Deadly Suspicious-The Outcasts 3

By Amarinda Jones

Eventually they found a small motel right under the airport flight path. Denby was too tried to care about that. “I could sleep on a barbed wire fence,” she muttered as she flopped onto the double bed in the room they had taken for the night.
“I wish you’d told me. It would’ve been cheaper to sleep on barbed wire,” Sirius quipped as he dropped the car keys down on a bench.
Money. He had it. She didn’t. Denby felt guilty. She had been the one who wanted to go. “I should pay.” Problem was, she wasn’t sure how.
“It’s okay, Denby,” he assured her as he sat down on the bed beside her.
“I pay my way.”
“As I do I. Added to that, I chose to come.” He lay back on the bedspread. “Arrrggghh, that feels good.”
She sat up. Him lying beside her was making Denby feel stuff she didn’t want to feel. Memories of a hard, warm body tight against hers made tense up. Sex right now would be totally inconvenient. Great, but awkward, with her irrational need to still feel pissed off at him. It was hard to keep that up when he was being so nice. “Well, I’ll buy dinner.” She reached for her duffle bag and scrabbled through her meager belongings to find her purse. “Or not.” She was broke but for three dollars, ten cents, a busted packet of mints and some ants who had managed to find their way in for the mints.
“Denby,” Sirius murmured to her.
“What?” She turned to see his eyes closed. He had to be knackered after driving for so long.
“While I’ve always loved your independence it’s okay for either a man or a woman to depend on the other. It doesn’t mean one is less than the other.”
Of course he was right. “I’m just used to looking after myself.” She dropped the bag on the floor. Flee while you have the chance, ants. Everything deserved to be free.
“I know and I don’t expect anything from you.”
“Oh.” She felt weirdly disappointed that he wasn’t so overcome by lust he wouldn’t want to jump her bones then and there. Not that he has to. It’s not like I want sex or anything.
Sirius opened his eyes and smiled. “No, your virtue is safe.”
“Right.” Disappointment slammed into her. Okay, maybe I do want sex. Spending so much time with him in the car had made her start to remember stuff she thought she had squashed down.
“Disappointed?” He tilted his head and looked at her with interest.
“No. Yeah. I don’t know.” He was a bastard. She hated him. He did wrong by her. Yet I want him. How confusing is that?
“Need sex?”
“It’s just being with you again—”
“Feels right?”
“Sorta. Anyway forget it.” There was no way she was going to ask for sex.
“Nope, I can’t now.” Sirius kept his gaze locked on her eyes. “Sex is handy to have with someone you already know as there are no ties or expectations.”
“I suppose.” Handy? Jeez, hardly romantic.
“And you could still consider me a bastard afterwards.” He grinned at her.
Lordy, he’s lovely when he smiles. “I was angry when I said that.”
“I know.”
Denby blew out a breath and contemplated her options. It was just sex. They had done it before. It’d be no big deal if they did it again. Right? “So, I suppose we could—”
“Yeah, we could.”
“You don’t sound that excited.” Maybe this is a bad idea. Maybe I’ll just use my fingers and memory later in the shower.
“Are you kidding me?” Sirius picked up her hand and placed it on his crotch. “I’ve had a hard on since the millisecond I saw you.”
“Wow!” He was hard. And all for me. It’d be a shame to waste it. Denby licked her lips. She couldn’t believe how horny she was. But this was Sirius and he was hard. It was a no brains required situation. “No strings attached right?” Her fingers hovered above the metal tag of his zipper.
“Right.”
“And later we’ll act like nothing happened.”
“If you say so, darling.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scarlet Harlot Publishing
• Release date: Apr 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301928477

Amarinda Jones

Amarinda Jones believes anything is possible and sometimes just asking for the impossible will surprise someone enough that they will give it to you. Writing is like that. Put it out there and wait for a response. There is always the possibility you may fall on your arse, but after all, that's what cellulite is for. Amarinda believes in taking chances, speaking her mind and aging disgracefully. Twenty years from now she plans on being the neighborhood witch that all the kids are scared of. But then, everyone has to have a hobby.

Book preview

Deadly Serious

By Amarinda Jones

Published by Amarinda Jones at Smashwords

Copyright© 2013 Amarinda Jones

Smashwords Edition

Deadly Suspicious

The Outcasts Series

Amarinda Jones

Chapter One

February 2012

I agree. Women must be jailed for abortion. Sirius Tate’s voice was strong and full of determination. The dark gray suited men of the Jacobson Committee nodded and murmured their approval. Women cannot dictate to men whether they will or won’t have a child, nor can they abort a fetus because it doesn’t suit them to have a baby. A man has rights.

Well said.

That must be put into the ruling draft.

Agreed. For a woman to have a baby is as important as it is for her to marry.

They all nodded. "That is a woman’s job after all."

Sirius looked around the boardroom table at the bland faces. They all appeared identical to him. Pale, thin lipped and with a fanatical gleam in their eyes. That they disliked women was a given. That’s what made them good, servile lackeys of the Committee. Knowing he was one of them sometimes surprised him. He only disliked one woman. Intensely. She was the reason behind the amendment to the draft he’d proposed. No woman should ever take away a man’s right to his child.

The Jacobson Committee, which had its origins in Australia, but soon became a global entity, was in the middle of drafting a law designed to change the world. They had started off as a small group of men who expounded their theories on old fashioned values and a woman’s place being in the home. To get their message out to the masses, they schmoozed with pop stars and politicians and lobbied anyone in power to listen to them. Rock concerts, film productions, sporting events and men’s health programs were funded to win the hearts and minds of the people. The best looking members of the Committee spoke to women’s homemaker groups, making the women feel special, letting them know the homemaker projects they were doing were important to the happiness of the family home. They wined and dined female politicians, having sex with them when necessary, adoring them and making them feel what it was like to be looked after by a man and why it was a feeling every woman should have instead of worrying about things that were a man’s job. They were smooth, charming and influential. One of their biggest coups was to pay the big breasted, no brained Miller sisters, Milly, Molly, Mandy and their mother Mattie, to influence women to be like them and follow not only their diets, fashion lines and hair styles but also their beliefs that anything the Jacobson Committee wanted was good.

What the committee wanted was so alien to the world, it took the pop stars, divas and the politicians who could be bought off with sex, drugs and fame, to promote it. The war on women started because the vain and the vacuous had the following of the uneducated, the needy and the gullible. When pronouncements like ‘all women past the age of twenty-one must be married to a male or in a monogamous, sexual relationship with another female constituting a partnership that has been sanctioned by the Jacobson Committee’ were made, Milly Miller and her sisters jumped on the bandwagon with their vacuous thoughts on what else was a woman for but to be adored by a man and ‘think of the power, ladies, in having a man who adores only you.’

Senator Jane Roenfeld was completely on board with the committee’s beliefs that all women must have at least one child unless they could prove they were medically unfit to conceive. She was quoted as saying, It seems reasonable to me and not too much to ask. But then her campaign for re-election was being topped up by the shadowy committee and she would say whatever they wanted. If a woman is found to be pregnant and single and refusing to marry? the senator preached on the campaign trail. Well that’s unfair of her to make a man suffer. Exposing her to jail time and having the child taken from her is reasonable also. Why penalize the man? Women’s groups were outraged. The committee slammed them down by having superstar, sex symbol Jed Jedson, whose drug habit they were funding, announce that he only found ‘married women sexy.’ Those women hungry for a man and romance fell on board with this idea. When he told the adoring masses that the women’s groups who opposed the benefits of the new plan were militant, khaki wearing, lesbian throwbacks from the 1970s, many agreed with him.

The war against women was fought and won using celebrities to woo adoring fans into believing the committee only wanted the best for women. What woman wouldn’t want romance, love, kids, and a stable home with a loving husband?

* * * * *

Sirius Tate wasn’t surprised the men of the committee instantly agreed with him. They hated woman. They wanted them subdued and under control. At that moment, Sirius knew only one thing. He was still angry. Very, very angry. It was a cancer that had begun to eat away at him three months ago when Penny, his lover of the time, announced she had aborted their child ‘because I’m not in the right place in my life to have a baby.’ Sirius had been horrified. He didn’t have a clue she was pregnant and that she had so coldly announced it was done and a baby didn’t suit her? It had made him want to throttle her. The fact she hadn’t considered his rights as a father, nor had she even considered he needed to be brought into the discussion, made him mad. Real mad. So mad that he joined the then new men’s group, the Jacobson Committee, to try and change the laws about abortion and the rights of fathers. What the other men’s personal agendas were didn’t concern him. He knew what he was fighting for.

However, once a part of the Committee, they urged Sirius on to feel anger towards all women. The Committee wanted that to happen. Angry men were strong men and useful to their cause. Added to that, at thirty-five, Sirius Tate was a poster boy for their cause. He was handsome, commanding, dark haired, tall and well-built. They recognized he had an authority that made other men listen and women want to do whatever he told them. The Committee needed men like Tate. He became a rising star and even the founder of the Jacobson Committee, who few had seen and many speculated on, was impressed with Tate.

"Keep him angry."

"That won’t be hard, we know which buttons to push."

"Good. That’s why I pay you."

"Sir, I hear your daughter is in town."

"You hear correct."

"Can we do anything to assist?"

"Keep an eye on her. Denby had this foolish notion she wants to change the world by militant over reaction."

"Hasn’t she learned the world has changed?"

"Her mother was a bitch. She had strange ideas too. Australian women are like that. Too independent for their own good."

"Those females are going to be the hardest to crush."

"Yes,