Shades of Submission: Fifty by Fifty #1: Billionaire Romance Boxed Set

by Hunter, Adriana

  Then a hand closed around my right ankle, pushing my stocking-clad leg high, my foot over his shoulder. With his other hand he reached down, took my other ankle and pushed it up so that both legs were against his chest, my feet over his shoulders, and he was bearing down on me so hard I felt as if I would snap in half at any moment.

  His hardness found me, then, sliding against my wet heat, its length gliding through my folds, grinding against my clit as I pushed up to meet every thrust. Then, with a slight twist of the body, he pulled back and the swollen head of his manhood pressed against my opening, slid inside and I felt myself being parted, penetrated, forced open by him.

  He drove deep, slowly sinking into me until I was filled and then filled more, and still he kept sliding slowly inside me. Just as I thought I could take no more, his balls pressed up against my ass, and his pubic bone ground up against my clit. I’d never been had so deeply before... I felt so full!

  He pushed again, a slight movement, and it was as if every sensation was magnified by the size of him, by how full I was. His length, deep inside me, the pressing of his balls against my ass, the wetness and heat between us, that grinding... oh, that grinding against me, taking that hot electric feeling and intensifying it, a heat spreading through my belly, a tightening... sudden and unexpected in its intensity.

  My entire body bucked against him as I tightened around him and that wave of sheer, intense pleasure swept over my senses, so sudden and overwhelming that I almost blacked out.

  And again, a tightening, a wave passing through my entire body.

  Over and over, until finally each wave was less than the one before. I’d never climaxed so intensely, or for that long, before. I’d never known anything like it.

  As I slumped against him, spent, he started to move. Small thrusts at first, then pulling back his entire length before driving hard and deep inside me again.

  Normally for me, one big orgasm is it, but there was something different this time, his sudden rough intensity arrested that inevitable slide down from the peak of climax, drew it out, transformed it, so that each time he slid home there was an echo of what had just happened, a tightening, a surge of sensation welling up inside me...

  It was taking me over, swamping my awareness, so that all I was conscious of was each peak of pleasure as he drove his length deep inside me. I couldn’t think, I don’t think I could even see straight.

  He was being so hard and brutal with me, he really was fucking me senseless.

  Harder and faster with each thrust, it felt as if I was about to burst, split open by his need.

  His head, his face... they’d been buried into the space between my neck and shoulder, but now he arched his back, raising himself, and those predator eyes locked on mine and suddenly there was a whole new level of intensity to it all.

  With each thrust, I rose to meet him, welcoming him as deep as he could go, reluctantly slumping back as he withdrew, and then rising to meet him once more.

  He plunged his head down, and his mouth found mine, a savage, brutal kiss as he drove deep inside me and there was a sudden blossoming of liquid heat in my belly and he stayed there, deep, filling me as he came. And then, as his hardness inside me transformed, started to ebb, I felt a new heat, a new tightening, and I was climaxing again, pushing up against him, keeping him firm inside me as my body spasmed and tightened and then finally, slowly, eased, settled, slumped.

  He lay there, on top of me, our hearts hammering in our chests, his face against mine, him still deep inside me, spent, and into his ear I gasped, “I’m still mad at you, remember? I’m still mad.”

  22.

  I was still mad at him. I was confused and mad at the same time.

  Mad that I couldn’t pin him down. I didn’t know him. A man who was so elemental, so variable. Which was the real Willem Bentinck-Stanley? The sensitive yet strong man I was teeteringly close to falling for? Or the bad boy, who more than one person had warned me to steer clear of? The arrogant manipulative man who I always felt was gaming me, or the one so close to spilling tears for a woman who had only ever seemed to cause him trouble? A woman who had died because she had got too close to whatever dangerous activities Will was involved with...

  I didn’t know. I couldn’t work it out, couldn’t work him out.

  And I couldn’t quite allow myself to relax into this relationship. I couldn’t quite trust it.

  He was an evasive man. Quite natural for someone who had every reason to be wary of people, for a man who moved in Government circles, with an office at the House of Lords and frequent trips around the world on God knows what business. But whatever his good reasons might be, it did little to put me at ease.

  We met for dinner. A pretty conventional date, for goodness sake. This was the man who had pursued me with roses, had me driven to meet him for drinks at the House of Lords, who had whisked me off to a hotel he owned in the Alps just for dinner... An evening at a little Soho bistro was such a refreshing change from all that.

  He sent a car for me, driven by Maninder, the giant of a Sikh who served as Will’s driver, minder, assistant and who knows what else? I tried to make small talk, but Maninder was a man of few words. He dropped me off at a little place on a side street just off Dean Street, a place with a small frontage of bull’s-eye windows. There was a bar at the front, then eating space stretching a long way back.

  Will stood when he saw me, and gestured to the seat opposite him across the small table. I went over, we kissed on the cheek, and for a moment I thought it was going to be all rather formal. Then he raised a hand to my jaw, turned me slightly – such a delicate touch, and yet so commanding – and kissed me briefly on the lips.

  I sat, blushing again, God damn it! How did he do that to me?

  Those predator eyes, watching me, a slight smile on his face.

  He’d shaved for this evening, and as I returned his look I wasn’t quite sure whether I preferred him well turned out like this or just a little rough, a little dangerous. Prompted by that thought, my head suddenly filled with flashbacks to that evening when he’d tied my wrists to the sofa with my torn blouse and had me, quite brutally.

  That did nothing for the blushing.

  I looked down at the menu, and concentrated on the music playing in the background, Madeleine Peyroux’s “Dance Me to the End of Love”.

  He reached across the table and touched the back of my hand, gently, briefly, and a bolt of desire stabbed through me from that touch. I’d never known anyone who could have such an effect on me. Ask me there and then and I’d happily have skipped dinner.

  “Mersea oysters,” he said. “The native oysters have just come into season. These ones will have been in the River Blackwater only a few hours ago. You like oysters?”

  I nodded. I didn’t trust my voice. God, I felt like a schoolgirl before him!

  “Let’s have the oysters, then. And a Pinot Noir? Not an obvious combination, but believe me, they have one from New Zealand’s Awatere Valley here that’s perfect. The vineyard owner made me try it with oysters he insisted it would change my life. He wasn’t far wrong.”

  This was smooth Will, the one who showed me his Rembrandts and van Goghs, who whisked me to the Alps and dressed me in designer dresses and shoes. The one who took all that for granted. Doesn’t everyone know vineyard owners on the other side of the world?

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You can relax. You don’t need to perform, okay?”

  For a moment he looked like he was going to deny it, then a tension seemed to ease out of him and he gave me a boyish grin. “You do strange things to me,” he said. “You make me tongue-tied. You occupy my thoughts whenever we’re apart. You make me want to show off, be extravagant. I... I don’t really do relationships. They never seem to work out. But you... you do things to me, Trudy Parsons. Strange things.”

  “Good things?”

  He just nodded.

  “You do things to me, too,” I said. “Like rip my clothes off and tie me up
to my own furniture and make me feel like I’ve never felt before. Like... like occupy my thoughts, too. Strange things, indeed.”

  Just then I became aware of the presence of someone standing at my shoulder. The waiter. How much had he heard, and did I even care?

  “We’ll have the Mersea oysters,” Will said, “and a bottle of The Crossings Pinot Noir, please.” Then, to me: “You were saying...?”

  When the waiter had retreated, I said, “Tying me up. That’s what I was saying.” I liked the way his eyes widened just a little when I said those words. They did that at other times, too, like when he was buried deep inside me, barely moving, savoring every sensation. “After you’d ripped my blouse off. Tying my arms above my head so that I was helpless. You’ve done that before, haven’t you?”

  “You’d rather I hadn’t?” One eyebrow cocked, and still that smile.

  I shook my head. “I liked it,” I told him. I wondered then if I should tell him that I’d done that kind of thing before, too. A neck-tie around Charlie’s wrists; the handcuffs Charlie had surprised me with one day, how he’d kept me locked to the bed frame for nearly an hour one time, drawing everything out deliciously...

  Now, as if reading my mind, Will reached for his neck-tie and loosened it a little, undoing his top button. He smiled. He knew what he was doing. Were we really talking bondage on our first normal date?

  I looked down again, then away.

  The oysters and wine came, and Will was right. The light fruitiness of the Pinot Noir went perfectly with the saltiness of the oysters, bringing out their meatiness and highlighting the metal tang of their aftertaste. I watched as he raised each oyster to his mouth, tipped and swallowed, and all the time, his eyes never left mine.

  I stretched one leg, curling my foot around his calf, and his eyes widened again.

  I leaned towards him, touched the back of his hand, just as he had touched mine, and said, “We should be naked.” Then I took another oyster and downed it.

  Those eyes. Those dark, intense eyes. In those eyes I was naked already, I knew.

  “In your head,” I said. “Tell me what’s in your head.”

  “You,” he said. “Just you. Everything that is you.”

  I’d expected him to be more graphic. To tell me his fantasies, what he wanted to be doing with me right then. But those few words... They did so much more than that.

  I ordered quail breasts, remembering that he had ordered them for me in Austria. There were probably less subtle ways to tell him I was his, but I liked the symmetry of me choosing what he had chosen. He ordered steak, and I wondered whether there was meaning there too: red meat, man food, the alpha male asserting himself. Or maybe he just fancied steak.

  We talked a little about day to day things: my work at Ellison and Coles, the food and wine – I’d gone on to a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc with my quail; he’d stuck with his favorite Pinot Noir – we’d talked of Ethan and Eleanor, and the fact that they had returned from their honeymoon in the Maldives that afternoon.

  There was history between Will and Ethan, and Charlie, my ex. The Cabal, and Sally Fielding.

  I remembered a conversation with Julie, then. We were talking about how she researched her books and I remembered her saying, “Research? Always go to the source, Trude. Always go to the source. Everything else is just hearsay. Chinese whispers.”

  So I asked him.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened back then? You, Ethan, Charlie. Sally Fielding. That whole Cabal thing?”

  He shrugged and all of a sudden he was transformed again, to the slightly flustered Englishman persona, that Hugh Grant thing he sometimes did. “Oh, you know,” he said, knowing damned well that I didn’t.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Young men, the college high life, all a bit of fun, a bit of a lark...” I hadn’t meant it to sound so harsh, but that’s just how it came out. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been bottling it up – the curiosity, the resentment at how he would just brush the subject away with a few dismissive strokes.

  “I... well, yes,” he said. “It was a long time ago. Look, do you really want all the gory details about my sordid past? It was nothing. Just a bit of fun that got out of hand.”

  “A bit of fun that ended up with rehab, blackmail, and a woman dead.”

  He put his hand on mine, and the contact was perfect. I didn’t want to be confronting him, but I didn’t like feeling that I was being kept in the dark, either. That touch reminded me of what we had between us.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to...” His hand tightened on mine, cutting off my apologies.

  “It’s fine, Trudy,” he said. “I know there’s... well, there’s a lot of shit in my life and I have this stupid protective thing where I just want to shelter people from it. It kicks in automatically. I’m not deliberately keeping you in the dark.”

  I decided then not to press, and almost immediately I wondered if that was exactly what he had intended. Damn, but this man generated so many mixed reactions in me! So many good ones, but also this paranoid suspicion, this feeling that I was being gamed, played like a fish on a line.

  But then, after a pause, he went on, and I felt bad for ever doubting him.

  “There’s not a lot to say,” he said. “Me, Ethan and Charlie, we were really close for a time. We used to party together. We had fun. There were girls. Girls like Sally. Sometimes the girls would move around between us: one week with me, the next with Charlie or Ethan. It was fun and we were young.”

  It was strange hearing him talk of my ex and my brother like this. A side of their earlier lives I’d never known about.

  “Please don’t judge me for sowing a few wild oats.”

  His hand was still on mine, and so I turned mine and squeezed back. “Why would I judge?” I asked.

  “Well... One of our parties got a bit out of hand. We got a bit carried away, you know? All four of us. The Press got wind, my family found out and they did what they could to snuff out the story before it became a scandal. That’s it, Trudy: just college kids getting stupid.”

  A party... I knew what wasn’t being said. They’d moved from passing girls around to sharing them... an orgy... a gang-bang.

  “But...” I said. “But... Ethan?”

  I pulled a face and Will did a double-take and then laughed, just a little.

  “I know, right,” he said. “Your brother has sex.”

  I pulled my hand away and rapped him lightly on the wrist. I didn’t need that kind of image, that kind of knowledge. Ethan was still the big kid who went all goofy for Dunkin’ Donuts.

  I couldn’t quite leave it there, though. I had to ask.

  “Sally,” I said. “You said she’d been found dead. The word you used was ‘killed’...”

  Serious again, he nodded. “She always had problems. Desperate for attention, desperate for contact. I can see that now. Back then she was just a rather attractive young woman who was throwing herself at us, you know? A few weeks ago she called me. I don’t know how she got my number, but she always did have her ways. Said she was in a clinic and she needed money. Sally always needed money, but now she had big bills to pay if she was to get the help she needed. Said she had turned to me first as an old friend, but she could always turn to Eleanor. And I knew that ‘turning to Eleanor’ meant telling her whatever it took to get money from the family – Sally was no friend of Eleanor’s.”

  “Blackmail.”

  “Desperation,” Will said. “The action of a vulnerable woman who was struggling to cling on.”

  “You’re doing that protective thing again,” I chided him, and he smiled, which was a heart-achingly beautiful sight on a face that was looking so anguished.

  “I spoke to Interpol today. An agent I know–”

  That thing of his again: the tantalizing hints, the man who just happens to have contacts at the international police agency...

  “–I’ve given statements and everything already, of course. They mi
ght want to talk to you, too, I’m afraid. Filling in all the gaps, and all that.”

  “Me?” But of course: I was there in Austria. But did that mean that Will was under any kind of suspicion? Was I... was I his alibi...?

  “Just to confirm a few details,” he said. “No big deal. Dessert?”

  §

  So how do your first dates go?

  This, my first date with Will – I couldn’t count that fairytale meal in Austria as a date; it had been something else entirely – and we started off with talk of bondage, we got hot and steamy over oysters, we talked of dark secrets from the past, of murder... I ended up understanding him no better than before, the evening only confirming that I didn’t really know him at all. I even had the nagging suspicion that somehow I was getting wrapped up in an international murder plot as some kind of cover story. I was being used, being gamed all over again.

  This, our first real date, and we ended with pleasantries, an awkward, stilted exchange outside the bistro while we waited for a cab, and then he went off in his chauffeur-driven car and I climbed into my cab, gave my address to the driver, and somehow felt a weight lifting.

  All the way up Tottenham Court Road and onto Euston Road, my head was spinning, and trying to catch a thought was like chasing butterflies. Past King’s Cross, and my head started to settle. I was so confused by that man! The evening had been such a mix of things.

  The attraction was like nothing I’d ever known. It was as if there were rubber bands stretched taut between us, always pulling us together. Just a look, a touch, a half-smile, and my heart would race and there would be a heat deep in the pit of my belly. I wanted him more than I’d ever wanted a man before.

  And those moments when I managed to scrape beneath the surface and glimpse the real Will. Each of them, a moment to treasure, when you see it in his eyes and smile, when you’ve connected.

  I wanted that. I wanted that Will.

  But Willem Bentinck-Stanley was a man of many aspects. The flustered upper-class thing, the arrogance of a man who has always had whatever he wanted, the evasiveness that I guessed went with the kind of jet-setting James Bond lifestyle he led. The manipulation... He was a man who didn’t trust people and that seemed to translate to it being okay to use and abuse them.