I go weak all over—too weak to stop him from pushing his hand under my dress, and my traitorous body coils tighter in arousal at his touch. “So wet,” he whispers, sliding one finger back and forth. I grip the table’s edge, straining not to show my anxiety to onlookers. His voice lowers so that he can’t be overheard. “So who should I show it to, Clara? Who is it that you want to see you like that, writhing around on the floor at the center of a threesome, getting licked by another girl, letting a man fuck you for the camera …”
I’m shaken. I’m so shaken by the question that I can’t even slap him, like I should. Like any woman would. But I did this to myself. I walked right into the devil’s open arms. Why should I be surprised that he wants to take me straight to hell?
Leo’s still waiting, but I can’t make my throat work. My mouth is dry. My tongue seems swollen in my mouth. It won’t move. I hear myself swallow, but that’s the only sound I make as he rubs in a slow circle. “Here’s how it’s going to happen. You’re going to give me the key to your studio. Tomorrow night, I’m going to invite a friend to meet me there to watch the film. When he leaves, I’ll drop by your place and you can thank me properly.”
My nostrils flare. “You expect me to thank you?”
“I expect you to give me permission to take the key.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Clara, look at me.”
“No,” I say, twisting my head away, even as my hips press forward against his hand.
“You’re scared of two things right now, Clara. The first thing you’re scared of is that I’m going to let someone else watch your stag film. The second thing you’re afraid of is that I won’t. But you don’t have to be afraid of either of these things because it’s out of your hands.”
“You don’t seem to understand how blackmail works,” I manage to choke out, even as the ache between my legs feels heavier and more insistent by the moment. I dig my fingers into his arm to make him stop stroking me, but his touch only intensifies. Dear god, does he mean to make me come right here?
“You don’t seem to understand how I work, Clara. Look at me.”
“No,” I murmur. I should make him stop. I should make him stop right now. But his touch is the only relief against the burning heat searing through my body.
I’m undone by him.
Lifting my eyes, I’m met by a gaze that burns dark as coal. “Clara, I’m going to do it whether or not you give me that key. I’ll build my own projector if I have to. It’s going to happen … and what I want to know is, would you rather that I show it to a man or to a woman?”
The idea of Leo in a darkened room with another woman sends a stab of jealousy through me so sharp that I gasp, “A man.”
My admission forces a moan past my defenses and I snap my eyes shut. Too late, though. His finger slips into me and his thumb takes up the task of tormenting me. Twin spirals of pleasure coil up into my belly and now all I want is to satisfy my hunger.
“You’re close, aren’t you, Clara?”
I nod, wordlessly.
“Give me permission to take the key.”
Rocking against his hand, biting my lower lip so hard I think I taste blood, I whisper, “Take it!”
At his triumph, he smiles against my bare shoulder and fetches the key into his hand. Then he trails his fingers wetly down my thigh, leaving me shaking and unfinished. I writhe in misery at being left empty. Then I’m furious. I’d batter him with both fists if it wouldn’t attract an audience. “You bastard.”
“I’m going to show your stag film to someone else, Clara. Then I’m going to tell you all about it. When I do, I’m going to make you come harder than you’ve ever come before. I’m going to turn you into a quivering mess. And the only thing that’s going to turn you on more than knowing that I did it is knowing that you gave me this key.”
CHAPTER
Six
The critics hate the studio’s latest Clara Cartwright movie. Nevertheless, it’s a box office smash. Good thing, too, since I’ve snubbed my financier to take up with a sadistic aviator who seems intent upon ruining me. Maybe I want to be ruined, I decide. It’s what I deserve. Mama always said that everything I had was the wages of sin; maybe I’m trying to pay it all back with interest.
The night Leo calls, I give Pops enough cash to go on a bender at the speakeasy. I ought to feel guilty giving that much money to a drunk but I can’t bear to have anyone here while I wait, pacing back and forth in a satiny robe with feather trim. Leo promised me he’d make me shiver. Make me tremble. Make me afraid.
He’s certainly giving it a go.
I try to work, making notes. I’ve been making movies in my head all my life. But I can’t concentrate tonight. All I can think about is two men ogling me in my stag film. Not that being ogled has ever bothered me, mind you, but there’s something more perverse about this. Something more objectifying. As much as I said I enjoyed being a glorious object of pleasure, I can’t shake the baseness of it.
Maybe they’re sitting in silence. Maybe they’re talking about me. Maybe Leo is saying something about the way my breasts felt in his hands; maybe the stranger is talking about the curve of my ass …
The stranger.
I’m dying to know who he is. I ought to drive over to the lot right now to see who leaves my studio, but that’d be too risky. I remind myself that rumors about this stag film have been circulating for years. Leo Vanderberg isn’t the first man to get his hands on the reel. The idea that there are countless men out there who may have seen it makes me shiver—and not with revulsion. So what’s one more?
The phone doesn’t ring until ten o’clock and by then, I’m jumping out of my satin slippers. “Send him up, Charlie.”
My doorman sounds rueful. “Miss Cartwright, I don’t think I could stop him if I tried.”
Leo walks into my penthouse like he owns it then takes off his overcoat and hat. He hangs them on the hooks by the door, just as casual as you please. But I’m a trained actress; I know when someone is faking. He’s strung tight, shoulders squared, sexual need rolling off him like some kind of nectar I want to catch on my tongue.
His skin is so hot I can feel it even before he catches me by the waist and pulls me against him. “Do you want me to tell you about it, Clara?”
“You didn’t do it,” I say, breathless. “Tell me you didn’t do it.”
He backs me against the wall. “I told you before that I don’t bluff. I did it and you know I did it. Which is why you’re shaking like a leaf.”
I’m so grateful to be trapped between the solidity of the wall and his body, because I feel as if I’m going to shake apart. Leo’s erection is hard as steel, painful where he grinds it against my hip. And I can’t seem to get enough air. Winding my fingers through his hair, I keep gasping. I think I’ll drown if I don’t get him inside me.
“Where’s the bedroom?” he asks.
“It doesn’t matter.” I’m the kind of girl he can lay down on the floor. The couch. Anywhere.
But he hoists me into his arms, carrying me into the hall, trying each door until he finds the room with my four-poster canopy bed. He drops me down on the glamorous blue and gold damask bedspread, knocking tasseled pillows to the floor as he crawls over me. I love the weight of him as we sink into the softness of the mattress, the long arms that pin me down as he kisses the base of my throat.
My heartbeat leaps under his lips.
“My friend and I started the night with drinks,” he murmurs between kisses. “He had too many. He’s in love with a woman who doesn’t love him back, so I offered him a little distraction. I invited him to your studio for a smoke and a movie.”
“Oh god,” I say, arching my neck as his teeth graze my collarbone.
“My friend didn’t recognize you on the screen at first, Clara. You were just some bright young thing with a talent for living, eager to get naked for anyone who wanted to watch. Then he realized it was you.”
I whimp
er. “No. No, he didn’t.”
“Of course he did. You’re the most famous woman in the country. He said your name. He asked me.”
I moan, stricken with equal parts humiliation and lust. “Did he touch himself?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
I close my eyes, imagining it. Leo strokes my thigh and catches my nipple between his teeth, biting it through the fabric of my robe. The sensation is electric. “I can’t think when you do that, Leo.”
“Good,” he says, with immense satisfaction. “And to answer your question, no. My friend didn’t touch himself during the film but he’s probably stroking himself now, thinking about you. I’d wager that any time he sees you on any movie screen, he’s going to be thinking about your naked body.”
Between panting breaths, I whisper, “That doesn’t make you jealous?”
“It makes me hard, Clara.” He presses his erection against my hand to prove it. “It makes me feel like a goddamned god. Because I gave him that sexy image of you like a gift. I gave you to him. And you don’t even know who he is.”
I moan again. I clutch at him. I’m dying for him. “Tell me … tell me his name.”
“Not yet. I wanna keep you like this for a while. Nervous. Unsteady. A little thrill in your belly every time you meet a man on the street, wondering if it’s him. Wondering if the twinkle in a stranger’s eye is because he knows how you like to get fucked and he’s seen you do it. I like having that power over you.”
“Bastard.”
“You like it, too.”
It’s true. It’s so true I don’t dare deny it. I never liked anybody using me or trying to tell me what to do, but with Leo everything has changed. He’s making me feel things I didn’t know I could feel and I wonder if there’s anything, anything, I won’t do to have him inside me. I reach for his shirt, popping the buttons in my hurry to get it open. “I can’t keep my hands off you, Leo.”
He levels me with a heated gaze. “You’re going to have to, because you turned me into a thirteen-year-old boy the last time you touched me. You’re a force of nature I’m not ready to unleash, so keep your hands over your head.”
I don’t pay him the slightest heed, reaching to unclasp his belt. He lets me do it, but when I pull the leather free, he takes it from me and uses it to bind my hands to the headboard. I cry out, kicking at him in sudden frustrated rage. When he’s got my wrists fastened good and tight, he asks, “Do I need to tie your legs down, too?”
“Leo!”
“I like to drive, Clara. Just enjoy the ride.”
Now that sounds more like it. “Fuck me, Leo. Just do it before it kills me.”
“It’s not gonna kill you,” he says with a wry smile. “I know a survivor when I see one.”
He opens my robe, blowing the feathery fringe away from my skin. I spread my legs so wide, so eagerly, that they ache at the stretch. I catch the scent of my own arousal as he dips his head to trace a hot wet trail down my belly with his tongue. When I realize where he’s going, I try to twist my hips away from him. “No, Leo. I don’t like that.”
His breath caresses the soft thatch between my legs. “You liked it in the movie. When the girl did it to you.”
“That’s different.”
“How so?” he asks, petting the vulnerable spot.
If my hands were free, I’d shove him away. I’d break out of his grasp. But now I pull against the belt that restrains me until my arms tire from the effort. “I don’t know. It just was. I don’t like men doing it.”
“Good thing you don’t have much choice in the matter.” Defiantly, he dips his head for a long lick. “Mmmm. Do I taste something floral?”
“It’s the gardenia from the soap in my bath,” I say, nearly spitting the words.
If he notices that I’m furious, he doesn’t seem to care. “I have a new favorite flower.”
“Stop teasing me!” I cry. I know that he’s aroused. I can see the flush of it on him. His skin is burning with it. So why won’t he take off his pants and thrust inside me?
“You’re right to scold me,” Leo says, strong fingers with short, clean nails, scraping lightly over my skin, leaving gooseflesh in their wake. “It wasn’t right of me to leave you unsatisfied last night in the restaurant, was it? Well, let’s see if I can make up for it.”
With that, he pulls my knees up over his shoulders, and then I’m there again in that stag film. Lying on that floor behind the bar. Naked and splayed and exposed and vulnerable. He strokes me softly, my cunt, my belly, my thighs. Then he drops little kisses between my legs as if to soothe me. “How curious …”
I groan, no longer wanting him to stop. “What?”
He pauses, drawing the moment out interminably. The amusement in his voice makes me feel even more exposed. “It’s just that all the women I’ve been with are darker here than on their heads, but these very wet curls of yours are fair.”
“I’m strawberry blonde by nature,” I snap. “I dye my hair to make it a richer red.”
“Why?”
Trembling with unfulfilled need, I whimper. “Do we have to talk about this now?”
Mercifully, he presses his hot tongue right where it aches. He wriggles it a little bit until I sink deeper into pleasure. Then he stops again. “Actually, now seems like as good a time as any to talk about it.”
“Damn you!”
He laughs. “Why do you dye your hair?”
“I never liked the way fair hair looks on film.” Maybe if I say it all quickly, he’ll touch me where I need to be touched. “You can’t see much variation in color on the screen so those blondes always look all angelic like Garbo. That’s not me. So I put henna in my hair. I never thought to do it down there as well.”
“Well, your pussy is hot enough without the fiery red hair,” he says, mischievously. Then he presses his tongue even harder. I try to pull my hips back to escape the unexpected assault of his mouth, but there’s no resisting him. Every time I shift away, his tongue finds me again, flicking in ways that arouse me as much as surprise me.
He’s not sloppy or overeager. He has a dry, dexterous tongue that teases and tortures the swollen little button at my center. He pokes. He prods. He’s learning me, just like he said he would. And when he finds just the right way to circle his tongue, he drives me to a place of utter, helpless surrender.
Then he stops again. “Have you ever heard of an Immelmann turn?”
“Oh, I hate you, Leo. I hate you!”
He grins, his fingers doing the work his mouth leaves undone. “In a dogfight, after an attack, the pilot takes the plane straight up to the sky, climbing higher …”
He’s very slow with his fingers, circling around the swollen pearl until I moan.
“You take the plane higher and higher … until the whole craft is shaking around you.”
It’s coiling inside me, the pleasure, tightening until I do start to shake. I think I’m going to fly apart.
“Do you know what happens then?” he asks. “To the plane I mean? It stalls out. It hangs there, nearly motionless, as if the whole world has frozen.”
I feel that way. Suspended. Lost. The rest of the world no longer any concern at all when he lowers his mouth to lick me once again in earnest. It takes only a few moments before a scream of pleasure tears itself from my throat, and then I’m bucking underneath him. He stays with it, he stays with me, laving me until it’s so intense I can’t stand it, then easing off into little kisses that trail all the way to the edge of my stockings.
I go limp in my release, my head lolling to the side, luxuriating in the little spasms that slowly fade away.
But Leo keeps going.
“No, Leo, I—I can’t. Not so fast … I need …” Every bit of me is oversensitive to the touch. What was so deliriously pleasurable before is now too much. I can’t stand for him to keep rubbing, but he doesn’t listen. He doesn’t stop. He refuses to let me come down from the high. Not even when I’m thrashing. “Oh g
od, Leo stop … I can’t …”
“You’re close, Clara. Try riding it out and maybe I can get you there again. See, when the plane suspends in the air, that’s the point of maximum vulnerability. After the stall, the plane starts falling. Plummeting really. But a good pilot has already applied full rudder to yaw the plane in a new and unexpected direction.”
His palm comes crashing down between my legs, and the sting of it shocks me. It stills me. And before I can even yelp out a protest, his kisses soothe my stinging flesh, the pain alleviated by the pleasure of his soft tongue.
“What are you doing, Leo Vanderberg?”
He lifts his head again, one finger pumping very slowly inside me. “It’s a difficult trick to do properly. It involves precise control of the aircraft at low speed. But with practice and proper use of all of the fighter’s controls, the plane can be positioned for a second attack.”
Then he does it again.
Again.
Again.
Spanking the damp thatch between my legs, then licking it until some sort of floodgate inside me crashes open. He’s going to make me come again. And I’m going to let him. Even if it’s like this. The sound I make isn’t one I recognize. It’s pure animal need as Leo uses his mouth to exert new pressure, eliciting unusual sensations that make the heat rise. I’m climbing again to climax, higher and higher, until my back arches. My arms go rigid, and I undulate under him. My hips feel like a wide expanse of need and my skin is burning up. He keeps doing it until an explosion of ecstasy makes me blind to the world.
My sweat-damp hair flies wild and I call out his name. I scream it, really, almost a keening wail.
When I’m done, he looks up at me from the cradle of my quaking thighs with immense satisfaction. “That was two.”
“No more,” I pant, so spent I just want to die. “Stop.”
“Stopping now would defeat the purpose of the experiment.”
Breathless, I plead for mercy. “No more. I’m begging you. I’m begging you!”
It Stings So Sweet Page 12
