The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,88
skin looked dark against a crisp banded collar. White Trash had her paws stretched out in front of her and her butt in the air.
He rose slowly to full height, all of about five feet nine even in his western boots. “She missed me,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “You probably smell like fish.”
He smiled gently. “I’m changing, Keye. I’m working hard to turn my life around. To make things right.”
I ignored that. “Why do cats like fish anyway? It’s not like they’re out there trout fishing in the wild. Ever see a cat rip a fish out of a stream on Wild Kingdom?”
Dan was undeterred. “I don’t know how you can forgive me for the kind of man I’ve been to you, but if you’ll just try, I won’t let you down this time.”
Of course he would. It’s what we do. We make promises, he breaks them, I’m wounded and pissed off. Then we start all over. Sick, I know, but I didn’t care suddenly. I just wanted him. I didn’t exactly stretch out my paws and stick my butt in the air, but I must have signaled him in some basic animal way, because he came to me, held my jaw, and kissed me. His mouth tasted like Starburst, the orange ones he loved and probably had a bag of in his banged-up old car. He smelled like drier sheets and soap, and when he pressed against me, when he whispered, “I’m crazy about you, Keye. I always have been,” he was already hard. He didn’t ask why I’d been packing when we moved to the bedroom and pushed my suitcase onto the floor.
Dan was a submissive lover, sweet and silky and hard. He liked kissing. He liked being undressed. He liked to be restrained. He liked letting me do whatever I wanted with him for as long as I wanted. In some circles, he was called a Bottom, and it was one of the things I adored about him. There was something boyish and wounded in him when we made love. He was responsive and open, eager and utterly awed by me—everything I wanted from him in life and more than I could ever expect.
We were silent for a while after we’d made love. My head was on his chest, his fingers skipping lightly over my bare shoulder. “You awake?” he murmured finally, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to talk. I just wanted to fall back asleep like this, in the softness of this moment.
He shook me a little. He wasn’t giving up. “What’s with the suitcase?”
I kissed his neck, pressed a finger against his lips. The sun was setting and I was sleepy. White Trash jumped on the bed and immediately went for the exposed half of Dan’s fuzzy chest. She paused briefly to sniff my eyelashes, then put her butt in my face and relaxed her whole body on top of him. The phone began to ring. So much for the moment.
“Want a failure to appear with priors?” It was Tyrone from Tyrone’s Quikbail. “Money’s good,” he added. “Meaty.”
Tyrone could say things like “meaty” and still sound cool. I rose up on my elbow. “What priors?”
“Assault, armed robbery.”
I hadn’t exactly been running down new work. I was sucked into the Wishbone investigation and all the crap that always swallows up my life—background checks, service of process, and about a hundred applications to verify for Rapid Placement, the employment agency that used up a couple thousand dollars’ worth of my time each month. I needed them, but the work was so excruciatingly boring that I always put it off until the last possible minute every week, drooling into my keyboard till I fell asleep on Sunday nights, groggily turning in my reports on Monday mornings.
I told Tyrone I wouldn’t be available for a few days. He took the news well. He had a long list of agents who wanted work. He had called me first because he liked me. That was the rumor anyway. It’s hard to tell with Tyrone.
I curled back up to Dan and the scraggly white cat that seemed to no longer give a damn about me. “It’s a business trip,” I said before Dan had to ask again. “A few days maybe. I’m not sure yet.”
He moaned a little, kissed the top of my head, pulled me closer. “And just when we’re getting along so well.”