Free Fatal Affair: 1 (Courthouse Connections) by Ann Jacobs

given
him the choice—do it her way or not at all. “I’ll be there waiting for you. Go
back to Plant City and play with my rings. Pretend it’s me tugging and sucking
on your pretty nipples, and wear something sexy for me.”
    “JD, you’re making me hot and it’s still
three days before we meet again. Good night, before I break down and agree to
meet you here at my office.”
    “Okay, okay.” He hung up, willing his
hard-on to subside so he could walk to his car without making a spectacle of
himself.
    * * * * *
    It seemed the hours barely ticked by, but
finally it was Saturday and Lanie sat on the porch at JD’s cottage, rocking
back and forth in a hammock hanging from the ceiling. He’d called to say he’d
be a few minutes late because he’d gotten a late start from Tampa.
    She listened to a song that wafted along
the salty breeze from a juke box at the open-air bar across the road. The
tearjerker lyrics might have been written especially for her, she decided as
she listened to a female singer belt out words about love and guilt and the
impossibility of wanting what she couldn’t have.
    Cry, hell. She wanted to scream out about
the unfairness of the desperate bargain she’d made so long ago. The nightmare
didn’t look as though it would be ending any time soon, either—she’d heard not
only from Wayne but from a furious Bert Davies while driving up there.
    Damn it all, she wouldn’t think about them
now. She’d forget all the threats and cajoling and have fun with her lover. She’d
begun thinking of JD as her master during her very first visit to Cedar Key,
and she could hardly wait for him to get there and take control over her hungry
body.
    She closed her eyes, imagining how he’d
look, his hair windblown and in need of a cut. He’d told her his slightly
crooked nose was a souvenir from his football-playing days for the Gators. That
small imperfection and an almost imperceptible scar on his strong chin somehow
made him seem real—imperfect and therefore more lovable, more within her realm
of possibility.
    What she liked best about him was the way
he made her feel important, as though he wanted her for herself, not as an
attractive accessory to augment his own personal value.
    JD was nothing like Wayne. Nothing at all.
She knew now that the eight years she’d spent with Wayne had nothing to do with
love, only with satisfying mutual need—his for a prop to bolster his image as a
devoted family man, hers for a means of dragging herself out of the mire of
poverty into which she’d been born. Put that way, she had to admit that what
she’d done made her not much better than a common prostitute—well, not much
better than an expensive call girl, even though she’d never had to put out to
earn her pay.
    She laughed at herself. JD knew all about
where she came from and he didn’t care. That was a miracle, because eight years
ago she’d never thought she might someday experience the kind of sexual
chemistry she’d read about in books and heard sung about in nameless ballads
that had somehow etched themselves into her brain.
    As impossible, as wrong as it was, Lanie
had fallen in love with her master—her fantasy lover. What had begun simply as
the mutual satisfaction of long-denied carnal needs had morphed in the space of
just a few weeks into so much more.
    The tragedy of it all lay in the fact that
unless Wayne could persuade Bert to let her go in peace, she could never admit
how deeply she felt about JD. Not to anyone except herself, and only in the
darkness of her solitary nights.

Chapter Seven
     
    “Where’s that agile mind of yours taking
you now, sweetheart?” JD’s deep, compelling voice poured over her like honey.
    She couldn’t help wishing this could be
more than just a series of brief interludes when they had no past, no future, just
the pleasure they could bring each other for a few fleeting moments in time,
only to return to soon to their separate realities.
    “I wish…”