His hand skimmed higher, sloping toward the sensitive area between my legs. “And maybe we’ll get done early enough that we can go to the Open Door afterward.”
“You’re going to wear a tux?” I asked, as though that were the deciding factor. As though I wasn’t distracted by the pathway of his touch.
“I am. We’ll have to stop by my place and pick it up so I can change.”
I chewed on one side of my lip as I wondered if I had anything clean and appropriate to wear to a formal work event. It would be the first time I’d attended one of those things in ages. For the most part, Pierce Industries didn’t include executive assistants at events that weren’t simply office parties, like the one later this month for the holidays.
“What if I don’t have anything to wear?” Everything fancy I owned was made for easy access. They were gowns, yes, but all of them had long slits and plunging necklines designed to show lots of skin.
Nate was already jumping off the bed, headed toward my closet, which made me tense automatically. “What are you doing?”
“Checking out your dresses.” He opened my closet and started moving hangers. “Oh, you have plenty here that would be appropriate. How about this one?” He pulled out a ruched chiffon gown in burgundy with a deep V-neck. It was floor length and pretty modest as far as my evening dresses went.
“Is that what you’d like me to wear?” For some reason the idea of him choosing my dress made me all sorts of tingly and on fire with desire.
“Yeah.” He hung the dress back up then sauntered toward me. My eyes flickered toward his cock, which was semi-aroused. “Will you let me choose the rest of your clothes, too? I’d love to dress you up.”
God, I was wet. Usually, I got wet at the idea of a man taking my clothes off, not putting them on.
Though if I said yes, it would mean he’d be messing around in more of my things. Learning even more about me, creating more entanglements.
But what excuse could I give him not to? “Uh, sure.”
I scooted to the edge of the bed and sat there wringing my hands as I watched him go through my drawers, my heart beating with an unsettled meter. Normally the sight of a naked man would be the cause of my distraction, especially the sight of this naked man. Nate Sinclair had one of the best-looking backsides I’d ever seen. But I was fretting too much to enjoy it, too anxious about him touching my belongings, even though I had nothing that really mattered in my clothes drawers.
It felt like so personal. Almost like a violation. No man—no person—had touched my private things since… I couldn’t even remember when. The last time I could remember was when my sister Francesca found the deck of Chippendale’s playing cards I’d gotten from a girl at school and she’d told my father. My ass had been spanked raw afterward, and, worse, the cards had been confiscated.
Even though I didn’t have anything to hide from Nate now, memories of other physical secrets I’d tried to keep from my siblings were stirred by his rummaging. The sexy lingerie I liked to wear that my mother would have decked me for. My secret dildo I’d hidden under my mattress. The diary I’d kept in my jeans drawer.
I’d lived with a constant ball of anxiety.
To this day, I hated people touching my things. Hated it.
I watched, apprehensive, as he pulled out one bra and then another, then put the first one back and pulled out several more. Finally, he settled on black lace, then moved to my garter drawer. He picked something out there and then found my panty drawer and stalled for a moment, which made me nervous. Well, more nervous than I’d been before.
“Is there a problem?” Did he not like my panties?
He looked over his shoulder at me. “Just trying to decide if I want you wearing panties or not. I think I’m going with not.” He dumped the handful back into the drawer and shut it with his hip. “Where do you keep your stockings?”
“Um. Bottom drawer on the left.”
A few minutes later he had a pair of hose picked out for me as well. Then he urged me into the shower, which he thankfully accompanied me into. I couldn’t have borne the thought of him roaming around my space while I washed. Plus, Nate, it turned out, was really good at cleaning a woman up. Almost as good as he was at getting her dirty in the first place.
After our shower, he was back to directing me again. With a towel slung around his waist, he wrapped me in a robe and set me at my vanity.
“I’d like smoky eyes, gray eyeliner. Pale pink cheeks. Bright red lips.”
I tried to concentrate on my makeup while he rustled through my jewelry box, which was nearly impossible. The spool of tension inside me that had relaxed under the heat of the hot water wound tight again as his fingers rearranged items and moved them from their designated places. After selecting a pair of crystal chandelier earrings and a matching crystal pendant necklace, he got dressed in his clothes from the night before. Finally able to breathe easily again, I made up my face the way he’d instructed.
Once he deemed my makeup perfect, he brought the items he’d pulled for me earlier and helped me dress in them one by one. First the garter belt, and then the bra. Then he helped me roll lace-topped stockings up each leg, attaching them to the clips of the garter belt. When I was done, he stood me in front of him so he could look me over.
“Not quite,” he said, his eyes squinted as he inspected me. “Can you pin your hair up, but loosely? Nothing too tight. Just a low knot would be perfect.”
While I worked on my hair, he disappeared again into my closet, and my stomach twisted. “Nate,” I called after him. “Do you need help in there?”
“Just looking for the perfect pair of shoes, baby.”
Of course. What did it matter if he was in my stuff anyway? I really didn’t have anything to hide. There wasn’t anything I cared about him seeing. I just liked my stuff being mine and mine alone. All those old feelings about my sisters resurfaced the second he so much as looked at my closet. It was silly, but knowing that didn’t change anything.
I shook my head, trying to knock the feeling free, and concentrated on putting bobby pins in my hair. When I was done, I turned away from the mirror and there he was with a pair of high heels that I rarely wore because they were too hard to get on and off. I didn’t have to worry about strapping them on this time, though, because Nate got down on his knees and carefully put them on for me.
Something about it was quite sensual, quite arousing. Strange, after all the crazy things in my life that I’d done, that this moment of domesticity was giving me goosebumps.
When he was done I was five inches taller. He stood to his full height, and now when he looked me over, he smiled and his eyes shone with pride.
“Fuck. That’s it,” he said as he circled me. “You look gorgeous.” I didn’t even have my dress on yet. I stood tall and proud in my lingerie and heels so he could drink me in. “I cannot wait to show you off. For people to see how fucking stunning you are.” When he came around in front of me again, he was rubbing his crotch. “Look how hard I am for you, baby. I should punish you for this.”
My heart was racing, and my mouth started watering. “Definitely. Punish me for what I’ve done to you.” Never mind that he’d been the one to make me look like this. “I bet that’s really uncomfortable.” His pants were completely tented now with a full erection. Being back on familiar ground, back in the driver’s seat, allowed me to relax and enjoy the view.
It made me pretty wet myself, and I told him so.
“Show me. Show me how wet you are.”
I reached down between my thighs and scooped up some of the slick juice that had gathered, bringing up my finger to show him.
He took my fingers and directed them into my own mouth. “Suck it, baby. Then I want you down on your knees, and you’re gonna suck me too.”
I couldn’t get down in front of him quickly enough. He had his cock out so fast that almost as soon as my knees hit the floor, his crown hit my lips.
“I like it deep and I like
it quick. No pussyfooting around when you suck me off, you got it?”
I’d given enough blowjobs in my time to know how to give a good one. I’d also given enough blowjobs to know that men liked it many different ways. I didn’t mind trying out different techniques; sometimes I even taught a man he liked something he didn’t know he liked. Most men, even though they knew what they wanted, waited for me to discover it by myself instead of just saying it.
Nate Sinclair telling me in detail how he wanted me to suck him off was one of the hottest things I’d ever heard.
I drew him into my mouth, sucking him in, then running my tongue along the underside of his cock. He was so thick and heavy, it was hard to take him all the way, but I was determined to do it. Because he’d asked. Not every woman had mastered her reflexes the way I had through careful practice, and I wanted to use all that practice to deep-throat him. I put one hand on the base of his cock and pumped it in time with my mouth to make sure he got full coverage, though, to give him the best experience possible.
“Like that, Trish. Just like that.” He was careful around my freshly pinned hair, but he held up a few wispy strands out of my face and peered down, watching himself get lost inside my mouth with each thrust, with each bob of my throat. It was so arousing, and imagining what the sight must be like from his viewpoint made me even more excited. I pushed one hand down my panties to rub myself.
“Uh uh. I don’t want you touching yourself, gorgeous. This time’s all about me.”
So that was the punishment. Denied orgasm.
This man was a sex god.
And so I did make it all about him. I threw every ounce of my focus into it, into giving him the best oral pleasure of his life. I sucked him, hard and deep. I pumped him fast. With my other hand, still wet from touching myself, I rubbed his balls and stroked up to his taint. I could feel he was getting close when his balls began to tighten up close to his body.
“Trish, I want to decorate your tits with my cum. It would be so beautiful on your skin. But I don’t want to mess you up, so you’re going to have to swallow.” His words tumbled urgent and quick. “And I’m coming now.”
And then he did. With another grunt, he exploded in my mouth, no other warning, and I took every bit of him. Swallowed every last drop, because I knew that’s what he wanted me to do. And because I wanted to do it for him, too. Because I was already addicted to his dirty, filthy ways.
When he was finished, he pulled me to my feet and kissed me hard. Kissed me like he was trying to take off my long-lasting lipstick. Kissed me until I was dizzy and breathless and seeing spots before my eyes.
“You keep giving head like that,” he said when he pulled away, “I’m gonna want to keep you around.”
My chest constricted like he’d strung me up in a too-tight corset.
What he’d said—it was sweet and sexy and something that you said after you came when you were still high on the endorphins.
But the problem was, I was starting to feel the same.
Chapter Eight
As soon as we arrived at the event at the hotel, I realized this wasn’t just a “work thing” as Nate had said it was.
It was a wedding.
Nate Sinclair had taken me on our second public outing to a wedding.
I mentally erased every wonderful, amazing thing I’d thought about him in the last forty-eight hours. I took it back. It was null and void. All of it.
Weddings were the worst. Weddings meant commitment. Taking somebody to a wedding was making an overly bold statement. It meant you were serious about someone. It meant you wanted to be with them. At the very least, it meant you were dating.
And we were most certainly not dating.
I wondered if Nate knew that.
I made a note to tell him as plainly and clearly as possible. As soon as I got the chance. Unfortunately, it would have to wait, because we arrived at the wedding (a fucking wedding!) just as the ceremony began, and I had to keep my mouth shut.
The wedding itself was lovely—even I had to admit that. It was a simple ceremony between Weston King, one of the guys who owned the ad agency with Nate, and Elizabeth Dyson, a well-known debutante. But it wasn’t like I cared about either of them.
I made a note to tell Nate about that too.
But as soon as the wedding was over, everyone started to funnel past the divider in the room to the open space beyond. The reception began immediately, and with everyone crowding around Nate, I couldn’t yell at him then, either. I had to play it cool.
Fortunately, I had enough experience working at Pierce Industries to know how to put on the charm, and I did so, greeting everyone that came up to us with a smile and a nod. Engaging in conversation with polite small talk. I was familiar with the standard topics of conversation among the elite. Nate seemed to be somewhat bored with that, but it was his job, so I understood. He was charming, nonetheless. I could tell that he liked talking to people, liked mingling with them when the conversations got real, and occasionally they did. One couple engaged him in a conversation about a recent vacation they’d taken to Tibet. Nate, it turned out, had once spent a couple weeks there climbing and buying antique Buddhist statues. Just listening to that was a fascinating fifteen minutes.
I was still mad, though.
And then, just when I thought we had a break in the swarm, just when I thought I’d be able to give Nate more than a scowl, we bumped into the one person I never wanted to see in a situation like this—my boss, Hudson Pierce.
“Patricia,” Hudson exclaimed, as surprised to see me as I was shocked to see him. “I didn’t expect to see you here. Are you a friend of the groom or the bride?”
“Hudson,” his wife nagged him. “Leave her alone. She’s off the clock. Her private life is her business. Not yours.”
Alayna gave me a tired grin. Likely she’d been up late with her infant twins. She was still in the phase where she always looked exhausted when I saw her. Poor woman. I remembered seeing that look on my mother’s face in photographs from when I was young, and then seeing it replicated on several of my sisters’ faces when their own babies were born.
“You look lovely, Trish,” she said, with moderate enthusiasm. “That color brings your eyes out.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Pierce.” I shook my head, realizing that calling her Mrs. Pierce was maybe a little too formal for the occasion. “Laney,” I said at the same time as she said, “Laney.”
Nate turned to me with a flute of champagne he’d just scavenged off of some waiter’s tray. “Here you go, babe.”
I felt my face turn fifty shades of red. Well, Nate Sinclair had just outed us to my boss.
And there wasn’t even an “us” to out!
Now not only was I mad, I was petrified.
“You’re here with Nathan?” Hudson remarked, his eyes darting carefully from me to his newest ad manager.
“Yes,” Nate said at the same time as I said, “No, we’re just...”
But what were we “just”?
There was nothing to say. There was no answer I could give, no excuse. “We came together, yes.”
“I didn’t realize you knew each other outside of the office,” Hudson said pointedly.
I searched my mental files to see if I could remember if there were any rules about dating people that walk through his doors, but I couldn’t remember that there were any. Those had just always been my rules. But even if they weren’t official policy, it still felt like the wrong answer to say that I was on a date with Nate. It felt like a conflict somehow.
And truth be told, I did know Nate from somewhere else. But I wasn’t about to admit where from.
“We—” I looked to Nate, searching for help.
Nate studied me, sensing the source of my dismay. “We met at the party of a mutual friend.” He saved the day. Thank God.
“So you’re dating,” Laney said, trying to make the moment celebratory but inadvertently making it weirder because I hadn’t had time to let him kno
w we weren’t dating.
He was going to find out now. Sorry, Nate.
“I only came because Nate needed someone to accompany him. That’s all. Not for any other reason. I just… Just, you know. He needed a date. Because it’s his work thing. And he had to be here.” I sounded like an idiot. I’d never sounded like that in front of Hudson Pierce. My professionalism was a point of pride for me.
He probably thought I was drunk. Or lying. Or had something to hide. And only the last was true—but I wasn’t hiding anything that directly pertained to his business, so my secrets were my own to keep.
“And how are the babies?” I asked, wanting to change the subject as quickly as I could. “They sleep through the night yet? Is that a thing that they do at this age? All my nieces and nephews live on Long Island, and you know how it is with work and all… I feel like I mostly only see them on special occasions these days, so I never remember when the milestones happen...”
That sure sounded like a sincere interest in children, didn’t it? I was mentally face-palming myself.
“The babies are fantastic,” Alayna said, ignoring my flustered, incoherent babbling. “They’re probably too little still to sleep through the night, but we do have a nanny who helps us, and I’m not working right now. Soon, though. Though they’re four months old and that’s about when Mina slept through the night for the first time.”
Mina was their older daughter.
“She did?” Hudson asked. “It felt like it was a year before she was sleeping through the night.”
Laney rolled her eyes. “Men. They never remember things the way women do. Anyway, I’ll let you two enjoy yourselves. We’re about to get going. We just wanted to stop in and give our congratulations to the happy couple. But we’re both ready to be home. If I don’t nurse soon I’m going to burst.”
TMI, I thought. And I was the kind of woman who pretty much thought nothing was too much information. But anything even remotely related to the mysteries of babydom gave me the shudders. Women always assumed other women were waiting for one eventually. I supposed most of them were. That had just never been on my list of dreams. Did men deal with the assumption that the ultimate career was child-rearing? I doubted it.
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