Going Too Far (The Curvy Submissive) (11 page)

I waited for her to get to the details we both knew I ached
for.
Josh.
I tried to burn his name into her forehead from my seat.
Tell
me about Josh
.

“He left,” she said finally. She sighed, took my hand from
my lap, and pressed it against the heater. I didn’t even realize how cold my
fingers were. “After he put you in my car and asked me to drive you home. He
left.”

“Oh.” I stared out the window. I don’t know why it made me
feel so sad, so lost, but it did.

I felt…

Like a mistake.

Julie sighed. “If it makes you feel better, he practically
made me sign in blood that I’d make sure you got home safe.”

I didn’t answer. A shiver passed through me and I wrapped my
arms around my body and squeezed.

“Damn it, Kat.” Julie plunked her coffee in a drink holder
and veered sharply towards the side of the road and came to a slow stop. An
early morning fog hovered across the ground, making the empty nothing on either
side of the highway seem particularly ominous.

Fitting since it was Halloween. Tonight would be one of the
biggest nights of the year at South River. I’d offered to help. Josh would be
there. We’d have to face each other, surrounded by hundreds of people.

“I’m fine,” I interrupted before she could start in on me,
though we both knew I wasn’t fine. I didn’t know what I was, not exactly, but
it wasn’t fine.

Regret.

Guilt.

Shame.

Aching, dreadful longing.

Oh, fuck me
.

“I don’t know what happened,” she started and turned fully
in her seat. Her perfect fairy hair was messy and ratted on one side of her
head, but somehow her make-up remained as crisp and new as if we’d just left
for the party. “I can guess and I don’t need details. He seemed pretty upset
and now so do you.”

“Please, Julie, please don’t look at me like that. I know
what you’re thinking. And believe me, whatever you’re thinking, I’m thinking
something worse.”

“I knew the moment he saw you we were in big trouble.”

I leaned back into the chair and stared out into the fog.
Was this what Brian meant every time he laid into me? For the first time I felt
like I was still a little girl pretending to play in a grown up world.

“I feel like I’ve set fire to my whole world.”

Julie snaked her fingers through mine and squeezed. “Let’s
hope it doesn’t burn to the ground, but even if it does? I won’t leave you to
face it alone.”

***

Thank you for reading Josh and Kat’s story! But it’s not
over yet. The story picks up with broken hearts in
GIRL IN PIECES
before
crashing into the finale with
WANTING IT ALL
.

ͻ
        
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my new release e-mail list
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, or like
my Facebook page at
www.facebook.com/authorJordanBell
.

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Share it with a friend!

ͻ
        
If you like more books about curvy girls, strong heroes, and steamy
nights, you’ll love the Amazon Bestseller
THE CURVY SISTER
and the BDSM
series
SECRETS
, beginning with book 1
HER SECRET PLEASURE
, book 2
HER SECRET BETRAYAL
, and ending with book 3
HER SECRET POWER
.

ͻ
        
If you’d like to read an excerpt from
GIRL IN PIECES
the
second book in this series, please keep reading.

THE CURVY SUBMISSIVE #2: GIRL IN PIECES

In
GIRL IN PIECES
, Josh has
turned his back on what happened between them, leaving Kat on her own to deal
with her new, stormy desires. When her relationship with her brother
deteriorates and financial troubles threaten to crush her dreams, Kat finds
herself seeking escape in another’s arms, one who is willing to mentor her
while she tries to get over her heartbreak. As her life goes to pieces, she
struggles to hold onto the girl she used to be while facing the girl she might
yet become.

Enjoy the first chapter of
GIRL IN PIECES
!

Josh was awake.

I could see his bedroom light on from my window which had
never made me feel so much like a stalker until this morning.

It was comforting, though, to know he was as awake at the
wrong end of the day as I was.

The digital on my bedside table read 4:49 a.m. Below Josh’s
bedroom window the South River Bar sat quiet and dark. Someone had parked in
front of the fire hydrant again and behind that was a pale pink convertible La
Sabre with a cream top and white leather seats. You could always tell what kind
of night South River had by how many cars were still parked on the street after
last call.

I settled my hands against the cool glass and marveled at
the bracelet of bruises he’d left across my wrists, blues almost too faded to
make out in the dim light. His big hands had fit perfectly around mine when
he’d held me down and held me still. If I closed my eyes, I could still feel
his breath on my neck and his weight and his…

I shivered and pressed my fingertips into my eyes until
lights sparkled across my vision. Sleep was out of the question, no matter how
tired and heavy my body felt. Instead there was only pacing and thinking and
watching his window for a sign.

It was inevitable really.
Katrina Koile, stalker
. I
was one pair of binoculars shy of a misdemeanor.

Josh Murcek, my brother’s best friend and owner of the South
River Bar, was my second unofficial brother by choice. We grew up together,
even though he was five years older. Pop Murcek taught me to waltz when I was
sixteen and Josh tutored me in algebra at a booth in the back by the stage. He
taught me to tie cherry stems with my tongue, do tequila shots without wanting
to die, and defended me to Brian when Brian got into one of his anti-Kat moods.

Josh…he’d always been my friend.

My apartment sat diagonal to the bar and he lived in the
apartment above it. We had these rituals - Sunday mornings he’d make pancakes
and when I saw the vodka sign turn on in the window it was my signal to head
over. If I left the bar late I was to turn my bedroom light on as soon as I
made it home safely so he’d know.

He’d been my friend for so long I’d never thought of him as
anything more. At least…not serious thoughts. I rarely saw him with women and
when he dated they never seemed to stick around long enough to learn all our
names. I flirted with him playfully when I wanted free drinks, but he never
overstepped into something inappropriate.

Liar, liar, pants on fire.
That wasn’t true at all.
There was one night when things went in a very different direction. Just a
little. Just a toe over the line, but enough for me to think about his mouth
late at night for months after.

It was the night of a very bad breakup. We were days into
moving Kyle’s shit into my apartment when he decided things were moving too
fast and I came home to find all his stuff gone and a note asking me to delete
his number from my cell phone. Josh stayed up with me into the wee hours of the
morning, unwilling to let me go home and cry myself to sleep. He dumped dozens
of quarters into the juke box and we spent the night inventing new drinks named
after the faults of our past lovers.

Comes Too Fast
- Aftershock and Rumplemintz
with a maraschino cherry floating in the middle.

Texts Every Six Minutes
- low cal skinny
Raspberry Vodka, a splash of pineapple juice, Sprite and an orange wedge
skewered onto a bendy straw.

Comments on the Size of My Thighs
- espresso,
chocolate syrup, Frangelica, and as much whip cream as can fit in the glass.
Topped with chocolate shavings and a maraschino cherry. Or two.

Expects Dinner but Doesn’t Do Take-out
–
Goldschlagger and Crown Royal, chased with a shot of the cheapest Vodka in the
bar.

It had been incredibly cathartic even though I’d suffered
one of the worst hangovers of my life the next day. I still had a rumpled copy
of our drink recipes stuck to my fridge.

The memory of that night hit me bright and loud and I
couldn’t help but smile. Green Day rocked out on the juke box and whenever the
tears threatened to start again Josh would feed me a steady stream of cherries
soaked in amaretto to quiet them. I was sitting on the bar, my legs dangling
over the edge and somehow he’d pushed his way between them so that we were
incredibly close. Too close, but we’d had enough shots by that point that it
didn’t even occur to me to blush.

He settled his hand on the outside of my thigh and I could
remember feeling the weight of it through my fashionably ripped jeans and,
despite my tipsy haze, I’d felt my body’s reaction to it. Later I was
embarrassed by the memory of my actions, but at the time I’d stared right into
his eyes and opened my knees wider so he could climb closer and he had without
hesitation. His hand had traveled higher, dangerously close to the rounded bottom
edge of my ass. I’d felt his fingertips dig into my thigh as he gripped me in
one hand.

Josh brought the cherry to my mouth. Touched it against my
lips. A drop of amaretto splashed my bottom lip and without hesitating he’d run
his fingertip along my lip to capture it. I watched him suck the liquor from
the pad of his thumb. My heart had gone stratospheric.

The spell broke when my cell went off. Julie making sure I
wasn’t setting the apartment on fire. I’d been sure at the moment that his
unabashed, intimate reaction had been a symptom of too many shots. Now I was
sure it had been something more.

Because last night I’d submitted to him, on my knees,
begging for him to touch me.
Mine
he’d growled, his rough heavy breath
punctuating the possessiveness behind that single, fascinating word.

I closed my eyes and leaned my hot forehead against the
glass and tried to calm my breathing. We hadn’t had sex. The thought struck me
as funny now that I stood alone in my apartment, in my pajamas, stalking him.
We’d done everything else, but not that.

No, that was a lie too. Not everything. We hadn’t kissed.
That would have been too intimate. Too far. I’d succumbed entirely like a
little girl too quick to love, but he’d played it smart and held back the most
important parts. The parts that couldn’t be undone in the morning. 

Regardless, things were different. I could feel it in my
chest, could feel it in my guilt over watching his apartment like this when I’d
checked to see if he was up a thousand mornings before without feeling like a
crazy ex-girlfriend stalker.

Obsessive Friend After Benefits
- Parfait
d’amour, Grenadine, Amaretto, Sprite. Served in a completely inappropriate
wedding champagne flute.

Things were different.

I paced.

Now I knew his secret. Easy going, handsome, slightly
unkempt Josh masqueraded as a respected Dom in the BDSM community. I didn’t
even know we
had
a BDSM community until I Googled the damn thing. Josh
was trained in rope bondage and, in his own words, liked to dominate the young
women he slept with.

Young women like me.

I closed my eyes and imagined him, broad and tall, his big
hands holding me still, palming my breasts as he tied me up in front of a room
full of strangers. I imagined his racing pulse, his panting breath, his
prominent erection. I could almost remember what it felt like when he held me
against his chest to calm my erratic breathing.

I’d been more powerful and more vulnerable in that one
moment when I’d turned Josh from brother to lover than I had been in my entire
life.

When I opened my eyes, my hands were shaking. That settled
it. Certainly he must have been as worked up over what had happened last night
as I was and neither of us were going to get any sleep until we knew we were
ok. Until we knew that the sun would rise and life would go on and we would
still have each other no matter what happened.

Because he’d promised. He’d promised I’d never have to know
what it would be like without him.

He promised.

I grabbed my hoodie and headed out into the quiet street.
Until midnight South River Boulevard was noisy with cars and music, voices and
high heels on concrete. The morning hours belonged to the rest of us, so quiet
and so still the buildings could have been fake Hollywood props – doors and
windows leading nowhere.

I slipped around the pink convertible, dug out my key and
let myself into the building. Steps led up to the second floor where Josh’s
office and apartment lived.

Tan and brown patterned carpet muffled my footsteps up the
two flights of stairs. The fluorescents did little against the dark, fake wood
paneled walls. It still smelled faintly of the 70s, musty and green. Frosted
glass hid the dark interior of his office and though he was the only apartment
in the whole building, he’d stenciled his apartment number outside the door
beneath a faint, swampy hall light. More than once I’d pretended Josh was a
detective in a hardboiled crime noir and I was some damsel with a missing lover
and a suitcase full of secrets.

Beneath the apartment number was a paper decoration, the
Superman logo, but instead of an
S
it was a
J
. I touched the
faded construction paper, rough beneath my fingertips, and smiled. Brian had
the poor judgment to let me decorate Josh’s twenty-fifth birthday party so I’d
thrown him a superhero party, complete with paper masks and capes. Two years
and he still had this thing hanging up. Something in my chest stirred - how
could I bring the two different memories of Josh together? The guy who’d helped
me grow up or the guy whose name I came screaming last night?