03 Cutler Brides (7 page)

But apparently Cade could only take so much teasing because after a moment he grasped her hips and slid into her pussy in one smooth thrust. Riley gasped, still amazed at how incredible his cock always felt inside her.

As she slowly began to ride up and down on her husband’s cock, Riley was surprised to feel the first tremors of an orgasm ripple though her. Abruptly, she remembered what had gotten her so turned on, and she immediately began to fantasize about what was taking place in the room next to theirs.

Was Madoc still spanking Shayna? Riley pictured her friend over her husband’s knee, squirming and wiggling as he brought his hand down over and over on her bottom. Suddenly, Riley’s fantasy became more vivid and in it, Madoc had slid his hand between Shayna’s legs to tease her clit. Riley could imagine the other girl’s breath coming in quick, little pants as Madoc made his pretty wife come. And then, after her orgasm subsided, he would lean down and whisper in her ear, telling her to climb on his hard cock.

Riley moaned as much from the fantasy playing out in her head as from the pleasure Cade was giving her. Her husband’s hands suddenly tightened on her hips, urging her to ride him faster.

On the brink of orgasm herself, Riley gladly obeyed, bouncing up and down on his cock wildly until they both came. Her climax felt amazing and she couldn’t help but wonder if her fantasies about Shayna getting spanked had something to do with how intense it had been.

The images of Shayna’s bottom getting reddened had been so vivid that it felt almost as if Riley had been getting spanked herself. God, she never realized she had such a voyeuristic streak!

Spent, Riley lay draped across Cade’s chest his chest afterward. After a moment, her brow furrowed.

Lifting her head, she gazed down at her husband. “Honey, do you think your brother spanks Shayna?”

Cade opened his eyes to regard her sleepily. “What would give you an idea like that?”

She shrugged. “When I came out of the bathroom before I thought I heard him spanking her.”

Her husband chuckled. “No way. My brother’s way too vanilla for that.”

Riley could only smile. She knew that wasn’t true, but she said nothing as she lay back down. If Cade only knew, she thought.

As she and Shayna were lounging by the pool the next afternoon, Riley really wanted to ask the other girl if that was spanking she’d heard coming from their bedroom the night before, but every time she tried, she just couldn’t seem to make the words come out. She didn’t want to embarrass the other girl or herself, so she decided it was probably better if she just didn’t bring up the subject. She supposed she would have to keep wondering.

Riley was just settling back in her lounge chair again when she heard footsteps on the patio. Thinking it was probably Arlene, she was surprised to see Rosie coming toward them. On the lounge chair beside her, Shayna looked just as surprised.

“Arlene told me you were out here,” Rosie said as she sat down on the bottom of Riley’s lounge chair.

Riley sat up, as did Shayna. They both looked at the other girl expectantly.

“Were you able to find out anything from the license plate number you copied down?” Riley asked.

Rosie nodded, her dark eyes filled with excitement. “Yes, and it’s really weird. That car belongs to a pharmaceutical company.”

Shayna frowned. “What would someone from a pharmaceutical company be doing talking to Bill Bingham out in the middle of nowhere?”

The Mexican girl shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but I’m thinking that it must have something to do with drugs. I mean, what else would a pharmaceutical company be involved in?”

Riley’s brow furrowed. “Drugs make sense, but what are they doing?”

“I have no idea,” Rosie said. “None of the day-laborers who work at the mining company will say anything, either. But I know that a lot of them got picked for work today, which means that something big is going on up there.” She looked at them expectantly. “I thought you girls might want to come with me to check it out.”

Shayna’s eyes narrowed. “Check it out how exactly?”

“I’m going to sneak up there and take pictures of whatever it is that’s going on, then give them to my boyfriend,” Rosie told them.

Riley looked at her in surprise. “Why? Is he a cop?”

The other girl nodded. “He’s the deputy you saw me with the day you came to the sheriff’s office.”

Shayna gave her a frown. “Then if he’s a cop, why don’t you just tell him your suspicions and let him check it out?”

Rosie sighed. “Because Clay always thinks I’m imagining things,” she said. “Which is why I need to get him proof.”

“But wasn’t your boyfriend the one who ran the license plate for you?” Riley asked.

“Didn’t he wonder what you wanted it for?”

The Mexican girl shook her head. “Actually, he didn’t run the plate for me. I got his computer password out of his wallet while he was in the shower.”

Shayna blinked. “Won’t he be angry if he finds out?”

But Rosie only gave her a grin. “Probably,” she said. “But I have Clay so wrapped around my finger he doesn’t know which end is up most of the time.”

If Cade caught her doing something like that, she would be over his knee so fast, Riley thought. From Shayna’s expression, apparently she didn’t think Madoc would be nearly as understanding as Rosie’s boyfriend, either.

“So,” Rosie said. “What do you say? Are you in?”

Riley looked at Shayna, who shrugged. She knew exactly what the other girl was thinking – they’d better not get caught, or they would be in for it.

“Okay,” Riley told Rosie. “But our husbands can’t find out about this.”

Rosie grinned. “No problem,” she said. “We’ll just tell them we’re going shopping.”

Since they couldn’t very well go with Rosie dressed like they were, Riley and Shayna went upstairs to change out of their bikinis and into more suitable clothes. When they went back downstairs, it was to find Rosie in the kitchen with Arlene.

“You girls have fun,” the older woman said when Riley told her they were going shopping with Rosie.

As they left the house, Riley wondered if they should have let Arlene in on where they were really going just in case something went wrong and she and the other girls got caught snooping. Then again, if they did get caught, Bill Bingham would probably have them all arrested for trespassing on private property, which meant Madoc and Cade would find out anyway.

They drove out to the same location they had the day before and hid the car in a ravine.

As they crept over the next hill, they saw that the area was crawling with people. Most of them seemed to be the day laborers Rosie had mentioned, but there were also a handful of men carrying rifles. It looked like they were the ones directing the work that was going on. It was hard to see exactly what they were doing with all the dust that was being kicked up, but Riley could see that there were several large trucks, as well as a bulldozer. The dozer had just finished digging what looked like a really deep trench.

Eager to see what was going on down in the valley below them, Riley and the other two girls carefully crept closer to the working men. They tried to move as stealthily as they could from one hiding place to the next. Within a few minutes, they had worked themselves to within a hundred feet or so of the work site. From their vantage point behind a large rock, Riley watched as the day laborers unloaded plastic bags from the trucks and tossed them into the huge hole the bulldozer had dug.

“What are they doing?” Riley whispered to the other two girls.

It was Rosie who answered. “I don’t know, but it’s obviously not legal.”

Digging into her bag, Rosie took out the digital camera she had brought with her and held it up so that she could use the zoom function to see better.

“Do you think they’re burying drugs?” Shayna asked, leaning in close so that she could look through the camera, too.

“Maybe,” Rosie said.

Riley’s brow furrowed. “But why would they bury drugs? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Unless someone else is going to come and dig them up later,” Rosie suggested.

They all fell silent for a moment as Rosie took some pictures. “I’d love to get a little closer, but I don’t know if we dare,” she said.

“And what the hell do you girls think you’re doing?”

Startled by the gruff male voice, Riley jerked around to see two men standing behind them, a pistol in one of their hands and a rifle in the other. From the corner of her eye, she saw Rosie’s grip on the camera tighten.

Riley swallowed hard. “We, uh, were just out sightseeing and...” she began.

“Like hell you were!” the second man snarled. “Get up!”

With two guns being held on them, Riley and her friends had no choice but to obey. She wondered for a moment if they should try and make a run for it, but then thought better of it. If they ran, the men would probably shoot them for sure. However, if they went along willingly, the men might let them go, or at least she and the other girls might be able to escape later.

Apparently, Shayna and Rosie must have thought so, too, because when the men gestured for them to walk toward where the men were working, they went without protest.

Though the day laborers looked at Riley and the other girls curiously, they didn’t stop unloading the trucks. But perhaps that had something to do with the half a dozen men brandishing guns, she thought bitterly. Bill Bingham, however, strode over to meet them as soon as she and the other girls were herded into the clearing.

“I thought I told you girls to stay away from here,” he said, looking from Riley to Shayna. “But you couldn’t leave well enough alone could you? And now you’ve involved your friend, too.”

Rosie glared at him. “They didn’t involve me in anything. I’ve been on to you for weeks now, you bastard! I knew you were doing something illegal and now I’ve got the pictures to prove it.”

Bill Bingham’s eyes narrowed as he took in the camera she had in her hand. “You’ve got nothing but pictures of a bunch of Mexican day laborers unloading plastic bags from trucks and tossing them into a hole in the ground.”

“Plastic bags full of drugs, you mean,” Rosie sneered.

Bill Bingham stared at her in disbelief. “Drugs? Is that what you think is in those bags?”

He let out a harsh laugh. “Does that stench smell like drugs to you?”

Riley had been too preoccupied with their situation before to pay much attention to the smell, but now that she did, she wrinkled her nose. She didn’t know what drugs smelled like, but she didn’t think it was that.

“If it’s not drugs, then what is it?” she asked.

He regarded her in silence for a moment as if deciding whether he should answer, then shook his head.

“You really want to know what’s in the bags? I’ll tell you,” he said. “A local pharmaceutical company is paying us to dispose of the lab animals they use for testing.”

Riley blinked, her gaze going to the bags the workers had already thrown into the hole.

There had to be hundreds of bags in there, she thought, sickened by the idea. She didn’t like the thought of animal testing to begin with, and after seeing this, she was even more against it.

Beside her, Shayna looked just as disgusted. “This can’t be the approved method of...of disposal,” she said.

Bill Bingham shrugged. “No, but it is cheaper. And more importantly, it covers up how many animals they’re actually killing in their testing. If the public ever found out how many of those cute, cuddly critters die just to make sure their mascara doesn’t run, there’d be an international outcry.”

Riley tore her gaze away from the growing pile of bags in the trench. “What about the body we saw floating in the stream the other day? That wasn’t an animal.”

His mouth tightened. “No, it wasn’t. It was one of the laborers we hired. He decided he was going to tell the authorities what we were doing up here, anonymously of course, since he was an illegal. But either way, we couldn’t have him doing that, so we stopped him.”

“Killed him, you mean?” Rosie sneered.

Bill Bingham fixed her with a glare. “If you prefer,” he said. “Which is exactly what it looks like we’re going to have to do to you.”

Riley felt her heart start to pound. “B-but you can’t!” she protested.

“She’s right,” Shayna told him. “Our husbands are U.S. Marshals and they know we came up here.”

Bill Bingham smirked. “Somehow I doubt that.” His gaze went to the men standing guard behind them.

“Shoot them and then put them in the trench with the rest of the trash.”

“You can’t think you’re going to get away with this!” Rosie shouted.

But Bill Bingham was already walking away.

Cade and Madoc were just heading in from the barn when they spotted a sheriff’s vehicle coming up the driveway. His brow furrowing, Cade came to a halt, as did his brother. A moment later, the SUV slowed to a stop and Clay Ericson got out. Cade and Clay had been friends since grade school, and while Cade had chosen to become a police officer in Dallas, Clay had decided to stay in the local area and become a deputy instead. Cade grinned at the other man as he and Madoc walked over to meet him.

“What brings you out here?” Cade asked, giving him a hearty handshake.

“I’m looking for Rosie, actually,” Clay said. “She left me a message on my cell saying she was coming out here to see your wives. I’m going to be on duty for a while yet so I thought I’d come by and see if she wanted to grab some dinner.”

Cade glanced at Madoc. “Rosie’s not here. She went into Fort Worth to do some shopping with Riley and Shayna.”

Clay’s eyes went wide at that. “Shopping? Are you sure? Rosie hates to go shopping.”

Cade didn’t think he’d ever heard of a woman who didn’t like to shop. “That’s what they said.”

Clay was about to reply when a woman’s voice came over the radio handset attached to his shoulder.

“Clay, you there?”

The deputy reached up to thumb the talk button. “Go ahead, Marcy,” he said.

“I think we may have a problem,” the woman said. “One of Rosie’s friends is here and she said Rosie went up to do some snooping around on Big Sky Mining property this afternoon.

She says Rosie swore her to secrecy, but since Rosie’s not back yet, her friend thinks she might be in some kind of trouble.”

Cade’s brow furrowed as he shared a look with Madoc. There was no way Riley or Shayna would deliberately go snooping up at the mining company after they’d specifically told the girls to stay out of it. What the hell was he thinking? Of course they would!

Clay swore under his breath. “Is the sheriff still there, Marcy?”

“He and his wife already left to go to Dallas,” the woman said.

“What about Whitley or Michaels?” he said.

“Both of them are out on Old Mine Road about a domestic disturbance,” Marcy said.

“Shit,” Clay muttered. “All right. Get them on the radio and have them meet me up at Big Sky Mining.”

“Roger that,” she said.

“What do you think is going on?” Cade asked.

Clay shook his head. “I’m not sure, but Rosie has been going on about something shady happening up at Big Sky Mining for weeks now. I told her to stay out of it, but obviously she didn’t, and now who knows what she’s gotten herself into.” His mouth tightened. “Or what she’s gotten your wives into.”

Madoc clenched his jaw. “Shayna and Riley probably didn’t need that much persuading.

They thought they saw a body floating in the stream when they went riding up near the mining company’s property the other day, so they were already suspicious.”

Clay frowned. “Absolutely wonderful,” he muttered. “Well, as you heard, I could use some back-up.

You boys game to help out?”

Cade had known his wife’s snooping was going to get her into trouble, and now it seemed that he’d been right. He should have listened to her when she’d said they’d seen a body.

If he had, then she and Shayna wouldn’t be in this situation right now. But there was no time to beat himself up about it; they had to get out to that mining property, and quickly.

Apparently, Madoc had the same thought because he turned and disappeared into the house without saying a word. A minute later, he came back out with two rifles, one of which he tossed to Cade.

“Let’s go.”