Nathan Walker had never felt rage like this in his life. He'd just hung up on the phone after two hours of begging, promising and cajoling Ashley to come back to him. In the end, he didn't succeed.
That she had no feelings for him hurt but the anger stemmed from things she'd learned since leaving him.
Ashley related the details of the things Officer Amber Bateman had done to him that day so many months ago as he hung upside down and helpless on his inversion table. She told him she'd found out everything about Bateman pushing him against the car and masturbating him and how she'd pulled him over and done it again right before a domestic disturbance call came in. Ashley even knew about the night Bateman took him into the woods ostensibly to assist with a burglary investigation and jerked him off even as she sat in the car waiting for him.
"Seems you've been getting around a long time since we moved to Luvton, Nate," she'd said acidly. "You even let the EMTs have a turn at you. After all that, after you couldn't bear it any longer, you wound up fucking that tubby bitch of a cop, didn't you?"
Nate didn't bother correcting her. It was only the one EMT that'd taken him in hand--the female one.
He tried to emphasize the fact that in every single case he was coerced into doing those things. Ashley, however, had insisted on interpreting everything in the worst possible light. Nate really didn't expect otherwise. She left before she found out all that and believing the worst of him made everything easier.
For her.
Nate fumed and slept practically none that night. Amber Bateman had spilled the beans to Ashley about everything and for what? Why rub salt into this particular wound?
The next day his mind was like a bee in a jar banging fruitlessly around trying to figure things out. He'd almost cost a client quite a few thousands of dollars but caught the mistake at the last minute before the trade went through. He shut down early giving up quite a bit of commission as he stalked through the empty house.
Nathan had never been a fan of men who hit women but fantasies of backhanding the female police officer played over and over in his mind. Thoughts of ripping her uniform to shreds and pounding angrily into her looped endlessly. If he couldn't make love to a woman he cared about he would fuck the woman who'd sealed the fate of his relationship forever, fuck her like an animal.
He knew what he was entertaining. A rape fantasy. That's all it would ever be, though. Nathan was not a man capable of such an act. But to do it--to a cop--that would be the worst of all worlds and the last sex he'd ever have outside of being taken by a big bruiser of a prisoner.
At that thought, he shivered and decided it was best to spend the rest of the evening with a brown bottle.
For the next several days Nate tried to let it go. He wanted to confront Amber, wanted to find out why she'd thought it necessary to cause him such hopelessness. The logical part of his mind told him he wouldn't be satisfied with anything Bateman could say. But the emotional part wanted to call her the pig she was for doing this to him.
Four days later, the emotional side won out.
Nate sat in his car a block from the police station. It was almost three in the morning. He knew that most days, Bateman patrolled from six or so until three a.m. because that's when most crimes occurred--not that there was all that much in this tiny town that could happen.
Strange, Nate thought, that after all this time and all these trysts with the lone cop here, he never knew where she lived. Hell, he'd never seen her when she wasn't in uniform.
Well, that wasn't entirely true. Even though he was handcuffed to a jailhouse cot at the time, he'd seen her completely out of uniform. In his sweatpants, Nate felt himself swell a bit at the memory of her nude, curvy body as it settled onto him.
But as her patrol car slid by his and toward the station, he had to remember why he'd come here and it wasn't to try to get back into her uniform slacks, either.
He waited ten minutes then waited ten more, time enough for her to get in the station and settle down to what he figured would be some end-of-watch paperwork. Then he slipped out of the car and moved quietly down the block and toward the station's main entrance.
Nate slipped into the main entrance of the station and into the drab, government-issue waiting room. Two hard chairs sat in front of a plain wooden desk with nothing on it except a phone and a hand-lettered sign that read DIAL 0 FOR ASSISTANCE 24 HOURS.
He strode past the desk and down the hall beyond toward a single light burning far back on the left.
"Hello?" came Amber's voice.
Nate moved into the doorway of the office. "Hello, Bateman," he said flatly.
Amber sat her papers down and crossed her hands primly on the desk and peered at him with an air of disinterest. "What brings you out at such an ungodly hour?" She gave him a once over noting his plain white t-shirt, black sweatpants, and slippers. "You causing trouble or do you have some trouble?"
"You," Nate said flatly. "You are what brings me out here at such an ungodly hour, Bateman."
Amber smiled thinly and leaned back in the chair. Nate noticed her service belt was gone and a glance around the office revealed that it hung on a hook in the corner near the door where he stood.
"Is that right? Now how is that, Nate?"
Nate gritted his teeth. "I told you the last time we were together that I was going to try to make it work between Ashley and me. I said I wanted our last bit of fun to be the end of it."
"That's what you said," Amber nodded.
"Apparently, you didn't respect my wishes to go back to Ashley. She knew all about the handjobs and the jailhouse fucking."
Bateman folded her hands behind her head. Nate couldn't resist a glance down at the straining buttons over her bosom. "What are you saying? A little birdy told Little Miss Ashley about all the things we'd been doing under her nose?"
His fists closed and he had to force them open again. "Why, Amber? Why in the hell do that? You and I both know from the first time it happened that I never wanted it."
"Maybe not at first but you never seemed to have any trouble performing." Her blue eyes rose to the ceiling and a smile played across her lips at the memory. "Especially back there in that cell. You performed like a pro."
Nate took a step toward the desk, his anger rising. "If you weren't threatening me with telling Ashley you were threatening me with all sorts of legal troubles. I didn't have a choice and if you'll recall you had my balls chained to the bars while you threatened to burn, Tase or shoot my dick off. You fucking forced me to let you blow me!"
Bateman grinned and put her sock feet on the desk.
"Then you zip-tied me to the cot, put a rubber on me and fucked me. Twice!"
"Do you really think any jury in the world would buy this?" Amber looked him up and down as if regarding an insect. "First of all, it's your word against mine."
"Lynn knows it, too!" Nate tried and realized how useless that fact was.
"She's got a fiancé and she wants to keep him. She's not going to remember watching you jerk off and she sure as hell won't recall jerking you off in the back of the ambulance."
"Fucking bitches!" Nate cried and took another step forward. "Both of you!"
Bateman adjusted her barrette and closed her eyes no longer deigning to look at him. "Second of all--if you'll let me finish--not a single man or woman would believe that you consistently performed each and every time I--as you put it--'coerced' you. A man doesn't get an erection unless he wants to."
"You're going to sit there and tell me I had a choice?"
"You always had a choice, Walker. If you had genuinely not wanted me to do what I did, you would have remained as limp as a cooked noodle. But that was far from what happened, wasn't it?"
Nate opened his mouth, closed it.
Bateman took her feet off the desk and leaned forward and continued in a low voice. "You and Ashley were having troubles, I knew that way before you did."
"No, we didn't, not until after that night you stroked me off in the woods." Nate became even more indignant. "While she was sitting the damn car, I might add!"
"It was well before that, Nate. Ashley was fucking a pilot every time he was in town. A guy named Stanton Pickett. Seems she always tried to get on his flights, too."
Nate's jaw unhinged in disbelief. "How in the fuck do you know all of that?"
She shook her head. "I'm a cop, you dumb shit. I've had my eye on you since the day you moved in and I had my eye on your girlfriend, too, just not in the same way. I could tell the first time I saw her, sitting in the parking lot at the Stop-N-Save giggling like a schoolgirl over her cell, that she had one foot out of the door even as she was moving her shit into your house."
"That proves nothing, Amber! She could've been talking to anybody!"
