Cat & Mouse

It would be very unwise, Raven thought, to get into a car with this woman. She had some part in Gregory Holmsworth’s business, a business which had some very dangerous elements and connections. Even if her role in the business was legit, her association with Gregory, and Raven’s job as a PI, meant that the two of them arranging to meet placed them both in danger should he learn of it.

Vice and Victor were counting on him, and he had never taken on a job that he had not seen through to completion. He had his professional pride, damn it.

“F-k it.” Raven was sure that he was going to die, but he had a feeling that he would not mind when it happened. He opened the door and slid in. The seats were form fitting and threaded with red. As she started the engine, the sound system roared out, and he recognised the song as one of Mirage’s man hating anthems. He wondered if that was on purpose.

He still could not believe that Vice and Victor had gone there. Sure, Mirage was sizzling hot, and had inherited enough dollars from her parents that they could launch their own label earlier than planned but listening to her croon about her fury with men was off-putting. Men weren’t allowed to be men anymore, Raven thought, ruefully. They had to apologise for their very nature.

Now Vixen was another type of woman altogether. He assessed her from the corner of his eye as she eased the Ferrari through the tight turns of the carpark. She was a woman made for a man. He did not think she would cry foul if a man expressed a desire for her, as she invited it with every movement.

The carpark opened onto the street, and her lips curled back from perfect white teeth. He had a moment to think, oh shit, quite clearly, before the Ferrari surged forward.

“That was a red light,” he gasped, as she roared the beast down the road, zipping into gaps he would never be game to attempt, let alone in a car that cost more than most house mortgages.

She laughed, that throaty, lustful laugh that hit him right where it counted.

They were leaving the city, hitting the freeway, and at a certain point she abandoned even the pretence of following the speed limit, the Ferrari flying almost effortlessly through the dark. Raven gripped the side of his seat as the speed pushed him back into it. The slick flick of scenery through the windscreen stole his breath. He was not entirely sure if he was terrified or turned on. There was something hypnotic about being completely powerless.

The car turned onto a side road that he had not even seen, and Vixen’s laughter rang out over the music. The trees pressed in on the car, and he was appalled by her disregard for the expensive paint job on the Ferrari. He could see the city lights before them and pressed back in his seat as the Ferrari seemed to plunge towards the edge of a cliff, but she braked at the very last moment, and the music and the Ferrari’s purr were silenced.

He could hear Shadow’s heavy breathing from the back seat and was not sure if the man were turned on or scared shitless. Raven could not tell which one he was, either - maybe somewhere between the two. Vixen opened the car door, and stepped out, pushing it closed with her divine arse.

“This is not where I expected we would be,” Raven said to Shadow.

The man in the backseat chuckled.

The car door opened on Raven’s side, and Vixen slid into his lap. “F-k,” he groaned as her purple hair fell over his face and his hands closed on that fabulous arse. Her gorgeous mouth found his, her tongue swiping against his lips, so that he opened for her, and then snaking in to tease his in a proxy of sex.

He was hard, the hardest he had ever been, almost painfully rigid against the confines of his jeans. The sharp points of her heels gouged the dashboard, and he felt a moment of sorrow for the Ferrari, but her reckless disregard for the vehicle was also such a turn on, that those gouges made him moan.

The leather bra seemed to just come apart at a touch, and he blessed its designer, as he cast it over his shoulder to Shadow. Her breasts were perfect, heavy, an overabundance, more than his hands could hold, and pierced through the left nipple. He lifted that piercing to his mouth, felt the strike of the metal against his teeth as he sucked on it.

She opened a condom.

He released her breast. “How the f–k did I get this lucky?” He wondered, his voice hoarse as she released his fly and freed him from his jeans. The relief of that release almost broke his control.

“Looks to me I am the lucky one, stud,” she crooned.

A singer, he thought, randomly, recognising the voice control from his years as Vice and Victor’s friends, some things he had picked up from the industry via osmosis. He went slack jawed as she rolled the condom onto him.

She lifted. “Do you want to open me up?”

Oh, boy, did he. His hands shook as he unzipped the shorts. The zip went all the way, he found to his fascination, but she did not let him release them to the full extent before she sank down on him, with a throaty groan.

“Oh, yes,” she said, adjusting and sinking deeper upon him.

He gripped her arse and lifted his hips into her. She reached to the side of the seat, releasing it so it sank back suddenly, and Shadow leaned over him, to feast upon her breasts as she rode Raven, her knees braced to either side of his hips. Raven held onto her thighs, feeling the shift of muscle beneath his grip. Strong, he thought, and fit, from the way she drove her body against him, but definitely a plus size. He liked a girl who ate and was not afraid of beer.

Shadow’s hand pressed between them, and she cried out. Raven moaned as the man’s hand came into contact with his skin.

“F-k,” he ground out between his teeth. “I am going to-” She came first, clenching tightly around him, and his cries filled the small cabin of the Ferrari, loud in his abandonment.

She sagged over him, and he saw Shadow retreat back into the recesses of the backseat like the shadows he was named after and heard him grunt, followed by the rustle of plastic. Raven would bet his favourite jacket that the man had just jerked himself off in the back seat. Raven pressed his face into Vixen’s neck as he snickered with amusement.

She smelled divine, honey, vanilla, and something sulkily floral underneath.

She reached between them, holding the condom in place as she lifted from him, and then whipping it from him before he could do so himself, deftly tying a knot in the end. “Souvenir,” she grinned wickedly, bare-breasted, her shorts barely holding on, and those killer boots making an image that he thought seared into his soul.

Shadow passed her the bra. She held it loosely in the same hand as she held the used condom, and zipped her shorts up, with a wink, before using her arse to close the door.

He lay in the reclined seat, watching her in absolute empty-minded astonishment as she sauntered around the front of the Ferrari. She paused by the driver door whilst she returned the bra to its enviable position, and then she opened it, sliding into the seat. She passed the used condom back to Shadow and buckled herself into the seat as she started the engine.

“You might want to sit up and zip up, stud,” she ran her tongue over the point of her canine with a lecherous grin, her eyes flicking from his lap to his face.

“F-k,” he said, about the only thing he seemed able to say eloquently. He zipped himself up, and then found the controls to right the seat, lifting it into position.

He felt, he thought, as Alice must have felt when she had fallen down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, or as if he had taken a really, really good hallucinogen. After all, he told himself, how often did a guy wander into a sex club, get picked up by a super-hot, sexed up couple, get taken on a break-necked ride in a Ferrari, and then have what he decided was close enough to a mind-blowing threesome in the middle of no-where?

She set the Ferrari into motion.

“I thought you were taking me to Gregory Holmsworth,” he said.

She shrugged. “Consider it an audition, pretty birdie,” she told him without taking her eyes off the road as she swung the Ferrari off the side road and back onto the main without applying the brake.

“Did I pass?” He wondered. He did not know if he wanted to, if not passing meant it might lead to another audition. Fuel for a year’s worth of masturbatory fantasy in one evening, he thought.

“Did he pass, Shadow?” She laughed over her shoulder.

“He did okay,” Shadow’s voice was rich and amused.

“Shadow says you did okay,” she told him, sliding her eyes from the road to him, and back again. He began to recognise the roads they passed through. She was taking him home. That they knew the location of his home was disturbing, but at the same time he was relieved that she was not about to recklessly abandon him in the bush.

She pulled up outside his building and leaned over him, releasing the door. “Take my advice, Raven,” she said to him, quite seriously. “Don’t keep poking into Gregory’s business. You are too pretty to f–k with some of these people.”

Raven released his seatbelt, almost reluctant to leave her company. “Well,” he said, “I have your number, right?”

Shadow reached through the centre console and grinned at him as he pulled the door shut in his face. The engine revved, and the Ferrari pulled recklessly out into traffic. Raven watched it disappear, his heart racing and hi c-k hard again, damn it.

He was left with a feeling of emptiness and missed opportunity.

It was okay, though, he told himself. He had slipped the tracker under the front passenger seat when he had adjusted it. And how many purple Ferrari’s could there be in the city, after all?

The answer was none.

Which was interesting, he thought three days later, as he followed a canary yellow Ferrari through the streets. It had spent a couple of days in the industrial area of town, shut inside a warehouse, only to reappear in its current glory. He wondered if they had also repaired the scars her heels had dug into the dash. The memory made him grin and have to adjust his trousers over his straining hard on.

F-king hell, Raven, he thought as he shifted on his seat, get yourself under control.

The licence plates identified it as belonging to the same Iblis Holdings which owned the building of the sex club. Further investigation into Iblis Holdings traced it overseas, to Dauntless Incorporated, which spread in tentacles like an octopus through a variety of businesses, all of which seemed to have no products or trade, but which owned a lot of other things. He suspected that he would need a team of forensic accountants to trace down each of those businesses.

The Ferrari was a vehicle that looked legitimate at a casual glance but showed corrosion under close scrutiny.

A bit like Gregory Holmsworth, Raven thought grimly.

When Victor had asked him initially to investigate Miranda Holmsworth, also known as Mirage, and her estranged grandfather Gregory, he had not expected to find anything too exciting. Money, some shady dealings that always seemed to go hand in hand with business, and maybe an old scandal or skeleton or two, or three.

Initially, he had been looking so that he could identify who had twice attempted to kidnap Miranda. Then, he had begun investigating in order to fully understand the family to whom Vice and Victor had become linked through their relationship with her.

Now, he had slipped into the rabbit hole, and could not stop eating the damn cake.

Oh, but the cake tasted so good, he thought as the Ferrari pulled over at a recording studio, and Vixen oozed her way out of the driver’s seat. There was no wig today, and no half-mask. He didn’t think that shade of white-blonde was natural, by her eyebrows, and she had well and truly stuffed those gorgeous curves into a very lucky pair of jeans, and a t-shirt advertising herself as a brunette under the name “Temptation” standing in front of three guys, one of whom was Shadow.

Temptation. She definitely was that. Punk band, he decided from the clothes they wore on the t-shirt, and he would place her as the lead singer from the fact she stood to the front of the three guys.

He conducted some searches online whilst he waited for Vixen and Shadow to leave the recording studio and found the band online. Punk band, he confirmed, must be quite good too as they had quite a following. Temperance and Gabe, lead singer and drummer.

Temperance, Temptation, he grinned. That alone would have confirmed her as the lead singer.

What was the lead singer of a punk band doing working for Gregory Holmsworth? Was she involved somehow in Gregory Holmsworth’s side-step into the music industry? His online searches had determined that Gregory had diversified his portfolio to include recording studios and venues, including the one Raven was parked in front of.

It was interesting, Raven thought, sucking on his teeth, that this new musical inclination happened around the same time as Holmsworth’s granddaughter turned twenty-one, inherited the trust fund left to her by her parents, and stepped out of granddad’s control to pursue a career as a pop star.

Had Gregory bought into the music industry to aid, or hinder, his granddaughter’s career?

Vixen slid into the car passenger seat at the same time as the back passenger door directly behind the driver’s seat opened, and he was not surprised to see Shadow, mask-less and superhero handsome, with tousled brown curls, grin at him in the mirror.

He recognised him Raven realised with a start. From the café. The big guy with the cuff with the pink diamantes. Which meant that Vixen was the luscious arse Raven had been lusting over at the time. They had been tailing him. F–k it, and he hadn’t even noticed.

“Hi Raven.”

“Hi Shadow,” Raven replied politely. “Vixen.”

“Drive, Raven,” Vixen put on her seatbelt.