TAMED: #2 in the Fit Trilogy (3 page)

Armando smiled down at her and let out a rough laugh. “Everything okay?”

Nailah jostled her head to clear it. “Yeah, sorry. Sorry, I’m late.” She held up her phone. “Just a little client business.”

“No problem. You wanna get started?”

“Yeah… I…” Nailah could not stop staring. This Armando guy was drop-dead gorgeous. Deeply tanned skin and a thick goatee. And his eyes, a brown so deep Nailah just knew they held all kinds of interesting secrets. The man was tall, chiseled. His hair was long on the top, but styled back and shaved on the sides. Nailah almost shivered.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

No. She really wasn’t. She didn’t know whether to laugh at herself or walk right out the door. “Yeah, I just–I don’t know what my father was thinking. Calling you, I mean.”

“Come on.” Armando took her keys and cellphone, placing them in a cubby by the door. Then he motioned for her to join him over by a rack of weights.

Nailah explained, as they walked across the room. “I had some… issues with my last trainer, and considering your overall aesthetic appeal, I’m not sure why he thought you were a better choice.”

“Are you saying I’m too good looking to train you?” Even his teasing scowl was sexy. Nailah almost looked away.

“No, no. I–”

“Listen. I wasn’t going to say anything, and I’m not assuming anything about you, I just…I know Kalli. I know what he’s about. We’re very happy to have you here with us, but I’m not that kind of guy and this is not that kind of gym. We’ll have a good time. We’ll have some good workouts. It’ll all be good.” His perfect white teeth gleamed under his perfectly trimmed mustache. Nailah didn’t know whether to be pissed off or turned on. He was just so damn attractive, but what the fuck did he know about her and Kalli? Why did he know about Kalli at all? Why’d he have to be so hot?

Nailah swallowed and squared her shoulders. She needed her control back. “I’d appreciate it if we didn’t talk about Kalli.”

Armando offered her a sobering nod. “Deal. Let’s get all your stats down and then you tell me about your goals.”

After Armando weighed her in, she filled out all her info on a tablet—their plan to cut down on paper waste, he explained. They talked about the ass Nailah wanted to sculpt and the bit of her stomach she wanted to trim down. Her arm strength was pretty non-existent, so she wanted to work on that too. When Nailah actually thought about it, Kalli didn’t train her that well. Their sessions were more like foreplay than actually workouts. She maintained her weight through her own effort, but none of the goals she set when she signed up with Kalli had been met. She explained all this to Armando, and for the fifty minutes that followed, he made her work her ass off.

✶

“Lady, those mini blinds are so ugly. Like real fucking ugly,” Nailah said to herself. Everyone teased her about the way she had full conversations with no one else in the room, but she could never come up with a good reason to make herself stop, so she just went with it. Even now, with her office door wide open, her and her brother’s assistants sitting ten feet away, she didn’t really care if she sounded crazy or not.

“Nope, that’s ugly too.”

Mrs. Levitz had sent over some ideas for her daughter’s bedroom, dozens of links for paint colors, light fixtures, and decor that all clashed or looked flat-out hideous. Luckily, Mrs. Levitz was just trying to be more helpful than insistent. Nailah could use maybe one of her ideas. It wouldn’t be too tough to steer her client away from the rest.

“I found him!” Maura shouted from the next room.

“Oh my god, he’s cute,” Brian added. Garai’s assistant was a great asset to Shalaby-Gold Realty, when he wasn’t drifting down the hall to play with Maura.

“Nailah, you wanna see? I think we found some good dirt.”

That had her attention. “Yeah, yeah! Let me see. Bring it in here.”

She absently registered Maura and Brian bolting into her office, chattering on as they came. Nailah finally looked up from her email when Maura plopped her laptop down on the desk.

“That’s him, right?”

After their first workout together, Nailah checked out the Melrose Fitness company website and spent a few moments drooling over Armando’s picture on the ABOUT US page. She had work to do and beauty sleep to catch up on, but as soon as she got back to the office the following day she put Maura up to further recon.

Nailah scanned over the Facebook profile in front of her before her eyes focused on the profile picture itself. The page most definitely belonged to Armando Vasquez, her new trainer and one of the sexiest men she had even seen up close. “Yep. That’s him.”

She should have scoped him out before she went over to Melrose Fitness, but she was so busy and still so irritated with her father, she’d simply put the address into her phone and prayed he was at least tolerable enough to spend a sweaty hour with.

Tolerable would have been a blessing. What she got was a complete punishment. He said his only interest was helping her sculpt the body she wanted. That didn’t change the array of sudden interests that popped up in her mind. How could she not sleep with him? Not only was he a work of art to behold but everything about him, his voice, his demeanor, his smile, even his eyebrows—which weren’t manicured but still managed to be perfectly in control—screamed mount me, do me, fuck me until you can barely move. She had been a fool with Kalli. He was a boy. A pitiful pastime. Armando Vasquez was a man. A man she could really spend some quality time with.

“Okay.” Nailah pushed her laptop to the side and pulled Maura’s computer closer. “Let’s see what we can find.”

“Start with his tagged photos,” Brian suggested. “You can usually find the best dirt from the people who’ve tagged him.”

Nailah clicked on his photos and saw that Brian was right. Armando had tons of public photos of him with his friends. She recognized his co-workers from the gym, this white guy Grant something or other and a pretty black woman named Keira. A ton of pictures of the three of them being fitness-minded at different fitness-related events. There was a picture of Armando with Kalli at a fitness expo. Nailah quickly moved on from that and clicked on a picture that looked like Armando with his family and some friends. A Javier, Maria, and Connie Vasquez were bunched around Armando, who towered over all of them except for a Mark Vasquez, a taller, older black man who stood behind the girl tagged Maria.

The next picture was of the two older men, Javier and Mark, kissing Armando on either cheek. Nailah ignored Maura and Brian’s awwww’s of sweetness, but she had to admit to herself that the picture was pretty cute.

It took some clicking, and a solid five minutes of Brian and Maura saying “Click that one. Click that one,” but finally things got interesting.

The first gem they found was a few years old, a picture of Armando with a different older black man and a younger white girl. Armando was in a t-shirt. The girl was wearing a collar and a corset that pushed her boobs up to her chin. The other man was wearing a leather vest that hung open, revealing some ink on his chest. He looked familiar, but Nailah couldn’t place him. The caption read “Sir and I ran into Master Philip at the expo.” Nailah read it out loud.

“Hello!” Brian added.

“Is that the kink expo they have down at the convention center?” Maura asked.

“What do you know about it?” Nailah couldn’t hide her shock.

“They put a billboard up near my apartment every year.”

“Click on the Master Philip guy,” Brian suggested.

Nailah clicked through to his profile and found more gilded breadcrumbs. This Philip guy was massively into kink. All his pictures were relatively g-rated but most of them were taken at some kind of fetish event. Nailah was surprised when she came across pictures of him and a woman named Evelyn Baker, who he’d tagged as his wife, sitting on the beach. But the rest of the pictures? Leather. So much leather.

“Go to his ‘about’ tab.” Brian suggested. “There. Click that.”

The URL took them to a fetish site,
kinklife.com.

“You have to have a profile to view his page,” Nailah said as she reached a digital roadblock.

“So let’s make one. Here.” Maura grabbed her laptop back and flopped into the chair on the other side of Nailah’s desk.

Nailah tried to focus on Mrs. Levitz and her home decor, but she couldn’t keep her mind off Armando and his interesting group of acquaintances.

“I wonder if he’s still with her,” she pondered out loud.

“With who?” Brian asked.

“Uh, no one.” She was thinking of the girl who’d referred to Armando as Sir, Tina something. The jab of jealousy she felt made no sense but it was there, poking her like a stick.

“Okay. I made you a new email account to register with,” Maura boasted, as if she’d just scored Nailah her dream client. She handed the laptop back to Nailah, as she scurried behind her chair.

“Queen_oftheNile? Really?” Nailah looked at the profile name they’d come up with, right next to a picture of a woman’s hands holding a set of golden handcuffs.

“It’s just for stalking purposes,” Maura said, offering a shrug.

“Very subtle.” Nailah clicked on the link next to Master Philip’s profile. “There’s a lot going on.”

The man’s page boasted over one thousand pictures, a bio longer than Nailah’s arm and more personal associations than one could follow. He was in a relationship with a MistresstoherKnight, who she quickly discovered was his wife Evelyn, but his leather family, whatever the fuck that was, was a list of nearly ten people. Nailah clicked on pictures, knowing she’d have better luck finding Armando on sight rather than looking for some silly nickname.

Third row down, second picture in, there he was. Nailah could almost feel the anticipation coming off of Brian and Maura as they looked over her shoulder.

He wasn’t tagged in the picture, but he’d liked it. His face was clearly visible in a little icon off to the right.

She didn’t wait for any comments or directions from the peanut gallery. His page told her a few things right off the bat. He knew how to pose for a good photo. The larger version of his profile picture showed him shirtless, his body half-cast in shadow. He had tattoos all down his right side and up his left shoulder and left pec. His profile said he was a Dominant and that he was single. So much for the girl from the expo.

Nailah clicked on his pictures.

“Oh my god!” Maura screeched.

“What?!” Nailah’s eyes darted back and forth across the screen, searching for the source of the shock.

“That’s what.” Brian pointed at the screen, at a picture of a very nude Armando where he was sporting a very real hard on.

“Out. Everybody out!”

“What?” Brian said.

“I need a minute and you don’t need to be looking at this. Out.”

“But I need my laptop to work,” Maura said.

“Here.” Nailah grabbed her wallet and slapped all the cash she had in Maura’s palm. “Go get lunch.”

“It’s 10:30.”

“Go to Starbucks! Take Brian. Tell Garai it was my idea. Go.”

“Come on, Mar. She needs some alone time with that picture.” Nailah’s glare wiped the smirk right off Brian’s face as he ran out the door.

When she was finally alone, Nailah let out a deep breath. The nudity wasn’t that big of a deal, on its own, but finding this whole other side to the lighthearted man she’d met the day before was a lot to process. She clicked through the whole set of photos, all erotic nudes of Armando displaying different items. A whip, a set of handcuffs, a length of rope. There were more pictures of him at different events.

She recognized Master Philip and that Grant guy in a handful of them. These guys really knew how to have a good time. And then there were the women. Various women in various states of undress, some in leather, some in lace, some completely nude, over Armando’s knee, on their knees at his feet, trailing a few steps behind him as he led them on a leash.

Nailah felt herself growing hot all over. The craziest thing she’d ever done was have sex with Kalli in the backseat of his car. She’d never imagined a sex life like the one Armando was deeply engaged in. She knew it was none of her business, but she had to know more about Mr_V724.

✶

Something was up with Nailah Shalaby. Not that he knew her really at all, but during their first session she’d been pretty talkative. Gruff and direct, but they talked the whole time. Today, she was acting...weird. She wasn’t talking much and she was pointedly avoiding eye contact with him. She’d admitted to finding him attractive, but insisted in almost the same breath that she’d be able to put that attraction aside so they could work together.

Their first session had gone perfectly well. His own raging attraction to Nailah aside, he thought she was a great client. He’d looked her up before he’d even called her, as was the unofficial protocol with all referrals. It seemed like something he specifically had to do this time, especially from the way Master Philip presented the situation to him. Her page was easy to find on Facebook. Her interior design company popped up after a quick Google search. Digging up information on her proved to be a good idea. It prepared him for just how hot she was.

Nailah Shalaby was a damn goddess. She was nearly a foot shorter than him, petite in some ways, but she was thick with perfectly shaped legs and an amazing ass. He was a little shocked when she said she wanted to “work on it”, but he kept his opinion out of the conversation. She had beautiful caramel-brown eyes and these kissable pink lips, but she was off limits and all business, so that made his job much easier. Or at least it had, before she stopped speaking to him.

During their first session, she joked a little here and there. Complained just enough as he added weights, but stuck it out and pushed through to the end. She even thanked him for pushing her before she took off. Now? He wondered if something had happened. Was she having a terrible day or was she angrier about his knowledge of her relationship with Kalli than she’d initially let on? Did he smell? Finally, he just asked.

“How are you doing today? You’re a little quiet.”

Nailah nodded, but still kept her gaze toward the floor as she completed another curl. “Yeah, I’m great. I’m just sweating it out. Pumping this iron.”