Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [64]
Her breathing was controlled, holding for several seconds. Her pulse was slow, a runner’s …
Where did she learn all this stuff? Not in Ohio; not at Oberlin College.
Her eyes closed. Such smiling eyes. She was easy to be with.
Carroll’s pulse was thumping so damn hard. He’d never in his life held off orgasm this long, never felt excited in quite this way. His head grew light.
“Please wait. Okay?” Caitlin whispered to him. Her body spasmed lightly.
“Trying…”
“Just… wait… Arch?”
Carroll’s brain was burning up. His body was a million raw exposed nerves—as he floated down, floated down, floated down. Finally—he went inside Caitlin.
Her eyes slowly, very slowly, shut.
Her mouth opened. Wider and wider, an unbelievably soft, delicately pink mouth.
Her face was so surprisingly sweet in passion. She seemed to be smiling all the time …
Then Caitlin’s eyes flipped open—looked at him—and she made him feel so good. Wanted again. Necessary to somebody.
“Hi there, Arch. Nice to have you here.”
“Hi yourself. Nice to be had.”
They moved faster together. Her dark hair slowly danced backward and forward. Her curls spread across the pillow, brushed, flowed majestically across his face—hid her eyes.
Carroll arched dramatically and nearly fell over backwards. Impossible, acrobatic positions.
He spasmed, shuddered, called out her name so loudly it embarrassed him.
“Caitlin.”
Completely new feelings were coming so fast…
Again… “Caitlin.”
He felt as if she knew him—instantly saw through his defenses, his poses:… Finally, somebody … Jesus.
When it was over, when it was finally, finally over, neither of them could move…. Nothing anywhere in the universe could move. Not ever again.
Chapter 44
THOMAS X. O’NEIL, Chief of U.S. Customs at Shannon Airport, Ireland, walked with most of his body weight ponderously thrown back on his boot heels. As he walked, his toes splayed out as if he were wearing ill-fitting bedroom slippers. His size forty-seven waist protruded obscenely, as did his customary, nine-incher Cuban cigar. Chief O’Neil looked like an unflattering caricature of Churchill and he couldn’t have cared less. He had a public image and he enjoyed it. He didn’t give a good goddamn what anyone thought.
At twelve noon, O’Neil casually waddled across the frozen gray tarmac toward North Building Three at the Irish airfield located outside of Dublin.
As he walked, O’Neil could smell fresh peat settling in the air. Nothing quite like the blessed aroma, he was thinking.
At the same moment he looked up and saw a majestic 727 just gliding in through a blowing fog from America. Seven years before, he’d come over from New York himself. He never ever planned to return to that syphilitic rat’s asshole, either. He had even tried to alter his accent and speech patterns so that he’d sound Irish: it was a ludicrous attempt and he came off sounding like a ham in some third-rate touring company doing George Bernard Shaw.
Inside Building Three there were hundreds of various-sized wooden crates, marked with the usual, faded corporate logos.
A carrot-haired Irish inspector stood with a red marker and clipboard beside a bare wooden desk, right at the center of the cluttered warehouse room.
“This the lot of it, Liam?” Chief O’Neil asked the inspector. “This Pan Am Three Ten from this morning?”
“Aye, sir. These particular boxes’re from the Catholic Charities in New York. Clothes and such for sendin’ up north. Givin’ us all their old Calvin Kleins, their Jordache jeans, so they are. Look very smart and chic on the Provos, I’ll bet”
Chief Inspector O’Neil grinned broadly. He was trailing grand clouds of smoke all around the freight inspection shack. He both chewed and puffed his Cubans, to get his money’s worth.
Thomas O’Neil had been born and raised in New York’s Yorkville section; he’d worked as an inspector at Kennedy International, nearly nine years before his fortuitous transfer as Head of the U.S. service at Shannon.
Before that, O’Neil had been a master sergeant in general supply in