He stroked me until I was just as ready for him as he was for me. I turned around to face him, and we moved together with one thought. Our lips met and opened, our tongues stroking together, slow and soft at first, then quicker and more demanding as our hunger built. The water trailed down our bodies, and our hands followed suit, gliding, stroking, caressing, even as our kisses grew harder and greedier.
Owen left the shower long enough to grab a condom from his wallet. I took my little white pills, but we always used extra protection.
He stepped back into the warm spray of water. I reached for him, but he was quicker. He picked me up, put my back against the wall, and slid into me with one smooth thrust. I groaned and wrapped my legs around his waist, my hands digging into his shoulders.
“Now, this would be teasing,” Owen rasped against my lips.He withdrew, then surged into me again, making me groan once more.
“I think I’ve had enough teasing,” I said, nipping at his lower teeth with my lip. “Haven’t you?”
He responded by thrusting into me again, even deeper than before. My nails dug into his skin. Oh, yeah. We were definitely done teasing.
What started out slow, soft, and sweet quickly boiled up into something quick, hard, and wickedly good.
Owen thrust into me over and over again, and I matched him, rocking my hips against his. Our movements were so quick, so hard, so frantic, that my wet back slid down the shower wall. Owen growled and lowered me to the ground, the water pounding into his back even as he kept moving inside me, going deeper and deeper.
We rolled together, and then I was on top. I drew back, then rocked my hips forward in a long, slow glide that finally sent us both over the edge. Owen growled again, even lower and fiercer than before, and pulled me down on top of him. His lips met mine, both of us sucking the air out of each other’s mouth, even as we moved together in that perfect rhythm.
And then . . . bliss—pure, white-hot bliss that blotted out everything else.
I collapsed on top of him. Owen pressed his lips to my temple and pulled me even closer, cradling me in the strong circle of his arms. I rested my face in the curve of his neck. No words were necessary. Not now.
And we stayed like that for a long, long time, the water cascading down all around us.
Chapter Thirty-one
Three days later, the news broke about the grisly discovery of dozens of bodies at what looked like a small encamp— ment in the mountains above Ashland. A couple of retired folks who were hiking part of the Appalachian Trail apparently noticed legions of flies in the clearing at Grimes’s camp and went to investigate. They probably wished that they had just kept on walking.
But the hikers made a frantic call to the forest service, which in turn called in the po-po. Bria and Xavier were lucky—or unlucky—enough to be assigned to the case.
The po-po set up a staging area at the picnic tables in the park at the bottom of Bone Mountain, which was where I was right now. Bria had been practically living on the mountain for two days straight, and I’d brought her some food from the Pork Pit, along with enough for her to share with Xavier and her fellow boys in blue. I figured
that it was only fair, since I’d created a good portion of the mess that they were dealing with now.
Bria, Xavier, and I were sitting at one of the blue fiberglass picnic tables, several feet away from everyone else.
The two of them were scarfing down cheeseburgers with all the fixings, along with crispy steak-cut fries, coleslaw, potato salad, and some double-chocolate-chip cookies that I’d baked fresh that morning.
“We’ve got more than three dozen bodies in the pit alone,” Bria said, washing down a bite of burger with some raspberry lemonade that I’d also made. “All in various states of decay. Not to mention all of the men that you killed.”
Xavier nudged Bria with his elbow. “Tell her about the coroner.”
She snorted. “Oh, he’s having an absolute field day with all of this. You’d think that he was a kid, and it was christmas morning, given how giddy he is. It’s like he actually enjoys working on dead people.”
Speaking of the coroner, he was taking a break too and standing in the food line with some of the other cops and crime-scene techs. He held out his plate, and Sophia dished him up some baked beans and fries, and a thick, hearty, barbecued-beef sandwich. He noticed me watching him. He smiled and gave me a cheery wave before scurrying over to take a seat at one of the tables.
“Maybe he just enjoys all the overtime that the city has to pay him and his assistants for schlepping all the way out here,” I murmured in response.
Xavier looked at me over the tops of his aviator sunglasses. The noon sun beating down on his shaved head made his ebony skin gleam. “With all the bodies that you’ve dropped in and around Ashland in the past year, you’ve probably paid for a summer home for that man.”
“Well, it’s good to know that I have such a positive impact on our local economy,” I drawled. “If not so much on its citizens.”
Both Xavier and Bria grinned at my dark humor.
We sat there and chatted about other things while they finished their food. Xavier excused himself, got up, and went to go get seconds from Sophia, but Bria stayed at the table with me.
I glanced around to make sure that no one was within earshot, then asked her the question that had been on my mind ever since Finn had shown me the note on the guns in the back of Grimes’s trunk.
“Have you found out anything else about M. M.
Monroe?”
Bria shook her head. “Nothing. I’ve scoured the main house and the building where Grimes actually stored his guns, but I haven’t come up with anything. No pieces of paper with that name on them, no cell-phone numbers, no other indication that the guns were for M. M. Monroe. In fact, I haven’t found so much as a date book or even an old-fashioned ledger of who bought guns from him. Say what you will about him, Grimes protected his clients’ identities.”
“Finn hasn’t been able to find out anything on M.M.
either,” I said. “He’s still horrified that Grimes did everything face-to-face and that he didn’t even own a com— puter, much less use e-mail.”
Bria chuckled and shook her head. Then she reached down under the table and rifled through the backpack that she’d been carrying with her back and forth from the camp. She came up with a couple of towels and handed them over to me.
“I found a few things I thought you might like to have back.”
I unrolled one of the towels to find a silverstone knife nestled inside, one of the extra weapons that I’d used to fight the men on the ridge. “Thanks. I am glad to see them again. You can never have too many knives.”
Bria smiled a little, but then her face turned serious.
“There’s something else.”
This time, she pulled a brown envelope out of her
backpack and slid it over to me.
“I also took the liberty of going through Grimes’s house and removing all those creepy pictures of Sophia that he had,” she said in a soft voice. “I figured that nobody needed to know about Sophia except for us.”
I nodded and pulled the envelope over to my side of the table. “I appreciate that, and I’m sure that she and Jo-Jo will too.”
“How is Sophia? I’ve been so busy up here that I haven’t had a chance to drop by the salon and see her or Jo-Jo.”
“It’s hard to tell with her. She keeps everything to herself.”
Bria gave me a wry grin. “That sounds like someone else I know.”
I stuck my tongue out at her, but I couldn’t refute her words, because they were all too true. And I had my own nightmares about Grimes and his camp.