“That, my friend, is why I’m calling.” Jefferson didn’t waste a moment. “The woman—that angel you had on the dance floor. Please tell me you’re not involved and please tell me you can introduce me. If she’s a client, then sign me up.”
“Ah…”
Something came through in my voice.
Jefferson hesitated and then asked, “Are you involved?”
“No,” I said after a moment. “No, we’re not.”
“But…” Jefferson blew out a breath. “Okay. Sounds like you want something to be there.”
I pushed back from my desk and moved to the window. “I don’t know what I want.”
“Dom, when have you ever?”
Closing my eyes, I said, “That’s not the issue. Look, I can’t help you out with this, but if you’re wanting to sign on here, I can—”
“Nah, man.” Jefferson cut me off. “The party was amazing and it sounds like you’ve got a good thing going, not that I’m surprised. You’re like Midas. But I barely have time to sleep these days and you know how half your crowd sees me. I’m that uppity lawyer who has the balls to think I’ve got the right to sit at your table.”
I laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in it.
“I’d rather neither of us sit at that table. It’s a pain in the ass,” I told him.
“Fine. We’ll head back to my dad’s old neighborhood and find us some real food—something that’s meant to be eaten, not just sit on a plate and look pretty. And maybe you can tell me about this woman of yours.”
“She’s not mine, Jefferson.” That admission caused a pang every time I thought it.
“You sure about that?”
Before I could answer, he had another call come in. “Okay, rich boy,” Jefferson said. “I gotta go. Been waiting on that call. Listen, you drop me a line if you feel like getting together.”
He was gone before I had a chance to say anything else.
Dropping the phone into the cradle, I braced my hands on the table.
She’s not mine.
You sure about that?
Yeah. I was sure. But I sure as hell
wanted
her to be mine.
I could feel her skin under my fingers, against my tongue. It had been so soft, like silk. And the way it had felt to sink inside her…
“Damn it!”
Tired of fighting it, I dropped down on the couch and leaned back, staring up at the ceiling.
She wasn’t mine. Wouldn’t ever be mine.
But if she was…
There was nothing about her I didn’t like. That core of steel, her humor, the kindness.
And now…groaning, I slid a hand down my chest and cupped myself through the fine wool of my trousers.
I’d entertained a few fantasies of her submitting to me, her low, velvety soft voice rough with need as she said, ‘
Yes, sir’.
She’d submit. One night in bed—no, after that first kiss, I’d known. Maybe that was why I’d been so stupid. I’d been around her long enough to get a rough idea and the thought of it had been slowly driving me crazy, but now I knew. When you’ve been in this lifestyle as long as I have, you start to develop an eye for it.
She’d never fully embrace the life of submission, but I didn’t need that.
I didn’t want a woman who’d let me take her over—I’d
been
taken over.
But I wanted a woman who’d give herself up to me. Who’d yield.
That’s what dominance was about after all. The trust of it, the yielding. A woman—or a man—trusting their dominant enough to yield. I wanted that from Aleena. I wanted her to trust me and yield and give herself over.
I could almost picture her on her knees, chin up but eyes down, her breasts rising and falling with each breath.
I wished I’d turned on the light that night so I could’ve seen every inch of her. I knew the feel and the taste and the shape of her nipples, but I didn’t know the color. I knew she had a neat patch of curls between her thighs—I usually made my lovers wax, but I hadn’t minded with Aleena. Now I wanted to see those curls, to spread her open and lick her, clean her, then make her wet all over again.
More than that, I wished I would’ve taken my time with her.
I wanted to see her on her knees, wanted to watch that pretty mouth part around my cock, watch as she took me as deep as she could and then I’d work with her until she could take me deeper. I wanted to teach her to take my cock into her throat.
My stomach clenched and my cock grew even harder. I swore and the words came out low and rough.
I imagined it was Aleena’s hands on me. I shouldn’t be thinking about her this way. Wondering what it would be like to introduce Aleena to my lifestyle. Seeing those wide, innocent eyes looking up at me while I fucked her mouth. Watching how her light golden skin flushed with pink as I spanked her or used a flogger.
I imagined bringing her to the edge, then taking her over. Holding her as she calmed. Would she cry? The first few times a dominant brought a sub to the edge could be emotional—even beyond those first few times, it could be emotional. I’d had more than a few women cry after…
After
.
Swallowing, I rose from the couch and started to pace.
I didn’t like to think about after. I was considered to be a
kind
dominant, even though I’d gotten more selective. I wasn’t looking to be a therapist and if I suspected any sub I was interested in was as fucked up as I was, then I looked for…calmer pastures.
But it didn’t always happen.
Sometimes, a woman cried in my arms and when it ended, I felt like an ass when I bundled her up and send her home with my driver. Very few people drove in New York and I sure as hell wasn’t putting a partner of mine into a taxi if she was going through some serious emotional upheaval.
Aleena had been the one to hold me, though. And there would be no cabs, no drivers. She lived with me—or at least, she lived under my roof or on my property.
Agitated, when my cellphone rang, I grabbed it, thinking a call would distract me and I could stop thinking about this, even if only for a few minutes.
I realized a second after I’d answered what a mistake that had been.
“Hello, Mom.”
Chapter 9
Aleena
After two weeks, you’d think I could forget about that night.
Or at least put it up on a shelf—like a keepsake.
A hot, sexy, torrid, it-really-shouldn’t-have-happened keepsake. I sighed. But it had happened, so I needed to-deal-with-it sort of keepsake.
It didn’t work, though.
The only thing that halfway kept me from reliving it over and over was work—as in working nonstop.
Fortunately, there was plenty to keep me busy.
Dominic was constantly throwing more work at me, from cleaning the office at the penthouse,
then
the office at the main house and when that was all done, he had me start digging up information on a business down in Philadelphia.
But as busy as I was, even when I fell down face-first into exhaustion, I couldn’t keep myself from dreaming.
More than once, I’d woken up breathing heavily, my heart racing. Sometimes, I would wake up, my hand inside my panties and I’d roll over and muffle my moans into my pillow.
He was my boss. I lived with him. What had happened was in the past and it had been a mistake. Momentary weakness brought on by sympathy for whatever he’d been going through combined with a bout of homesickness compounded by the loneliness of not having spent much time with Molly.
A trifecta of excuses.
That sounded good enough to keep me from completely freaking out. For the first couple of days at least. As more time passed and the tension between us didn’t go away, I started to wonder if I’d completely screwed everything up.
There were times in a girl’s life when there are only two things you can reach for—your phone and your wine.
I grabbed one of the bottles I’d picked up—Dominic had been subtly teaching me the finer points of alcohol and I’d fallen in love with Italian wines, especially once I’d figured out how affordable some of them were. Even though I was making a lot more money than before, growing up middle-class had taught me to respect the almighty dollar.
Then I grabbed my Bluetooth. Fawna had told me that I’d grow to love it and she was right.
By the time I hit the kitchen, I had Molly on the line.
“Aleena!”
I couldn’t help but smile. “Hey, Moll.”
“Are we still on for next week?”
“Yeah.” I’d almost forgotten. Checking my phone, I saw that I still had the note on my calendar, along with a note that I had emailed Dominic and he’d emailed back. I had the weekend off. “I’m not catching you at work, am I?”
Even though she wasn’t allowed to have her phone on the floor, I knew Molly didn’t always follow the rules, and if she’d seen it was a call from me, she might’ve answered the phone anyway.
“No,” she said. “I have the day off. Worked a double both Saturday and Sunday.”
“That sucks,” I said as I tugged down a box of pasta. Francisco had told me he could teach me to make fresh pasta, but I’d politely declined. I’d rather spend what little free time I had doing something other than make spaghetti by hand.
“It is what it is,” she said breezily. “But I know you didn’t call to listen to me complain about work. What’s up?”
I took a deep breath. Here it was. I had two choices. I could lie and tell her I’d missed her and just wanted to talk, which wasn’t technically a lie since I really had missed her. Or, I could be honest and spill my guts about all that had happened over the past two weeks.
After a moment of a brief but intense internal debate, I picked the latter. “I did something really stupid.”
“Spill.” Molly’s voice went from carefree to serious in a second.
“When I first met Dominic, I thought he was hot, you know?”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “You like guys and have eyes. Not much else needs to be said about that. The man’s gorgeous.”
“Thing is, Molly, he’s not just good-looking.”
“He’s rich, too,” she added.
“Well, yeah…but…look, he’s more than that. He’s decent to work for. A lot better than Gary, for sure.” Then I grimaced. “Not that he can’t be an ass, but we all have our moments.”
As I put some water on, Molly said, “Get to it, honey. Whatever it is…oh, hell. Are you falling for this guy?”
Silence was my only answer.
“Shit, Aleena, are you falling for him?” she asked again.
I closed my eyes and leaned on the counter. “I don’t know, Molly.”
She was quiet a moment and then softly, she said, “You know, we can’t always pick and choose with this kind of thing, but…do you think that’s wise?”
For a moment, I just stared down in the pot of water.
“I don’t think I really have much choice,” I whispered.
“Then I think it’s past the ‘
I don’t know’
phase, isn’t it?”
Frustrated, I turned away from the stove and dug out some olive oil. There was fresh garlic—I
could
figure that part out. “Yeah. I think it is.”
“Well…” Molly blew out a breath. “Look, we both know it’s a bad idea to get involved with somebody we work with. It gets messy. Things get awkward. But if you don’t go sleeping with him—”
“Um, yeah. Well, about that.”
“You didn’t.” I could all but hear Molly shaking her head.
“I…kinda did.” I dumped pasta into the now boiling water. “Remember I told you his new company was having this big Valentine’s Day party?”
“Yeah, we had to cancel our plans, right?”
“Well, he asked me to dance.”
Molly said, “Okay, but please tell me you didn’t have a quickie on the floor.”
“Ha, ha.” As the pasta started to boil, I opened my bottle of wine. “Look…he kissed me. It was…weird. Kinda like we bumped mouths or it was no big deal. But it freaked me out and I left. But I ended up going back to the main house later. I’d forgotten my phone and…anyway. I heard him and…it was this nightmare, Molly. It was something awful. I woke him up and he kissed me and things just kind of went from there.”
Molly was quiet for a moment, then she asked, “Were you careful?”
“No.” I had to squeeze the word out. “And now…shit, Moll. Everything’s weird. He acts weird, I act weird. Nothing’s right anymore.”
“No shit,” she said. “Okay, first…you’re going to go get tested.”
“I’m on the pill.”
“Not
that
kind of tested.”
“But…”
“Don’t,” Molly said quietly. “I’m sure he’s told you he’s clean, and I’m pretty sure you are. But you’re going to be smart. Don’t take a chance, okay? We can go together. You’ll probably even feel better for it. Okay?”
Taking a deep breath, I stared at the glass of wine I’d yet to drink. Then I said, “Okay.”
“Okay. Now…second, and here’s the big Q. Do you like him?”
“I do,” I admitted. “I just don’t know what it means because what happened between the two of us can never happen again, so what’s the point?”
“But what if you can?”
“But Molly…” My heart constricted. “I’m just…me.”
“Yeah. You’re you and you’re awesome. Why can’t you have the prince?”
I started to shake my head, then stopped. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“Why? Because he’s rich? Fuck the money. If he’s this great guy like you’re telling me, the only thing that should matter is whether or not he likes you back.”
But there’s more to it
.
I wasn’t about to explain the kind of things Dominic was into, not on the phone. And after that night, he probably knew…oh
fuck
.
“Molly,” I whispered, humiliation crowding up into me. “What if…” I had to stop and take a drink of the wine just to continue, “…what if I was just so bad in bed…I mean, it’s not like I’ve got much experience, you know? What if I was so lousy and that’s why he doesn’t want to talk to me now?”
“Bullshit.” Molly didn’t even pause before the word blasted out of her mouth. “It takes two to tango, baby.”
“But—”
“Two!”
I sighed and closed my eyes, fighting the tears.
Molly was either psychic or she just knew me that well. “Aw, honey…”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re not. But listen…either you have to deal with this or get out of the situation. Which is it going to be?”
“Get out?” I asked.