Page 1 of Double Bucked

1

RANSOM

I’m tongue-deep in Jade. Her fingers curl into my hair, locking me in place.

“Goddamn.” She pants. “You work that mouth like you get paid for it.”

I smack her thigh. “You giving me a raise?”

“Don’t do that.”

“Hm?”

“Don’t talk. You’re ruining it.”

I flatten my tongue up the seam of her, the way I’ve learned she likes, and lick upwards, suctioning my mouth around her swollen nub. My efforts earn a shaky moan.

Jade and I are something with benefits. Not quite friends. Not quite coworkers. Her husband is my boss. What does that make me?

An asshole, I suppose.

But we recognize skills in each other. I make her come. She makes me forget.

Win-win.

She’s got strong thighs—the thighs of a woman who grew up riding, just like ninety-percent of all the other ladies in Belleflower—and they lock around my shoulders as she arches into my mouth.

But just I feel her start to give, we both hear it?—

The downstairs door unlocks.

“Jade!” her husband calls out. “You here?”

Jade jolts up, her head whipping back and forth like a dog that just scented coyote.

“Upstairs!” she shouts. “Be right down!” Her foot finds my chest, and she kicks me backward, off her bed. She swallows her dark skin under a velvet robe, and I snatch my shirt off the floor, tugging it over my head.

“Back door?” I whisper.

She shakes her head as she knots her robe. “He’ll catch you.”

We can both hear him. Those heavy footsteps climbing the staircase. Jade looks towards the window, then raises her eyebrows at me.

I groan. “C’mon now…”

She goes to the window, flinging open the double panes. “There’s a terrace. You’ll be fine.”

“The hell I will?—”

But she’s pushing me toward the window, using all her might to get me out of there as fast as she can. “He’ll kill you. And me. You get that, don’t you? So. What’s it going to be? Terrace or a bullet?”

“Well, when you put it like that.”

“Ransom. Move.”

My boots crush her nice satin pillows covering the nook as I shimmy out the window. The panes are tight on my shoulders. I climb out backward and hook the tip of my boot against the wall, finding some kind of purchase on the thin, ivy-covered terrace.

In the twilight, I can make out the shape of the earth two stories down. My horse—Chaucer—lingers near the side of the house, looking bored with my escapades.

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