STORY EXCERPT

“Ah, the skeleton?” Perry shouted.

His loud donkey’s voice startled Sasha, who jumped. Rowan put his arms protectively around her, and they both looked out the window at the road’s shoulder. “It’s probably not even our target,” grumped Rowan. “El Zeub doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy to wear an entire mountain lion on his head.”

“A fake cartoon mountain lion, maybe,” Perry reminded him. Perry had the theory that perhaps El Zeub was taking a couple vacation days off from his terrorism schedule to actually attend the Great Utah FurFest—that he wasn’t following Sasha at all.

Rowan said, “El Zeub isn’t a survivalist that I can tell. He stayed in a five-star hotel in Detroit.”

“Maybe he’s just trying to look like another whacky hunter,” suggested Perry, “by wearing that mountain lion on his head.”

Rowan said, “Or maybe it is another hunter. Don’t they use little caverns to stash their hunting gear?”

Sasha asked, “How far are we from Navajo land? Could the citizen have seen a Native American performing some ritual?”

Perry admitted, “We’ll be onto res land if we keep going, that’s for sure. And they don’t like me poking around in their affairs. El Zeub could know that. Fugitives have been known to hide on res land. But the citizen also would’ve told dispatch that he saw the bomber on res land. Around here everyone knows the boundaries. And sure, Navajo have ‘skin-walkers,’ witches who travel in animal form. They can wear the pelts of their animals—I’ve seen dudes with coyotes or crows on their heads running around, trying to scare people with their evil powers. So yeah, to answer your question. It could have been something like that.”

“Must get confusing out here,” said Rowan, “between hunters, skin-walkers, and Furries.”

“Well, the Furries are no problem,” said Sasha sincerely. “You can tell by their bright colors that they aren’t organic.”

Rowan thought Sasha’s literalness was adorable. She must have to be so completely sophisticated and scrupulous about everything she said for her job. One could not run around being misunderstood when dictating an autopsy report. Being spontaneous as she had been the past couple of days must have been exhilarating for her. “All right,” Rowan allowed. “But telling the hunters from the skin-walkers could be difficult, at a distance.”

“Oh, no problem, really,” said Perry. “The skin-walkers have glowing eyes.”

After another hour, they still hadn’t found the skeleton, and Perry pulled off onto a side road to show them some incredible vista. They had to walk up a steep red-orange sandy hill, and Perry would not leave Sasha’s side. He stuck to her almost as tenaciously as the bomb-sniffing Labrador that followed them. Rowan was irritated because he had something to give Sasha.

“Perry, how did you learn all that fire stuff?” he asked casually. He had taken one of Sasha’s arms and Perry took the other. Now they practically dragged her as though she were an invalid.

“Actually,” Perry said sheepishly, “I was always kind of a firebug. I love the rush, the excitement of watching the flames flicker. My father was always busting me playing with matches. I never set anything horribly on fire. I never let it get out of control because that was part of the fun—controlling the fire. I knew so much about how to put out fires I became a fireman when I was sixteen.”

“Wait a minute,” said Sasha. “You’re a conservation officer yet also a pyromaniac? Interesting.”

Rowan chuckled as Perry hastened to assure his girlfriend. “Oh, I wouldn’t call myself a pyromaniac, per se. How could I be? I’m charged with stopping fires, not starting them. I just think there’s a beauty in the luminosity, the sparks, the flames. It’s more a scientific interest.”

Rowan laughed fully now. He was glad that Sasha was studying Perry under the microscope currently, and not him. “Scientific, I see. And that’s how you learned how to make trails of fire up a woman’s chest?”

“In a way, yes. I never knew it was a thing until years later, but I was a teen when I started playing with fire and women’s bodies. I had a girlfriend once who could swallow a fire stick up her pussy.”

Sasha shook off both men’s guiding hands. “Oh, come now! The hair on her vulva would burn before you could get the fire inside her vaginal canal.”

“Well,” Perry said, “she did shave her vulva.”

Rowan reached for Sasha’s forearm again before Perry could get carried away rhapsodizing about the joys of conflagration. “I want to show you something.”

Sasha allowed herself to be led behind a rocky outcropping while Perry stood like an adventurer at the top of the dune. The sun was low in the sky, bathing him in heroic, amber tones. The dog even sat, posing in profile. Rowan realized he admired Perry for his outdoorsy, healthy lifestyle. The only time Rowan spent outdoors was when he had to stake out a target, and that rarely ever took place out in nature. More like sitting in a car by the side of the road inhaling exhaust fumes. “See?” Perry shouted. “There’s that monolith, standing by itself in the middle of the valley. It looks like god is giving everyone the finger.”

The monolith and its brothers did resemble a miniature Monument Valley, the spires rising straight from the flat desert as though they had erupted through the earth’s crust. Rowan tugged Sasha behind a boulder so she could marvel at the rock formation.

“Here.”

Sasha took the tiny fossil. Rowan had purchased it from a Navajo guy selling stuff by the side of the road days earlier, before he had found Sasha again at the swimming hole—before he had impulsively sucked Perry’s dick against the hood of his company SUV. It seemed like years ago in terms of how much had changed emotionally. Now, love welled in his chest as he watched Sasha examine the little cephalopod with a critical eye. “A pyritized ammonite.”

“Exactly. I thought you’d like it because you’re…”

Sasha looked up at him. “Scientific?”

“Yes,” said Rowan, unsure of himself now. He had probably given her the fossil equivalent of a Justin Bieber album.

ADULT EXCERPT

Rowan’s fingers stilled, so close to her blooming pussy he could feel the heat emanating. He actually had not thought to trace Danza’s travels. That should be easy enough to do by looking at the celebrity website, TMZ. He doubted, though, that Danza had any pressing business in Cheyenne, Detroit, and then Salt Lake, unless he was on some kind of shoddy, pathetic comedy tour. Was Danza even a comedian? “Maybe he’s stalking me.” He said that to take Sasha’s mind off his nuzzling near her pussy. Her wrists were bound but not cinched to anything, so she leaned back on her forearms, making no motion to stop Rowan from nibbling at the luscious flesh where her thighs touched each other. His fingers tangled in her ash blonde curls, and he took her labia between thumb and forefinger, the better to rub them together.

“Oh!” Sasha grunted. There was a definite tremor in her voice now. “Is this how you treat all of your clients?”

“None of them,” Rowan murmured, and took a few laps at the protruding clitoris.

“Ah!” Sasha was definitely aroused now. “Rowan!”

He withdrew only because it was what he wanted to do anyway—to smile up at her and continue drawing the stockings up to her waist. “Sorry, miss. Got carried away. Your sweet pussy smells like violets.”

“You’re making my ovaries throb, you bastard. I could easily knee you in the chin, make you bite your tongue off. I saw that happen once. I mean, I didn’t see it happen, but I saw the end result.”

Rowan shuddered, and not with lust now. That was another thing they had in common. They both had spent way too many years viewing things like that—or the end result of things like that. Now he slid the high-heeled pumps onto her feet, proud of the way she sat on one thigh, like the pinup girl he’d pictured her as earlier, by the creek. It was time to thread the ribbon between her two wrists through the headboard slats. He had to untie one wrist to bring them together over her head. Now she was bound as though on train tracks in the movies, and it was safe to reveal another pair of furry cuffs from where he’d dropped them on the floor.

“If you’ve never done this,” Sasha pointed out logically, “what are you doing travelling around with so many pairs of handcuffs?”

He tightened one around her ankle. “Good question. Easy answer. Nathan Horowitz has a lot of them lying around.”

Sasha gasped, but now her other ankle was bound to the bedpost, so she couldn’t even kick him with her patent leather shoes. “Nathan? Oh, dear God! You spoke to him about handcuffs?”

Cinching the strap professionally, Rowan stood, uncaring if his massive erection was bulging in the crotch of his jeans. He was proud when her eyes strayed there. “We mercs have to stick together. But I didn’t think you’d like the government-issue metal cuffs we carry.”

“Oh, so very thoughtful of you to line my wrists and ankles with fur. Ever the gentleman. Now my entire family knows you’re tying me up.”

Rowan quickly found the small scissors that were one attachment of his Swiss army knife. He got down on his knees between her thighs, amused at the shadow of doubt that passed over her face. “Hey. Not only does he know, he said Xandra said to be careful with these cuffs. They’re antique. She brought them all the way from Charleston.”

Sasha gasped again, for an entirely different reason. Pinching a bit of the real silk that covered her naked crotch, Rowan drew it away and cut an oval in the fabric. “What are you doing?” was her natural question.

“You want to be able to come real nice, don’t you?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

The stockings were ruined now, but who cared? Closing up the knife, Rowan shoved it in his pocket and took a nibble of bare flesh near her labia. He made sure to snort hot breath against her quivering clit. Judging by how strongly she had come when just his fingers had diddled her to her second orgasm in ten minutes, he knew she would simply explode once his mouth started working on her.

“Oh! Rowan! You’re so nasty!” Since she couldn’t grab him, she made do with shuddering and shimmying her hips into the air, giving him better access to her pussy. At first he merely nibbled at her flesh. Her clitoris elongated and reddened, emerging from between her labia, standing up eagerly for attention. Rowan slid his shoulders beneath her ass to lift her, and his tongue tip tickled her perineum. Now he was faced with the little shell of her pussy, and he teased her with the tiniest of licks to the outside of her slit.

“Rowan!” she roared. “If I had hands I’d be punching the daylights out of you! Go, man, go! Stop taking your time! You’re driving me absolutely out of my frigging mind!”

Rowan lifted his head and looked down at her. Her shoulders were pressed to the mattress, the bracelets holding them taut between the bed posts. Her eyes bulged from her skull. She looked genuinely angry, so he soothed her. “It’s called S&M for a reason, my dear girl. There’s the sadist part. That would be me. That leaves only you to be the masochist. Part of our play involves pleasurable torture. You love this form of torture, don’t you?”

“Yes!” she roared. “No! I mean, I don’t know!”