Triptych (Will Trent #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,121
“Let me taste you.”
The raw growl of his voice sent a tingle through her body. She bit her bottom lip, trying not to think about how good his mouth would feel down lower as his lips grazed her stomach.
“No,” she managed, gently pulling him back up. “I need to go.”
“Stay with me.”
Somehow, the begging quality to his voice made it easier for her to leave. “I’ve got work tomorrow.”
“So do I.”
She pushed him away more firmly this time. “Will.”
He rolled off her and fell against the back of the couch with another groan, but this one was far from an expression of pleasure.
She pulled her underwear back on as she stood. Her shirt was still crooked and she leaned over as she adjusted it.
He wrapped his hand around her leg. “Why do you do this?”
She stepped out of his reach, finding her purse on the table by the front door. “Why do you let me?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
FEBRUARY 9, 2006
9:58 AM
Martha Lam had apparently made not one but several phone calls. John had gotten a full refund on the rent he had paid at the flophouse and the room at Mr. Applebaum’s was almost thirty dollars cheaper a month. Combined with the fifty bucks John had gotten for crawling through the vacuum tank, he might actually be able to eat this month.
“Damn,” Ray-Ray said. He was looking at a woman who had just pulled up with a Toyota Camry full of screaming kids. “She cain’t help that she ugly, but the least she could do is stay at home.”
John gave him a sideways glance. “When’d you learn to speak in complete sentences?”
“They’s a lot more to a brother than what you see,” Ray-Ray told him.
He left John at the dryer and went to help wipe down one of the cars. John’s uneasy peace with Ray-Ray had settled into some kind of friendliness on the other man’s part since he’d taken him to the hospital. John wasn’t sure what had brought about this transformation, but he wasn’t about to complain. He had enough people after him right now. Anything that got Ray-Ray off his back was all right with him.
The hospital visit had been a good thing for John, too. He still felt his heart skip in his chest when he thought about seeing Robin in the waiting room. She’d been wearing her work attire, but he couldn’t help seeing past that to her soft skin, her full lips. The way she stood with her weight shifted to one leg, her hip jutting out. What would it be like to run his hand along that hip, pull her close to him? These were the kinds of thoughts that kept a man awake at night.
Robin wasn’t the reason John had gotten in to work early this morning, showing up even before Art. Moving from one place to the other wasn’t a big deal. John had tossed his clothes into the cooler and used it as a suitcase as he walked the six blocks over to Mr. Applebaum’s house. Once John was settled in, he went back to Ashby Street one more time and dug up the knife where he had buried it under a tree for safekeeping. He’d sweated all the way on the bus, scared he’d be caught with a weapon. At the car wash, John had dropped it in the vacuum canister and sat on the retaining wall under the magnolia tree until Art had driven up in his Cadillac, asking, “What’s with you, Shelley? You bucking for a promotion?” as he locked his car door.
John was trying to think logically, figure out what to do next, but as much as he tried to concentrate, all he could feel was a burning anger. Michael had put that knife under his mattress in the flophouse just like he’d stashed the kitchen knife, the so-called murder weapon, in John’s closet all those years ago. What the hell did the guy have against him? What did John ever do to Michael to bring this down on his head? Not just John’s head, but on his entire family.
It was one thing to set up John all those years ago, but to keep it up, to use his identity while he was locked away in prison…that was some kind of sick obsession. Michael hated him. You didn’t hold on to another man’s name for all these years unless you really fucking hated the guy. And the prick had obviously used his position on the police force to