by Megan Crane
“When you say ‘okay,’ I need to be sure we both know what that means. I need you to say it out loud.” There was that predatory glint in his gaze, something hard in his smile, and I didn’t care. I wanted more. I wanted everything. “You’re choosing me. You want this to happen. You want to lose your virginity to me.”
I wanted it so much I thought I might burst into sobs at the thought, and I was anything but sad. He still held his hand to my face, and I was sure he could feel me trembling slightly.
“Yes,” I said, as if this was a vow and it might be etched in stone as I mouthed the words. “I want that. I want you.”
And the way he looked at me then was molten hot. As if he’d been concealing the true depths of his own need until then, but no more. The sheer, dizzying heat surged through me, an impossible searing burn like a brand down the middle of my body, and I knew, then. I would never be the same. I would never be the Scottie Grey who’d gotten into that elevator this morning, not ever again. I would be whatever pieces were left of me when this beautiful, dangerous man was done tonight.
And I couldn’t wait to meet her, whoever she was. The Scottie who got to experience him. The Scottie who lived through it and came out the other side, changed forever.
Damon dropped his hand. I don’t know what I expected. For him to grab me? For him to start with something over the top and probably illegal, right here where anyone who wanted to look at us could see what we were doing?
Yes, said the naughty voice inside me, who’d read a thousand dirty books in her time and had yearned for them all to come true, one after the next. All of that, please.
Instead, he stepped away from me and dropped down onto the nearest low sofa, all modern lines and sleek, pale leather. He lounged there like a sultan, though I could see he was holding his jaw tight, as if it hurt him to act so blasé. As if he was as affected by all of this as I was. I looked lower, and I could see the outline of a very impressive erection against the fly of his trousers.
It made me feel fluttery, everywhere, to imagine all of that—all of him—inside me.
“Eyes on me,” he said, a hint of laughter in his voice.
I obeyed him. It didn’t occur to me to do anything else.
“Take off that jacket,” he ordered me, his dark blue eyes never leaving mine. “We’re not at work now.”
I’d almost forgotten I was still wearing my work clothes. I shrugged out of my jacket and tossed it next to his on the gleaming white sofa. That left me in nothing but a soft camisole, a pencil skirt, and the high heels I’d grown so used to wearing in the past year that they felt like part of me.
Even now, when my knees were so shaky I thought I might topple over at any moment.
Damon’s gaze moved from my face to my slightly parted lips, then down to my breasts. I told myself he couldn’t see anything through the silk of my camisole, but I felt my nipples tighten even as I thought it, making me a liar.
“Let your hair down,” he said then, his voice deeper. Rougher. “I want to see it.”
A thousand smart remarks about playing Rapunzel danced in my head, even made it to my tongue, but I swallowed them back. It was something about that simmering way he watched me, never shifting that gaze of his an inch.
If he wanted to climb me, any part of me, I’d let him.
I reached up and pulled the pins out of my hair, then tugged off the elastic. My hair tumbled down to one shoulder in a coil and I raked my fingers through it, letting the thick, chocolate brown waves swirl around me. I could smell this morning’s shampoo in a sudden cloud of scent between us, sharp and sweet. Damon’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t move from that languid, lounging position that nonetheless made it clear that he was the one in charge here.
I didn’t have a single doubt about that, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. It felt a lot like elation.
No debate necessary. No arguing about boundaries or waiting or romance. No wheedling or trying to “accidentally” get carried away. Nothing this man did was going to be accidental.
Damon studied me for a moment, a half-smile making his lean, clever face that much more devastating, and then he crooked a finger.
“Come here,” he said.
I did that too, nerves shooting through my body and humming along the surface of my skin as I obeyed him. I stood between his outstretched legs, looking down into his dark blue eyes, and I understood in that moment that I would do anything he asked. Anything at all.
And it wasn’t as much about me or my virginity as I might have imagined. I simply wanted to please him. I wanted his lips to move into that wicked little crook and admiration to shine in those dark blue eyes of his more than I could remember wanting all the other things I’d thought I’d die without in my life. Everything behind me seemed like sepia-tinted brown. All I could see was blue.
“Wait,” I managed to say as something occurred to me, even as his bold gaze was kicking up brushfires all over my body. “Is this some kind of kinky thing with you? These rules of yours?”
The very delight I’d wanted to see cracked over his face then, and it was as good as I’d imagined.
“Are you asking me if I’m into BDSM?”
Images chased each other through my head then, one naughtier and wilder than the last. Scenes from books I’d read again and again and again. Men with cruel mouths and patient eyes. Hard hands against soft flesh. Hot tears that bloomed into wild sex. Things I’d always assured myself were better as fantasies anyway.
A position I was reconsidering the longer this man gazed at me, so many worlds I wanted to explore right there in his astonishingly blue eyes.
“Are you?” I asked, someone else’s scratchy voice coming out of my mouth. Someone else’s raw voice, her need an evident thing—so obvious that she, whoever she was, should have been deeply embarrassed that someone else heard it.
I was too busy waiting to hear what he might say next to worry about any embarrassment.
“I think the proper term for me is ‘bossy.’” Damon leaned back further against the sofa, but there was that knowing gleam in his eyes. There was that certainty in every line of his chiseled frame. “Like this. I want you to kiss me, Scottie. Letting nothing but your mouth touch mine. Do you understand?”
I scowled at him, trying to figure out the angles. That sounded like… calisthenics. Not what I wanted to do, which was give into this heedless, reckless excitement. Indulge the hot, molten river of sexual desire that was swamping me where I stood.
“And less of that expression, please.” Now he was laughing at me. “What if you get stuck that way?”
“It would be your fault. How do I…?”
“Scottie.” His voice wrapped around me. It was like a shot of whiskey, a smooth fire all over me and deep into me, too, igniting everything it touched. “Don’t argue. Just do it.”
Rule number one, he’d said. Do what I tell you to do.
I eyed him, trying to work out the mechanics of it. To do what he wanted me to do I’d have to brace my hands on the back of the sofa and angle myself down from my high heels, precarious and careful, to that marvelous mouth. Why he wanted me to do something so awkward, I couldn’t imagine. I opened my mouth to ask him.
Rule number two, he’d said. When in doubt, do it anyway.
So I shut my mouth, aware that he bit back another smile when I did. That emboldened me. I widened my stance and leaned over, grabbing the back of the sofa with one hand. I realized my legs didn’t quite work, so I moved, shifting so I straddled one of his outstretched legs without touching it. Still. The fact that any part of him was between my legs was… everything.
The position was as ridiculous as I’d feared. My ass was in the air, my hair was tumbling everywhere, and I had to concentrate to lower myself toward him without simply collapsing and writhing against him the way I wanted.
But his mouth. His mouth. He tilted his head back and it was right there. It was temptation and sin. I could smell him—a hint of some
thing spicy and a certain underlying maleness that was all him. I could feel the heat coming off of his skin.
My own mouth watered.
Between my legs, a sweet fire bloomed into a volcano.
Then I lowered myself down and fit my mouth to his.
He let me kiss him. His mouth was firm and dangerous, but he kissed me back almost sweetly. It was like a balancing act over a cliff, and every time I angled my head for a better fit I felt my stomach drop, as if I was that close to toppling to my death.
I wasn’t sure I’d mind.
He tasted like I’d died and gone to heaven—but he pulled away. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t recognize the noise that came out of my throat. I didn’t understand what was happening. I’d thought I’d known what desperation was, before tonight. Before Damon.
I hadn’t had a clue.
“Is that how you like to kiss?” he asked me, that erotic knowledge in his eyes and something rougher in his voice. It made my heart sing inside my chest. “Is that what you want?”
I tried to answer him. I could only shake my head, begging him for something I didn’t even understand with nothing but my gaze.
His softened. Slightly.
“Get on my lap,” he ordered me.
I would have done anything at that moment, including parade naked through the higher levels of Granger & Knox right in front of the senior partners, if it meant more of this. More of what I’d barely tasted.
I didn’t argue. I slid onto his lap as best I could in my pencil skirt, shifting my legs to one side and then letting out a small sigh when his hard cock, tucked away in his trousers, rubbed against my ass. God, I wanted that. I wanted him.
I wanted everything.
He moved then. He tugged me into a slightly different position so my legs sprawled down the sofa to the side and his cock was pressed tight against the seam of my ass. And he held me so my head fell back toward one strong shoulder.
“That wasn’t much of a kiss,” he said, and there was laughter in his voice, though his expression was serious, as if he was giving me a performance review.
“I did what you told me,” I protested, though I could hardly concentrate. He was running one hand along the outside of my leg, from my knee to my thigh, then smoothing it over my hip. Then he found his way to my camisole, tugging it from the waistband of my skirt. He didn’t seem to notice the way my breath caught, or the way I let it out in a rush when his fingers dipped beneath the silky material and found my bare skin. He traced a pattern there, light and lazy, as if it was an afterthought.
“So you did,” he agreed. “Let’s try something else.”
He bent to capture my mouth with his, and everything exploded.
Holy shit.
I’d been kissed before. Some years, that was all Alexander and I had done. I’d kissed a lot, and artfully. But never in my life had I ever been kissed like this.
Damon didn’t play. He took.
He was like a hurricane, taking me over and shaking me down, and I loved it. He ate at my mouth. He plundered me, until I was lost in the heat of it, the slide of his tongue and the clamor of my heart.
Until I thought I might die or I had died, and still there was nothing but that delicious ferocity as he made me his, our tongues tangled together and that fire like a wild thing all around us, burning down the world.
And then the hand he’d slid beneath my camisole closed over my breast, not entirely gently, and I stopped thinking altogether.
Damon pulled his mouth away from mine, but he left his hand where it was, his palm moving to gently abrade my nipple. The sensation was a wild tumult, a line of fire that shot straight from my breast to my clit and set me ablaze, and I couldn’t seem to do a thing in the world but arch into him.
He laughed, then let go, claiming my mouth again as he did.
The music in the club swelled around us, the high notes chasing each other through the insistent bass, and it was as if it was inside me, too. I was lost there, the music a delirious throb within me, Damon around me and beneath me, and his mouth moving against mine.
He kissed as if it was the most carnal and intimate of sex acts. As if it was neither a prelude to something else nor a lesser version of something real, but the main act. He was dirty and demanding, greedy and slick and hot.
He made me wonder if I was a true innocent after all, that I could be so undone by a kiss. If I’d been kidding myself.
Hours could have passed and I wouldn’t have known it, and then he shifted so he could come up over me, and slide that free hand of his beneath my skirt. My whole body shook in anticipation.
Damon kept exploring my mouth as his fingers trailed over my inner thigh, and he laughed slightly when I had to tear my mouth from his to try to breathe. Or maybe I wasn’t breathing. Maybe I was just making that high-pitched noise and breathing had nothing to do with it.
Higher he went, then higher still, until he cupped my pussy with his big, hard hand.
I trembled. Hard.
The club raged around us, right there on the other side of the balcony that shielded us, but I wouldn’t have cared if we were in the center of the dance floor and lit up by a set of spotlights.
“Please…” I whispered.
As if he’d been waiting for that, Damon smiled.
Then he slid his fingers beneath the crotch of my panties, sliding them deep into my soft, wet heat.
I bucked against him, flushed hot and needy as he murmured words of approval against my temple. I was open to him, desperate and greedy, and he didn’t disappoint me. He stroked my pussy, learning its shape from the slick heat of my folds to my needy clit, and my hips moved to meet him of their own accord.
“You’re perfect,” he growled against my mouth, and then he claimed my mouth again as he drove two fingers deep into me.
I’d come before of course, me and my hand or a toy at the ready, but this was something else. This was different. This was a tearing apart. An awakening. I convulsed against him, going stiff as my hips tried to pound themselves against his hand, my head thrown back and my wild cries swallowed up by the loud club around us.
Damon laughed, a sound of rich male delight.
Then he claimed my mouth with his.
And he did it all over again.
Chapter Six
‡
I’d never know how long we stayed there like that. I didn’t care if it was whole years. I hoped it was at least a few decades.
I was lost in the wizardry of Damon’s hands, the wild talent of his mouth. The way he could make me shake apart again and again, as if he knew more about my body than I did. He swallowed my cries each time he threw me over that edge, until I couldn’t tell where I ended and he began.
I came and came and came again.
At some point he shifted, leaving me flushed and soft in his arms. His dark blue eyes were nearly black, and his mouth was damp from mine, and if possible, he was even more gorgeous than before.
He pulled his hand from beneath my skirt, smiling slightly as I made a noise that I couldn’t pretend was anything but dismay at the loss of his touch. I could still feel him, hot and ready, beneath me. I moved my hips, rubbing my ass against him with abandon, and was rewarded by his swift intake of breath.
But then he moved, tipping me out of his lap as he rose to his feet. “None of that.”
“I thought that was the point.”
Damon didn’t mention that I sounded completely unlike myself. I sounded instead like someone who had spent God knew how long coming apart in his hands. Literally.
Instead, he kept his blue gaze trained on me as he licked his fingers clean. It nearly made me come again right there where I stood, my knees almost too shaky to hold me up.
I thought he’d laugh at me the way he’d been doing all night, all of that male confidence and awareness simmering in his gaze, but he didn’t. If anything, he looked… strained.
“It’s time to take this somewhere more private.” His voice was a
rasp and I wanted that to mean things. I wanted him to be as thrown by this as I was—but I knew that was crazy. The entire point of this, of this whole evening and the very fact I was standing here with him at all, was that Damon Patrick wasn’t thrown by anything.
Certainly not a naïve little fool like me.
Really, I should find that liberating.
I laughed then. The whole situation struck me as ridiculous, suddenly—or maybe that was a very different emotion sweeping over me, sharp and bright. I didn’t want to name it.
“Now you want privacy?” I shook my head, which only made me aware that my hair was a thick, messy curtain all around me, styled by his greedy, careless, beautiful fingers. “Why did I think you were completely without boundaries?”
Damon’s mouth curved, and he reached over to tug on another long tendril of my hair. Not entirely gently. It should have irritated me. It didn’t.
“It’s not about my boundaries, Scottie. It’s about yours.”
“I think I’ve already proved I have none where you’re concerned.”
“Sure. Here and now.” He swept up his jacket and mine, then nodded toward the door. “But tomorrow, a week from now, you might regret that. You waited for this for a long time. You deserve better than a couch in a club.”
I frowned at him, but I obeyed him anyway, walking toward the door and hoping my legs were a bit steadier than they felt beneath me, especially when I could feel him close behind me. I stopped at the door that led out into the rest of the packed club.
“You seem a lot more concerned about this than I am. I was considering a bathroom in a terrible bar. A couch in a club is an upgrade.”
I could feel his laughter, his perfect chest pressed to my back as I stood there in the entrance, some part of me worried that leaving here meant nothing more than this would ever happen between us. And don’t get me wrong—I loved everything that had happened.
But I was greedy. I wanted more.
“I’m the upgrade,” Damon told me, his voice a low rumble directly in my ear that wound its way through me and coiled tight low in my belly and the soft pulse between my legs. “You need to trust me, okay?”
