The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor by Lucy Taylor Read Free Book Online Page B

cries and grunts and moans converging in a strange, atonal symphony. He felt absent from his own skin, detached from the eager pulsings that stirred his cock to stiffness. He stood up, retrieved his clothing from the pile beside the door, went outside to the men’s room in the corridor and got dressed. As he was coming out, a slender woman with a lustrous tangle of frosted blonde hair was hurrying along the corridor. She wore a suede skirt, high heels, a black leather vest over a white turtleneck.
    Nicholas considered making some minor witticism about etiquette at an orgy (don’t worry, late-comers are well thought of), but then thought better of it. As she breezed past, she half-turned toward him. He glimpsed her face.
    “Wait!”
    She kept going.
    “Elise!”
    He could see she tried to pretend the name meant nothing, but there was a slight cringe when he said it, as though he’d lobbed a small stone.
    “Wait, I know it’s you!”
    He grabbed her arm, spun her around. “Why are you running from me? What are you afraid of?”
    “Let me go!”
    “You
knew
what you were doing to me,” he said. “When I thought back on it, the last thing you said was that you were giving me something, too. You
knew
you were sick. You did it to me on purpose.”
    She pulled away, anger in the twisting of her crimson-lined lips, fear in the overbright sheen of her eyes. “Let go of me!”
    “Not until you tell me why you wanted to infect me. You didn’t even know me. Why?”
    She turned away, shoulders slumping in defeat. “I know you won’t believe this, but I never in my life purposely set out to hurt somebody like I did you. I’ve thought about you so much, wondering what happened to you and to your wife. I am truly sorry.”
    “I don’t give a damn about your being sorry. Answer the fucking question.
Why
?”
    Sooty tears spread from the corners of her heavily mas-cara’d eyes and tracked down her cheeks. “I needed money. For doctors’ bills, all kinds of things. I needed money, and I had to get it any way I could.”
    “You mean, somebody paid you to have sex with me, knowing you were infected?”
    She nodded.
    “Who?”
    But the question was already answered in his mind even before she said it for him: “Sonny.”
    “Jesus God, that vicious bastard.”
    “He’s obsessed with getting revenge on you. Almost as much as he does –” she nodded toward the door behind which Myriam performed “– her.”
    “But that doesn’t make sense.”
    “He says you rolled on him years back. Set it up so you walked after only a couple years, and he got sentenced to twelve.”
    “That’s not how it went.”
    “Maybe not, but he thinks it did. That makes it true.”
    “So he wanted me dead. Then why did he tell me about Myriam? She saved my life.”
    “Myriam cured Sonny, too, but she couldn’t cure him of all the hate he carries around inside him. She also fucked with his mind. Maybe he thought she’d fuck you up, too, and that would be worse than whatever else he could do to you.” She looked toward the door and fidgeted with the buttons of her vest. “I need to get in there.”
    “Go on.”
    “I’m sorry, Nicholas. Can you forgive me?”
    He started to answer with something along the lines of,
no way, you fucking little bitch
. Instead he said, “Are you cured, now?”
    She shrugged. “So far, so good. It would appear so.”
    “Good. I’m glad for you.”
    “About Sonny – I shouldn’t have told you he hired me. You aren’t going to do anything, are you?”
    “Only what I wish I’d done a long time ago – blow the fucking scumbag’s brains out his asshole.”
    “I know it was you who sent me this. I want to know why.”
    Sonny Valdez took the photo Beth handed him and stared at it as though seeing it for the first time. “I thought you’d be interested in a side of your husband’s past I’m betting he never told you about.”
    “He worked for you?”
    “Worked for me. Serviced me,