Three Fates

her breast.
    Her body was a banquet. Sleek and curvy with generous breasts, endless legs. He’d wanted to feast since he’d first seen her strut onstage in her man’s clothes with that knowing smirk on her fabulous face.
    He couldn’t think about how it was a mistake. He could only think how much he needed to feed.
    He found her mouth again, and pain and pleasure warred through him. She was dragging his jeans down, raking her nails over his hips. And his blood was a raging hammer blasting against his heart, in his head.
    Then he was inside her, rammed deep, and she was already coming around him on a wild, wet burst.
    “Jesus!” Her eyes flew open and were nearly black with shock. “Jesus, what was that?”
    “I don’t know, but let’s try it again.” Even as she shuddered, he drove himself into her in fast, nearly violent strokes. He heard her gasp for air, saw the fresh flush of heat flood her cheeks. Then she was matching him, beat for frantic beat.
    And on the instant when he lost himself in her, she dragged his mouth back to hers.

Eight
     
     
     
     
    C LEO lay facedown and crossways on a mattress that had all the yield of concrete. Her lungs had stopped wheezing, and the roar of blood in her ears had subsided to a pleasant hum.
    She’d had her first sexual experience at sixteen when, after a fight with her mother, she’d let Jimmy Moffet do what he’d been begging her to let him do for three months.
    The earth hadn’t moved, but as initiators went, Jimmy had been all right.
    In the eleven years since, she’d had better, and she’d had worse, and she’d learned to be selective. She’d learned what pleasured her own body and how to guide a man to satisfy her needs.
    She’d made some mistakes, of course, Sidney Walter being the most recent and the most costly. But by and large she thought she had a good, healthy sex drive and a reasonably discriminating taste in bed partners.
    It was true that drive had diminished radically during her stint as a performer at Down Under, but strip clubs tended to show men and sex at their most basic and ordinary. In the same way, she imagined that experience had only honed her discrimination.
    It certainly seemed to have worked this time around.
    Gideon Sullivan not only knew how to make the earth move, he had it doing the merengue. And the tango. And the rumba. The man was a regular Fred Astaire in the sheets.
    It was, she decided, going to add a nice dimension to this odd business partnership of theirs.
    Not that he considered it a partnership, but she did. And that’s what counted. Plus, she had an ace in the hole. She opened her eyes and looked at the purse that sat on the pockmarked dresser.
    Make that a queen in the hole, she mused. A silver queen.
    She intended to deal squarely with him when the time came. Probably. But experience had taught her it was wise to keep something in reserve. For all she knew, if she told Gideon about the statue, he’d take off with it just as he had her earrings.
    Damn it, she’d really liked those earrings.
    Of course, he didn’t seem to be a total prick. The man had ethics when it came to sex, and she respected that. But money was a whole different ball game. It was one thing to heat the sheets with a man she’d known less than a week, and another to trust him with a potential gold mine.
    Smarter, much smarter to keep her own counsel and pump him for information.
    She rolled over, scraped her teeth along his hip since it was handy. “I didn’t realize you Irish guys had such stamina.”
    “Guinness for strength.” His voice was rough with sleep. “Christ Jesus, and I do need a beer.”
    “You’ve got a nice build here, Slick.” To please herself she walked her finger up his thigh. “You work out?”
    “Like at a gymnasium? No. Bunch of sweaty guys and terrifying machinery.”
    “You run?”
    “If I’m in a hurry.”
    She laughed and slithered up to his chest. “So what do you do back in Ireland?”
    “We have boats.” He stirred himself to trail fingers into her hair. He really liked all that dense, dark hair of hers. “Tour boats, fishing boats. Sometimes I run tourists around, sometimes I fish, and half the time I’m hammering one of the bloody boats into proper repair.”
    “That explains these.” She pinched his biceps. “Tell me more about the Fates.”
    “I told you already.”
    “You told me some of the history stuff. But that doesn’t tell me how you’re so sure they’re worth a lot