Perilous Curves Collection (BBW Romance) (14 page)

"I love you," he repeated.

I closed my eyes, tears sliding down each side of my face. I couldn't say it back. I felt it, just couldn't bring myself to say the words. They would make me vulnerable, insuring more heartbreak if he left again.

"It's okay." Dante nuzzled the side of my face. "You don't have to say it. I just want you to know."

His hips ground against me as he took up a gentle side to side swing. I wrapped my arms around his back, hugged him to me. He covered me, his arms and hands between my bottom and the mattress as he controlled the pace of our thrusting. He took me slow, then fast, then slow again, grinding his cock deeper as his mouth bruised my neck with sucking kisses.

"Kiss me," I begged, knowing there was no other way to silence the scream building with the oncoming rush of a fresh release.

He possessed my mouth, his tongue teasing and thrusting with the same speed and direction of his cock, both organs filling and stroking my senses. Stopping the kiss, his lips hovered just above mine, both of us panting. He dotted the perimeter of my mouth with soft pecks before he took my bottom lip between his teeth and drew it taut.

The fat head of his cock lodged itself against my cervix. Our hips started to roll in opposite directions. He tapped the sensitive nerves inside me again and again as my body knotted and twisted around his shaft. Moaning, he took control of my mouth again, the taps coming a little harder and faster as I plummeted over the line for a third time, my climax unleashed.

Dante drove harder, the muscles beneath my hands tightening and straining as he sank all the way. My thighs spread wide, my labia pressed flat against his groin as he ground into me. His kisses came harder, his fingertips digging into the generous globes of my ass to keep me cinched to him. I felt him jerk inside me, a hard upward lift of his cock that was repeated three times more as he filled me with his cum.

I pulsed with him, my climax showing no signs of diminishing. His strokes resumed to gently bring me back to earth. When we were both finally spent, he slid out and moved down my body until he could suckle at my breasts once more while his hands moved in a roaming massage over my tired muscles.

My body finally sated, my brain kicked back in. It struck me that I'd just had unprotected sex. Strangely enough, I wasn't worried about disease. Dante had always been a health nut. Instead, I worried about conception. I still could, as far as I knew.

I turned the idea over in my head until I was certain that the only thing that frightened me about the prospect was that I would be on my own again as soon as Alex was freed from jail.

Slowly, I eased myself out from under Dante's massive frame.

"You can't stay the night. Momma won't understand." I tried to keep my voice relaxed but I had suddenly grown tense all over.

Dante tried to snuggle next to me, his hand at my breast as he stared at the darkly swollen nipple. "Just a little while, Liv."

I brushed his hand away. "No, we might fall asleep, or she could wake up."

He pushed up on one elbow to stare at my face. "This is just about your mom, right?"

Closing my eyes, I nodded. I couldn't look at him while I was lying. He sighed and then I felt him move along the bed. I heard the rustle of his clothes as he got dressed. I kept my eyes closed. He was too beautiful to look at and the disparities between us would only make the doubt dig a little deeper under my skin.

His lips brushed mine, startling my eyes open.

"This isn't over, love," he whispered and then he left.

Chapter Thirteen

Sleep didn't come easy. My dreams alternated between being in Dante's arms and showing up someplace he was supposed to be and finding that he had abandoned me all over again. Either way, I woke with my heart racing and a soft cry on my lips. At five, I gave up the fight and got dressed.

I had one hell of an appetite. A holy trinity of orgasms did that. I cooked biscuits, gravy and bacon for breakfast and timed it for Ivy's arrival, so that the three of us were sitting around the table reading the newspaper and helping ourselves to seconds. It was a good breakfast, if not a healthy one. Momma didn't need reminded who Ivy was, recognized the president's picture on the front page and talked about daddy in the past tense.

I didn't want to start my work day and leave momma when she was so wonderfully present, but I had to. Alex's surgery had been performed yesterday morning. He'd most likely be back in county jail before tomorrow was through. Sighing, I started gathering my things up.

Giving momma a good-bye kiss, I tossed a wink at Ivy. "By the way, how was the Jack?"

Smiling, Ivy gave two very hard thumbs up and winked back.

Chuckling in my car, I started the engine and checked for voicemail and text messages while I fiddled with the air conditioner's control and searched for a decent signal on the radio. Seeing Davies' name at the top of a text message, the chuckle died in my throat. I opened the text message to find two words.

Call me.

I looked at the time display on the phone. Eight o'clock. Well, I did have an invitation, I thought, and pressed the call button.

"Yeah, give me a couple minutes, I'll call you back."

I started to say "Okay," but Davies had already hung up. I dropped the phone into the cup holder, checked the rear view mirror and pulled out onto the street.

I was halfway to my office when he called back. Pulling the car into the parking lot of a convenience store, I took the call.

"Phone's been used just once since Epps died," Davies said.

"Calling whom?" I heard the sound of cars around Davies and the faint and peculiar trill he made when exhaling cigarette smoke. I was ready to repeat the question when he finally answered.

"Don't know...went to a pre-paid phone activated day after the murder."

"Where was it purchased?" I pulled a pen and pad from my bag and started taking notes.

"Walmart on Canal."

"Shit..."

Davies chuckled. "Yeah, you won't be able to find some douche liquor store clerk who'll let you watch the videotapes for a couple hundred this time."

I rolled my eyes. That "douche" clerk had stayed past closing with Craig and pocketed a thousand bucks before the night was up.

"You got the pre-paid's number?"

"161-248-1796."

I wrote it down. Hearing Davies clear his throat, I felt like he was holding something back. "What else?"

"Some files were sent from Ray's phone to the pre-paid."

"Files?" My heart felt like it was doing a back flip in my chest. The files had to be important, the reason why the killer hadn't thrown the phone away and had risked using it.

"Looks like jpegs, but we haven't been able to view them."

I tapped the pen against the tablet. He wasn't hanging up on me, so I guessed he had more to say even if he didn't want to. "Come on, Davies. You've got more than that. Why are you holding out on me?"

I heard the metal flick of his lighter as he started a new cigarette. I shook my head at the sound. Chain smoking in the morning -- either the job was too stressful for him or this particular case was. I waited another second for him to finish his drag and then gave him a little prompt when he didn't continue.

"I know you don't believe me, but I'm trying to help you out here...Alex doesn't look good for this anymore and you got nowhere else to go right now."

Davies relented. "We got a tower trace on the pre-paid last night, must have been while the files were being accessed again. It came from within a couple block radius of Epps' house." He stopped for a second, took another hit on his cigarette and came back with his voice rougher. "You want anything else, you better bring something new to the table. Understand?"

I told him I did and said good-bye. The line went dead before I finished. I wrinkled my nose at the phone. Davies would be damn lucky if the next thing I brought to the table wasn't the recording of Hicks.

********************

Still in the convenience store parking lot, I immediately called Craig. I told him what Davies had said, absent the beating around the bush and the long drags on a cigarette between revelations.

"So, what does that tell us?" Craig asked.

"It's not a family member. The phone was with Epps before the murder -- it was the number anyone calling in sick would use to reach Ray as the foreman. Same for deliveries or any haulage contractor. He had it with him that day, so the killer had to have carried it back to the neighborhood."

"Why?"

I growled into the phone at Craig. My gut was telling me the phone was important. I didn't want to explain it to him or anyone else, particularly by playing a game of twenty questions. "Look, it can't be coincidence that the killer was at Ray's work site on Friday and in his neighborhood last night."

"But that doesn't mean it wasn't a family member."

An image of Vivian, her face swollen from crying, flashed through my mind and my stomach dropped a few inches real fast. Craig was right. It could still be a family member who had the phone...who had access to it after the murder.

I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. The person throwing the jacket away had been white. So a family member hadn't thrown the jacket away. But had there been anyone else in the car?

I tried to imagine Lee in the car, some friend from the neighborhood helping him get rid of the evidence. That made no sense. Lee had no reason to kill Ray and his face had been free of guilt, showing only grief and anger.

Vivian? Had she heard about the fight and gone to talk to her father? There had been more than grief in Vivian's face, but was that because she thought her boyfriend had killed her father? Could it be Alex's arm on the video store tape? Both Vivian and Alex, who was half a foot taller, could have been at the site. Briggs could have seen only Vivian leaving, Alex already out the door in front of her.

Craig whistled over the phone, resorting to "Yo, Columbo!" when I didn't respond.

"Yeah, I'm here. Look, I've got to get back into Epps' neighborhood."

He whistled again, more softly. "From what I heard about your last visit, you're gonna need an armed escort to get in there and talk to anybody."

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that." I turned the car back on and rolled down the window as I started to sweat.

"Meet me at my office," Craig said. "I think I have a way to get you in without starting a riot."

Chapter Fourteen

I sat in Diamond's car waiting with him a few blocks from Ray Epps' house. The car was an old but well-kept Crown Vic that I assumed he'd purchased at a police auction. We hadn't ventured onto Ray's block yet because we were waiting for Diamond's former partner from when he'd still been part of the Masonville homicide squad.

"Won't Delta be stepping on Hicks' ..." I caught myself before I finished the almost rhyme.

"Yeah," Craig laughed. "That's probably half of why she's willing to do it. There's no love lost between those two."

The Crown Vic still had that squad car feeling to it, the sort of lightly lived in smell that made veteran cops feel like it was a sacred space in which they could say anything. I quirked a brow at Craig. "And the other half?"

"Well, I guilted her a little." He smiled. "Since she's screwing with my retirement plans."

I twisted in my seat. I could tell he was kind of joking, but not completely. "What do you mean?"

"There's this producer wants to license a script about us...well, mostly about her." Craig spread his hands wide in front of him, like he was reading out a movie marquee in which he had somehow taken first billing. "Diamond and Steele. Pretty catchy, huh?"

I nodded, smiling my encouragement at him. "But she doesn't want to?"

He shrugged. "They want to start with her brother Bobby dying."

My smile faded. Officer Robert Dupree was the victim of an unsolved cop killing that was almost a decade old, a fact that always came up when the local papers found a reason to focus on the sharpest homicide detective the Masonville PD had to offer. "I can see why she would say no."

Craig rubbed at his brow and looked in his side mirror for about the tenth time since we had parked. "At least while her mom's still alive. It's a real sore spot for the old lady, not knowing what happened or if the guy's ever going to get caught."

I nodded. I had gone through a lot of sit downs with families looking for closure. It was hard to move on -- hardest, I thought, for the mothers and children left behind. Looking at Diamond, I saw that his lips had disappeared into a solid line and guessed Dupree's death was still something of a sore spot with him, too.

"So, you sure she's going to show?"

"There she is," he said, lowering his window as an unmarked cop car came rolling to a stop next to us.

I shifted forward in my seat for a good look at Delta Steele. Inside the car, the detective's face was shadows and sunglasses, except for the genuine smile she threw up at Diamond when he said her name. She wore her hair bound in a tightly wrapped bun at the base of her hairline. Her jacket was a pearl gray, with a black shell beneath it. Somewhere in her early thirties, she had a soft, generous body that surprised me.