Page 56 of Jacking Jill

Romeo took a deep breath, his expanding chest igniting something raw and primal in his testosterone-jacked body, his whiskey-fueled brain. Triceps bulging, Romeo flexed beneath his tailored silk shirt that had been sweated into beneath his jacket and was stuck to his muscle-ridged torso like a wrapper. He stripped off his jacket, yanked off his tie, unbuttoned the front of his shirt almost down to his belt. Outside the window the parking lot was a snow-covered winter wonderland, but inside the office it felt hotter than the tropics. Rivulets of sweat trickled down past Romeo’s heavy pectorals, down the center-line of his ridged abdomen, beneath his belt and into his silk Italian underwear.

Romeo gazed down at himself as his chest expanded and contracted with each heavy breath. He admired his sculpted body, then let his gaze flick down to the heavy bulge at the front of his trousers. He realized he was monstrously erect, like maybe there was something to Miss IMG’s speech about sex and violence being part of the same primal energy.

“Oh, fuck,” Romeo groaned, fisting his cock through his trousers, closing his eyes and seeing himself in violent action later tonight, storming the gates, taking down the enemy. “Oh, yes.”

It didn’t matter to Romeo that Darkwater were former military. In his opinion—and perhaps the rest of the world’s too—America’s military no longer glowed with the halo of righteousness they’d earned after winning World War II. And today’s warriors were video-game heroes more than anything—soft-bellied nerds operating joysticks and squinting at satellite images on screens a thousand miles away from the action. Yeah, the American Special Forces guys were still elite, still worthy of admiration and respect. But Jack Wagner and the rest of those guys were civilians now. They were no longer special.

But Romeo . . . yes, Romeo was special, he thought as he massaged his cock and manhandled his balls, the sexual energy surging through his body like he was being pulled into that vortex Miss IMG had spoken about, a place where the urges to fuck and to fight swirled around each other in cosmic coitus, feeding off the same fuel, mixing with each other to create something potent and primal, dark and deadly.

Now Romeo heard Kay’s voice outside his office door. She was protesting at being pushed around by one of Romeo’s guys. Romeo smiled, tightening his grip on his cock when he heard Kay take a swing at one of his thugs before yelping in pain when she was slammed up against the wall. Kay’s slim body was wiry-strong, and Romeo knew she worked out obsessively. But she also drank obsessively, and although he’d always marveled at how a woman with so little meat on her bones could handle her liquor so well, Kay didn’t have the strength to take on two of Romeo’s thugs.

Romeo felt that surging energy of dark-cold violence and scorching-hot sex whip through his body like an electric current. His jaw tightened, his neck thickening as he wondered if that mysterious IMG woman had done something to him with her choice of words, the cadence of her sentences, that hypnotic lilt to her tone. Neuro-linguistic programming was a well-studied weapon in the CIA’s arsenal of mind-control techniques. Despite Miss IMG’s assurances to the contrary, Romeo couldn’t rule out the troubling possibility that he was about to join the ranks of infamous patsies like Lee Harvey Oswald but without the trademark middle name.

“I know all your names,” came Kay’s snarling threat as the door swung open and one of Romeo’s thugs dragged her into the room. “Don’t think I won’t get you all arrested for assault, you fucking assholes.” Kay wrenched her arm away from Romeo’s thug, turned her angry attention to Romeo. Her cheek was bruised from where she’d been slammed against the wall outside, but otherwise Kay looked all right.

More than all right, Romeo thought as he dragged his gaze down along Kay’s slender body, down past her pencil-skirt to those knee-high black boots, then back up along the buttons of her black silk blouse visible beneath her jacket, his cock throbbing in his trousers when he recalled those darkly alluring tattoos carved into Kay’s torso, circling her pointy little tits.

Romeo almost blacked out from the surge of raw desire, just barely stopping himself from leaping across the room and taking Kay like he’d fantasized about so many times over the past few years. Swallowing thickly, Romeo blinked himself back into focus, saw that Kay had noticed the obscene peak at the front of his trousers, the sight making her eyes narrow with a dangerous mix of fear and rage.

“Romeo, whatever you heard on that phone call . . .” Kay started to say before Romeo swiped at the air to shut her up, shaking his head violently.

“Don’t bother. It’s over, Kay. You’d already be dead if not for simple considerations of logistics and body disposal.” Romeo nodded to his thugs. “Gag her and bag her. We’re going on a trip.”

Kay screamed, lunging at Romeo, who sidestepped her claws just in time. His thugs grappled her to the ground, one of them ramming his knee into her back and holding her face-down while the other guy proceeded to bind her wrists with heavy-duty plastic-ties and place a thick strip of black duct-tape over her mouth.

“Stand her up,” Romeo ordered. “Up against the wall.” He waited until Kay was upright, her back to the side wall, her eyes now wide with more fear than rage.

The kind of fear that Romeo knew came from that broken place inside her.

That place which would never heal.

“Oh, Kay,” he whispered as he came close, leaning in and sniffing the air around her panicked body. “If only you were capable of giving yourself to me. What a team we could have made, you and I.” Romeo dragged his fingertips along her sunken cheek, then stroked her long slender neck. She recoiled in disgust, shivered with something uncontrollable, like maybe this was the first time a man had touched her since she’d been attacked all those years ago, violated in unspeakable ways. That event had destroyed anything soft and feminine in this butterfly, Romeo thought with a sad smile. She was just an empty shell, incapable of love, a twisted creature whose body reacted violently to a man’s touch.

Any man.

Every man.

For a long dark moment Romeo considered ripping off that duct-tape to see if she’d bargain for her life, offer herself to him willingly. But Romeo already knew she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Not just in principle, but physically. Her body simply wouldn’t go along with it, even if her brain decided it was the logical choice. Romeo had seen it in how she’d flinched involuntarily at his touch, her body recoiling with visceral disgust, the rejection of a man’s touch now indistinguishable from instinct.

She’d rather die than be fucked by a man ever again.

Romeo gazed into Kay’s panic-stricken eyes now, running his fingertips down past her throat and teasing the top button of her blouse. He tugged gently at the neckline, pulling the blouse away from her chest just enough to give him a glimpse of her petite cleavage and the edges of those mysterious black tattoos.

Kay lurched her body to the side away from him, panting heavily into the duct-tape, her sunken cheeks puffing out as she hyperventilated. Romeo gritted his teeth and clenched his fists, fighting back a surge of dangerous desire, like those twin snakes of sex and violence wanted to strike at Kay together. Suddenly he understood what drove bad men to do bad things, how that darkness lived in every man’s heart, how that evil was part of the very core of mankind, a savage urge bred into man’s psyche from millions of years where survival depended on giving free rein to those two primal drives:

Fighting and fucking.

Romeo drew back slowly, using every ounce of willpower to tear himself away from the terrible temptation of those urges. Releasing all that energy now would be a mistake, he understood. There would be time for this later, when the fight was done and the battle was won.

Then Romeo would take his prize.

Release those demon-dark urges before putting this broken butterfly out of her misery, send her to hell to torment the souls of men she’d sent there. She could spend eternity reliving the darkly addictive power of revenge.

“You’ll get your revenge on me too, eventually.” Romeo smiled. “We’ll meet in hell someday. You’ll keep it warm for me, won’t you, Kay?” Romeo’s smile expanded to a grin when he saw the rage burn in Kay’s eyes again, chasing away some of the fear, perhaps replacing it with relief that death was near, that it was finally the end of the line, that it was time to go.

Romeo glanced at his watch now, then flicked his gaze towards his thugs as his mind snapped to the fight ahead. He barked out his orders, instructing his guys to gather the troops, load up the SUVs with fire-starting supplies just like the old days.

“We’ll either smoke them out and gun them down, or barricade them inside and let them burn,” he told his guys as they glanced at each other and grinned. “Maybe a bit of both. Now get the SUVs ready to go. We leave as soon as we’re loaded up.”

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