Dirty Girl [NOOK Book]

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Kate

Rough yet gentle hands caress my breasts. A hot mouth covers mine with soft kisses and then moves down to tease my nipples with a tender but insistent tongue. He sucks and nips my aching buds until I think I will go crazy with wanting him.

His mouth moves down further, leaving a trail of fire along my navel and hip bones, until he reaches the center of my need. Oh, God! He parts my thighs and the warmth of his breath blowing across my heated flesh is almost too much to bear. He spends an eternity kissing my inner thighs, the stubble of his five o'clock shadow scratches at my tender flesh until I'm moaning and begging him for more.

Teasingly, lightly at first, he kisses the outer lips of my sex, the same tender way he kissed my mouth. He gathers my hips in his large hands and pulls me to him, as though he is dying of thirst and my pelvis were a bowl of clear water. He parts my lips and begins to taste me in earnest.

I gasp in pleasure, gripping my lover's thick black hair, arching my back shamelessly to meet his exploring tongue and ride his mouth as he draws magical figure eights around my swollen clit. He thrusts his tongue into me, penetrating me gently but forcefully, stripping away the last of my dignity as I cry out for more, cry out for him to bring me to the edge and push me over...

I woke abruptly, tangled in the sheets and breathing heavily. The dream still hung over me like a cloud, cluttering the inside of my head with confusing images. Groaning, I rolled onto my right side to glance at the bedside clock. Surely I had managed to get two or three hours sleepthis time?

"Damn!" Not even one hour since the last time I had awoken in the grip of that awful dream. Three a.m. and no sleep in sight. I felt exhausted, but turning over and trying to get back to sleep wasn't an option right now. I'd only wake up again forty-five minutes later thrashing and moaning, clawing the sheets...

A quick trip to the bathroom and a glance in the mirror over the sink showed my blonde curls in a hopeless tangle, and bags under my bloodshot blue eyes Samsonite would be proud of. I needed a hot cup of herbal tea. In the past, I had sometimes been able to break the odd spell the dream had over me in this way--by taking a small break from sleep. I threw on a robe and ran my hands through my hair. I sighed heavily and padded to my kitchen to put on the kettle.

As the tea steeped I considered my predicament. How long had it been since I had had a decent night's rest? Two weeks? Three? It seemed like an eternity since I had slept the night through and it was starting to affect my performance at work.

Phillip Paxton, my partner of six years, had already tentatively asked me once or twice if I was all right, but I'd quickly rebuffed him. Phillip was a topnotch profiler--one of the best in the country--and I didn't want him inside my head. He didn't know about my strange recurring dream and he didn't need to know either.

I shifted uneasily on my hard, wooden dining room chair. The ornately carved dining room set had belonged to my grandmother--a rather puritanical soul. In light of that fact, the chair hardly seemed the correct place to sit with the dream's disturbing images still trapped inside my brain.

Abruptly, I picked up my cup and retired to the cozy armchair in my favorite nook of the living room. I had bought this chair myself and it felt more comfortable than the hard, cold wooden one anyway.

"There, Kate." I curled into a comfortable ball with my feet tucked under me in the overstuffed armchair. "Think as many dirty thoughts as you want to. This is the place for it." Except lately, any place seemed to be the place for it. Because the damn dream wouldn't leave my head.

It's funny really because usually dreams are so fleeting. You wake up, even from a pretty horrible nightmare, thinking, "God ... I'll never forget that!" But by the time you're in the shower with hot water running across your skull, it's melted away to nothing and you can't remember a thing. But not this dream. This dream--or should I say the dream--went clicking through my head twenty-four hours a day until lately I thought I was going to go crazy. I mean, I could never completely get rid of it--the details, the images in my head were like a murmur, an undertone to all my other thoughts. And the thoughts and images weren't the worst either.

No, the worst was definitely the constant state of arousal I was in lately. From the dream? I didn't know. Can someone be bombarded with sexual images and thoughts all day and not become aroused? It didn't seem likely, but for whatever reason I felt like a goddamn cat in heat lately and I had for the last three weeks ever since the dream started. And what's more, it was getting worse.

"What's wrong with me?" I asked myself for the umpteenth million time. "I know it's not physical..."

I knew that because the battery of blood tests and the MRI brain scan I ordered for myself the week before had all come back negative. Being an M.D. does have its advantages, even if my work as a pathologist with the District of Colombia's serial killer division did mean most of my best work was done on corpses.

But all the tests I had ordered had come back completely negative, nothing wrong with my body chemistry, and no brain tumor to explain my strange dreams or my mood of late. The fact remained that I was constantly, continuously aroused and thinking of sex. That, coupled with three weeks of sleep deprivation, was beginning to wear me down. No, scratch that, I was already worn down--almost to the point of a breakdown even. But what could I do? It was just as bad when I was home as it was when I was at work--worse maybe. At least the work distracted my mind.

"This must be what it feels like to be a man. Always horny. My God, how do they stand it?"

I took another sip of tea, concentrating on the hot, soothing liquid running down my throat. And what did men do about it? Hell--what did anyone do about it when they felt this way? Well they ... took care of themselves. Well, let's not put too fine a point on it...

"They masturbate, Katie." I said aloud to the empty room. "Why don't you try it?"

I knew why, though I was thoroughly ashamed to admit even to myself that a childhood memory was keeping me from relieving myself of this tortuous state of arousal. It was so stupid! But it was still so vivid ... Perhaps the most vivid memory in my whole childhood. And pretty horrible to.

I couldn't have been more than four or five at the time. Whatever my age, I guess I wasn't old enough to know better. I remember I was in a small, secluded corner of the playground of our little Catholic school. I think I was sitting behind a bush because it was quite a long time before anyone found me.

I was utterly engaged in the new activity I had discovered only that morning. I had found that I had a spot--right between my legs--that felt so ... different when I touched it. When I touched myself there, I felt all tingly and warm and really quite wonderful. In fact, the spot seem to feel better and better the more I touched it. So it seemed natural to want to touch it as often as possible. Accordingly, I had hidden myself in a corner of the play yard behind a bush so that I could touch my "spot" uninterrupted. I don't know how long I had been at it, skirt hiked up, cotton candy-pink panties down around my ankles, thoroughly absorbed in my new activity when a thin, shrewish voice pierced my concentration.

"Now then, little Miss McKinley, and what are you doing hiding back there?" The bad-tempered voice belonged to the meanest nun at the school--Sister Mary Frances. Sister M. F., as some of the more daring older students called her behind her back, was six feet tall if she was an inch and she weighed in at least two hundred and fifty pounds.

She towered over me, her high, massive bosom heaving with indignation and the tight wimple and high collar pinching her face and neck into a lumpy pale mass. All her features were scrunched together in the center like raisins in an undercooked lump of dough. Somehow I knew I was in trouble.

It came to me suddenly that nothing that felt as good as what I had been doing to myself could possibly be anything less than a mortal sin. Frantically, I tried to hide myself, but it was too late. Her doughy face turned tomato red and her bosom heaved even more frantically than ever when she realized what I had been up too.

"Why you the filthy, dirty little imp!" she exclaimed, reaching out one long, black clad arm and seized me tightly in a pincer-like grip. Her massive, puffy digits wrapped around my small forearm, snatching my offending fingers away from my "special spot" and dragging me upright.

As I am a small woman now, so I was a very small child at that time. Pictures of me back then show a tiny, delicate little girl with a halo of blonde curls and wide, scared blue eyes. A little pixie, my mother used to call me. So, as tiny as I was, when the huge mountain of a nun, Sister Mary Frances reached for me, I was frightened to death.

The black cloth that covered her hair swung down over one shoulder and almost into my face as she bent to pull me up. I remember being terrified of that black cloth--thinking that it was what happened to a woman's hair when she became a nun. I had a strange idea in my four-year-old head that if that black stuff touched me, I would become a nun too. That it was catching, like some weird disease.

I didn't want my pretty blonde hair to turn to dark, ugly stiff stuff that smelled of starch and stale sweat so when Sister Mary Frances yanked me up by the arm (nearly dislocating my humeral head from its socket in the process) I screamed hysterically, "Don't touch me! Don't touch me!"

The huge nun was absolutely unmoved by my impassioned plea. "And why not?" she roared, her thin, nasally voice deepening and becoming strident with anger and disgust. "Haven't you been sitting there touching yourself all this time? Dirty Girl!" she barked, pulling me stumbling and wailing, my panties still down around my ankles out to the middle of the play yard.

"Dirty girl! Don't you know that you'll sink to the deepest pits of hell and burn in eternal fire for ever for doing that? For ... touching yourself?" She spat out the words as if they were the filthiest curse she knew. "Disgusting!" she bugled and then, to my utter horror, at the top of her lungs she began to call ... "Boys and girls ... please gather around here. Come here now, I have something important to discuss with each and every one of you."

Horrified and humiliated beyond words that my peers would see me this way, I made a snatch with my free hand for my panties and tried to pull them up before too many people noticed. But Sister Mary Frances saw me and quickly slapped my hand away.

"Trying to touch yourself some more you filthy creature?" she hissed. "We're going to put a stop to that right now." I gave up at that point and drooped miserably at Sister Mary Frances's side, my arm caught in her iron grasp, my pretty, cotton candy-pink panties puddled around my patent leather shoes, my eyes cast down at the ground.

"This dirty girl," I heard Sister Mary Frances boom above me. "This filthy, dirty girl has been caught touching herself in the forbidden area just now. Do you know what I mean boys and girls?"

Some of the children were no older than me and I saw looks of puzzlement on their faces. But most of the children on the play yard that day--there couldn't have been more than thirty as it was a very small school, but it seemed more like three hundred--were quite a bit older and wiser than me. These older students gave each other knowing looks and sniggers of amused understanding. Their unkind laughter was like a nail in my heart. If authority had indicated the activity I had been engaged in was wrong, the mocking laughter of my peers confirmed it.

I squeeze my eyes shut against the hot and awful sobs building up inside me. My cheeks burned a hot, guilty red. I had never felt so exposed, so horribly naked before.

"Never," intoned Sister Mary Frances, shaking me like a huge Doberman might shake a Pomeranian for emphasis, "Never touch yourselves in your forbidden places. It is wrong and you will burn! Burn for it children! Burn forever in the lake of fire!"

She was nearly screaming at that point and I remember wishing distinctly that the ground would open and swallow me up. I remember thinking that I wouldn't care if the devil himself came and speared me on the end of his wickedly sharp, pointy tail and dragged me down to hell as long as I could be away from that horrible scene in the play yard that instant.

I don't remember much else about that day except for the dreadful humiliation of having to wear a large sign hung around my neck on which Sister Mary Frances had printed in black block letters the words, "Dirty Girl." I was, at last, allowed to pull up my panties, but the derision of my classmates and the hounding of Sister Mary Francis lasted for the rest of that school year and I knew that somewhere in my head the words "Dirty Girl" were echoing still.

"Dirty Girl." I whispered, wiping a stray tear from the corner of my eye. The memory remained fresh--so vivid that it could still draw tears. Is it any wonder I never masturbated again? Not that I hadn't wanted to, especially in adolescence when my hormones were rioting along with everyone else's but somehow ... I just couldn't. That pain and shame came rocketing up from inside me the moment my hand went 'south of the border.' It was stupid, but undeniably true. Sister Mary Frances had successfully eradicated my ability to "touch myself."

I sighed. No, masturbation was definitely out of the question. I'd just have to live with the dream and its maddening side effects for now.

Surely something would break loose at work soon. It had been quiet for while but very soon a new case would hit the desk that would utterly engross all my time and energy. Then the stupid dream and the relentless arousal it brought with it would fade. Surely...

I looked down in my empty cup, the tea was gone. Time to go back to bed and try again to get a little sleep. It was only four a.m.--I could still get two hours of sleep if I went directly to bed. If I was lucky.

His mouth covers mine, eager hands caress my breasts and twist my nipples until I moan, arching my back for more.

"Take me!" I beg him. "Fuck me--you know how I want it, how I need it. Deep and rough ... God, don't stop!" He moves between my legs, his thick cock nudging my inner thigh as I spread myself for him, needing him deep inside me...

I was awake, staring groggily around me, half reaching for the dream lover, though my conscious mind knew he didn't exist. Or did he? Whose mouth? Whose hands were on me in the dream? The answer drifted slowly up from my subconscious but my waking mind pushed it violently away. Surely not. Surely not ... him? I fell back into uneasy sleep and this time managed to make it to the six a.m. alarm.

I felt like hell the next morning and I knew I looked like it too, because those were the first words that popped out of Phillip Paxton, my longtime friend and partner's mouth when I dragged myself into the office, thirty minutes late and yawning miserably.

"Damn, McKinley, you look like hell!" he exclaimed, eyeing my disheveled hair and bloodshot eyes critically. I made a small effort at smoothing my curls, which hadn't wanted to cooperate in the least that morning.

"Thanks so much, Paxton. You really know how to make a girl feel beautiful," I snapped sarcastically, dropping my purse on my desk.

"No, McKinley--I mean it!" He was up from his desk in an instant and grasping my arms with both large hands. His fingers felt warm even through the maroon jacket of my career-woman power suit. He peered anxiously down into my face.

Phillip is six foot two to my rather diminutive five foot four and there used to be a lot of jokes about our height difference around the department when we were first paired up as partners. That was before it became apparent that whatever our differences, we got the job done.

You might not think that a pathologist and a profiler could work effectively together, but it was almost as if we completed each other. As long as I had known him, it was like Phillip had one half of an idea and I had the other. Together we were a very effective team, so effective in fact that we were often loaned out to police departments outside our jurisdiction when they needed a little extra help.

Since we had been working together for so long and neither one of us was married or had family in town, we had also become very close friends. Usually it was wonderful working with someone who knew me so well, we almost seemed to share a happy kind of telepathy. Phillip always happened come back from his break with a cup of tea I desperately needed, or have just the file I was looking for on his desk at any given time. But judging from the concerned look in his hazel eyes, being so close to my partner while I wanted to keep a secret from him was definitely going to work against me now.

"I'm fine," I muttered, trying to pull away from him.

Phillip wouldn't let me go.

"Bullshit," he said flatly. "You've been looking kind of peaked for weeks but today you look really..." he grasped for a word. "Ill. You're not sick are you, McKinley? Please tell me you'd let me know if you were. Are you?"

He shook me a little for emphasis and the action brought back my childhood memory of the night before. Sister Mary Francis shaking me like a small dog...

"I said I'm fine, Paxton." I snapped, finally pulling out of his grasp with undue irritation. "I just haven't been sleeping well lately. Okay?"

"No," he shook his head in that determined way he has when he's decided he's going to get to the bottom of something no matter what. Seeing that look on his face I groaned inwardly. Phillip on the scent of some mystery is like a dog with a bone--he won't let it go.

"Paxton..." I said in warning.

"There's something you're not telling me and it's affecting your health and well-being. As your partner, I'm entitled to know what it is." Phillip ran one large hand through his untidy, thick black hair and his hazel eyes blazed at me, daring me to contradict him.

I groaned again, this time aloud.

"Screw you, Paxton. And just how do you think you're entitled? Can't I have any private life at all?"

"Not if it's making you sick," he shot back. "Damn it, McKinley, sometimes you're so damn stubborn I just want to turn you over my knee..."

My eyes widened at his words. "What did you say?" In all our years as partners, Phillip had never spoken like that to me before. Of course, I had never tried to hide something as damaging as the dream I was having from him either. Clearly my secretive ways were upsetting to him.

"Nothing, forget I said it." Phillip's voice suddenly turned soft and coaxing, although he was rubbing his right palm against the side of his pants leg as though it were itching fiercely.

"Come on, McKinley, you know you'll tell me sooner or later. You know I always wear you down. So why don't you just tell me now and spare us both the suspense?" He flashed that charming, crooked grin of his.

I frowned stubbornly in reply. "It's just what I said," I told him carefully. I knew I had to give him a little something to get him off my back. Phillip can be relentless--utterly relentless. "I haven't been sleeping well lately."

"Because?" he prompted.

"Because..." I sank wearily into my cushy office chair. "Because ... because I keep having this ... strange, recurring dream."

"Is it like a nightmare? God knows we see enough horrible shit to give anyone nightmares, McKinley." Phillip knelt in an attitude of concern before my chair and took my hands in his. "Can you remember the details? Maybe I can help you work it out..."

I pulled my hands away quickly and sat up straighter, putting some distance between us. Phillip had advanced degrees in both criminal and clinical psychology. The last thing I needed was to have him inside my head. After all, I wasn't some serial killer to be profiled, I was his partner. And that was how things had to stay.

"No, Paxton. I won't tell you the details. Only that ... it's disturbing."

My pulse pounded in my ears and I could feel myself flush with his nearness. His spicy, masculine scent, part aftershave and part just Phillip filled my senses. He was so close I could feel his body heat radiating against my skin. His deep, hazel eyes were thoughtful--concerned.

Dream images chased through my brain and I close my eyes, struggling with the tension coursing through my body. Damn him--couldn't he see that his proximity to me was making my condition that much worse? Apparently not.

Phillip leaned even closer and captured one of my hands again. I opened my eyes to see him comparing my small hand to his much larger one. Palm to palm, my fingertips didn't even reached the first joint of his long, strong fingers. The touch sent warm fire up my arm.

"I notice you say won't, not can't," Phillip said softly, seeming to concentrate on our hands. He raised his eyes to meet mine. "Why not? What is so terrible that you can't tell your partner about it? We've been through a lot together. Are you gonna let a dream come between us now? Please Kate, I've been patient but I can't be patient anymore. I'm worried about you. I can see that you're hurting--maybe even sick. Please tell me the details of your dream ... if that's what's really hurting you. It might help to talk about it."

I knew he was sincere; the way he slipped and used my first name instead of my last told me that. But I just couldn't do what he was asking.

Mutely, I shook my head. 'No way, Phillip,' I thought. 'This is too damn personal.' Aloud I said, "It's personal, Paxton. Give it up."

I spoke in my best patient-confidentiality tone of voice. Only this time, the patient I was trying to protect was myself.

He searched my eyes for answers.

I made my face as blank as possible and tried to ignore the feelings rushing through me as he slowly and gently massaged my small hand with his large one. I tried not to think of the dream, or that time in the hallway of his apartment complex, not so many months ago when it looked like we were going to let the barriers of professionalism fall and do something reckless--something I had rigorously avoided for six years. If only my phone hadn't picked just that time to ring...

If only ... if only ... My 'ifs' were starting to piss me off. If only this stupid dream would leave me alone. If only I could sleep at night without dreaming about ... that. I didn't want to name my sexual frustration, even to myself, in front of Phillip.

Phillip was still staring into my face so searchingly that I felt compelled to drop my eyes. I just couldn't meet his intense hazel gaze any longer. Damn him, I was coming apart at the seams, but he was kneeling in front of me, calmly looking at me as though he could read my mind. "Is it me? I mean, am I in it?" he asked me in a low, searching tone.

"No! God, no!" I jumped up, pulling my hand from his. In my haste, I overturned my office chair and nearly tripped over it trying to get away from him. He remained kneeling on one knee, like a suitor who has been rejected. He stared up at my furiously blushing face, surprise evident on his sharp features.

"Damn, what did I say? Would it be so bad to have a little dream about me once in awhile?" He was trying to turn the whole thing into a joke, but obviously my violent reaction had startled him--perhaps hurt him.

"No, Paxton. God!" I exploded. "Look--all right--if I tell you a little, do you promise to leave me alone and let us get on with work?"

Phillip's eyes narrowed. "Deal--for now, anyway. Spill it, McKinley."

"Fine. Well, the truth is..." I busied myself righting my overturned chair and straightening my rumpled suit jacket so I wouldn't have to see him as I spoke. "The truth is that for about three weeks I've been having the same dream, more than once a night and it's so disturbing that it's making it difficult, if not impossible, for me to get any sleep."

"And?" he prompted. "The dream's contents...?"

"The dream's contents are ... sexual in nature." I used my best 'we are discussing medical matters now' voice. Very proper and professional. There was dead silence for an instant and then Phillip gave a short, incredulous laugh.

"Damn, McKinley, are you trying to tell me that you've been kept up for the last three weeks running by a ... by a wet dream?" He laughed again.

"Stop it!" I snapped. "It's not like that. Does it begin to become obvious why I didn't want to discuss this with you in the first place? Now you've had your fun, can we please get back to work?"

Phillip was serious again in an instant. "I'm sorry," he said contritely. "I didn't mean to make fun of what's obviously a real problem for you. Forgive me?" He looked at me appealingly with those hazel-brown eyes, the lost puppy dog look he knew I couldn't resist.

"All right," I muttered. "But can we please, please just drop it now?"

"Okay." He paused. "For now..."

We both sat down to work, but assistant director Murtaugh walked in and dropped a file on Phillip's desk. Our boss looks like exactly what he is--ex-military. From his gray crew cut to his spit and polish shoes that you can see your reflection in, he's as tightly wound as they come.

"Got a hot one for you two," he announced abruptly. "Some sick bastard's set up shop in Biloxi."

"Biloxi?" Phillip seemed startled.

"Yes, Paxton, that's what I said. Several girls have been drugged, sexually assaulted and dumped to drown, probably off one of the riverboats down there. We think there may be two of the bastards working together."

"Riverboats?" It was my turn to be startled.

"Yes, McKinley. Riverboats. They use them for gambling. Regular little mini Las Vegases down there. They've got shows, gambling, the works. All right? Good. The locals have requested our help so I want you two packed and on the road by this afternoon. It's not quite far enough to fly you so you'll have to drive there. New regulations. Sorry."

"Oh, that's all right, sir," Phillip replied easily. "We don't mind driving." He grinned at me. He knew how much I hated car trips. I scowled back.

"Fine. Just keep receipts as usual and I'll expect regular reports once you get there." Murtaugh turned on his heel and as abruptly as he had entered, he left.

"Whew, well--guess we'd better get packing." Misinterpreting the look on my face Phillip said, "Oh, come on, McKinley, it won't be so bad. I'll drive all the way and maybe you can catch up on some sleep."

And that was exactly what I was afraid of.