Blurring the Line (29 page)

“Is that why you’re sucking his dick, because he stood up for you to Jessop?”

Beth’s mouth dropped. Patterson was uncouth at the best of times but he was never this angry or disrespectful. “Screw you! How dare you speak to me like that! It is none of your business whose dick I suck. If I want to screw every agent in the DEA, I will do it. Don’t you ever speak to me like that again.”

Patterson dropped his head. For a long time he didn’t say anything. Eventually he looked back up at her. There was pain written clearly on his face. “I’m sorry, Beth. I fucked up. I should have had your back. Look…” He tapped his long fingers on the mahogany desk. He let out a stream of air. “I – I care about you OK? You’re my partner. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Beth sighed. She understood better than anyone how much it pained Patterson to admit he cared. She had known him long enough to know that compassion didn’t feature heavily in his emotional repertoire. He had mastered anger and indifference, but this was new for him. She cared for him too. He was a misogynist and borderline racist but under all the crap was someone she genuinely liked.

Realisation washed over Beth. Patterson had intentionally withheld the information about Torres because he wanted her to think Torres had murdered Martinez.

And it worked.

“Patterson, I appreciate your concern, I really do, but what is going on with Torres has nothing to do with us, OK? We’re good, right?”

Patterson nodded begrudgingly. “Yeah, we’re good.”

Beth sighed in relief. “So tell me what happened in Colombia.”

“Torres was on his tail. He made Jessop promise not to tell you. No idea how he manages to give Jessop orders, but that he does.”

“I do,” Beth said. Anyone who had ever laid eyes on Torres would understand why people complied with his demands.

Patterson shook his head. “He has massive balls, I’ll give him that.”

Beth shrugged her shoulders and smiled. “The balls are pretty normal but there are other massive parts to him.”

Patterson held up his hand. “Jesus, Thomson. I don’t want to imagine Torres boning my partner with his massive dick.”

“Well stop imagine him boning me all together. I think that would be the way forward.”

“Jesus, now I can’t stop thinking about it.” Patterson grimaced.

“I don’t care if you think about it, but if you jerk off to the image, I don’t want to hear about it.”

Patterson laughed. “That’s my dirty girl. Now you know I’m going to have to jerk off to the image of you getting boned.”

“Yes, well best not to imagine Torres. The feeling of inadequacy would kill your hard on.”

“Don’t worry about me, California. I do just fine in that department. Want to see?” He pretended to reach for his zipper.

Beth rolled her eyes. “No thanks. I’ve heard all about it.” Patterson had slept with the majority of women in the office. There were no complaints about him between the sheets. In the cold light of day, he was a real jackass, but apparently he got the job done in the bedroom.

“Suit yourself.”

Beth stood up. “I’m leaving before you show me your dick. I don’t want to try to get rid of that image.”

“Trust me, California. Don’t waste your time trying to forget. Never going to happen.”

Beth shook her head. “I am going to pretend this conversation never happened.”

“Suit yourself,” he said again.

***

Beth scooped peanut butter out of the jar with her index finger. Thank God for the emergency supply of Skippy she kept in her top drawer. Some days were eat-peanut-butter-directly from the jar days. Today was one of them. She had left her sack lunch at Alejandra’s day care and there was no way she was going down to get it. She knew if the baby cried, she would end up just picking her up and taking her home to eat popsicles and dig for worms in the back yard. She was far too soft. She was going to have to sort that out before she had her own children. If she had her own children…

Beth licked her finger and then stuck it back in the jar. Normally she would be appalled at the thought of double-dipping, especially with fingers, but she needed the hit of salty fatty goodness. M&M therapy would have been better but she didn’t have the energy to take the elevator to the vending machine on the ground floor.

She sighed. What she really needed was to speak to Torres. Nobody could talk her off a ledge like he could. She shook her head. She had well and truly burned that bridge. And the irony, she needed to talk to Torres about ruining things with him. She was a special kind of pathetic.

Oh well… Peanut butter was the way forward. She took another scoop. She looked at the calorie content and winced. Oh who was she kidding, no one was likely to see her naked in the near future, she may as well finish the jar.

“I hear that is good on pancakes.”

Beth’s head shot up. Her breath caught when she saw him.

Torres was standing in the doorway. He had never been to the building; it was far too dangerous for an undercover agent to be anywhere near a DEA office.

“Hi.” She put down the jar, and tried to hide the enormous glob of peanut butter on her finger behind the stapler on her desk. “I’m glad you’re here. We need to talk.”

Torres closed the door behind him and locked it before drawing the shade on the glass panel. “You have done enough talking.” He was looking at her like he was trying to decide the best way to murder her.

Beth glanced at the door. There were at least a dozen people less than thirty feet away. If she screamed, Patterson would have the door down in thirty seconds. He may be an ass hat, but he was a strong ass hat who wouldn’t let anything happen to her. “I didn’t expect to see you again.”

“That’s the problem isn’t it? You have always expected me to fuck off as soon as I got what I wanted.”

Torres crossed the room in three long strides. “Trouble is, I didn’t get what I wanted.”

His low voice sent a bolt of desire to her core. She licked her dry lips. “Torres,” she started to speak but he cut her off by taking her hand and bringing it to his lips. He licked her finger, first the tip and then he turned her hand over and kissed her palm, licking the cleft between her finger and thumb.

She sucked in a ragged breath. “Torres.” She couldn’t think. All the blood drained from her head and pooled at her centre.

“
Callate, mujer.
”
Shut up, woman.

Beth blinked. If he said it in English she would have been tempted to smack him in the mouth but in Spanish she was too focused on the way his mouth caressed the words when he spoke to consider the actual words.

Beth stood up. “Look, Torres—”

Torres held his hand up to stop her. Anger radiated off of him. “Don’t make me gag you, we both know I am not above it.”

Beth nodded. Torres was capable of lots of things. Half of them scared the hell out of her and the other half turned her on, unfortunately, his threat to gag her fell into both categories.

“Do you know how angry you make me?” Torres asked. He ran a hand over his short beard.

Beth guessed it was a rhetorical question but she was fairly sure she knew the answer.

“I meant it this morning when I told you to fuck off. I have never been angrier than when I left your house this morning but then I started driving to Mexico and with every mile that passed I got angrier. By the time I got to Nuevo Laredo, I was ready to kill someone.”

Beth glanced at the door. If he did kill her, she just hoped he would send her off with a good hard seeing to first. She couldn’t think of a better way to die. Beth shook her head to dislodge the thought. What was she thinking? Or more to the point, why couldn’t she think about anything beyond sex when Torres was so close? There was a safe zone: as long as he was more than four feet away, she was fine, but the moment he entered her space, it was all systems go. There must be something short-circuiting in her brain, there was something chemical going on because she had developed a full-blown addiction to him. She didn’t even want to think of the withdrawal symptoms.

“Because I am trying to minimise the number of people I shoot in the face, I decided to take a page from your book and make a list of everything I hate about you.”

Beth’s shoulders slumped. That would be a very long list.

“And God Bless you, Beth, you make it too easy for me. There is so much to pick from. You’re uptight and you’re messy. You can’t manage to get wrappers all the way into the garbage. You put them on the counter next to it because clearly the extra two feet is too much. While we are on the subject, shoving your clothes in a suitcase is not packing, but I digress. You’re both impulsive and gun shy. When you’re not drooling in your sleep, you are snoring.”

Beth held up her hand. “I get the point.”

Torres shook his head. “No I don’t think you do. You may as well sit down because I’m just getting started. It took me forty miles to finish the list. Where was I? Oh yes, you’re not all that pretty. I don’t hate that about you, it’s just a fact.”

Beth’s eyes narrowed. Her hands scrunched into tight fists. She might just hit him. Hell if she had the shank Flores used, she might give him a matching scar on the other side. “Did you come to my work to tell me that? You really shouldn’t have bothered.”

“There you go interrupting me again, and always before I get to the important part.”

Her fingers itched to wrap around his throat. The only thing that stopped her was that she deserved it. She had assumed the worst about him the way she did about everyone else. He was angry and hurt and lashing out. She would take it…but she wouldn’t like it. “I think the not thinking I’m pretty is a fairly important point. That might just be me being a girl. You know we tend to care about these things. Asshole,” she muttered under her breath.

Torres’ lips curled into half a smile. “Jumping to conclusions again,
Gatita
. I hate that about you too. The list just keeps getting bigger.”

Beth threw her hands in the air. She tried taking the high road but it really wasn’t her. “Patterson is thirty feet away. If I scream, he will be here in twenty seconds, just something to consider before you keep going.”

Torres smirked. “Really, Beth? We both know Patterson wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Beth considered for a second. Torres and Patterson were fairly evenly matched physically. But, yes, Torres would destroy him. “Fine. Get to your point.”

“It is really hard to get to my point when I keep remembering reasons why you drive me crazy. You are completely oblivious to the fact that Patterson would do anything to get into your pants. I don’t blame him, having been there, I can highly recommend it.”

His anger wasn’t shifting, if anything it had taken root. There was no warmth in the room, just a solid wall of ice formed by her doubt and his bitterness.

Beth shook her head. “Don’t be stupid. Patterson doesn’t want me.”

“Trust me. He looks at you like he wants to bend you over the desk and fuck you. And if he doesn’t stop looking at you like that, I am going to rip his throat out. If there is anyone fucking you over the desk, it will be me.”

The admission sent a hot wave of pleasure through her. She sucked in a sharp breath. She wouldn’t let herself believe it, his words were just another way to hurt her, draw her in just to push her away. “And why exactly would you want to do that? I’m not pretty, remember?”

“Objectively, you’re not, you’re as average as they come. But fuck if I can be objective about you. To me, you are beautiful. You are the most beautiful woman I have ever met and it pisses me off because I have no idea when or why it happened, but here we are.” The frustration was clear in his voice. Torres sat down and pulled her down on his lap. “Can you feel that?” His erection was pressed against her bottom. “Reason number 895 why you piss me off. I can’t stand next to you without getting an erection. All I have to do is hear your name and I’m hard. Even when I’m fucking you, I am thinking about when I will get to do it again. And it really pisses me off that I will never get enough of you. I could fuck you every night for the rest of my life and I would still want more.”

Her body tingled. She pushed her butt over the hard length of his erection. His anger only served to excite her.

“That reminds me of another reason I hate you: you touch me and I come. I have never had that problem before. The first time, I thought it was just because it had been so long but then I realised it is just you.”

Torres reached under her shirt and caressed her nipple through the satin fabric of her bra. The sensitive flesh hardened under his expert touch. Her back arched, her head rested against his broad chest. “You’ve not heard me complain about it.” She wanted to turn around and kiss him, but having her back to him meant he had the perfect angle to stroke her breasts. And she wasn’t sure he would kiss her back. He didn’t want her for that. What he wanted from her wasn’t sweet or romantic or tender.

She shifted her body back and forth, rubbing herself against him.

“Stop.” His voice sounded strangled. “If you keep doing that, I really will be fucking you over your desk.”

He meant it as a warning, but all her mind heard was an invitation. She ground herself against him.

“Bad at taking orders. Yet another thing to add to the list.” In an instant he had lifted her off of him. He pulled her skirt up to her waist and then pulled down her panties to her knees. “You really need to be more obedient.” He pushed her over on the desk. Her hands tried to hold her up but he pushed her down. There was nothing sweet or gentle about it. This wasn’t about making love; this was fucking pure and simple. And she loved it. She needed it. He needed it. His anger and frustration were still present, hanging between them like an unwelcome guest. His hand ran over her naked skin. “Do you know how angry you make me?” he asked.

She didn’t turn around. Her skin tingled like small electric pins pricking her. “Show me,” she breathed against the solid oak surface of her desk. “Let me feel how angry you are.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Torres said.

“Show me,” she said again. “Show me how angry I make you. I want to feel it.”