“Do I have a famous speech?”
“I figure there has to be something. Some careful line you throw out there to manage expectations. It doesn’t make any sense that out of all those women, not one was ever under the impression that whatever they had with you meant more.”
“I like to be clear.”
And there was that ruthlessness about him then, and a hint of those hard, stern lines to his face that had undone her earlier. She squirmed in her chair, and when his gaze got that much greener, she knew he saw it. And knew why.
“Hit me with all your clarity, then,” she dared him.
His smile was not reassuring. “There are only two things you need to know. I’m going to tell you exactly what I want. You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to wonder if I’m liking something or not liking something. You don’t have to concern yourself with whether or not I’m having fun. I’ll tell you.”
She blinked, her mind reeling as she tried to connect that to her supposedly easygoing best friend. “Do people normally worry?”
But even as she asked that, she knew better. Had she ever not felt self-conscious during sex? Had she ever not tried to imagine what was going on as if she was crouched on the ceiling, looking down? And she’d certainly been guilty of checking out a partner’s face to make sure he was still enjoying himself. Or to see if she could move things along.
“All you have to do is what I tell you to do,” Dylan said, and his voice was easy. Almost lazy. But she could see that look in his eyes and she knew he wasn’t kidding.
“That’s a bit bossy, Dylan. Don’t you think?”
“I’m a bit bossy, Jenny. As it happens.”
She laughed, but he didn’t. And suddenly her own laugh made her feel much too restless. “Oh. Well. How bossy?”
His eyes seemed greener, then. “Very, very bossy.”
“What if... What if I don’t like being bossed about?”
But he only smiled. “You liked it well enough when I had your pussy in my mouth.”
And once again, he didn’t laugh. He didn’t break. This wasn’t her Dylan, something in her whispered. This was someone else altogether, and she couldn’t possibly figure out how she felt about that. Because she felt too many things at once. And her pussy was hot and wet, and it pulsed.
“This is your secret?” Her voice was far huskier than it had been before. She couldn’t seem to help it. “You’re... I mean, are you a...?”
“I’m a man who likes to be in charge.” Another dark, stirring smile. “And I like my sex the way I like everything else, Jenny. I like it when it’s mine.”
“Oh,” she breathed, in a sudden rush of understanding. “This is the talk.”
“It is.”
“So what happens if a woman says she’d rather not let you boss her around to your heart’s content, thanks very much?” She frowned at him. “Is that it? Sex off the table?”
“I never take sex off the table.” Again, there was that little crook in the corner of his mouth that was so different from the friendly grin she associated with him that she honestly couldn’t tell if she wanted to smack it off his mouth, or put her own lips against it. Maybe both. “Usually I offer a wee challenge, to see if she likes what I have to offer.”
“And what if she doesn’t?”
“I wouldn’t know.” That little crook deepened. “It’s never happened.”
She blew out a little huff of something that could as easily have been outrage as lust. Or as seemed to be the case with Dylan, all of the above. And everything had already shifted between them, outrageously. Why not take it further?
“I accept this challenge,” she told him, grandly. “You can try to convince me.”
She didn’t expect him to laugh, then, but he did. And this laugh, she recognized. It was vintage Dylan, delighted and long.
“Why is that funny?” she asked, flushing.
“I’ve just had my face between your legs,” he replied. “And unless I miss my guess, that’s not something you’d say you much enjoy, generally.”
“What does that have to do anything?”
And the laughter on his face turned too quickly to stern intent. “I already know that you like to be told what to do, Jenny.”
Her flush got worse. Red and hot. “If you already know, then why are we having this conversation?”
“Because you don’t know what you know,” he said with a shrug, as if that was simple. “Your whole life has been filled with sorry wankers who made you work to get yourself off. It took me moments.”
“I’ll have that challenge now,” she said, trying to sound icy.
Now the laughter had moved into his green eyes, making them brighter, which didn’t help. “Right. Are you sure?”
And she wanted to scream, but they were in public. Jenny leaned forward instead. “I’m beginning to think that you’re stalling, actually. What’s the matter, Dylan? Are you afraid that after all this talk you won’t be able to handle your end of the bargain?”
She could only describe the look on his face then as pitying.
“We covered number one, which is that I’m in charge,” he said by way of a reply. As if she hadn’t spoken. “I wouldn’t want to forget number two.”
“What’s that? I fling myself prostrate at your feet and call you master?”
“You can call me anything you want.” There was still laughter in Dylan’s eyes, and that pitying thing, as if she was already over her head and she didn’t know it.
And too many things rolled through her, all at once. Maybe that outrage she’d been reaching for all along. Or maybe something worse. Less palatable.
Maybe something like longing, something in her whispered.
“As I said, I’m a greedy fucker,” Dylan told her, calmly. Much too calmly. “I’m not always gentle. I like it hard and I like it rough, and when I say that I want you to let me be in charge, that also means I want you to trust me. But that goes both ways. I have to trust that you’ll tell me if something’s too intense for you.”
She lifted her chin. “It won’t be.”
“That’s big talk, Jenny. But it’s easy to think you’ll feel one way now, then find you feel a completely different way later. You don’t have to make a speech. All you have to do is tell me. Stop. No. Raise a hand. Push me off. No matter how far we’ve gone, or what’s going on. Do you understand that?”
“I understand that once again, there’s a whole lot of talking and explaining and anticipation, and yet nothing happens.”
“This is nonnegotiable.”
There was that kick to his voice, and the cool, certain way he looked at her. She remembered, yet again and with that same flood of awareness, that this person she was discussing sex with was not the easygoing friend she knew so well. This was the other Dylan. And the other Dylan was one of the most powerful men in the world.
And he wasn’t kidding around.
“I’m beginning to think I trusted you more before all of this,” Jenny said.
“We don’t have to do it then,” he replied, too easily for her liking. He even shrugged. “It’s entirely up to you. I’m happy to go on home, sleep it off and wake up tomorrow as if none of this ever happened.”
Jenny wanted to punch him. Hard, right in his annoyingly gorgeous face. She felt distinctly violent, and it seemed connected to all the other sensations dancing around inside of her. “I have to tell you, so far I don’t really understand how you’ve managed to talk any woman into sleeping with you. Much less legions.”
“Most of them aren’t you,” he replied. Wholly unbothered, it would appear. “I’m not the one who’s stalling, Jenny.”
Ouch.
“I will tell you to stop if I want you to stop,” she said, very directly, and she knew that he was right. That she was the one who’d been stalling, because her pussy
was still swollen, she was too wet and she couldn’t get her head around what happened already. She could feel his shoulder against her thigh and his ravenous mouth, devouring her. And that flush was a part of her now, betraying her and heating her in turn. “And now I want that challenge.”
A different sort of smile played around Dylan’s mouth, then. “Last opportunity to keep that door shut,” he said softly. “To keep it at a crack. Not throw it wide open.”
“Now who’s stalling?”
Dylan didn’t look away. He kept that green gaze trained on her and as she watched, it grew more intense. Until she felt as if his intensity overtook her pulse, then moved through her veins. “There’s a bathroom in the hall,” he said quietly. “We passed it on our way in. I want you to go there. I want you to take off all your clothes, though you can leave your shoes on. I like the heel.”
She was mute. Overwhelmed. But she couldn’t tear her gaze away from his.
By contrast, Dylan looked perfectly relaxed, save for that glittering in his green eyes that made her clit throb.
“I’ll want you bent over, bracing yourself on your elbows. Eyes closed, hair down. And I want you to wait for me.”
“With the door unlocked?”
“I want you to wait for me,” he said again, with that pointed patience that made her feel weak. And something like bubbly. “Can you do that?”
“I...” But her throat wasn’t working properly. And her mouth was so dry she thought she might go up in flames.
Maybe she already had.
“You don’t have to tell me about it, Jenny,” Dylan said in that quiet, powerful way of his. It hummed inside of her. “You don’t have to find the words. You can either get up from the table and make your way to that bathroom, or you can sit here. We can discuss the weather, or the football. Old stories from uni. And everything will go back to normal. It’s entirely up to you.”
The breath in her lungs felt too hot. It took up too much space, and was much heavier than normal breath. Jenny was shaking so hard she worried she might fly apart at the seams, but when she looked down at her hands, she wasn’t shaking at all.
And she wanted to find the words, to find something to help her gain her footing again—
But something washed over her as she gazed into the quiet, unmistakable challenge in his green eyes. It wasn’t quite peace. It was too jagged and edgy for that.
Still, it helped.
And he was Dylan. With new and surprising facets, but still her Dylan. He would keep her safe. He would keep that bubble of his around them, and whatever happened there, it would be okay. She knew without a shred of doubt that he would fight to keep it that way.
Jenny pushed her chair back. She stood and tossed her linen napkin on the table.
Then she turned, and walked off to take his challenge.
And she had every intention of acing it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JENNY MADE HER way through the rooftop restaurant, only vaguely aware that there were other people tucked away in their own little pockets of privacy in the soft, close dark. Because all she could think about was Dylan.
All versions of Dylan.
She found the door that led into the building, then down the same hallway they’d come up—while she’d been reeling from his mouth and barely aware that she was upright and walking.
Sure enough, there was another door with a WC slapped on the front. She stood in front of it for a moment, wracked with indecision, and then swallowed. Hard. She looked around, but there was only the one. No chance that she might arrange herself fetchingly in the wrong bathroom.
She laughed a little bit at that, but when the laugh was done, she was still standing there in the hallway. Definitely stalling, and after all that big talk at the table.
“Right, then,” she told herself bracingly, as if that could launch her forward.
As if what she really needed here was a stern talking to, and then what she was about to do would all seem normal.
But it was Dylan. And she’d come here for this. And even though everything that had happened tonight was so far out of the realm of what she’d imagined or anticipated, it was all right, somehow. Because it was Dylan, and if she believed nothing else, she believed in him.
She always had—but maybe this wasn’t the right time to dig into her long friendship with a man who’d apparently had all of this inside him all the while.
She pushed her way into the bathroom. It was small, but still managed to seem infinitely luxurious the way everything else did in this place. There was only one stall, but it was behind its own full door and it was empty when she checked.
There was dim, inviting light from a sconce on the wall. The sink was ornate, with fluffy towels on the counter and a selection of not only soaps and lotions, but a variety of toiletries.
Including condoms.
And it was only when she could hear the way she was panting—actually panting—that she realized there was no music piped in. It was hushed and quiet here.
“There will be no hiding,” she whispered, to test it. And her own voice seemed unduly loud.
She felt drunk, she realized then. That was different than shakiness, and better, in a way. It made her feel less fragile, and more liquid.
Jenny stared at herself in the mirror that took up the whole of the wall over the sink, and there was absolutely no doubt in her mind that Dylan knew it was right there. And more, that she would be doing exactly this as she decided whether or not to do what he’d asked.
And just as she found him difficult to recognize tonight, she looked like a different version of herself, too. Her eyes were wide and her pupils were dilated. Her hair was full and wavier than usual, because his hands had been in it. Her mouth felt overly sensitive, and her lips were more swollen than before. He’d done that, too.
And the Lady Jenny Markham she had always been would never do something like this. She would never so much as consider it. Lady Jenny Markham was unfailingly polite, scrupulously well mannered, and she did not create scenes. Ever. She did volunteer charity work. She facilitated conversations between the kinds of businessmen who frequented clubs like this, and made them run smoother. She was a credit to her bloodline, as her father liked to tell his friends.
But Lady Jenny Markham was the one who was going to dutifully marry Conrad and live out the rest of her glacially polite days in precisely the manner her father wanted. Quiet gentility, companionship without emotion, like well-appointed rooms in silent houses. It would be a very pretty grave she was walking into. She knew that.
Tonight, she was only a woman. And Dylan had already done things to her that didn’t make sense, that she couldn’t even begin to process, and that had taught her that she was more alive and more hungry than she’d ever dreamed possible.
And she wanted to take this challenge, not because she thought that she wouldn’t like the things he wanted to do to her. But because she wanted him to do them. Now.
She pulled off the soft shirt she wore that managed somehow to look a lot fancier that it was. Then she shrugged out of the tighter tank she’d worn beneath it, that kept her breasts in place without too much fuss. She sighed a little as she pulled it up and over her head, because the fabric dragged against her nipples and it was like lightning stormed through her in response. And it turned out her nipples had a direct line to her clit, and she couldn’t tell the difference, anymore, between what hurt and what might just make her come again.
The bathroom floor was covered in a thick, gorgeous rug, so she kicked off her shoes, then stripped herself of her jeans. Remembering all the while that he’d done it once tonight already.
And he’d already ripped her panties off, so that was it, she was naked. And the sheer illicitness of it, to stand in a bathroom, of all places—naked, in public, when anyone could walk in—
Jenny had to steady
herself with a hand on the counter. She stepped back into her shoes, carefully because she kept shivering, and moved to the sink, as ordered.
As ordered.
The words seemed to take on weight and heft, and she was glad she was bending over because she could prop herself up. And maybe not topple over, that way. The heels made her hips hitch up higher, leaving her angled toward the door to the hall that was directly behind her. Whoever walked in—and God help her, it could be anyone—would see her spread out before them.
Her ass and her pussy were on full display, and there was nothing she could do about that. There was no hiding it, or pretending for a moment she wasn’t doing exactly what she was doing.
The heat inside her leaped into a bright flame, and burned.
Hot. Long.
Jenny dropped her head, letting it droop down toward her elbows. Her hair fell all around her. She shut her eyes.
And then she waited.
And she was shivering, though she wasn’t cold. She could feel the air all around her, and she had never been naked in a public place before—because of course she hadn’t. And anyone could walk in. And even if the only person who did walk in was Dylan, that was its own problem, surely, because what did he plan to do—
The door swung open and a flash of ice cascaded over her, dousing her with a thousand pinpricks of pure fear.
And then in the next moment, the stunning heat of shame.
Jenny was frozen. There was no sound. She heard the door swing shut, and it had to be him. Surely it needed to be him, because anyone else would react to the sight of her. A stranger would make some kind of a sound, some kind of embarrassed cough or laugh—
But there was nothing but silence.
And her breathing was beginning to sound high-pitched and labored. She couldn’t tell if she was hot or cold, but she was sweating either way. Her toes were curling up in her shoes, which was making her hips lift higher, and if it wasn’t him, would whoever it was think that it was an invitation—
Of course they would think it was an invitation—
Take Me Page 9
