Chapter 20 Tangled in an Inescapable Conundrum
Tangled in an Inescapable Conundrum
In the scant hours until daybreak, my friends and I put aside our shock and outrage to dispose of the body and clean up all traces that the man who so precisely resembled Griffin, but definitely wasn’t him, had been here at all.
However, we quickly found ourselves tangled in an inescapable conundrum.
We were trapped in a town we couldn’t escape.
Furthermore, everyone who shared Ridgemore with us was likely in on the plot against us.
Maybe there were some outliers, some who resisted Magnum’s insane orders, but we couldn’t guess at who they were, or if they’d actually help us.
After all, they presumably agreed to dupe us, The Truman Show style, in the first place.
That choice didn’t exactly imply any of them had hearts of gold, just waiting for us to give them an opportunity to rescue us.
Since Brady and Layla’s not-mom had warned us so intently in her latest hypno not to trust Sheriff Xander Jones, we considered going to him. But on his own, he didn’t seem force enough to stand up to Magnum’s might. And our only reason to trust him was not-Celia telling us not to. Too risky.
We debated driving out toward Raven’s Lagoon and dumping the body off the side of a cliff.
A poetic option, truly, since Magnum had surely ordered Clyde’s brake line be cut, sending Griffin to his first death.
But then we’d have all sorts of biological material up in one of our Mustangs, ripe for a forensics team to find—assuming any would come looking for evidence of a crime in this inescapable town.
It wasn’t as if we had large plastic sheets lying around tagged for future corpse disposal, or flesh-dissolving acid and its attendant accoutrements, for that matter, which Layla suggested.
Plus, there was no cleaning the blood from the carpet.
After I stabbed the impersonator, I shoved him off me and the bed before I could consider the importance of containing a crime scene.
The blood on me, my sheets, and the knife, not a big problem.
But the richly dark blood had soaked deep into the carpet fibers.
There was no point in even attempting to scrub it out.
The best we could come up with was to use Bobo’s bed, which he rarely used in favor of mine, to conceal the spot, and then arrange for fresh carpet in my room—while somehow avoiding all the informants who would tattle the very instant we strolled into a flooring store casually inquiring about new carpet.
Besides, my DNA would be all up on the body.
As much as I wished I could deny it, the Griffin impostor had been a little bit inside me.
He’d kissed me, touched me, licked me, rubbed all up on me.
Even hacking the body up into little pieces—another of Layla’s suggestions—wouldn’t help if they ever were to be found and analyzed by real professionals who weren’t Magnum’s lackeys.
And where exactly were we supposed to do something like that, anyway?
How would we contain such a gruesome scene?
After the more violent disposal methods, which held a punishing appeal, we also considered the obvious option of simply burying the body somewhere in the woods out back behind our houses.
Between all our lie-rents, they owned all the property.
Unless someone went looking for a cadaver, it would probably never be found.
But that was when we landed on the most limiting predicament of them all: We were being surveilled. Constantly.
No matter where we went or when, the lie-rents—possibly even Tracy, aka not-Mitzi, and the rest of the team of scientists Magnum employed to analyze every little thing about us—would know.
When we’d hacked their system, we’d discovered camera feeds with vantage points every-fucking-where, stopping just short of aiming for a good view up our rectums.
If we moved a body, no matter what precautions we took, the lie-rents would know it come morning.
We were still grasping at better alternatives—and failing to find them—when the dead man on my bedroom floor shifted from an identical image of the man I loved to the one I most despised.
The complete transition took only a minute at most, but all five of us caught it, staring, mesmerized, as Griffin’s familiar features stretched, strained, and morphed, until a bare-naked Magnum was what remained.
Seeing him, we made our decision.
Hunt, Brady, and Layla kept eagle eyes on the corpse—not that it was going anywhere—and on a still-snoring Bobo while I cleaned up. Griffin insisted on following me into the shower to help scrub off the blood and Magnum’s touch. The memories, regrettably, wouldn’t be quite so easy to erase.
I brushed my teeth aggressively three times while Griffin, naked under the spray with me, washed my hair and body with such tender care I couldn’t believe it had taken me as long as it had to figure out the man who’d entered my bedroom without my invitation wasn’t him.
As scoured clean as I was going to get, Griffin hesitated before eventually wrapping his arms around my waist and pulling my back against his chest. He rested his chin on the top of my head, kissing me there over and over while the hot water streamed down on us.
he asked into our private chat, which our friends in the other room would be able to hear plainly. It was either that or have the lie-rents later listen to a recording of us instead.
I leaned my head back onto his shoulder.
I smiled sadly and tilted my closed eyes up to the water, allowing the rainfall showerhead to pitter-patter upon my face.
I sensed that comment drew my friends’ rapt attention, so I changed tack, swiveling in Griffin’s arms to look up at him.
Griffin tensed, his slick muscles corded under my touch.
In my mind, his words trembled.
He shook his head; it deflected the rainfall.
I whispered into our shared bond.
He chortled darkly.
I repeated, resting my face on his chest, tilting my head to the side so the water would sluice down my back.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” Griffin murmured aloud against my hair. “So, so sorry I wasn’t here to stop him.”
I pulled back to look him in the eyes, pivoting so the spray no longer reached our faces.
I grimaced. I asked the others.
Hunt replied, the one word vibrating with his fury.
Griffin said, shuddering.
I wove my arms around his neck.
I pulled his mouth down to mine and pressed my lips to his.
For the first awful moment, all I could think of was how those lips had felt when they’d been Magnum’s. Their touch delivered me instantly back to Magnum’s body on top of me, forcing its way inside me.
But then Griffin kissed me back with so much gentleness, his hands caressing long lines down my back with such precious care, that he overrode those memories.
Eager for him to replace more of them, I pulled him down harder into my kiss.
He didn’t make me ask, seemed to know what I wanted, what I needed.
His tongue was hot and wonderful as it slid along mine. A moan slipped from between our pressed mouths.
He pulled my hips into his, where I discovered him already hard and straining to be inside me.
I hitched a leg around his thigh, opening myself up for him, and angled myself so that his dick slid easily into place.
I was about to sink down onto him when his hands gripped me around the waist.
he panted into my mind. Into that of our friends just outside.
Shaking my head, I began lowering myself onto him.
But he jerked his pelvis away so that, once more, only the tip remained notched inside me.
he insisted.
His eyes studied me, but he didn’t argue. He lowered his lips to my ear. “Let’s wait, baby. Give you—hell, us—time to recover first. So that it’s just us again. I don’t want … him,” he spat, “between us.”
“He isn’t,” I whispered back. “I promise.” There was, however, a tiny chance that I was lying, as much to myself as to him. I realized it even then.
Wrapping both arms around his shoulders, I gave a little hop, and wound my legs around his hips. He, of course, caught me, with both hands under my ass.
As if he couldn’t help himself, he squeezed my butt cheeks and moaned deeply.
When I lifted myself up and lined us up again, he stilled me with those strong hands that massaged my cheeks, spreading them.
“Joss, baby, I love you. We’ve got time. No need to hurr—”
In a single stroke, I sank down onto him, sheathing the hard length of him entirely inside me.
Together, we threw our heads back and groaned.
Layla’s voice cut in sharply.
Griffin and I stilled for a beat before he ground up inside me again. My eyes fluttered shut at the sensation of being so gloriously filled by him. Layla wasn’t wrong, obvi she wasn’t. But fuck if I couldn’t help myself.
Layla pressed.
Brady asked.
Layla went on, unperturbed,
Layla’s point fully taken, I sighed, enjoyed the crap out of Griffin gliding me up and down his cock a few more times, before I unwound my legs from his hips and brought my feet gingerly to the tiled floor, without dislodging him.
He thrust inside me again, causing me to claw at his back with my nails, before growling against my ear.
“Rain check. It’s only a brief rain check. I’ll be back inside you first chance we get.”
“Promise?” I breathed.
He nodded his nose up and down my neck. “Never’s a promise been so easy to make.”
The water temperature began to turn tepid as he withdrew. I didn’t realize I was staring at his dick, wearing my feelings all on the outside, until his rolling chuckle yanked me from my daze.
He lowered his lips to the shell of my ear again. Dragged his tongue along my earlobe, sucked it into his mouth, then said, “You’re looking at my dick like I’m breakin’ your heart by putting him away.”
Eyes wide and earnest, I glanced up at him before admiring his proud, beautiful dick some more. “You absolutely are.”
This time, his laugh was hearty. “Come ’ere.” He opened his arms for me.
I stepped into them, but not before ducking down to drag a long lick up the length of his shaft.
His head hit the tiled wall before he wrapped me in his arms.
A soft knock rapped on the bathroom door.
As I allowed Griffin to dry me off and then wrap me in a fluffy towel, I smiled at him.
Down on a knee to dry my legs, he gazed up at me.
Then he slid open the two halves of my towel, parted my folds, and trailed his tongue up the entirety of my slickness.
I bucked and gasped.
He licked his lips.
“Fair’s fair,” he murmured in that deep rumble of his as he rose, a wolfish gleam twinkling in his eyes.
I stared deeply into them.
I saw him and only him.
There was no one else.