Torn (Lords of the City #1) (17 page)

Watching me as if I were a strawberry he’d like to savor, Noah leaned back in his seat. “I want to know more about you, Imogen. The parts of you that you aren’t willing to share.”

I nearly choked. “You mean like my fantasies?”

He grinned hedonistically, his teeth brilliantly white. “We’ll get there, but I mean something much more personal. I want to know more about your family. Let’s start with your mother.”

Grateful I had food in my mouth, I took my time to answer, preparing what to say. “There’s not much to tell. As I’ve said before, I have no clue where she is. She’s off the grid. Maybe she remarried, maybe I have brothers and sisters, or maybe she abandons everyone she meets. That’s my guess. She can’t be found because she doesn’t want to be. How else can you explain abandoning both your mother and your daughter?”

“So you’ve looked for her?” he deduced.

Dejected, I put my head in my hand and stabbed continuously at a piece of salad with my fork. “Not me, but my grandma did. She never stopped looking.”

“Sit up,” he ordered, and I did, meeting his inquisitive stare. “You’re angry, and you should be, but tell me more about her past, before she disappeared.”

“She didn’t disappear. She left. And I was a baby when she did. There’s nothing to report.”

He persisted. “There must be photos and remnants from her past around. Your grandmother likely spoke about her. Did she travel? Was she as adventurous as you? Or did she stay home and watch soap operas, dreaming of becoming a housewife? How old was she when she had you?”

My head spun with all his questions. “Is this part of your lesson?” I asked, hoping we would move on to the more enticing part of the night, where he ripped off my clothes, and we replayed our night entangled within the storm.

“A part of a lesson, but not this one,” he said. “Stop stroking your fork up and down like that. It’s distracting me.”

Not realizing I had been, I dropped it onto my plate. “Fine. My mother was living with my grandma when she became pregnant with me. She was twenty-years-old, young but old enough to know better. Even while she was pregnant with me, she went to biker bars. She was a wild child, preferring the suburbs where the danger in the bars was real. She wasn’t adventurous. She was careless. That’s what my grandma always told me, anyway.”

Frustrated, I shook my head. “My grandma was very honest about the type of woman my mother was, the good and the bad. She didn’t keep anything from me. I’m glad my grandma raised me. I’m glad my mother left.”

“You don’t mean that,” Noah said. “If you did, you wouldn’t be so hurt. You said your grandma told you the good and the bad. What was the good?”

I sighed. “She had a thing for birds. If she ever found a bird with a broken wing, she would nurse it back to health.”

“Interesting,” he said contemplatively. “Abandoning you was horrendous, but did you ever think that perhaps she thought she was doing what was best for you?”

“Don’t do that,” I protested. “Don’t make her out to be some sort of unsung martyr. If she cared at all, she would have come back at some point. She never came back. She never wrote. She never made any contact. Never. I’m lucky my grandma was full of enough love to make up for both my parents.”

“And what of your father? Do you know who he is?”

“Not a clue. Any time my grandma asked, my mother claimed she didn’t know.”

To my relief, Noah finally backed off. “I wish I could have met your grandma. She sounds like she was a wonderful woman, a real classy lady.”

I laughed. “Maybe not classy, but she had her virtues. I wish you could have met her too.” I choked out the sentiment, suddenly emotional.

“Is it too much?” he asked, reaching across the table to take my hand. It was warm, a hearth that comforted me from the woes of my past.

“No,” I said, sniffing the tears away. “I like talking about my grandma. She makes me happy. I would much rather talk about her than anyone else in my family.”

“How did she pass?”

“Typical old age. She had a stroke. I found her in the house after a camping trip I’d taken with my friends. She was still alive, but she died a few days later in the hospital. Up to that point, she had a lot of medical problems. It wasn’t her first stroke. After suffering from her first, she was paralyzed and spent the rest of her days in a wheelchair.”

“So you cared for her?”

“I tried, but I was also going to class and working. I had a lot of help from the community, especially the senior center. Milwaukee is a great place for that.”

“Peter told me how you opened your grandma’s house up to them during the storm. Clearly, you’ve adopted her virtues. You are honorable, Imogen. Usually, I choose my personal assistants from the hundreds of applications sent to me each year. Not you. You were handed to me by fate. When people do good deeds, they should be rewarded.” His voice dropped. “I’m going to reward you, Imogen.”

“I don’t need to be rewarded. That’s what friends do.”

Leaning forward, his hand moved up my arm, and he lightly caressed my cheek. “I’m going to reward you,” he said with his usual intensity.

Now I understood. The air around us changed, becoming much more in tune with the night. “How?” I asked, enjoying the way the pulse in his neck throbbed.

“I plan to awaken you,” he said, the control he emitted more mouthwatering than the food before us. “With a precise set of lessons, your body will experience a revelation. These lessons are based on levels. First, you must let go of your inhibitions. It’s the most basic level there is.”

I was entranced. “My inhibitions?”

“That’s what tonight is for. Only by letting go, by surrendering to higher forces, can you fully experience gratification.”

“Higher powers? Like church?” With his touch sending sparks across my cheek, I was reduced to short sentences, my mind melting.

He chuckled. “I like to think of it as a form of worship.”

Summoned by a snap of his fingers, a waiter came and set a small platter in front of me. At its center was a red chili pepper, long and smooth with a thick green stem.

“The chili is mild,” Noah assured me. “I would never hurt you. Before we go any further with any of our lessons, remember that. Everything I do, I do for your benefit.”

“I trust you,” I said. And I did trust him. Not with my heart, but with my body.

He traced the plumpness of my lips. “Take the chili and slowly put it in your mouth, but don’t chew. Let the flavor linger on your tongue. Allow your senses to take over. Don’t speak. Just feel.”

Blushing, I looked around at the empty rooftop. “Are the waiters gone?”

“They were instructed to leave after serving this last plate. It’s just the two of us, but that shouldn’t matter. Don’t let your insecurities hold you back from experiencing great pleasure.”

Gingerly, I picked the chili up and licked its tip, testing its mildness. Satisfied, I stuck it in my mouth and wrapped my lips firmly around it. A glaze of honey coated it, filling my mouth with a sweet joy, but the spice dominated. It heated my body, from lips to my breasts, down to my core. Closing my eyes, I felt the breeze slightly lift the hair off my neck.

“Imogen, you make it very difficult to get through this lesson. Watching you like that, I want to rip your clothes off.” He stood from the table. “Come with me.”

Bordering the rooftop was a tall guardrail. Noah pinned me against it and kissed me, licking the flavors of the night off my tongue as his hands crept up my thighs, stroking the area inches lower than where I needed him to stroke. More than anything, I wanted to feel his fingers inside me once again, caressing the pink flesh of my pussy, but I was acutely aware that the guardrail was made of glass.

“People can see,” I objected, but it didn’t stop him. His fingers inched closer to my folds.

“That’s the point. Toss aside your inhibitions. Let me show the world the beauty that’s in it. Let me show it you.”

Mesmerized by his raw manliness, I gave in, sodden as he played with the hairs of my manicured curls. “Teach me, sir.”

Harshly, he spun me around so that I was pressed against the glass, and he pulled my backside towards him, forcing me to arch my back. “This dress stays on,” he said huskily, “but these come off.” Going to his knees, he pulled down my panties and rubbed his nose next to my pussy. He licked my thigh, his tongue firm and warm against my skin as he drank in my juices, ripening me. “Your scent is splendid; your taste is ambrosial.”

An ache rolled across my stomach, sharpening my breath. It freaked me out how intimately he was acquainting himself with my body, but it was also utterly euphoric. I pressed my backside out further, giving him access to all of me. He could have me any way he wanted. As the spotlights of the city continued to roam the skies, I didn’t care if the whole damned world watched.

As he lapped at the wetness on my thighs, he pushed the hem of my dress over my hips and rubbed the cheeks of my ass, stimulating me fully. I longed for him to move his tongue to my pink flesh, to sip from my cup, but finished with his appetizer, he stood. Throbbing for more, I heard the shuffle of fabric and the sound of a wrapper being opened.

“Surrender,” he ordered and grabbed a fistful of my hair and pulled my head back. Holding onto it like a rope, he circled his free hand around my hips and plunged into me, filling me with his hard warmth, which augmented as he crashed his hips into my backside, stretching and rubbing my flesh in endless bliss.

Panting, my breath left steam against the glass of the guardrail, which rocked from his glorious siege. Feeling whole with his cock inside of me, the happiness I knew when I was with Noah overwhelmed me. As if he sensed this, he ran his palm down my spine. Jolts of electricity shot across my body, and I moaned loudly and freely, letting the night hear my cries of pleasure as I opened my eyes to watch the city sparkle below me.

Giving back, I clenched my pussy around his cock, tightening for him. “Imogen, you she-devil,” he breathed and slowed his pace, escalating my pleasure, which I swallowed back, allowing it to build deep within me. First, my skin tingled from the build-up, and then it went numb, my release close.

“I’m going to come,” I whimpered. “I can’t hold back any longer.”

“Neither can I.”

As my body began to flush, he pounded me with relentless passion, powerful strokes bruising the inside of me. The guardrail shuddered with me, and I climaxed, rising above the rooftops, flying free like a bird. His cock swelled within me with a virile heat, and then he groaned, joining me in flight.

While the lava of my joy seeped out of me, I rested my head against the cool glass, trying to catch my breath. Allowing me time to recover, Noah affectionately ran his hand through my hair and traced the perspiration along my back.

“And the show goes on,” I uttered when I was able to speak again.

“There was no show,” Noah informed me, refusing to let go of my hair, as if I were a thing to be petted. “The guardrail is a two-way mirror. We can see out, but no one can see in. It was a lesson, but the lesson is over. You’re not for show. You’re only for me.”

S
itting on my bed with my legs folded together, I flipped through the photo album that I’d brought with me from Milwaukee and stopped at the snapshots of my tenth birthday party. We had celebrated it at the senior center with my grandma’s friends, who gathered behind me in the photos with their arms raised high, cheering me on as if they were a bunch of teenagers touring with a band. Heaped on a table were scratch tickets, their gift to me. I’d won fifty bucks that day, which my grandma had collected for me.

“Don’t tell anyone you played the tickets,” she’d said that afternoon when we’d popped away to the local convenience store. “You’re too young.”

“Do I get to keep the money?” I’d asked.

She squeezed my hand as we entered through the sliding glass doors. “Every last penny. That’s five hundred wishes.”

“Five thousand,” I corrected her. Math had always been one of my better subjects.

“And what will you do with five thousand wishes?”

“Buy ice cream. And a telescope.”

Returning to the party, I’d been upset to learn my birthday cake was in the shape of a pickup truck. I’d wanted a princess cake, but my grandma was trying to broaden my mind, encouraging me to live outside the roles expected of me. At the time, I was too upset to understand any of that, and I threw a tantrum, bawling my eyes out.

The next day, I was still angry, so I ran away, high tailing it to the nearest bus stop. Recognizing me, one of the older fellows from the senior center sat beside me on the bench as I planned my escape. Every day, George wore a checkered shirt without fail, recorded in my many photos.

“What are you doing out here all alone?” he asked.

“I’m leaving town, and I ain’t coming back.”

He whistled. “That’s a big decision. Where will you go?”

“Anywhere but here.”

“That doesn’t sound like much of a plan. Aren’t you afraid?”

“No. I’m not afraid of anything,” I said boldly.

“You should be. The world is a scary place. I’m not saying tuck yourself away under a rock, I’m just saying that you have to be smart enough to know what you should or shouldn’t be afraid of. Some people, they cower away from the most trivial of things. Like honesty. Others, they put themselves at unnecessary risk.”

“I’m smart,” I claimed.

“I know you are. So tell me, is what you’re running away from worth losing all that you love here?”

I thought about it. “No,” I decided. “I want to stay.”

“I think that’s a wise decision,” George said and walked me home to my grandma, who was running around the street with curlers in her hair, frantic to find me.

The lesson Noah had taught me was not too dissimilar. I couldn’t let inhibitions hold me back. Fear wasn’t worth the risk of losing all that I loved, including the anxiety of being judged by my roomie. Sighing, I closed the photo album and set it aside before going into the front room to tell Julia everything. Too many unknowns circled around in my head. Julia was a constant, an erratic constant, but a constant. I had to tell her about my agreement with Noah. If I didn’t, and she found out elsewhere, she would be hurt, enough that it could ruin our friendship.