Page 16 of Dangerous Lover

He remembered everything about Caroline. Everything. How she looked with her hair in a pony tail, or loose around her shoulders. He remembered every item of clothing he’d ever seen her in and every expression she’d ever had. He remembered every single word she’d ever said to him. It was all seared into his mind and it would probably take a shot to the head to get rid of it all.

So naturally, when he reached for his cock to unload some stress, a generic woman with, say, one head, two tits, four limbs and the right plumbing simply wouldn’t do. Caroline floated into his head in those moments and he’d long ago given up the fight to keep her out.

Now there was something more, something unexpected. Turned out the Caroline he’d mooned over for twelve years was long gone, vanished with the years. The beautiful girl had been replaced by an even more beautiful woman, mature and stunning, intelligent and classy, a woman who wore sadness like a shroud, utterly irresistible.

The girl had been very pretty, like a million other upper-class girls, with a sunny smile showing off ten thousand dollars of orthodontics, wearing a thousand dollars’ worth of clothes. She bathed regularly and she had someone to wash andiron her clothes for her. Lots of girls in those conditions look pretty.

The woman she’d turned into, though, knocked the breath right out of him. She was like some sad princess longing for her lost kingdom.

Jack remembered every second she’d been in his arms as he reached down for himself, and gave one long, experimental stroke.

The hard-on had to go, right now. There was no way he could go down to dinner in this condition, she’d kick him right out. Please God, he thought, let me get through the evening without embarrassing myself.

To be really sure his dick would stay down, he should park himself in the shower under cold water and jerk off a couple of times, just to get rid of the fierce, itchy arousal he felt. His skin prickled with the desire to touch her again, only not for comfort this time and not dressed for cold weather with layers of clothes between his skin and hers.

No, he wanted to touch her and see whether he could make that smooth ivory skin turn pink with desire. He wanted to watch it happen, watch the flush cover her breasts, while he kissed them. He wanted to touch her sex, feel himself making her wet, ready for him.

His fist was working hard now, pumping, as the images of a naked Caroline spread out on a bed just for him filled his head. He wanted to know what sounds she made when she was turned on, feel her heels and nails digging into his back, feel her sex pulling at him as he stroked inside her…

It was all so much more intense now that he’d seen her again, felt her, smelled her. Now that he had so much more sensory input as he imagined fucking her, hard. For hours.

Sometimes it took him a long time to climax but he’d been semi-aroused since he’d seen her and when he imagined entering her, parting her tissues with his cock, he groaned. Red hot needles prickled down his spine and he started spurting violently, hips jerking in time with his fist. He came and came, leaning one-handed against the shower stall, until his knees were weak and it felt like he’d emptied himself of every ounce of moisture in his body.

It wasn’t quite enough. When Jack’s knees could support him again, he walked out of the shower stall, still semi-erect, still wanting her. Every cell in his body was turned on, damn it, attuned to the woman downstairs. He looked down at himself in disgust, big flag waving at half-mast.

How could he go down in this condition? Well, only one thing to do—wear a chastity belt. Or his tightest black jeans, which was the same thing. A hard-on would have no place to go in those jeans, he knew from painful experience. If he started swelling, his cock would meet stiff denim and the pain would make it go down again. That was the plan, anyway. He hoped it would work.

He couldn’t stay in the shower forever, jerking off until there was nothing left in him. It would take all night and probably all day tomorrow.

Jack unlocked the padlock on his bag and dumped all his clothes out. There weren’t many clothes, because he’d had to travel light. The only clean clothes he had left were a pair of sweats, the black jeans and a black turtleneck sweater. He hadn’t even thought to pack an extra pair of shoes, so the boots would have to do. Monday, he’d buy some clothes.

He dumped the last of the items in the bag on the bed. Fifty thousand dollars in ten bricks of $5,000 each. His toolkit. Another Glock with five magazines of ammo, and a cloth bag.

He took a small screwdriver out of the toolkit and checked the baseboard until he found an air vent close to the chest of drawers. Bending, he checked it out. Perfect. Tiny flakes of rust spotted the four screws holding the vent grate to the metal plate in the wall. The grate hadn’t been removed for years to judge from the build-up of soot and rust. Unscrewing the vent took time and some muscle but eventually he had the screws lined up on the floor and the grate was removed.

He checked his watch as he put the items from the bag far enough back in the vent so it wouldn’t show even if you were looking for something. He had no idea who cleaned the rooms, whether it was Caroline or a cleaning lady, but he didn’t want them stumbling onto the Glock, or the ammo, or—Jesus!—the contents of the cloth bag. They should be safe enough in the steel tube. It would only be until Monday.

Monday he was going to open a bank account, deposit the cash and the cashier’s check for ten million dollars and register for a safe deposit box for the contents of the cloth bag.

He checked his watch. 7:25. He’d be on time for dinner.

One last thing. Crouching, he opened the cloth bag and emptied its contents onto the hardwood floor, the dull, irregular rocks rattling as they spilled out in a stream.

Jack studied the jagged mound. Except for the odd glitter as the light caught a natural facet, the rocks could have been pebbles from a river bed.

Instead, he was looking at at least twenty million dollars in uncut diamonds.

He knew he was looking at rocks that represented human suffering on an unimaginable scale. They’d been mined by slave labor—men who toiled under the tropical sun from first to last light on a cup of rice, immediately shot in the back of the head when they grew too weak to work. An entire country was tearing itself apart because of dull rocks just like these—over eighty thousand people killed over the past year in Sierra Leone. Countless others had had their hands, lips and ears chopped off by the drugged-up baby soldiers fighting in the Revolutionary Army.

Vince Deaver and his men had been willing to massacre an entire village of women and children for them.

No wonder they called them blood diamonds.

It was a miracle that no blood oozed from the stones. But no—they were as neutral as they were inert—just rocks, for fuck’s sake. Just rocks.

Jack looked down at the mound people were willing to killand to die for and made a small noise of disgust before putting them back in the bag. Twenty million dollars of pain and suffering and misery. Murder, rape, dismemberment—that’s what the diamonds represented.

He’d taken them simply because there was no one left in the village alive to give them to and he’d have died himself rather than let Deaver have them. Where Deaver was going, the diamonds wouldn’t be any use to him anyway.

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