might get a visit from you, sooner or later.”
I never realized that we had the same face. The same cleft in the chin. The same eyes, the same square jaw. I remembered him being a giant who could, and often did, crush me like a bug. Only now he was thinner. Older. His dark hair was greasy and threaded with gray. Instead of looking like a man who I knew to be fifty-four, he looked over seventy.
Like a puzzle piece snapping into place, I realized why I had always avoided having my picture taken. Because I would end up with mementos around the house that would remind me of him.
“You turned out good-looking. Not like that ugly, useless bitch of a mother.”
“Shut the fuck up. Don’t you dare talk about my mother that way.”
“What are you going to do about it, Mikey? Hit me? Abuse your law-abiding father who deeply regrets his past sins and just wants to live in peace. That won’t play very well with your job.”
My spine locked.
There he was. When he wasn’t ranting and raging, he would sound like this. All tricky and fake. I remember my Mom always loving on him when he sounded like this. But even as a young child I never trusted him like this. I’d known he was a monster, no matter what guise he was in.
I pushed at the door. Hard. Shoving Sid backward, and I slammed the door shut behind us both. “Let’s get some things straight, shall we?”
“Think you’re a big man, do you?” Sid taunted. “Did a little time playing Army, and now you’re playing fireman and you think you can scare me. Well, I’ve met really scary men during my time in prison, and you’re just a pussy compared to them.”
“You stay away from my parents, and you stay away from Fallon. You don’t, and you die. It’s as simple as that.”
Sid laughed. “You won’t kill me. You don’t have it in you. I know you. I saw the woman that birthed you. I saw what a sniveling brat you were. You don’t have it in you to kill me.”
I thought about my time as a Ranger. I advanced on Sid until he was backed up against a wall. “You know nothing about me. You don’t know that I can kill you from one thousand meters away, or I can kill you with one hand right now. You don’t know what I’m capable of in order to protect those I love. If you value your life, you’ll stop what you’re doing and leave the state tonight.”
“If I leave, there will be a warrant out for my arrest for breaking my parole,” he whined. His words didn’t match what his eyes were telling me. He didn’t give a shit about his parole. He only cared about getting back at me.
“This is your one and only warning, Sid. When I leave through that door, all bets are off. You do one thing wrong and you’re a dead man.”
Sid laughed at me. “I’ve been a dead man for twenty-four years and it was all because of you. You have no idea what I went through in prison. You’ll pay for that.”
Now his gray eyes looked flat and dead.
I should probably just kill him right now and get it over with .
That stopped me up short.
Am I just like him?
The thought hit me like a freight train. My breath hitched. My vision tunneled.
How much of him was inside me? How much of his blood, his violence, his darkness lived in my bones?
But I knew, didn’t I? I’ve always known.
I swallowed hard, then turned around and left. I needed to get back to Fallon.