Page 26 of The Criminal

I thrust my throbbing erection against her backside. I wanted her to beg me to take her. Beg me to please her before I gave her my cock.

I was so hard it hurt. I slid my hand lower, parting her wet center. God, she was slick and burning hot to the touch. I pressed a finger inside her. She trembled. Yes, now I had her. Now she would ask.

“Please, Derek, fuck me.” Lee panted the words between gasps.

I tried to roll her beneath me. I needed to be inside her. I needed…

Shit.

My eyes flew open. Pale early morning light filtered between the blinds in my bedroom. My painfully hard cock was trapped between my body and the mattress. It was my fourth Lee sex dream this week. Unacceptable.

God, these had to stop. My dick was leaking when I rolled over and pushed my sleep pants down. I’d jacked off more in the last two weeks than in the prior two months. The images from the dream were still fresh. I stroked up and down my length, hard and fast. My hips pushed off the bed.

I’d given up trying to fight the Lee fantasies. I indulged fully. Eyes closed, I envisioned Lee beneath me as I sank my cock into her, my name tumbling from her lips as I thrust into her. My hand felt good, but it wasn’t what I craved.

Another couple of hard strokes and I came. Alone. In my bed. Dreaming of a woman I was never meant to lust over. My discarded towel from last night’s shower worked for clean-up.

Fuck.

One kiss had caused this problem. One ill-advised kiss.

I draped my forearm over my eyes, closing out the world, and wished the dreams would stop.

Yesterday I wished for the same thing.

Maybe I should see if Noah or Steel were up for hitting a club on South Beach. Find some nameless woman for a one-night stand. I laughed out loud at the idea, it was so bad. I was too damn old for the clubs in SoBe, and none of those women were Lee.

If only I could resurrect Ray. His killer right hook would knock all thoughts of Lee right out of my head. The memory of him and all the guilt I felt wasn’t enough to stop me from wanting her.

I groaned and fumbled for my phone on the bedside table.

Checking the tracking app for Lee’s whereabouts had become an obsession. At work, people had noticed. Every time John caught me, he gave me one of his cold looks, the one that was both concerned and scary as fuck. I’d become immune to the look in a week. Now two weeks in, John didn’t bother with the look when he caught me. He would mutter a curse instead.

I often echoed John’s curse because while I had the tracker, I didn’t have a reason to seek Lee out and butt into her life.

I had stopped at Oleander on a whim Monday. Lee had been out to lunch. Sara informed me that Lee had a standing monthly lunch date with a handful of ladies from Boca. The five women were big spenders, and after lunch and cocktails at the restaurant across the plaza, they would shop at Oleander. Lee would email their selections to their respective husbands so the proper baubles would magically appear for birthdays and anniversaries.

After asking Sara if Lee had had any other car trouble and getting a strange look, I excused myself, saying something about interfering in Lee’s workday.

I asked Sara not to tell Lee about my visit. No way she didn’t ignore my request.

But it was Sunday and no call came from Lee telling me to leave her alone. So maybe Sara hadn’t told her. Fuck, I didn’t know. I was grasping at straws. At my age, being interested in a woman shouldn’t be so complicated, but Lee was a minefield.

With the sad sigh of a man resigned to his fate, I clicked the refresh button on the app and focused my bleary eyes on the screen.

The dot representing Lee’s car was on the move, hauling ass. And she wasn’t on her way to any of her routine stops. Not work. Not Publix nor the dog park. Suddenly, I was wide awake. My heart was beating like I’d mainlined a pot of Cuban coffee. I sat up in bed.

There weren’t any landmarks I recognized on the map. I had to zoom way out to figure out where the hell she was.

The Redlands. Huh.

The Redlands was nowhere. West of Miami, it was the last vestige of what passed for farmland in Dade County. Too far from the ocean for developers to subdivide, it was the land that time and the real estate market forgot.

The red dot that indicated her location was sailing across the screen. In my mind was an image of her in the Bentley, her fingers caressing the leather-covered steering wheel, music on, and hair blowing in the breeze from the open windows. An early morning joyride. But that blissful idea was quickly replaced by a more ominous thought of her arriving at a meeting with some low-life scumbag at an old plant nursery or abandoned house. If things went bad, she could end up hurt or worse.

Panic surged through me. I had to get dressed and get out there.

I was in the bathroom with a mouth full of toothpaste and half-dressed when the dot on my phone finally parked in the middle of nowhere. The coordinates, when I popped them into Google, gave me an intriguing answer: Mission Critical K9 Academy.

---