Page 13 of The Deeper Game (The Kinky Bank Robbers #3)

Chapter Eight

Whatever Zeus had done to speed up the fingerprint processing had worked, because an hour later, the four of us were speeding down a highway toward Tivendale Heights, a suburb an hour northeast of LA, after a quick stop to change out of our clubbing clothes and get more weaponry.

The lights blurred by and the rain streaked sideways across the windows in spite of the wipers working double time.

They’d gotten a hit on one of the sets of fingerprints—a guy named Ingvey. He had a sexual assault arrest record.

Perfect, Zeus had said.

That was one way to look at it, I guess.

Odin sat in the front next to Zeus, as usual. He was noodling around on his smartphone, digging into Ingvey’s history.

“It’s all fucking-g foot stuff with this Ingvey,” Odin said.

I had my head on Thor’s shoulder in the back, legs curled sideways.

Thor’s face was lit blue by the screen of his iPad.

He was emailing back and forth with Mexico, which was never a good sign.

I could feel his tension building. I sat up and tucked his hair behind his ear.

Thor hadn’t shaved for a while, and the blond scruff on his face made him more exotic in a kind of Scandinavian way, like you could imagine him traipsing through the moonlit snow in badass fur boots.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Lupe, my risky breech, is stressing,” Thor said.

“You can’t leave,” Odin barked from the front.

“I won’t. She has at least three weeks. Unless she goes early. But she won’t,” he added quickly.

Silence in the SUV. It would be bad to leave before the Prime, but in spite of what Odin had said, we all knew Thor needed to do this.

Thor tended to unravel when he wasn’t able to be his doctor self.

Also, we all felt a special bond with Lupe due to her fugitive status. She was like our adopted sister.

“This makes zero fucking-g sense,” Odin bit out. “Ingvey’s a foot fetishist. What self-respecting foot fetishist would target Isis?”

“ Excuse me?” I protested.

“Not that you don’t have attractive feet, Isis, but you’re not what I’d imagine as the object of a foot fetishist.”

“What are you saying?”

Odin twisted around in the front seat to give me one of his smoldering looks.

“That you dishonor our gang cloud tattoo with your chipped pink toenail polish.” He turned back to the screen.

“Stalking and threatening. It doesn’t feel like the work of a foot fetishist. The feather, the note.

The feet, the way such a man operates…” He trailed off, consumed with these psychological variables.

“And when you look at what Ingvey has posted on boards,” he added.

“You know a lot about foot fetishists?” I asked.

“I know a lot about every kind of person,” Odin said simply.

“It’s disturbing,” Thor said, not looking up from his tablet. Thor was only half with us. That patient was worrying him.

“Isis has beautiful feet,” Zeus said. “And I am going to tear off his balls for threatening her.”

“You need to calm yourself down,” Odin said.

I caught Zeus’s eyes in the mirror, so full of anguish and rage and energy like a wild god.

He looked intense and alone, strapped into the driver’s seat, face pulsing light and dark from the headlights of passing cars, muscular hands dwarfing the steering wheel.

I felt like if he wanted to, he could just rip apart the whole vehicle.

I recalled the steely feel of his cock at the restaurant. I wondered if he was still hard.

“We don’t know that it’s him,” Odin added. “We’ll figure it out. They take people off investigations they’re too close to for a reason, Zeus. We do it right.”

“We will do it right.” Zeus’s chest rose and fell with force. “Whoever did this will not survive the heat of my goddamn fire.” He was getting himself more and more agitated. “I will rain hell on anybody who even looks at her wrong.”

“Odin has dibs on pulling out his guts like fishing rope, though,” I said.

Odin grinned.

Zeus frowned.

“I have total faith in you,” I said softly.

Zeus growled.

“When we enter his home, we’ll figure it out. We’ll inspect his shit, and we’ll know,” Odin said.

Which seemed like the last thing Zeus was capable of at the moment, on account of his fugue state of protectiveness.

I could see that Odin, for one, didn’t like it.

I suddenly wished very much that we weren’t speeding down a wet, rainy highway with me strapped into the backseat and Zeus strapped into the driver’s seat.

I wanted to feel him, to feel his fire, and to soothe him.

I leaned forward and rubbed his shoulder.

Zeus shot a glance at me in the rearview mirror, gaze hooded, like he felt my desire. He gusted out a breath. “…just don’t want you scared.”

Odin looked at Zeus, then back at me. “Isis. Come up here,” he said. “You need to sit in the middle of us.”

“We’re on the highway,” I said.

Odin tilted his head and gave me an eagle-eye look.

“Never mind,” Zeus said. “I’m driving.”

Odin eyed me again. “Zeus needs to feel you and know that you are okay.”

Zeus grunted in protest. “I’m driving.”

“She’s going to sit next to you, not suck your cock,” Odin said.

I specifically didn’t look over at Thor, who was a big fan of orgasms while driving. Or at least he had been, when he was on his recklessness jag before he got the clinic job.

“You’d want that, right?” Odin asked Zeus. “You want her up here?”

Zeus seethed out the windshield, like he could see Ingvey’s face on the road in front of us. “Yeah,” he grated.

Odin and I locked gazes. He didn’t need to say anything more. Odin wanted me to help calm down Zeus. He thought that my touch would calm him. Like Zeus was this large and highly distressed beast, which I supposed he was.

I unbuckled my seatbelt and crawled up between them. Zeus hissed out a sigh of relief as I settled in next to him and pressed flush to him. He grabbed the back of my hair and pulled me closer. I wrapped my arms around his meaty chest as Odin buckled me in.

Zeus started talking about how they were going to keep me safe, and I trusted him on that. His fury hadn’t kept him from brilliantly assessing every last clue inside Bolo’s trashed rooms.

Odin leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, “Touch his skin. You need to touch his skin.”

“What are you saying to her? Because I’m talking,” Zeus barked.

“Sorry.” Odin sat back and directed his attention out the passenger-side window.

I snaked my hand under Zeus’s shirt and touched his firm, lightly furred belly, pressing my hand into his warm skin.

“Baby,” Zeus breathed into my hair. His breathing seemed to calm and even out, just from my touch.

Odin put a hand on my leg, squeezed once. It was so weirdly observant of Odin to know that would happen.

I wedged my other hand a little ways in between the seat and Zeus’s back. He kissed my head and moved his non-driving hand to my neck. “You feel so good,” he breathed, sliding his hand down over my shoulder, cupping it. “You feel so good, and you smell so good,” he said.

“Thank you.” I snuggled into him, keeping my hand splayed over his firm belly, feeling the hard ridges of his muscles and the light, springy hairs.

We drove on into the night toward Ingvey in Tivendale Heights. Would he be our guy? Odin apparently had his doubts.

The dark back seat glowed with the soft light from Thor’s iPad, the front with passing headlights, all to the soft chant of wipers sloshing back and forth and tires on wet road.

There in the dark I moved my palm in a circle over the contours of Zeus’s belly.

I could tell where the line of hairs that led to his cock started, but I didn’t follow that treasure trail.

This wasn’t that kind of touching. I was just giving him reassurance.

Skin-to-skin contact. They’ve done studies where skin-to-skin contact calms blood pressure, anger, all the freak-out markers; Thor would have the clinical term for it.

Anyway, that’s what I was concentrating on. I could tell I was helping him.

Like I was the Zeus whisperer.

Odin and Zeus didn’t have to know how turned on I was—this was supposed to be a comforting thing, not a sexual thing.

But every time my fingers strayed over that line of hair, all I wanted to do was press my hand down into Zeus’s pants and take his giant, hard cock in my hand and my mouth and squeeze and lick and suck it.

I imagined him grabbing my hair and pushing my head down farther onto him the way I liked, forcing me to take him deeper.

Thrusting and fucking my hand and mouth.

I wanted to hear him go uh-uh-uh and lose all sense of everything.

I wanted to feel all that fucking energy inside him build up and unspool.

The best would be if I could get my hands around his ass and squeeze his ass cheeks. That sometimes drove him wild.

Then I changed the thought—I’d squeeze his ass cheek with one hand, while I squeezed the root of his cock with the other. I loved how rigid it would get when I did that, like pure steel. Sucking Zeus’s cock was like riding a tidal wave, but way hotter. And it ended better.

“Ice,” Zeus grated, startling me.

“What?” I came to my senses and realized I was squeezing a handful of skin, practically taking a chunk out of his abs. “Oh, sorry.”

“Fuck,” he whispered, voice husky. “Fuck. It felt good.” He looked down at me with a wild light in his eyes.

“Let’s hit the next rest stop,” Odin said.

The next thing I knew, the blinker was on.

Zeus moved his hand to my head again and squeezed my hair. “Ice,” he panted.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Where’re we going?” Thor asked.

“Rest stop,” Zeus said, barreling down the exit ramp.

“The idea is to fucking-g slow down on the exit,” Odin complained as Zeus sped toward the lonely building. Zeus slowed just before he squealed into a parking place.

The rest stop was dark and nearly deserted; only a couple of other cars were there. Not surprising considering it was 3:12 a.m.

Picnic tables were clustered off to the side under a towering light that illuminated the raindrops, though it was raining so hard, they weren’t drops at all—more like fat, bright dashes of water, streaking through the slim cones of light and down into the darkness.

Beyond the picnic area lay a dim expanse—grass with the occasional tree—and beyond that, more trees.

“We’ll be right back.” Zeus unbuckled his seatbelt and then mine. He opened the door and got out. The rain pounded on his head and back.

“It’s storming out there,” I said as the rain splashed in on his empty seat.

He bent back into the car, panting, short brown hair dripping onto his forehead. “Come with me, Ice.” He leaned in farther and kissed me roughly.

I laughed and grabbed his soaking wet shoulders. The rain was cold, but Zeus was warm, hot, and hard.

This stalker had brought out something new in Zeus—a weird, wild intensity.

I approved.