Chastity Flame (8 page)

Monitor tossed the folder on the desk
and plopped down in her battered chair with a sigh. "That's rather
the point, my dear. We've taken a beating in recent years as you
well know and attitudes have affected morale. We don't need
dissention from within. Taking the proper attitude to your work is
part of the job."

"Has my work suffered at all because
of my attitude?" Chastity said, folding her arms.

Monitor looked at her and sighed
again. "Yes, I think it has."

Chastity tried not to show that she
was stung. "It was not my fault that this little geek slipped the
noose. He twigged to our tech. I just told Kevin."

"I am well aware of that," Monitor
said. "But other things recently have suggested that your mind is
not on your work. That can cost us. It can also cost you. Do you
want to die of distraction?"

"I'm not going to die," Chastity said,
waving away the thought with a hand.

"That's the most dangerous mistake of
all. You know what the odds are in this line of work. Don't
increase them."

"I'm careful."

"But distracted." Monitor paused,
leaning back in her chair. "Do you need some time off?"

"What would I do?"

"Take a vacation? It's been done.
People do it all the time in fact. You haven't taken any time off
in the last eighteen months."

Chastity felt her face flush. "You've
been checking up on me."

"It's my job. I have a company to
run."

Chastity chuckled but there was no
humour in it. "Company. Half the time you talk about this place as
if it were any other job, and the rest of the time you run us
ragged."

"Things have to run efficiently if we
are to maintain security. People have to be dependable, as
dependable as machinery. There's no room for careless errors—like
killing someone before we know all he knows."

"He didn't know what he'd gotten
himself involved in, I'm sure of it."

"But you're still guessing," Monitor
shook her head. "We can't afford to guess. We have to know as much
as we can."

"Understood," Chastity said, her
posture as stiff as her words. "What now?"

"You're to go to a cocktail party. We
need you to observe a certain Dylan Foyle-Hatchard. We suspect he
might be bankrolling some of the hacking efforts. See if you can
get into his good graces."

"So, wear a low-cut gown."

"Whatever means necessary," Monitor
said with a flat tone. "Just try not to kill him unless absolutely
necessary." But she did manage a smile of a sort as she said it, so
Chastity tried not to take the remark to heart as she walked back
down the hall.

Back out on the streets of Soho, she
felt irritation return. Just because a couple of things hadn't
worked out quite right didn't mean she was skiving off. It
happened. Monitor was just a little too thin-skinned because of the
climate lately. Hardly her fault that things had blown that way,
but there it was.

Oh, stop whinging, Chastity scolded
herself. She had to get her mind off this grind and focus. As if
out of nowhere, the image of Damien popped into her head. She
looked around and, near Leicester Square, finally found a phone
booth—they were getting as rare as hen's teeth these days.
Everybody had a mobile, although no one ever seemed to use them for
anything but calling to say they were going to be late. What a
waste of technology.

She squeezed into the booth that was
plastered from floor to ceiling with postcards for prozzies, none
of whom were likely to look anything like the panting women on the
cards. Swiping her official credit card, she punched in Damien's
number (of course, she had memorized it; did she even hesitate,
pretending she hadn't?) and then wondered what she was going to say
if he answered.

Before she could think better of the
plan, he picked up and she thrilled to the warm sound of that rich
voice saying, "Hello."

"Hello, Damien."

"Helen? Helen Sinclair! Wonderful to
hear from you."

Chastity had forgotten that she had
given him that name and nearly giggled. She really had to stop
using movies for her pseudonyms. Someone was bound to catch on
sooner or later. "I was just thinking about you and decided to give
you a call. I have the afternoon free and I thought
perhaps—"

"Come now," he demanded, his hunger
for her evident in his teasing words. "I'll be waiting."

Grinning, she hung up the phone and
started walking toward his flat. As she walked along, she cast her
mind back to the first evening with him. Wonderful, wonderful—he
had been enthusiastic, entertaining and innovative. "Is there
anything you won't do?" he asked her curiously at one point when he
had her braced up against the head of the bed.

"Not so far," she had laughed. Yet
there was a limit and Chastity knew what that limit had to be: the
job. All right, she had to admit that her mind had not been
entirely on the job lately. What had happened? She caught her
reflection in a bookstore window as she crossed the street.
Doubtless anyone else would see a successful young woman, well
dressed and nicely groomed, her body disciplined if not gym-honed.
She was well aware that genetics had treated her well, giving her a
body whose ripeness suggested sex in almost anyone's eyes.
Nonetheless, it was not as if she could imagine any other line of
work. She had been born to it, like a tailor to the
needle.

Chastity thought again of her parents,
seeing them again through her childhood eyes. Bubbling to the
surface of her memories was a picture of the two of them framed in
the big window by the afternoon sun in the small chalet they had
taken in Lausanne, when her mother worked for the university. Or so
Chastity had been told at the time. Monitor told her later that she
had been hunting rumors of espionage on campus while her father
explored the avant-garde circles, often with their daughter in tow.
How she had loved the swirl of art, theater and writing that seemed
to echo from every café and gallery. The natural beauties of the
region were splendid and seemed to inspire a heightened communion
with the muse. What a disappointment it had been when she was
uprooted from Lausanne to move to the United States, to a vast
sprawling Midwestern town where the geography proved as undramatic
as Switzerland's had been breathtaking.

But she never had any say in the
peregrinations of the family. Her parents always tried to smooth
the transitions, but from an early age, they had made it clear to
her that their work required mobility. Maybe that was why she
adored her little flat on Tavistock Square. She often left it for
months at a time, but it was always waiting for her return,
familiar and welcoming, from the little gnome to the noisy
radiators. It was a pity she couldn't get a pet, though.

She could get some art, however,
Chastity thought as she passed the art store, stopping dead for a
moment to regard the dazzling array of books on everything from
Banksy to Wiertz. The joy of that simple realization struck her
with a nearly audible resonance. Why had she cut herself off from
the glories of art? As a child, Chastity had always been surrounded
by amazing images and beautiful music. Her parents had dragged her
to all manner of performances from bizarre performance pieces to
Shakespearean classics. There was a performance of Marlowe's Doctor
Faustus that could still provoke shivers simply by conjuring the
memory. Where had that been? Denmark? No, she remembered the words
being in English (although she knew, too, how much memory could
play tricks).

I'll ask Damien to go to the theatre
with me, Chastity decided, and ask his advice on art to purchase.
Might as well use that expertise, she thought, quickening her
pace.

Chapter
Six

He must have been waiting behind the
door, because Damien had it open before Chastity had a chance to
knock. "Hello!"

"Come in, come in!" Damian reached to
take her hand, drawing her inside and locking the door behind her.
At once he swept her into a kiss that stole her breath away. His
hands moved from the sides of her face to plunge into her hair,
massaging her scalp as his tongue investigated her mouth, as if to
see if he still remembered every contour. Chastity let her own
hands slip down to caress his bum, solid and firm, as she pulled
him close and felt the growing bulge at his groin. She began to
shimmy her hips ever so slightly against his and was pleased to
feel him respond in kind, as if they were swaying to the same
music.

"Oh, it's been too long," he murmured
in her ear before using his tongue to circle its shape, then
sucking on her lobe.

Chastity moaned appreciatively. "It's
only been a couple of days."

"Too long!" he declared, moving his
mouth to her neck and biting into her flesh with increasing force
while Chastity dug her fingers into his cheeks just to keep her
balance. His hands sought her breasts and kneaded them roughly.
Chastity used the space between them to reach for his pants, unsnap
them and slide down the zipper. She reached into the heat and
grabbed his stiff prick, making him grunt with pleasure.

Fumbling in her shoulder bag with her
other hand, she found a condom. She let go of him long enough to
open the wrapper and free its contents. Chastity pushed him down
onto the stairs and rolled the rubber over his cock, shed her own
pants and straddled him as they both sighed on impact.

It was awkward. The next step jutted
into his back, doubtless, and she had trouble figuring how to fold
up her legs enough to find balance, but they were both determined.
Damien closed his mouth upon her breast while he fiddled the other
with his fingers. Chastity closed her eyes and felt the incredible
sensation as he moved inside her, lifting herself to slam against
him as hard as she could from that tricky position. In no time, she
was coming, crying out her pleasure as she squeezed him inside her
and Damien beamed happily at her contortions.

When her shuddering slowed, he lifted
her up, still hard inside her and pressed her back against the
wall. They were a little askew as he had one leg on a higher step
than the other, but she held on tight with both legs and arms as
Damien thumped into her, growling with the effort, his balls
slapping against her as he stoked her cunt roughly, churning her on
to another orgasm as he finally came shouting her name.

Well, shouting 'Helen', which did just
as well, she thought sardonically. His passion was genuine and he
returned to fucking her mouth with delicious abandon, his tongue
eager to penetrate every depth of it. "Tell me you can stay a bit
longer," he breathed when at last he drew momentarily away, both
their lips burning with the friction.

"I have a cocktail party to attend
tonight. About six, I think," she said, feeling her breath
gradually slow toward normalcy. She relaxed her legs and slipped
down to rest on her own feet, feeling a little shaky.

"That's hours away," Damien said with
a giant-size smile. "Race you to the top of the stairs?"

Chastity dashed up ahead of him as he
hopped up, trying not to trip over his trousers. At the top of the
stairs she laughed at him, as he held up his jeans with one hand,
swinging the used condom in the other. "I win! I win! What do I
win?"

Damien curled an arm around her and
kissed her again, slowly and with evident delight. "What would you
settle for? One hundred pounds? Or a footrub?"

"Oooh, no contest," Chastity cooed.
"Footrub!"

"As you wish," Damien said with an
exaggerated bow, sweeping the way forward to the bedroom that
Chastity remembered so very well. She dropped her bag on the floor
and flopped on the bed. Damien stepped into the bathroom for a
moment and emerged with a bottle of skin lotion. "Shoes off!" he
demanded.

"You're very keen on the 'off, off,
off'," she murmured.

Damien had discarded his trousers and
sat with one leg crooked under him on the end of the bed. Lifting
her foot onto his lap, he caressed the ankle and ran his finger
along her instep. "Just trying to make you comfortable," he said,
catching her eye as she lay back on the pillows. He squeezed a bit
of lotion into his palm and set the bottle back down. Gently, he
spread the lotion across her foot, warming her skin as he rubbed it
in, smoothing it around the curve of her heel and between her
toes.

Chastity sighed and closed her eyes.
There was nothing more relaxing than a foot massage. How had she
lucked into this guy? His fingers were patient and slow, feeling
each nuance of her foot as if he were memorizing the contours. She
reveled in the attention and the rarity of such intimate contact.
Her mind drifted to Amélie and her passionate friendship. It was
unusual for her to snuggle with a lover, but Amélie had curled
around her and continued to chat away as if they had been lovers
for years. Odd as it was, Chastity had enjoyed the vicarious
closeness, as if tasting a fruit out of her reach, something she
knew she could not experience.

Yet here again there was that sense of
familiarity and comfort. It may be fleeting—what relationships of
hers were not?—but she decided to let it happen and enjoy it while
it lasted. Damien's hands felt wonderful. The tips of his fingers
sought out the tender places on her feet, not to tickle them, but
to singe the nerve endings with gentle caresses. It was
working.