Local woman killed in plane crash 14 page

Chapter 32

The next twenty-four hours tested Josh’s faith in God’s presence in Temple. As Liv sank slowly and deeply inside herself, he questioned if maybe this was hell. Perhaps she was right. God had abandoned him on a threadbare mattress, locked in an attic, with his heart hemorrhaging in his hands.

He’d fed her the meals she’d retrieved from downstairs, showered with her, and tended his swollen knuckles and the small rip on her rectum. But his single-minded outpouring of questions, affection, and worry was a failed attempt in breaking through her steel-plated chest, which grew colder and more rigid with each passing minute.

She curled in a ball on the mattress and clutched her phone. Waiting for the videos that never came. Watching the blank screen as if, at any moment, it would stare back with lifeless eyes.

If Mr. E intended to kill her Mom and daughter, he would do it after she delivered Kate. Van had left Temple before they’d returned early that morning. Mr. E needed her and wouldn’t risk her dissent. Josh knew she knew that.

He dropped the tennis ball he’d been throwing for the past hour and stood over her, hands on the waistband of his jeans. “What time is it?”

Her thumb tapped on the phone’s screen. “11:48 PM.”

Only fifteen minutes had passed since the last time he’d asked. He was out of excuses to coax her out of the attic. Kate was free to roam the outer room, and Liv had brought up enough food to hold the three of them over until the delivery tomorrow.

He knew Liv intended to kill Kate’s buyer. Every time he counseled her against this decision, he was met with a litany of colorful words. Liv seemed completely unconcerned about her own safety.

Numerous times, he’d considered calling his parents to let them know he was okay. He would’ve had to trick her into unlocking her phone, but that wasn’t what quashed the idea. He didn’t know the outcome of their situation until she delivered Kate. Giving his parents false hope would be cruel.

“No more waiting.” He perched on the edge of the mattress. “We need to leave. Escape with Kate.”

“No.” Her answer was cold, final. She turned away and stared at her phone.

It hadn’t passed his notice that she was the only one going downstairs for food. With Van gone, there was no need for pretense. Beneath that icy mask, she still believed he would leave her.

He drew in a breath and matched her chilly tone. “If you haven’t heard from Mr. E before the delivery, then what?” She’d said Van would send her the address for the delivery when he received it. “Are you still going to deliver that girl?”

Her body turned to stone, her voice grinding. “I’m going to do what I have to do.”

He rubbed his temples. He couldn’t ask her to choose whose lives to protect. It was an impossible decision. One that would make the strongest person lose her bearing.

Laying on her side with her back to him, she folded in on herself, arms and bedding wrapped around her belly. She needed someone to hold her on the shore of decision, to cradle her fears, to contemplate what was best for her.

He leaned in and touched her bare shoulder with his fingertips, with his lips. “If you need a place to go, Liv, I’m right here.”

A shiver twitched down her arm. Her hair swept over the pillow in ripples of mahogany. The naked curve of her spine disappeared beneath the sheet that bunched at her waist. He was conscious of her lack of clothing under there, and while her nudity was no longer a mystery, it was no less alluring. Even in her misery, he wanted her, in every way possible.

He trailed a knuckle along the dip of her waist, over the rise of her hip, taking the bedding with it. He expected her to jerk away as she’d done all day, so he decided to surprise her. He yanked the sheets to the floor, exposing her slim lines and milky skin, stripping her bare.

She rolled to her back, her lips parting in disbelief, her phone seemingly forgotten at the edge of the mattress. What a gorgeous opportunity. He pinned her chest with his and captured her mouth before she could close it, swiping his tongue, finding hers on the second pass, warm, wet, and so damned promising.

She arched into him, the heated satin of her flesh molding to his hands as he caressed her backside. He was instantly hard, his balls tightening with an achy need. He palmed her breasts, his thumbs rolling over her nipples, his tongue licking and stroking the sensual reaches of her mouth.

The most private part of her body ground against his, her calves hooked around the back of his thighs, her fingers clutching his biceps. As their mouths moved together in synchronized surrender, he wished he’d had the foresight to remove his jeans. He wanted to feel her against his skin. He wanted in her.

Her hands twisted through his hair and tugged, breaking the kiss. Her lashes lifted, carrying her gaze from his mouth to his eyes, and held him, heart and breath, in eternal suspension.

She licked her bottom lip, and he felt it pulse through his erection. She blinked and something shifted over her expression. Angling her chin to the side, the hands in his hair pulled his face to her chest, and her thighs tightened around his waist. “Please don’t give yourself to me.”

He broke the crush of her embrace and gripped her face with two hands, forcing her to look at him. “I already have. This—” he rocked his groin against hers “—is part of the deal.”

Her eyelids shuttered closed, and a breath spasmed through her chest, her lips in a flat line of rejection.

His hands fisted in the pillow. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, force her, beg her, or otherwise guilt her into it. He lowered his forehead to her shoulder, inhaling the clean scent of her skin, savoring the intimacy of her body against his.

A haunting melody strummed from her lips. He recognized it immediately. “Possession” by Sarah McLachlan was a sad but fitting choice, its tune reflecting the tragedies in Liv’s life. He shivered against the sweet breeze of her vocals, holding her tight as she expressed herself the one way she knew how.

She sang about trapped memories and solitude, but when the lyrics shifted to aching bodies, her huge brown eyes moistened, welling in the corners, staring up at him, piercing. Her conscience emerged through the words, her voice cracking, yearning. He realized she wasn’t rejecting him. She was beseeching him. Asking him to love her.

He sat back on his heels, curled her legs around him, and beheld the beauty of his world. Uncertainty misted her eyes. He drank in her fading hymns, her feminine allure. The parted seam of her mouth, gentle swells of breasts, flat expanse of belly, vulnerable spread of thighs. Her fearless heart.

His chest swelled, overcome and pounding frantically, as her love gathered before his eyes, twining her fingers around his, rolling tears down her cheeks, whispering a word he’d ached to hear in her angelic voice. “Josh.”

She stole his breath. He bent forward and collected a tear on his fingertip. His pulse beat in his throat as he lowered his finger and traced the slit between her legs with the teardrop, sliding deeper and deeper with each pass. His lungs panted. His finger breached her opening, and warm, slick flesh sucked him in.

Just thinking about putting his penis there sent a shock wave to his groin. He sank to the knuckle, her channel flexing and gripping. A moan tumbled out with his exhale, and he fell forward, catching his weight with his free arm beside her, laughing at himself, overwhelmed with desire.

He pressed in and out, and added a second finger. Her eyelids dipped to half-mast. Her lips freed a smile, her body glowing with life. He cherished every breathy gasp, marveled at how wet she was, and couldn’t let go. He wanted in, and given how violently his muscles shook, it would happen quickly and with a great amount of energy.

The naked light bared her arousal in all its curves and glistening flesh. His hand braced his larger frame over hers, his other exploring her sex with fumbling urgency. “Wish I had ten hands. I want to touch you everywhere while I’m doing this.”

“Just keep doing exactly what you’re doing.” She reached down, found the button on his jeans, released it, and lowered the zipper. “You’ll have me coming in no time.”

Oh, those words stroked him, made him harder. He concentrated on the depth of his touch, the velvet heat of her folds drenching his palm, and the sound of her exhales. When she pulled him from his pants and glided a fist up and down his length, he quickened the thrust of his fingers, wheezed on his laboring breaths, and felt his release barreling down.

He bucked out of her grip, pulling his fingers from her, squeezing the base of his erection and halting the orgasm. “I…uh…” A ragged laugh shook from him. “Wow. I’d like to get at least one thrust in before I embarrass myself.”

Stretching her arms above her head, legs spread in offering, she grinned. “I’ll keep my hands here.” She sucked on her bottom lip, her gaze sobering. “I’m all yours, Josh.”

Ahhh, his name on her lips. The arousal straining her face and the sultry caress of her voice accelerated the gallop of his heart and the throb between his legs. He lowered his face to her mound, slid his hands under her butt, and kissed a path down the line of her sex.

The sweet scent of her moisture infused his inhales. His mouth watered as he spread his lips over her, licking, sucking, imbibing the salty, sugary essence of her. He kissed her like he would her mouth. Deep, hungry pulls with his lips, burying his face, his tongue circling and lapping. The more he explored, the hotter her flesh grew, her entrance swelling, widening, wanting. He was doing that, tweaking her body, giving her pleasure.

Her legs flexed around his shoulders, her inner muscles pulsing against his tongue. Fingernails scraped the wall above her head. “Ohhh, fuck, fuck. Don’t stop.”

No way. He ground his hips against the mattress, working his jeans off with one hand, kicking them away. His heart raced toward implosion, his hard-on so hot and painful, he was consumed with the primal need to fill her, to make her his. He curled his fingers around her thighs, spreading her further, deepening his kiss.

Her curvaceous backside went tight in his hands and loosened with her full body sigh. “Ah, ahhh, I’m coming. Oh fuck, Josh, I’m coming.”

He devoured her through the twitches and pulses, the muscles inside of her beating against his tongue. Soon, she melted into the mattress, her breaths falling like lingering tears. She gazed down the length of her torso, eyes heavy-lidded and clinging to his.

One more tongue-delving kiss, and he crawled up her body, taking his time, dragging his mouth over her quivering belly, capturing every bead of sweat, following the dips of her ribs. He got sidetracked when he reached her nipples, flicking and biting until she pulled his hair and covered his mouth with swollen lips.

She drew in his tongue, humming, hands sweeping down his back. Her fingers burrowed into his butt crack and pressed against his rectum. Fire sparked in her eyes. “Take me.”

He shivered, his voice strangled. “Yes, ma’am.” He rolled his hips forward, cock in hand, and lined it up to her opening. They’d tied her tubes, but… “Condom?”

A smile shook the corner of her mouth. “Van doesn’t sleep around and has blood tests to prove it. I trust him on that.” Her eyes asked, Do you trust me?

He nodded, his heart hammered. This was it. He found her eyes, smoothed the hair from her face. She touched his lips then his chest, over his heart.

He thrust, a hard breathless slide, and they bled into one. Hot and wet. Soft and tight. Freedom. It was everything he’d wanted and nothing he’d expected. Her body stretched around him, gripping him, spinning stars through his brain. Buried to the root, he inhaled her breaths, sweating profusely, afraid to move.

She stared up at him with a yearning look, her dark eyes framed by wet lashes, the corner of her mouth shaking.

Connected inside her in a way he could’ve never imagined, he tasted her lips, a caress of soft, swollen bliss. “You okay?”

Her fingers speared his hair from his temples to his nape. “I never thought…” She drew in a deep breath, tightening her hold on the back of his head. “This tenderness…you and me…” She blinked rapidly, her inhale hitching. “This is an intimacy I never thought I’d experience.”

A deep level of satisfaction washed over him. He was able to give her something she’d never received from another man. Hope fluttered in his stomach. Maybe his love for her was big enough to heal her emotionally.

Her warm sex clenched, spurring him into motion. He withdrew, dragging his length along her walls, igniting a million sensations, and slammed back in. His hands scrambled for purchase on the mattress. Oh, God. His vision blacked, and his release tore from deep inside him, pummeling through his cock, shredding his throat. “Ah, ahhh, ughhh.” He shouted incoherent sounds over and over, his muscles jerking in spasmodic bliss, his heart tripping in his chest.

His head hit the pillow, the remnants of his climax thrumming through him, tingling his skin. When he regained his voice, he shifted his weight to his arms, bracketed her face, and searched her eyes. “I intended to last longer than two thrusts.” A smile pulled at his lips, and he let it loose with a laughing sigh. He circled his hips, still seated deep inside her, with no plans to pull out. Ever.

She shook her head, biting down on her own smile. “Just like a teenage boy.” She kissed him, gliding her tongue and heating his mouth. Then she pushed her hands through his hair and leaned back. “But you fuck with your heart.”

“Then my heart is aching to move.” He rocked his hips, relishing the connection. Grinding harder, he circled his pelvis, feeling her everywhere, and worked into a furious tempo.

She cupped his jaw and arched a brow. “Again?”

“As long as you’ll have me.”

Her legs and arms hooked around him, and she rolled them. With his back against the mattress, she straddled him, folding her arms behind her head. “My turn.”

What a glorious vision. With her body bared before him and a gleam in her eyes, she rotated her hips, breasts swaying, waves of dark brown hair cascading around her. “You gave me a gift, Joshua Carter. I’m keeping it. Always.”

He gripped the curves of her butt, holding her to him, lifting his hips, and sliding deeper. “Good. Because I’m yours. Always.”

When she came, she took him with her, milking him, crying his name. He would never forget that moment. The merging of their passion, peaking together. Two parts of a whole, lost together.

They curled up in silence, her back to his chest. She laced their fingers and brought them to her mouth, kissing the cuts on his knuckles.

A few moments later, her musical laugh tiptoed through the room. “You’re hard?”

He bit her shoulder, stroked his erection along the crease of her butt. “I’ll never get enough of you, Liv.”

She angled her hips, reached between her legs, and guided him inside. He was home.

Hours passed. Outside, the sun would’ve been climbing the sky, but he didn’t care. He had so much light in his arms, it was easy to pretend nothing else mattered. Just for a little longer. They made love incessantly and intensely, slow and fast, hard and soft. He was lost in her body. Lost in her.

Eventually, exhaustion pulled him under with her curves against his, limbs entwined.

When he woke, it was with a head full of sexy dreams and blood swelling him to a full hard-on. Never enough. He grinned and reached a hand over the mattress, searching for her. Not finding her.

He lurched to his knees. The mattress was bare. The room empty of life. His heart went wild, his thoughts crazed. Maybe she was checking on Kate. Or making lunch. He climbed to his feet, and something crinkled beneath his toes. A white piece of paper with scrawled handwriting. Beside it, a car key.

He dropped to his knees and a picked up the letter with shaking fingers.

Joshua,

Van called with the buyer’s pickup location. Meet me at the Sleepy Inn on 35. If I don’t make it there by morning, go home. Go home to your family.
The code is 0054. The key belongs to the black Honda parked out front.

Liv

The letter wadded in his clenching fists, a fog of red clouding his vision. All business. Nothing from the woman he’d spent the day in bed with. She might as well have signed it Deliverer.

He spun to the trunk and found his clothes inside. Hers were gone. She wasn’t coming back. He shoved his hands through his hair.

The code is 0054. Number fifty-four. She was freeing him. What would happen to her Mom and daughter?

His heart collapsed, spilling panic through his blood. What the hell was she planning?

Chapter 33

Liv drove the van out of Temple, with Kate strapped to the floor in the back and headed west on 190 to make her seventh and final delivery. Darkness descended over the horizon. Street lights flickered on. Her pulse beat a frenzied vibration in her ears.

Josh would be awake now, driving to the motel that would never be one of her destinations. If he obeyed her instructions, and hopefully, without revealing his identity to the motel clerk. God, she needed him to just wait somewhere safe and hidden until morning. By then, everything would be done. Surely, he wouldn’t go to the authorities before going to the motel?

Fuck, it was a risk, made more excruciating after spending the previous seventeen hours in his arms. She’d tried to keep him at a cold distance when they’d first returned from the meeting. She’d been fighting through her uncertainty about Mom and Mattie’s future and trying to come to terms with what she had to do. She needed to protect him from her, refused to endanger him with the details. But most of all, her plan would’ve devastated him.

When they became entangled, they brought with them all their convictions, pursuits, and pains. Whether it was scriptures from religious study, record-breaking interceptions, or delivery deadlines with sex traffickers, he’d taught her that one’s purpose in life had no sway on who the heart latched onto. And while she’d managed to keep her plan hidden, he exposed the rest of her with a fierce loyalty behind his gorgeous green eyes and a blaze of determination burning in his touch.

She yanked the seat belt pinching her chest, strangled and trapped by the tragedy of her miserable fucking life. She loved him, goddammit, but she had to let him go. She covered her mouth, smothering a sob between trembling fingers. Fuck, it hurt so damned much.

Focus. Breathe. Don’t fuck this up. Gripping the wheel with two hands, she glanced at the passenger seat. A mask, change of clothes, the LC9 pistol Van left for her, the pen knife he didn’t know about, the phone Mr. E would be tracking her with, and her letter to Van. What was she missing?

Josh. His absence was a bleeding fucking hole inside her, the stitches around her heart unraveling and ripping. She inhaled deeply. Gasped noisily. Fuck. Keep it together.

A glance over her shoulder revealed Kate’s heaving chest beneath the restraints on the floorboard. Liv’s throat burned, stinging pinpricks of pain through her head. She wiped at her nose and eyes, hands trembling.

A few miles later, a gas station emerged, the lot half-full with customers. The first stop.

She pulled off and parked at a pump beside a minivan. Bright lights fringed the canopy over the pump islands, flickering with winged insects and bleaching the starless sky. A woman leaned inside the minivan’s sliding door and hollered at the wailing kids within.

Liv approached her with her thumbs hooked in the front pockets of her jeans. “Excuse me, miss?”

The woman turned her head and blew a wayward hair away from her face.

She shaped her mouth into a friendly smile. “Sorry to bother you. Is there any way I can borrow your phone for a minute? Mine’s out of juice, and I really need to check on my dad.”

The woman shifted to face her, and her eyes widened, fixed on Liv’s scar. She looked away quickly. “Uh, yeah. Let me grab it.”

Funny, Liv never really thought about her fucked up face until she ventured into public. Her internal damage had always been much more distracting to her.

“Here you go.” The woman offered the phone, the pity in her eyes negating her smile.

“Thanks. I’ll just be a minute.” She stepped away from both vehicles until she was out of hearing distance and dialed the number she knew from memory. It was the sixth time she’d called it, and it’d been eight months since the last call.

“Who is this?” Camila’s sultry voice, though always straight to the point, had a way of warming Liv every damned time.

“It’s me.”

“Where?”

The reason for her calls was always the same. “Brady Reservoir.” She gave Camila the GPS coordinates Van had sent. “10:00 PM.”

“Shit. We’re three hours away.” A muffled noise scratched down the line. Then Camila’s voice came back. “We’ll make it. How many?”

“At least one extra man. Maybe two.”

“Stall them. We’ll be there.” The line disconnected.

Stall them? Buyers and their bodyguards did not stall, and it was eight fucking o’clock. Camila would have to make up a full hour. She sighed, rubbed her eyes. It wouldn’t be the first time Camila overextended.

Fear crept in, like it did before every delivery. Deep breath. This was the last one. She pinched the bridge of her nose, drew in another calming breath, and returned the phone to the woman.

For the next two hours, she smoked one cigarette after another. The stimulant intensified her edginess, so she sang while she smoked. When the tears sneaked in, she changed up the song. The towns grew smaller with each passing mile, stretching farther apart, separated by rocky scrub land. Fifteen minutes outside of Brady Reservoir, she stopped on the side of the road and changed into her costume.

The Deliverer wore a silver under-bust corset over a bra and boy shorts, both made of black latex. The gun went into her thigh-high boot. The knife’s scalpel blade folded in, and the pen-like design fit down the center of the bodice, snug in the corset casing that had originally held a steel bone.

With a few minutes to spare, she knelt beside Kate and brushed the girl’s hair from her sweaty forehead. “I delivered another girl once. Six years ago.” Her chest tightened, testing the seams of the bodice. “She was very brave.” She leaned down, pressed a kiss on trembling lips. “You remind me of her.”

Thanks to the pitch-black interior, she couldn’t see the fear in Kate’s eyes. She didn’t need to. It breathed through the van in a ghastly shudder, desolate and needful.

She returned to the driver’s seat, a sheen of dread dampening her skin and chilling her spine, and faced the next phase of the plan. As she maneuvered the winding roads, dipping and curving around hillocks and banks, she couldn’t escape the grip of doubt.

The emotionally detached letter she’d left Josh weighed on her the most, but she couldn’t leave him with the damaged whispers of her heart. He might’ve clung to her words, searched for her, tried to save her. There were too many people involved in her deliveries, too many identities to safeguard. The less he knew in his freedom the better for everyone.

Stunted bushes crowded the landscape, forming smudges against the inky backdrop of barrenness. The last building was ten miles back. The occasional headlight bobbed in her side mirror and vanished behind the bends in the road. The desolation preyed on her nerves.

The navigation system directed her onto a narrow path that faded into a gnarled expanse of wilderness. As the clutch of trees closed in, she put on her mask, tying the strings to hold the round white face in place.

Up ahead, an arced glow rose through the dark, striping through the skeletal branches. Her boot shook against the gas pedal, and her palms slicked the wheel.

“Glory and Gore” by Lorde invigorated her lungs and heart as she scanned the trees, searching for a sign of her secret saviors.

Ricky, Tomas, Luke, Martin, Tate, and her very first captive, Camila.

She knew them by the names she’d once refused to use, by the bruises on their skin, and by the strength of their forgiveness. Her six deliveries in seven years were dead to her. Until she called. Her freedom fighters always came when she called. And they came for blood.

A car blocked the road, its headlights aimed at her and cut by the silhouettes of two men. She shielded her eyes with a forearm, turned off the engine, and grabbed the phone. In the back, she unstrapped Kate, straightened the girl’s knee-length cotton dress, and led her out. “Stay beside me,” she whispered. “Shoulders back. Eyes down.”

“Yes, Mistress.” No chains or cuffs. The girl was broken in her despair.

With the confidence of the Deliverer, she swayed her hips and flexed her bare thighs with each stride toward the waiting men.

Chapter 34

Liv closed the final few feet with her chin held high, and her strides wide and easy. Her insides, however, shook with a violence that strangled her breaths.

The shorter of the two men wore a Guy Fawkes mask, painted with a mustache, goatee, and a cynical smirk. The bodyguard didn’t share his employer’s creativity, his face distorted in a transparent sleeve of nylon.

“Good evening.” Guy Fawkes cocked his head.

“We’ll see.” Her cool voice tangled in the autumn air.

The bodyguard approached her, and she remembered the drill from the intro meeting. She stretched out her arms¸ her phone in one hand. Beside her, Kate stared at her bare feet.

He prodded around her mask and hair and patted down her bra, corset, and skin-tight shorts. When he reached her boots, he lifted the gun as she’d expected. Pocketing it, he moved to Kate and repeated the search. That done, he stepped back.

The Guy Fawkes mask turned toward Kate. “Come to your Master.”

Liv clasped her wrist and walked a step ahead of her, holding her to the side. Was Camila there yet? Could Liv cut the fucker before his bodyguard shot her? Stall, stall, stall.

She released Kate’s arm. “Kneel.” As the girl descended to the ground, Liv arched into Guy Fawkes’ suit-clad body, inhaling the stench of musk and greed. She cupped his groin.

He swelled in her grip and held a palm out, halting his guard’s advance. “How much for both of you?”

Same question he’d asked last time. If he saw her scarred face, he’d probably choke on his persistence to buy her.

“Pay me for one slave.” She tightened her fist around him. “Then we’ll discuss the prospect for two.”

He pulled out his phone, his fingers tapping on the screen over her shoulder. She stroked his erection, bile burning through her chest, challenging her steady breaths.

“Sent.” He pocketed the device and slammed a hand down on her ass. A heavy fucking hand.

The sting rippled down her leg and burned through her muscles. He reared back and hit her again. Her fingers fell away from his dick to clutch his hip. She was sure he broke blood vessels, the sadistic prick.

Her phone vibrated in her hand. She held it between their chests, unlocked it, and glanced at the text.

Van: Funds received

Her heart soared. It took a great amount of discipline to hold in the relief blubbering to escape. She breathed to the beat of “Glory and Gore” and lowered the phone to her bodice. As she worked it beneath the binding, she slipped the pen knife free, her body pressed to his in a wretched embrace.

The bodyguard stood a few paces away, his nylon-smashed expression skimming the surrounding woodland.

She flicked the blade open, her hand hidden beneath the rise of her chest, her pulse thrumming wildly. Trusting that the Guy Fawkes mask limited his field of vision, she swung the scalpel upward, and sliced his carotid artery. He shuffled back, cupping the spray of blood beneath his mask.

The bodyguard straightened, drew a pistol from his hip. She stopped breathing.

One shot fired from the trees. Two. Three.

He jerked back, stumbled. Oh, thank God. The beam of headlights illuminated a crimson stain at the center of his white shirt. He snapped his gun up, aimed at her, and fired.

The bullet whistled past her. She leapt on him. Took him to the ground. Landed on his chest, the knife slick in her grip, her heart beating at a dangerous velocity.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 488