Page 35 of The Devil's Pair

“She definitely did,” Drake said. “And we got a great education, though we didn’t end up doing too much with it. Our life skills were never really academic.”

Beating back the memory of how their skills had driven her out of her head with three amazing orgasms, Briley narrowed her eyes at them.

“No?” she said. “What specific life skills are you boys talking about?”

They laughed, hearing full well what she was asking, and the truth was that she wasn’t far from wrong.

“Easy, babe,” Dux said, amused. “I mean, we’rekind oftalking about the skills that you – um –experiencedtonight. But we’rereallytalking about how, for our whole lives, we’ve had this fucking bizarre natural ability to read people.”

“Read people?” she echoed. “Like… like what profilers can do naturally?”

“Yep,” Drake said. “From the time we were small, we could tell what a person was feeling and thinking just by looking at their faces – especially their eyes – the way theyheld their bodies, the tone of their voice. We were especially good at sniffing out liars and fakes, ands wealwaysknew when someone was hiding something or not being straight with us.”

“That’s amazing,” she said, genuinely impressed. “Reading body language and micro-expressions was something that we were taught as cops, but it’s really a talent that either you’re born with or you’re not. It’s a real gift.”

“Yeah well,” Dux said. “Perhaps tragically, we’d never used this astonishing gift for anything more than seducing the opposite sex. Starting at about age eighteen, we offered ourselves as a tag-team package deal, and we found out that women areveryinterested in threesomes. In most cases, it was the woman’s first experience, and we all kind of learned together. But honestly, we could look at a woman, and we could justtellwhat she wanted and needed, even without her saying a word, sometimes even withoutherknowing. We were bed-hoppers, and no doubt about it, but I don’t think a single woman left the bed unhappy, unsatisfied, or unwilling to make a return trip.”

“I just bet,” she said, batting her eyelashes at them. “And I know of what I speak.”

They grinned at her now, and the appearance of those damn sexy eye-crinkles made her want to fling herself at them. But she really,reallywanted to hear more about their lives, so she reined herself in. Just for a few minutes more.

“So what then?” she asked.

“Well, we graduated high school at eighteen – no honors or anything, we hardly covered ourselves in academic glory – and we didn’t know what to do next,” Drake said. “But we were tall and strong and healthy, and an army recruiter came to our neighborhood one Saturday afternoon. We walked over out of curiosity, and started talking to him. After about an hour, we’d just about decided to sign up.”

“Just like that?”

“We talked to Mom and Brad first,” Dux told her. “Brad has a military background, so we asked him what we thought, and he had plenty of reservations. Told us the truth about training, and combat, and gave us all the cons of signing up. We listened, and then we talked about it again… and in the end, we joined.”

“What did your mother think?”

“She was really torn,” Drake said. “She was so proud of us for wanting to serve our country, but she was also scared to death.”

“Yeah. That makes sense.” Briley nodded. “My mother felt the same way about me becoming a police officer, after my Dad being killed on the job. Proud but totally freaked out.”

“Exactly,” Dux said. “So off we went. No need to go into the years of training, but after about four years, we were tapped to recruit for the Marine Corps. We jumped at it, no fucking hesitation, and we both failed our first attempt, passed on the second.” He shrugged. “And that was it, really. We saw more battle than we want to remember and we never talk about, but we were also tasked with being negotiators and interrogators.”

“Ahhh,” she said. “That reading people thing came in handy over there, didn’t it?”

“It sure did, darlin’,” Drake said. “The Marines had some really intensive psychological testing and assessment, and when they figured out that we both had these weird skills, they sent us for someserioustraining. We learned negotiation and techniques and strategies, and how to interrogate someone properly, and we carried these things out really successfully, more often than not.”

“Well,” she said. “Idorecall when I was tied up in my own living room and being questioned by you guys and Ice… it wasobvious, even without a singleword, that you two saw and heard far more than I was letting on or saying.”

“Yeah, we’restillreally sorry about that,” Dux told her, and both men looked shame-faced. “That was a pretty fucking crappy thing to do to you, babe.”

“It’s OK,” Briley said, surprised that theystillseemed to be upset about that. “I mean – you guys didn’t know me, right? I was, in all fairness, a crooked cop and in Gideon’s pocket, and you hadzeroreason to trust me.”

“Still.” Drake shook his head. “We hate that we did that.”

“Well, you’vemorethan made up for it since, haven’t you?” Briley said pertly. “And more than once. Besides, if you hadn’t done any of that, then none of this would be happening, right? Everything leads to something, and you guys crashing through my front door has led to this… to you in my bed. You think I’msorryabout that?”

“You sure didn’t seem to be earlier,” Dux commented. “You actually seem pretty happy that we’re here.”

“Smart ass,” she muttered, tapping him lightly on his perfect bum, just like he’d done to her earlier. “Anyway… negotiation and interrogation?”

“Oh, yeah,” Drake said. “So that’s what we did for about ten years, until we were in our early-thirties. We were active duty, we were all over the place, but mostly Afghanistan, and then we were honorably discharged at age thirty-three, we just kind of timed out.”

“That’s when we came to Denver,” Dux said. “One of our Marines buddies was from here, and he talked about the city constantly, and we kind of fell in love with it long-distance. So when we were discharged, we looked him up. He’d been injured a year before, and had been sent home, and we stayed in touch. When he heard that we were out, he invited us to Prospect for The Road Devils.”

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