"Oh well, what the hell."

"You're offering to massage me?" O'Sullivan looked like he'd just stepped into a pile of dog poo.

"Uh, yeah."

She wrinkled her nose... again bringing forth the dog poo analogy but then shrugged her shoulders. "Oh well, what the hell. I am tense as shit and if you're telling me the truth, going after these killers is likely to cost me my job. So, yeah, I'm tense. Do your magic."

She walked into her master bedroom, a sterile-looking room that looked more like it might be used as for some affluent Texans home and garden show than for actual sleeping and... other bedroom uses, stripped off her suit jacket, and flopped face down on her bed.

A part of Rick wanted to suggest that she take off the remainder of her clothing but the tenseness in her shoulders went beyond mere muscle soreness. She carried the weight of being the senior female member of her local police force, the resentment from every male officer she'd beaten in securing her detective slot, the envy of most female cops who probably thought she'd slept her way to the top, plus the certainty that working with Rick was going to end her career because, even if she took Dan Hughes down, the local power structure would come down on her and she'd find herself assigned to some meaningless desk job until she gave up and quit. While taking her clothes off and having a good fuck would certainly help, at least in the short term, Rick suspected that if he suggested it, she'd pull that weapon back out of wherever she'd hid it and shoot him with it. Which was not what either of them needed.

So, he kept his mouth shut about stripping. Instead he removed her shoes, black shiny leather things with inch-high heels that she probably though of as sensible (and were compared to some of the contraptions Jan wore) but were actually foot destroyers and got to work massaging her feet.

Rick had seen how her tension was linked to a level of excitement about the hunt, a type of excitement that was near-sexual already. He decided it was his sacred task to help O'Sullivan bridge that gap, to bring her to orgasm without actually touching her pussy or her tits. Which reminded him, "So, Detective O'Sullivan, what the hell is your first name?"

She mumbled something into her pillow.

"Sorry?"

"It's Tiffany, all right? My parents thought I was going to be a girly-girl and Tiffany was a popular name when I was born. So what, are you going to make fun of it?"

"Uh, no."

"Oh. Okay."

Her tension level had shot up which was not really what he wanted although relieving it could help in his goals. "How about I call you Tiff?" he suggested, "since you seem to have a block about the whole thing."

"Fine."

He went back to work on her feet, spending enough time to find the sore spots in each, rubbing out the tensions where her toes had been squeezed into the hard leather, where she'd had to support all of her weight on the balls of her feet, before moving to her ankles and calves.

"You know I have shoulders here," she said.

"And I'll get to them. I was going to ask if I tell you how to do your cop work but I guess I am doing that so I'll happily take suggestions on massage, too."

She grunted but relaxed a little.

He continued massaging her calves and up to her knees. As he reached her knees, both sexual and angry inpulses ran through her nervous system. Which made sense to him. She'd had to suppress her sexuality to work in the hostile environment of a Texas police department. So, he moved up to her shoulders.

They were stiff with tension that probably went back to her high school days... both from the pressures she faced on a daily basis and from the massive weight she carried in front of her body. Those tits definitely attracted Rick's attention but carrying them around all day had to be hard work.

He dug his fingers into her trapezius, then brought the base of his palms into her deltoids.

She gave a sigh that sounded as if someone had released a valve and let out a generation of compressed air.

Well, good.

Time to ramp it up, though.

He couldn't see the nervous messages beneath her white blouse, but he could see them when they emerged from her shoulders, traveled up her neck, and signaled the brain. So, he used what he could glen as he massaged down her spine, isolating each vertebra, feeling rather than seeing the tension and its relief.

If he hadn't given dozens of massages over the past few days, he could never have done it. He'd relied more than he'd imagined on the sight of those nervous impulses but he'd also trained his hands to sense tensed muscles, to penetrate and explode those areas where a woman built pressures within herself.

Yet there was something about Tiffany that he hadn't seen before. Usha and Jan were confident of their bodies. Jan and Eliza were sex machines. Tanya, Donna and the others had been party girls drunk and out for a good time. But Tiffany had suppressed the female part of herself to fit into the ultra-macho world of a Texas police force. Whether she'd done so consciously or not, she'd somehow damaged the linkage between relief, pleasure and sex.

For the first time, Rick wondered if he'd actually be able to accomplish the goal he'd set himself. Could he bring Tiffany O'Sullivan to orgasm without having to cross the boundaries into sexual contact? And if he did cross those boundaries, would she let him move forward or would she just shoot him and accuse his corpse of sexual assault?