Tolerable Cruelty - Chapter 18 (Patreon)

Chapter 18

Maria tried to catch Peter’s eye at work, clad in more and more revealing outfits. Sheer, black leggings, coupled with shorter and shorter skirts to show off her magnificently long and sculpted new legs, tighter blouses to emphasize her attention-grabbing bust. If she could make the men in the nightclub lose all control and embarrass themselves like that, perhaps all she needed to do was turn up the charm with Peter, and he would melt in her hands. She could even feign innocence or ignorance as she eroded his willpower, making him stain his pants and leaving him fantasizing about her in secret when he went home...

But it was all for naught. Peter remained warm and professional, but never displayed any interest.

Monitoring his every movement with her enhanced senses, Maria borderline stalked her boss. Every time he got up to go to the kitchen, every time he walked between the lab and his desk, Maria found an excuse to be there with them, chatting him up over a cup of coffee, or walking down the hallway with him. She would check her surroundings, then blur up behind him at super speed and give him a gentle brush of her firm breast.

Peter would always get startled and jump, but he always recovered with nervous laughter and asked if Maria was doing well.

It was insufferable!

Maria tried a different tack, noting that as the days passed, his wounds seemed to fade. She got to work early, even earlier than Peter, and awaited his arrival through the front door. It was no bother at all for her to pick up the sound of his car parking outside. She made her way to greet him at the entrance.

“Hello, Peter. How is your arm?” she reached out to caress his muscled limb, conspicuously noting that he wasn’t bound in a sling anymore. Her hand lingered far longer than appropriate, making a line up his forearm and all the way to his shoulder. She leaned in, letting her perfume waft over him.

“Getting better! It was a shoulder injury actually.” Peter backed off and gave her a stoic look as if to say he wasn’t interested, taking a deep glug of his lukewarm coffee. Not to be outdone, Maria stared hopefully into his eyes as she advanced again, her delicate, seductive touch lingering ever so slightly as she traced her hand over his shoulder.

“Gotta get back to it…” Peter’s composure held steady as he tilted his head toward the RecoGreen company logo on the wall. “I’ve gotta show upper management the results of our latest series of tests. They’re on our ass, as usual. Maria, can you have the results of our latest trials at my desk later? I had it running in the lab right overnight.”

She looked on in disappointment as Peter strolled away as if nothing had happened. Some co-workers who were busy ogling Maria’s new, outrageous curves in her too-tight outfit gave her a disapproving look. She was being awfully flirtatious with the boss. Maria gave them a snarl and stomped, gently, back to her desk. She’d barely sat down before she remembered that Peter had given her a task.

Ugh! She tried to avoid looking foolish as she stood right back up and headed to the lab where the fateful events with Rick and Peter had set this whole thing into motion. As her thoughts whirled trying to hatch a plan about how to win Peter over, she found Rick in the lab, meddling with Peter’s work.

“Rick? The hell are you doing? This isn’t your project!”

“Nothing. Nothing at all, just dropped a pen here,” he answered. “...and trying to find out what your precious little boss is hiding…” he subvocalized subconsciously.

Maria’s hearing didn’t miss a beat.

“He’s not hiding anything!” she insisted, perpetuating Peter’s lie.

Rick bumped his head against the table as Maria’s response to his silent mutterings startled him.

“Ow! Ah, fuck!” he spat, clutching the back of his head.

“Stop messing with our project! You already saddled us with this impossible shit!”

“You have no pr… I never… you guys put this on yourselves!” Rick stuttered.

Maria gasped at her own words. She probably wasn’t supposed to blurt out what Peter had told her in confidence about his suspicions of how they had been delegated the project in the first place. It was just gossip. Probably.

“Stop snooping and sabotaging us! Leave us alone!”

“I will not!”

Still cradling his bump, Rick advanced on her ominously. He didn’t know what, if anything, he was going to do, but Maria didn’t give him a chance.

She grabbed him by his right arm as she spun behind him and twisted it behind his back. Then, giving him a little shove with her free hand, she marched him out of the laboratory and dumped him into the hallway. She had half a mind to dislocate Rick’s shoulder, thinking of how Peter had suffered in his sling. It was incredible how strong she was! It would be so easy…

“Maria! P-p-p-please stop! You’re hurting me!”

“Not so fun, is it?”

“I’m sorry!”

Rick tried to twist, but Maria’s grasp was utterly unbreakable. He flailed his free arm, but Maria caught that one too and squeezed. Tears streamed down Rick’s eyes as he found himself completely immobile, a puppet beholden to Maria’s movement.

“Tch. Just leave us.”

She dumped him out on the hallway, leaving him to work off his pain. He sat by the wall for a while, averting his gaze from anyone walking by. None of them had much sympathy for him. His reputation was well known.

As Maria painstakingly processed the results of Peter’s experiments, she pulled up her phone. That man was too damn infuriating. She knew she was the center of attention wherever she went. Hell, she knew she was so damn sexy that she’d made people ejaculate in their pants at the nightclub! What made Peter so special!?

Of course, that was it. Peter was a nice guy… with incredible self control, it seemed. Maria sighed, forlorn. She pulled up Evening Social’s website again.

DJ Paloma would be playing that night.

Maria arched a perfect eyebrow. That might be interesting…

---

“Absolutely nothing on Behnam.”

“Nope.”

“The Palomas are really boring too. Just a normal suburban couple.”

“Hot fuckin’ piece of ass though. I mean, fuck. I’d slap my mama just to get a chance to talk to that fiery redhead.”

“Yeah, I’d slap your mom too.”

“Hell yeah you would.”

Carter and Harris were staked out in their black SUV outside of the Evening Social nightclub. They’d decided to assign another agent to watch the Paloma household as they followed Steven, the new X-factor.

He showed up at the popular nightclub before the rush, lugging his turntables and such out of his trunk. After he’d trudged inside and disappeared from view, Carter walked along the perimeter of the building. She found a little promo ad with his name on it. She took it.

Two hours later, both agents were stuffing their faces with some sloppy jus-soaked deli-bought sandwiches as they continued their long, arduous task of seeing nothing and waiting.

“Think we’ll figure this one out? Maybe just a freak coincidence,” Harris asked with his mouth full.

“Yeah, freak coincidence and a freak double murder? Keep dreaming.” Carter slurped on a loose piece of beef that was falling out of her sandwich.

“Wonder if we’re even on the right track.”

“Maybe we are, maybe we aren’t. It’s overtime pay, and only… eighteen more years until pension.”

“You said it.”

Carter belched loudly after she inhaled the rest of her food and a large swig of soda.

“I do wanna solve this one though. It’s too fuckin’ weird,” Carter continued.

“Didn’t your mom teach you manners!” Harris made a face as he tried to fan the foul air out of his way.

Carter ignored her partner’s statement.

“I mean this is some alien UFO shit or something. Or some sort of horror movie. I can’t stop looking at those photos.” Carter wiped her mouth with her sleeve.

“Whoa, whoa.” Harris urgently patted his partner’s elbow repeatedly as he grabbed his binoculars. “Damn. Look at her.”

Carter quickly grabbed her own.

The agents both stared at the Latina beauty in a shoulder-less, strapless, red dress. Her white panties were clearly visible since both sides fashioned a high slit up her luscious thighs, all the way to her flared hips. To their ogling eyes, she seemed to be moving in slow motion as she crossed under a bridge of light from the nearby street lamp. Unbelievably slender, toned limbs, her swooping, exaggerated curves swaying seductively as she seemed to glide along the pavement in her red stiletto heels, and the view of her side profile giving them both a dramatic view of the full swell of her breasts…

Both agents gasped audibly in lust.

“God fucking damn. Fucking semen demon,” Carter commented.

“You said it, not me. And I always knew you had a dick.”

“I’d slap my mama for a chance to talk to her.”

“Stop talking about your mom. You’re ruining the moment.” Harris began to grow hard in his pants before the beauty was finally enveloped by darkness once more.

“Fuck me, she’s hot,” he panted as he wiped the sweat off his brow. “Remind you of anyone?”

“You men. She looks nothing like Paloma.”

“Yet you still knew exactly who I was referring to.”

“Hmph. It’s just big tits with you guys.”

“You give us too little credit. Did you see her legs? And her hair too. I bet she smells like a flowery spring breeze. And no shit they’re not the same, but god damn does that beauty hit you the same way or what?”

To their luck, the mystery beauty got in line for the club.

“Hey hold down the fort, I’m gonna go… examine something,” Carter slapped her teammate on the back.

“Sarah!”

But she had already slid out of the surveillance vehicle and was making her way toward the club. No doubt she would flash her badge to get in, if need be. Even Harris admitted that his blonde partner was mildly attractive, despite her tableside manners.

“Goddammit Carter, you’re so fucking horny all the time,” he lamented, wishing that it were him chasing that tail. Maybe she would be away long enough for him to rub one out. It probably wouldn’t take long.

Carter, not at all dressed the part, got in line a few people behind the gorgeous fashion model or whatever it was they were stalking. Probably not related to the Palomas in any way, but she wasn’t going to miss a chance to potentially talk to the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen. Or maybe second most beautiful.

She chuckled as all of the other girls dressed in their skimpy clubbing clothes shivered from the cold of the night. She knew well enough how that felt.

But this… Aphrodite didn’t seem to be uncomfortable at all, despite not being in the cover of the sweltering body heat and booming music inside. Carter tried to keep her eye on the resplendent beauty without outright staring. Staring and tracking someone without being conspicuous and raising the hairs on their targets’ necks was the first thing she’d learned in training.

But it was getting difficult. Every time Carter looked back up, the gorgeous creature seemed to be getting further away. Carter watched intently for a while, wondering what was going on.

She was cutting in line! No… cutting wasn’t the right word. She would reach out and touch the people in front, politely ask to move ahead of them with her slight accent, and they would shiver and let her pass. And Carter was guessing they weren’t shivering from cold.

Carter just stared openly now as the Latina woman (judging from her accent) skipped what looked like a 30 minute wait and faced the bouncer. Instead of handing over any money, she placed a hand on his arm and squeezed, eliciting a shocked grimace of agony from what burly man. As he reached over with his free arm to try and grasp her hand, she gave him a gentle brush of her beautiful swollen bust, leaned in cheek to cheek, and appeared to whisper something in his ear.

The bouncer’s eyes slammed shut as he began to quiver. The woman disappeared into the strobing light of the club. The bouncer was clearly struggling before he bucked his hips once, twice, and sagged in relaxation.

Holy fuck! What the fuck was that!? Carter writhed in arousal. Fuck the double murder case and this pointless stakeout… Carter whimpered and rubbed her thighs together. She only wanted to meet this goddess of beauty now.