I liked that she knew I was watching. I loved that she wasn’t spooked. I got all kinds of thrills knowing she was facing up to me, pushing back. God, I’d love to get her in the ring again and really put her through her paces. This was a woman who didn’t scare.
I knew exactly what I was going to ask her to do. And exactly how to do it. But first, I wanted her. All of her that she was willing to give.
CHAPTER 7
Maxim
I couldn’t get her out of my head. Either one of them. My cock refused to settle every time she drifted into view and sleep was a thing of the past. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her, all the glimpses of her naked body I’d ever had forming into a fragmented, perfect whole, to taunt me.
I wanted her more than ever and she was torturing me, playing these games, flirting with me in the ring, and with that bullet, letting me think I could have her.
She was perfect. Sexual and wild, strong, but distractingly delicate, like a butterfly wing or a spider web. I wanted her in the worst possible ways, but I knew if I came at it wrong, I’d crush her.
And I never wanted to do that.
She was the only woman who’d made me pause for longer than a second. When I closed my eyes it was her body I saw, her face looking up at me as I plunged into her, and in her eyes I saw a future I never thought would be mine spiralling out in front of me.
A future with kids of our own, and her standing strong by my side. A future where I wasn’t trying to hide the side of me that lived for what I did, wasn’t hiding all the ugly things and spinning plates in the air to protect the fiction of something cleaner, better, more morally good.
I ended up in the shower, running cold water over myself until I was shivering and the goosebumps on my skin could have been used for sandpaper. All that and I was only just back in control of myself.
The slightest thought of her had me hard again. By the morning my balls were aching with a sickening throb that worsened with every drum of my pulse, but I refused to do anything about it. Jacking off wasn’t going to bring the kind of relief I wanted. After weeks of watching, not being able to touch, I needed her for real. The next hand closing around my cock wasn’t going to be mine. One way or the other, I had to have her in the flesh. There was no other way around it.
I knew from her schedule that I had carefully put together – kidding myself it was necessary information to target Sutherland effectively – that her very last exam finished this afternoon.
She’d walk out of her school gates for the final time, and never have to go back.
Screw Sutherland, I was going to be there to meet her.
The traffic across to Hammersmith always crawled. Driving in London was always terrible. Rush hour had extended itself to cover most of the day, peak times bleeding into each other. School rush and office workers, shift changes, then home runs and everything in reverse. Not so very different from any other major city in the world.
I was no fan of the scooter gangs who ran riot, buzzing up like swarms of wasps, mugging people from their cars, snatching handbags from the pavement, but two wheels were definitely better than four when it came to cutting through traffic.
My choice was a Ducati Multistrada 1200 with a red and black body and all the power in the engine I could have dreamed of. The only indulgence I allowed myself when it came to standing out was transport. When I was working, I blended in, but when I was off the clock, I had a playboy lifestyle to maintain, and that was easiest with sports cars and motorbikes that couldn’t be missed.
Protecting Elizabeth was what I wanted, and my above the board reputation could do that just as well as anything.
Screeching through the traffic, the roar of the bike’s engine between my thighs only made me more desperate to have Elizabeth there instead.
I ran three red lights in a row, setting off a string of speed cameras as I zoomed past, leaning into the curves of the road, dodging through cars. The lights went off like paparazzi flash bulbs. I didn’t care. I’d pay the fines, take the points when they came if I had to. We had friends at the DVLA who could make most things disappear.
The only thing that mattered was showing up for Elizabeth. I wanted to see her face when she saw me standing outside. Sutherland could have been giving everything over to the national press and right then I wouldn’t have given a monkey’s ass.