Intimate Persuasions (11 page)

Derek laughed. “It’s kind of funny when you think about it. I mean, I slept with her before I ever slept with her. Sorry, bad joke. Anyway, one day I came home from work and she was already at my place. She had candles and flowers everywhere, not that I needed them of course, but she did. She went to great lengths to make sure that her first time, our first time together, was perfect. And it was, you know. It was more than perfect. If I hadn’t already been in love with her then, that night sealed the deal. I was hers, completely, from that moment on.”

Ann closed her eyes and tried to hide the emotions swirling inside of her. While her and Quinn’s first time together hadn’t been romantic with flowers and candles, there was still something deep inside that happened to her, making her feel so at peace and content. So she knew exactly what Derek meant when he said it was perfect.

“So, to speed things up a bit to my devastating heartbreak, we moved in together, did everything together. We were absolutely inseparable, and it wasn’t a bad thing. It was great actually. She got a job working at that hotel you were staying at and she was happy. We were happy. Until a little over a year ago. Then everything changed.”

Ann reached her hand across the desk to take Derek’s in hers. The happiness that was in his eyes only minutes ago had vanished. He was upset again and hurting. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

Derek squeezed her hand and shook his head. “No. It’s good for me to talk about it. And truth be told, you’re easy to talk to. You don’t mind hearing it?”

“No, I’m honored that you would trust me enough to talk about it with me.”

“Okay, her sister, you know the one whose ID she had stolen?
 
She was getting married. We were both going, but the weekend before the wedding, she flew to
Denver
for the bachelorette party. It was no big deal. I loved her and trusted her. We actually just got engaged about a month before, so I had no reason to think that I should be worried. But I was wrong.”

Ann waited. Whatever he was about to tell her was killing him. She could see the pain reflected in his eyes.

Derek looked up at her and then away. “They went to an All Male Revue. I mean, I knew she was going. I didn’t care, heck I’d gone to bachelor parties that had ended up in strip clubs so I didn’t see anything wrong with it. But apparently this one guy, a dancer was hitting on her pretty bad. She did the right thing. Told him she was engaged and that she was taken. So I should have been happy, right?”

“Right. Why do I get the impression that you weren’t, though?”

“When I got out there to the wedding I overheard some of the bridesmaids talking at the reception. Talking about how this guy had been hounding her all week. Apparently, Sandi had met him a couple of times for drinks. Oh damn, was I pissed. I confronted her later that night at the hotel. She admitted to meeting him twice. But she swore that nothing happened. She swore that she only went there to insist that he leave her alone. She claimed she told him that she was engaged and she wasn’t free to see other men.”

Ann wondered if he realized what he’d said.

“I know, that’s what I thought, too. Not once while she was telling me how innocent their meetings were did she tell me that she didn’t want to see him. She kept saying that she was already taken, so she wasn’t
free
to see him. Like I was standing in her way or something. Needless to say, I was pissed off.”

Ann started to speak, but he quickly cut her off.

“No, wait for it, it gets better. So, we have a huge fight and I fly back home by myself. A week later she comes crawling back to me. Saying that she’s sorry and that I’m what she really wants. Not him. I should have been ecstatic, but I knew there was something she wasn’t telling me. And I also knew that she could never look me in the face and lie to me. So I asked her what it was, and I got to tell you a part of me wishes I hadn’t. Because at that moment my heart literally stopped beating. I stood there and listened while she told me she slept with him.”

“Oh, Derek. I’m so sorry.”

He shook his head. “Don’t be. She’s the one that did it. I, being the dumbass that I am, was willing to give her another chance. And despite the fact that I was angry, jealous and pissed off as all hell, things were going okay for about a month. But I could sense something was off. She changed, if only a little, but I could tell. I told myself it was just guilt that she was feeling. But when I came home one day I learned just how stupid that was.”

Derek’s eyes welled up with tears. He couldn’t fight the emotions that overcame him with the memory of that day. “I walked in my house, expecting to sit down to dinner with her. I guess I was earlier than usual or she had lost track of time, because the second I walked in the house I heard them.”

Derek ran his fingers through his hair and groaned in frustration. “I planned to just walk down the hall and walk in on them, if nothing else then for the pure satisfaction of seeing the look on her face when I caught her. But I stopped right outside the door. She was screaming, shouting really, telling him to fuck her harder, fuck her like she loves it, like Derek couldn’t. She actually said those words. That I couldn’t fuck her like she wanted. I heard a slap, peeked in the door and saw that she was getting spanked with a flogger.”

Derek saw the confused look on her face. “It’s like a small rubber whip. Fuck, Ann. You have no idea what it felt like to know that not only she had gone to another man, but that she didn’t think I could do those things for her.”

Derek saw that she was once again confused. “See I have a bit of an unusual appetite when it comes to my sexual preferences. But with her, I always held back. I guess I thought she was too special to subject her to any of my deepest, darkest desires. And I can see from the look on your face that I’ve made you uncomfortable.”

“No. No, I’m just surprised. So, if she, um, needed that and you wanted it too, why couldn’t you work things out?”

“Because I didn’t go in right away. I stayed outside the room and listened and watched. I don’t know why, but I felt like I had to. And unfortunately, I’m glad that I did. Because she kept talking. She kept telling him things, intimate things about us. She told him how I was too nice to her, how she wanted me to force her to do things like he did. She also told him that it never felt as good as it did when he was fucking her. That was the last straw; I stormed in the bedroom and kicked the asshole out of our house.”

“That must have been horrible for you,” Ann told him sincerely.

“It was. It was the worst pain I’d ever felt in my life. She actually turned to someone else because she thought I was too good to her. I mean shit, Ann. I fucking loved her so much I thought I would die from it. I never wanted to subject her to the kind of kinky things I was into. Sorry. I don’t know what else to call it.”

“That’s okay. What would you call it?” Why she asked, she had no idea. But curiosity had gotten the better of her. Because despite the pain of his story, she couldn’t help but feel some sort of connection to it. She herself was constantly worried that she wouldn’t be enough to make Quinn happy. That eventually he would tire of her. When she was with him, he made her feel like the most precious woman on the planet, it was because of this that caused her to worry. Why and how could she be so lucky to have such a wonderful man in her life? It was that constant question that nagged at her relentlessly, convincing her that it was only a matter of time until he got bored and moved on.

“Have you ever heard of BDSM?”

Ann swallowed a lump in her suddenly dry throat. “Yeah, I’ve heard of it but I don’t really know much about it.”

“Well, it’s not really appropriate for me to explain it to you, but suffice it to say that before Sandi, I was heavily into it. I sort of gave it up for her.” He laughed. “Ironic, huh? I mean I give it up for her, and it’s what she really wants. Anyhow, there was a lot of yelling and screaming. I actually considered giving her one more chance. I know. It was stupid to consider, seeing as how she cheated on me at least twice. But I loved her. I didn’t want to imagine my life without her. She was actually the one that ended things. She said that she didn’t believe me about my lifestyle before her. She said I was just using it as a ploy to get her back. That pissed me off. I mean the Sandi that I fell in love with would have never acted so cold to me. But this new woman acted like I should and would do whatever I could to get her back. It was sort of demeaning. Bottom line is that she said I was too nice of a guy to fuck her hard like she wanted.”

Ann gasped at the idea of a woman speaking to her man in such a horrible way.

“I know, so here we are. A year later and still being called ‘a nice guy’. Sometimes it just plain pisses me off.”

“Derek, you know that even if you gave her what she wanted that she might have still cheated on you. Because if she really loves you she wouldn’t have turned to someone else, she would have talked to you and told you what she needed.”

“You mean like you love Quinn?”

Ann nodded. “Yeah. I do love him. But you already know that. So, how about that drink huh?”

“Thought you weren’t much of a drinker,” he said as he poured two small shots.

“Well, you have the heartache of losing someone you love and I have the heartache of knowing that I’m going to lose someone that I love.”

“Ann, you have to stop thinking like that. You’re important to Quinn. You matter to him.” He insisted.

She winced as she let the warm liquid burn down her throat. “Eew. Yeah well, I’ve been important to other people, too. Just never enough to keep around.”

Derek hated that she was so hard on herself, so insecure of how Quinn felt about her. Soon Derek was going to have to talk to his brother. Because if Ann went on with this constant fear much longer, she was probably going to burst under the pressure.

“So, now I guess we drink.” Derek raised his glass to her. “What should we drink to?”

“Hope?”

He grinned. “That sounds pretty damn good to me.”

Chapter Nine

Quinn was exhausted. He pulled into his driveway and almost got out of the truck before he realized that Ann’s car wasn’t there. Instantly he panicked.
What could have happened to her?
He reached for his phone, already heading towards the restaurant. He listened as the phone rang and rang until finally her voicemail picked up.

“Ann where are you? Call me back.”

Not wasting time Quinn dialed Derek, hoping he would know where Ann was. He glanced at the brightly lit green clock on his dashboard which read 2:45 a.m., while Derek’s phone proceeded to go into his voice mail as well.

“Derek, call me man. Ann’s missing.”

After hanging up, Quinn glanced at his phone display. Checking to see if there was a little message symbol, hoping that he might have missed a call from her earlier that would have explained her absence. For reasons he couldn’t explain, he felt a fear clawing at his gut.
What if something had happened to her?
She became so important to him that he had never stopped to think what it would be like if she was taken away.

No. Don’t think like that
, Quinn chided himself.
She’s fine, everything’s okay
. They probably just had a big rush at the restaurant and she was working late. Although knowing the time he figured that was highly unlikely. Especially seeing as how they stopped seating at nine o’clock.

Quinn turned the corner and the restaurant was finally in sight. He slowed down as he pulled into the lot. Not for safety but because he was perplexed. In the parking lot he saw Ann’s and Derek’s cars. Why were they still here?

He pulled his truck into a parking space and slowly got out. He could have gone to the front entrance and rang the little service bell they used for when they weren’t open and the doors were locked, but he didn’t. Instead he walked around to the back and found his copy of the restaurant key on his ring.

He didn’t like the feeling that was overtaking him. He was scared to go inside. The ramification of what the woman he loved could be doing at close to three o’clock in the morning with his brother when she was supposed to be home sent a nauseating roil to his gut. What if he walked in on something he wasn’t ready to see?

Damn it
. He took a deep breath and stuck his key in the lock. Only it wasn’t locked. What in the hell? He walked in the restaurant and stopped when he heard noises. Squeaking? Someone was making squeaking sounds? Then he heard Derek, breathless, gasping for breath and making incoherent sounds.
Son of a bitch!

Quinn stormed through the restaurant until he got to the back office. He placed his arm on the door and flung it open in one giant swoosh of anger. Nothing that he imagined in his wildest fears prepared him for what he saw now.

Ann and Derek turned toward the door, startled out of their previous activity. They looked at Quinn with eyes wide, looked back at each other, and then burst back into their laughter.

Quinn looked at the two. The drunk two. They were completely skunked. The noise he had heard was them laughing so hard that they could barely breathe. So, while he was thinking the worst about the two people that meant the most to him, they were sitting in here getting shit faced.

“What in the hell is going on here?” He demanded of them.