InnocenceForSale.com/ Bree, page 10
I nodded.
For a moment, Andrew’s jaw seemed to be clenched teeth-crackingly hard. When he’d wrestled control back, he nodded at me too.
“Alright. Let’s try it. Math camp was cancelled early because the tutors got…say…food poisoning. You got back and there’s dead bodies all over the place, so where is she? Right?”
“Yep, sure.”
I stood and pulled out my phone, closing my eyes while holding it for a few seconds. After collecting my thoughts, I navigated through to my mom’s contact details and pressed the button to call her. As the phone rang, a lump grew in my throat.
It was still difficult to believe that things had come to this. I was betraying my own mother, but I had to remember that she had betrayed me first, and betrayed Andrew before that.
The phone continued to ring with no answer or voicemail and I steeled myself with memories of the way it felt that night I received my exam results, to have those invisible ties between her and I break. I was about to hang up when the line clicked and I heard her tentative voice on the other end.
“Hello?” she said.
“Mom? Mom, are you OK?” The lump in my throat helped with sounding stressed.
Andrew stood and brought his ear close to mine so he could hear the conversation.
“Yes… where are you, Bree?” she asked.
“I’m home! There’s dead guys all over the house! What’s going on?”
“You need to get out of there! We heard Andrew was coming for us and we had to get out quick. I…I was going to call you when we stopped. We’re still on the road.”
Once again, footsteps came in the direction of the breakroom. Andrew swiftly and silently crossed over to the door, which had a window in it.
“Where are you? I’ll come to you,” I said.
Andrew held up his hand to the window in a halting gesture, then held up one finger to request a minute and then held his hand to the side of his face with the thumb and little finger sticking out like a built-in super-spy phone.
In the background of my call, I heard Antonio growl, “Don’t fucking tell her.”
Andrew tiptoed back over and resumed listening.
“What? Mom… what does he mean? What am I supposed to do?”
The silence on the other end of the line was heartbreaking and infuriating in equal measure. She was on the verge of abandoning me and the last trace of guilt about my own actions evaporated.
“The men… do you recognize any of them? Do they look like Andrew’s guys? How many?”
“Mom… no. I don’t recognize them. There’s…”
Andrew held up his hand with four fingers spread out.
“Four of them,” I continued. “They’ve all been shot. Mom…? You gotta tell me...”
I was met with another one of those silences, then a muffled conversation on the other side where I couldn’t make out any words. Finally, my mom’s voice cleared again.
“Bree, you need to get out of there and make sure you’re not followed.”
“But… how do I find you?”
She sighed. “I… we… it’s too dangerous. Andrew is looking for the three of us, looking for a family that matches our description. It’s safer if we go our separate ways.”
“Mom!”
“You’re an adult now, Bree. You need to start acting like one. Get a job like I keep telling you.”
Andrew reminded me of a pressure cooker with a faulty safety mechanism, needle edging toward the red. He pointed at the briefcase on the table.
“Well, I won’t need a job for a while judging by all the money in this briefcase.”
“Briefcase?”
“Yeah.”
Again, I heard a muffled conversation on the other side but this time I was able to make out some cuss words before there seemed to be a minor scuffle over phone ownership.
Antonio’s voice came through loud and clear. “Where was the briefcase?”
“Sitting on the coffee table. I just opened it.”
“Is it full?”
“I guess so.”
“Is it full or not, bitch?”
“I don’t know? There’s plenty of cash but you could stuff some more in. How am I supposed to know?” I asked.
“For fuck sake,” said Antonio. “Don’t go anywhere. We’ll call you back.”
The line went dead before I could confirm I wasn’t disappearing into the ether with my briefcase of money. I held my phone out in front of me to look at it in mild disbelief, then dropped my hand to my side.
“You sure you want me to let her go?” Andrew asked.
I pursed my lips for a moment. It was a fair question. “Yes. I swear it will be like the end of the world for her.”
Andrew shrugged. “OK, a deal’s a deal, but…”
He walked over to the door and stepped outside. I heard his footsteps go down the couple stairs and then his voice talking to who I assumed was Mike again. I paced a little and, as I walked past the door, peeked out the window and confirmed the assumption.
My phone rang and I held it in front of me for a few seconds until Andrew came back inside the breakroom and closed the door behind him.
“Hello?”
It was my mom again. “OK, sweetie, we’ve figured out a place where we can meet. We’ll be in… well, we’re heading near Albuquerque. You can take a Greyhound from Oklahoma City and we can pick you up from the station. Be there Saturday, that’s the day after tomorrow. If you’re quick and your bus arrives earlier, wait at the station and we’ll pick you up at ten PM. Don’t contact us, and keep a low profile.”
Her change of tone calling me “sweetie” grated on my ears like fingernails on a blackboard at the front of a classroom full of cats being electrocuted. I bit my tongue against something sarcastic.
“Albuquerque, Saturday, ten PM, got it.”
“Stay safe, honey,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
I slipped my phone back into my pocket. Andrew held out his hands and cradled my face as he bent down to kiss me for a job well done.
“That’s my girl,” he said.
I melted against him.
Bree
Despite all the driving we’d done already today, Andrew drove the remaining couple of hours to Oklahoma City once Mike had everything under control. Van-loads of things from the house on Frosty Lane were already starting to arrive for investigation when we left.
Thankfully, instead of bundling me onto a Greyhound, Andrew booked us into a Presidential suite at the Hilton. I was exhausted. It seemed like the amount of time that had passed since I woke up in my wonderfully perfect old room was even longer than the previous gap between sleeps there.
I would have flopped down on top of the covers and fallen asleep before I could even scoot up enough to get my legs on the bed, but it wasn’t to be.
After all day in the car, losing my virginity in a threesome with Andrew and Cammy, getting covered in fear-sweat as I drove for our lives under fire and sitting in the distribution hub’s breakroom that smelled like diesel fumes and grease, I felt like I was covered in a layer of grime. My muscles were aching. I was still a little tender between my legs. I couldn’t fall asleep like that.
“You look beat,” said Andrew as I headed for the bathroom.
“An IFS girl is never too tired,” I mumbled.
Andrew was right behind me as I flicked on the light and looked back and forth between the shower with at least six nozzles at various heights and the huge bath. Attractive as he was, I hoped he wasn’t going to take my comment seriously. There was no way I could stand up to have sex in the shower right now.
He put his hands on my shoulders and walked past. Next, he shrugged off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves before starting to fill up the bath, while I stood indecisively by the door.
“Trust me, you’ll feel a lot better after this. You can try the shower in the morning,” he said.
“OK.”
He added some scented oils, and the aroma quickly diffused throughout the bathroom, carried by the steam of the hot water. When inhaling it, I felt like a cartoon character, floating through the air, enticed, trance-like by the smell.
The next thing he poured in caused frothy bubbles to start forming.
Andrew Everett, crime lord and relaxation technician? A corner of my mouth raised a little at the thought.
While the bath filled, he returned to me and curled his fingers under my tank top. “Arms up,” he said, and I complied.
Slowly and, despite my exhaustion I had to admit, sensually, he peeled off my tight white top, which had seemed to become stuck on like a second skin during all the action today. I wondered if I looked like I had a grime tan line, like a coal miner that had just taken off a pair of goggles after a day in the mines.
Before he took the shirt off completely, with a clever twist of his wrist, he entangled both my hands in the fabric and held them against the doorframe above me. With one hand now free, he tilted my head up with a couple fingers under my chin and kissed me slowly but deeply.
I couldn’t stop myself from whimpering a little with happiness before our lips parted. I was so tired, but the last few seconds had proved a point. Even now, if the mood struck him, Andrew could tie me up and force me to experience yet another powerful orgasm. There’d be nothing I could do.
He pulled back, paused, and then untwisted the shirt from around my wrists, letting my arms fall back to my sides. With a snap of his fingers behind my back my bra came loose, like he was a hypnotist and it was under his spell.
Andrew moved behind me before pushing the straps off my arms. My bra fell to the floor with a clack as the clasp hit the tiles and the cool air hit my skin.
I leaned back against him as his hands massaged my breasts and rubbed my ribcage from front to back where the underwire had been digging in. It felt heavenly, so good that my eyes almost rolled back in my head as I lifted my arms to drape them around his neck behind me, and let him take a little of my weight.
With a few careful tugs and pushes, my skirt and panties dropped to join my bra and I kicked off my socks in two steps towards the bath. Andrew turned off the flow of water as I lowered myself into the bubbles.
It was hot, but not too hot. I leaned back and blew some excess bubbles away from my face so I didn’t inhale them.
“You joining me? There’s plenty of room.”
“No. I’ve still got a few things to do. I’ll have a shower a little later.”
Andrew retrieved a washcloth from a pile on some shelving next to the sink, dipped it in the water and started slowly rubbing it all over my body. I was almost speechless. I felt like a princess out of a fairytale. I never considered outsourcing cleaning myself in the bath or shower, but it was something I could get used to.
I sighed happily and closed my eyes, letting the washcloth roam wherever Andrew wanted. He was holding one of my arms out of the water and scrubbing slowly up and down when I spoke again.
“How did you get away with it? The trial and everything? The way Antonio spoke, he thought he had an unquestionable paper trail, plus my mom’s testimony, and a few undercover agents from various departments that had infiltrated your operations,” I said.
“It wasn’t easy, they almost had me.”
“What did you do?”
“I had to…uh…invest in the FBI,” Andrew said.
“Invest?”
“Yeah. It was a real eye-opener. You know, all these old Italian crime families, they’ve been weaseling their way into the Feds, the CIA, the DEA, the NSA, all of them, for generations. Don Trevisano had some contacts, but when I took over they decided they wanted to renegotiate the terms of the arrangement. Well, I was on a power trip and to cut a long story short, I told them all go to fuck themselves.”
“And that’s when, co-incidentally, they started investigating you?” I asked.
“Yes and no. Take the FBI for example. I used to think of it as this one big hostile entity, but the reality is fifty times crazier than that.”
“Crazy, how?”
“Well, the Rigolottis have got some agents in their pocket, the Genoveses have got some agents in their pocket, and so on. Some of the agents might be playing more than one crime family. Some agents might take on extra work on the side for friends like those five clowns back in Hampton. Hell, for all I know, there might even be a few agents who actually just do their job for the government. And, nobody really knows the entirety of who works for who and they all head into the same office every day and pretend everything is normal. It’s fucking insane. It’s a cold war of corruption. They don’t investigate each other too carefully, in case they show how dirty their own hands are.”
“Wow, really?”
“Oh yeah. So, two years ago, shit hit the fan, as you know. I had to get in touch with Don Trevisano’s old contacts and I mostly ended up with worse deals than the ones I rejected years before. Not as bad a deal as losing everything and going to jail though. Thankfully, one contact at the FBI had been a busy little fucker and got himself a few promotions, so he was especially worth it at the time. I’ve got my hooks deep into all the relevant departments of government and law enforcement now. It’s taken my business to a whole new level. I’ll never have another problem quite like that again.”
“They won’t investigate you again, huh?”
“A person like me is always under investigation. It’s just that now the investigation will only turn up the information I let them have. The only people who get busted will be the people that I employ who try to double-cross me, or the stupid bastards who don’t follow instructions and make it so the police, Feds, whatever have no choice but to make an arrest because it’s already public knowledge. Things like that.”
“But you still went to trial,” I said.
“Yeah, by that time there was too much paperwork, too many people involved. It had to go to trial, but I knew their entire case before they brought it. Some of their evidence mysteriously went missing, the rest of it was discredited.”
“Yay,” I cheered tiredly, but honestly.
Andrew’s miraculous washcloth was between my legs, washing my thighs when he spoke again. “What were your plans for the money you got from IFS?”
I sighed. “Disappear. Live on a tropical island in the South Pacific, where life is beautiful and cheap, and live out my days.”
After letting myself sink down into the water and running my fingers through my hair, I resurfaced and once more had to blow some bubbles away to safely breathe. I blinked my eyes open for the first time in what might have been fifteen minutes and let Andrew help me out of the bath and into a towel.
Between the two of us and another couple towels from the shelves, I dried off enough for Andrew to lift me up like a bride being carried over the threshold and take me to bed. He pulled the covers over the top of me and stroked a stray strand of hair over my ear.
“It was the next best thing if I couldn’t come home,” I said.
“What was?”
“The island.”
“Oh, right. Well… I think when this is all done, maybe we can check out a few of those islands. But then, I think you should come home to stay.”
I reached up and held on to his hand, which was still near my head, and opened my eyes. Tears welled up in my eyes, but I furiously blinked them away. Words welled up in my throat, even scarier than the tears and infinitely more difficult to choke back.
“I love you, Andrew. I always have,” I said.
“I love you too, Bree. I promised I wouldn’t let myself do that again, but I can’t help it.”
He bent down and kissed me tenderly on the lips, a different kind of kiss than any I’d ever had before. I’d never felt so surrounded by love in my life. I wanted to stay awake, analyze the feeling, compare and contrast it… but in that moment of love and safety, I was like an Anti-Sleeping-Beauty, and my prince’s kiss sent me slowly drifting from consciousness.
Bree
When I first woke up, it took me several confusing moments for my mind to catch up with where I was. The first thing I realized was that I was sleeping on the most comfortable pillow in the world.
As reality separated itself from dreamland a little more, the pillow turned out to be Andrew’s shoulder. I’d been sleeping with my head resting on it, his arm around me. My arm and leg were draped over the top of him. We fit together along the full length of our bodies like we’d been cut apart in a different life.
My heart fluttered a little when I opened my eyes and looked up at his sleeping face. This was my first time sleeping in the same bed as a man, first time waking up with one. I didn’t remember him getting into bed, I didn’t remember snuggling up to him, but I felt like I’d been held like this all night, and damn if it didn’t feel good.
Under the covers, he seemed to be just as naked as I was. I shifted my hand and felt his taut pecs under my fingertips, then trailed them down over the bumps of his abs.
Tracing the paths of his abs with my fingers was waking me up more fully than any alarm clock ever had. I didn’t know what time it was, but the only thing growing as fast as my sense of excitement was my energy.
Bump, bump, bump.
My fingers finished exploring his abs and, after a moment’s hesitation, I let my hand roam lower. It wasn’t entirely unmapped territory for me now, but I still had this nagging sensation like I should be asking permission or something.
It was strange to assume access to the most intimate parts of somebody’s body. Yet, he loved me and I loved him. To have his hands on me was to live. I couldn’t imagine not wanting his touch. So, was his body mine the same way my body was his?
My exploration quickly revealed what I’d thought before. He wasn’t wearing any underwear, so unless he was sporting a pair of socks then he was just as naked as I was.
I turned my eyes back up to his face when I felt his cock under my palm. His breathing didn’t change at all as I wrapped my fingers around it. Even fast asleep and unaroused, his manhood was thick and had weight to it. I gave it a gentle squeeze and a few slow strokes, remembering all the pleasure it had given me yesterday.
