She thought she should shake her head, but she didn’t.
His voice vibrated in his chest next to her ear. “You’re so strong. I didn’t believe that you could endure everything.”
She had given him everything she had. Everything.
Mannix whispered, and his breath cooled her forehead, “You overcame the pain and triumphed.”
Before, overcoming the nails of pain had been the bare minimum expected of her.
Triumph was a whole new concept for Lizzy, who had suffered so much failure in her life. A single, momentous failure had cracked the foundation of her world.
Failure was the black pit in her mind that The Dom’s Russian words had driven her into. It blacked out her whole life, all her hopes, everything she wanted. Every relationship that she had tried to lose herself in had fallen into that pit of fear and failure: Gio, The Dom, and even Theo. Once she realized that Theo knew all about her, that he could see right through her, she had fallen past the lightless horizon of pain.
She had triumphed, Mannix said.
Lizzy reached a shaking hand up to his shoulder.
“Stay with me,” he said. “Come with me to my house tonight, and I’ll take care of you.”
Someone who would take care of her? Impossible.
He whispered by her ear, “Everything you need, everything you want, I can give you.”
Instead of trying so hard to carve out security for herself.
She was so tired.
“I’ll be there for you. I need you, Lizzy. Your strength is beautiful. I will make you strong, and I won’t let you go. Come live with me and be my love.”
Lizzy grasped his neck and held on.
Pain is weakness leaving the body, and Lizzy wanted, so much, to be strong.
A Blur into the Past
Lizzy walked on sore legs to the employee parking lot to drive her Boxster to Mannix’s house. Gravel slid under her hoochie shoes, and her thighs still trembled harder than they would have after a six-hour workout. Mannix had already texted her his address, though he said that she should follow him so he could open the security gates.
A couple spaces away, in a bright cone from a parking lot light, The Dom held a car door open for Rae. The yellow sodium light brightened his hair to a brilliant shade of gold, but shadow masked his face. Rae looked skeptically at the low sports car.
Lizzy didn’t need to duck behind the black sedan. Only her eyes peered over the top of the roof as she watched them.
Wow. It was too late at night for The Dom to be taking Rae on a Dom-Date, considering that there was usually a music performance or theater and supper involved and then the afterward part could take hours, not to mention that The Dom usually waited months or years before initiating a date, so Lizzy wondered where Rae and The Dom were going, so late.
In the spotlight, Lizzy saw the amused yet tender expression on The Dom’s face as Rae lowered herself toward the car.
Oh. The Dom really wasn’t in a position to take a sub. He and Rae were together.
Rae gingerly folded her long, coltish legs into the low-slung Tesla Roadster.
That morning, Rae’s flat tone when she urged Lizzy to tell The Dom how she felt now made sense. The tears in Rae’s eyes made sense.
Only a really good friend would offer to step away, especially if her heart was breaking.
But The Dom had chosen Rae, even when Lizzy had offered him everything she had.
He pressed Rae’s car door closed and strode to the driver’s side. The sodium parking lot light above touched his blond hair, turning it more sunny blond.
Lizzy’s heart sighed a small breath of disappointment, wanting to be the one he had chosen, but it wasn’t a spasm of pain like she had been in love with him.
And then it was gone.
At that moment, in the cooling night, Lizzy’s interest in The Dom lost focus, and he blurred into her past.
Lizzy had a Dom, her own Dom, and now she was positive that she should commit to Mannix.
She would give him everything.
Breakfast
Lizzy awoke in the guest bedroom that Mannix had showed her to last night, down the hall from his own master bedroom. Elaborate molding ringed the seam where the white walls met the ceiling. She studied the molding on the wall behind the bed while she stretched in the sheets. The carved woodwork on just the wall behind the bed was a little different, a little rounder in the ocean-like waves, like they had run out of the molding that was on the other three walls and matched it as best they could.
She shrugged. No one else would even notice. She was a bit of a detail freak sometimes.
In the adjoining bathroom, which blazed white on every surface like she had stepped into gleaming limbo, she found a new toothbrush and other stuff, including a black transparent peignoir set, size zero.
Mannix had prepared for her come home with him. She didn’t know if she should be honored or disturbed, but at least she felt wanted.
And she felt like someone was taking care of her, an awkward, warm sensation.
Last night at The Devilhouse was a pain-fueled blur.
After sleeping on it, she was pretty sure that being Mannix’s sub was a good idea. She had gone to The Devilhouse yesterday to become a sub and ended up with a Dom, just not the one that she had expected.
Well, her car was here at his house. She could always just walk out, get in her car, and drive off.
Lizzy hip-bumped the drawer closed and held the peignoir set to her shoulders, analyzing the fit. Mannix had bought the lingerie in smallest adult size, not knowing that even that would be too big for her. Luckily, the gown was meant to be short, which meant it hung tea-length on her. She gathered and safety-pinned the back at the waist. She always carried safety pins in her purse because all her clothes needed some sort of altering or pinning, and hems could give out at the worst times. Slogging around on soggy hems sucked.
Even the light silk scratched the raw skin on her back, and her bruises ached.
She set off through the house in search of Mannix. The hallway outside the guest bedrooms led to a grand staircase that curved down the main floor, and she remembered that turning right in the main room, a white-painted salt cave of a room, would lead to the kitchen.
Mannix was waiting in the kitchen, reading a tablet. He wore black silk pajama pants but no shirt, so his scrolling tattoos on his undulating, muscular torso were on glorious display. On his broad chest, the myriad of tattoos looked like dozens of interlocking crop circles cut into rolling hills, seen from a plane. Lizzy wanted to take a few hours to examine them all, running her fingers and tongue over them.
Coffee billowed dark brown scent around the black marble counters and Old World-style cabinets.
“Good morning, Lizzy. What do you eat for breakfast?” he asked.
“I don’t,” she admitted. “I usually work out in the mornings and then drink black coffee.”
He swiped the tablet, turning the page. “That’s not healthy. You should eat protein in the morning, eggs, bacon, steak, like that.”
“Oh, good God. I never eat that stuff.”
“Why not?”
Because even a few extra ounces of fat would reduce her strength-to-weight ratio, and the loss of jump height would show up on the vault and the floor exercise. “Habit.”
“Well, as my sub, you’ll eat. Sit on the floor beside my chair.”
“I beg your pardon.” Sitting at his feet wasn’t something that a Jersey girl did, yet she had said that she would do just that for The Dom. Well, hell. Thinking about it and actually doing it were two totally different things. Totally different.
“You’ll sit at my feet, and I’ll feed you.”
Lizzy froze, her hand resting on the cold marble counter, steadying her as she chewed her lip.
Wow, that was so weird. Being fed at his feet might make her his dog, his pet, and so dependent on him, but it was also strangely alluring, because he would be taking care of her so very basic need.
One meal wouldn’t hurt, just to try it, to see what it was like to be fed.
She settled to the floor, kneeling at his feet.
Mannix nodded at her but left her kneeling there while he strode around the kitchen, fixing eggs and bacon on the stove. The aroma of smoked meat and the burning sulfur of eggs overpowered the coffee and turned Lizzy’s stomach. She really wasn’t used to dumping solid food in her stomach before noon.
The image of Mannix doing something so domestic as cooking had never crossed her mind. Lizzy had assumed that she would do those wifely things for him, but evidently not.
Roll with the momentum, she thought.
Mannix brought two plates to the table and wolfed down his bacon and eggs while she waited, a reprieve that settled her stomach.
When he was finished, he turned his chair to face her. Mannix loomed larger over her, marking their difference in size. She was used to being small and feeling size disparity with everyone, but this emphasis was disconcerting.
He picked up a piece of bacon, cracking it into small pieces, and held it in his fingers in front of her mouth.
Lizzy leaned forward and delicately took it out of his fingers, then chewed and swallowed the salty, crisp meat.
Vile. She did not like eating in the morning.
He held a fluff of scrambled eggs out to her, also just in his fingertips, and she sucked that off his fingers. The creamy butter that he had fried them in ran over her tongue and tasted like browned, flaky pastry.
When her mouth closed around his fingers, Mannix’s black pupils expanded, crowding out the pale blue in his eyes, though his expression didn’t move.
Oh. Now she got it.
She ate all that she could stomach from his hands, sucking on his fingers and languorously running her tongue over his palms, even though half of what he had put on the plate was left over. Mannix’s breathing remained determined and steady, but his eyes remained dilated with passion and his pulse jumped in his throat.
Considering the sexy way he held each morsel out to her, Lizzy felt rather like a pampered pet.
After a few minutes, when she was so full that her stomach was getting upset, she took each tidbit more and more slowly, concentrating more on sucking on his hands than on the food, until he wiped his hands on a napkin and dropped to his knees on the floor in front of her, kissing her and holding her face in his huge hands.
Yeah, this was better.
His lips held hers, and he kissed her first softly, his lips just brushing hers, then deeper.
She stood on her knees, raising to meet him. Heat shot from her lips down her core, and desire sparked in her belly again. She pressed harder to him, wanting to taste him more. He opened his lips, kissing her deeper, mouthing her lips and tongue like she had licked his fingers.
Lizzy sucked in a jagged breath and reached for his shoulders, but he pulled away from her and stood up.
She almost fell over without his hard chest to push against, but she caught her balance by grabbing the chair.
Above her, he untied the drawstring of his black silk pajama pants. His predatory gaze told her exactly what he wanted, while she was down there on her knees. His abdominals were so overbuilt that his torso protruded like a beer belly, but beer could never produce those hard crenelations and bricks of muscle.
Mannix shoved his pants’ waistband under his balls.
His cock was as pale as the rest of his skin, but the shaft was rose pink and the top was violet, so engorged with blood. No wonder he had kept pushing into her last night.
Lizzy had planned to lean forward and give him some great head because, well, she had had some practice at that, but he grabbed the back of her skull in his meaty hands. She opened her lips quickly as he pulled her mouth onto him.
While his mouth had tasted just like her own—breakfast and an underlying hint of toothpaste mint—his cock tasted like the clean musk of Mannix’s body. His hardness shoved past her lips and pressed the back of her mouth. Lizzy stood on her knees and held the chair.
Mannix groaned and rocked against her lips again. His fist clenched on the back of her neck, but her blond hair was too short to grab hold of.
Her lips were too stretched to smile, but she had a surprise for him.
Lizzy sucked a deep breath through her nose and relaxed the muscles of her throat, allowing his cock to inch farther in. She pressed forward, taking him in slowly, down farther. Inside her mouth, his suede cock throbbed against her tongue and the back of her throat.
His surprised grunt was gratifying.
Her nose met his body, and she had taken him all the way down her throat. Lizzy had all kinds of muscle control. His male scent was stronger next to his body, that natural musk that had been almost hidden by the green cologne he was wearing. Lizzy sipped air through her nose, and his earthy scent rose into her.
He moved, slowly, in and out of her throat. Behind her head, his fist shook with exertion.
She kept one hand on the chair to steady herself because falling over just then might really hurt at least one of them, but Lizzy brought her other hand up and under his soft balls, rolling them in her palm.
He gasped and his dick throbbed in her mouth.
She rolled her tongue under his cock, dragging the roughness along the underside.
Mannix’s hand behind her head pushed her head down farther. She fought to not gag. Above her head, he cried out and came hard, his legs shaking.
As the last spasms left his body, Lizzy pulled her head off of him, and he collapsed in the chair behind him. He held his head in his shaking hands. His black hair draped forward around his face, and he seemed to struggle with something.
Lizzy sat back with her butt on her heels. Her lips felt bruised and swollen, and her throat was sore from taking him so far down, but the shock on his face was so worth it. She grinned.
Mannix finally looked up, and his blue eyes were full of fire again. He rolled one shoulder, then the other, and then stretched his back by twisting. His expression had been shocked surprise, like he had not realized just how incredible she was at blow jobs, but it shifted to exultation.
She smiled at the rising emotion in his eyes.
One should always be modest. Demonstration of one’s skills was better than bragging.
The astonishment in their eyes was so much better that way.
Mannix, Free
Mannix’s legs trembled, and he sat down hard on the kitchen chair. He grabbed the table, his fingers scrabbling against the dark wood.
Lizzy knelt in front of him, a devious grin on her pixie face. A strand of her short blond hair wove through his fingers where he had gripped it.
He felt no pain.
Mannix rolled his shoulders, and bent, and turned. Nothing hurt him. The relief from the constant, chronic pain was momentous. The pain always clawed at him, dropping a barbed curtain between him and everyone else that he couldn’t break through.
As Lizzy had deep-throated him, he had stared down at the bruises and stripes mottling her skin under the sheer fabric of the underwear set, and the pain had disintegrated.
Gone.
No fire lanced his spine. No glowing iron spikes stabbed through his neck and legs.
His bones and muscles felt like they had when he was teenager, maybe better. His first injury, a neck sprain, had sidelined him when he was fifteen, and he swore that he had never been right after that.
Now, he was right. He was whole.
Mannix panted, and his voice was hoarse with relief. “I could fall in love with a girl like you.”
Russian for Love
Lizzy shifted on her knees, watching Mannix.
His eyes were still unfocused from the orgasm, and shudders ran over his chest under his swirling tattoos. He braced himself on his knees, his big hands slipping a little on his black silk pajama pants as he breathed deep, shuddering gasps.
Lizzy resisted the urge to polish her nails on her shoulder like that was no big thing. Let
him revel in how she had worked him over.
Mannix’s soft voice rasped with vulnerability, like he was strung out and nearly dying, and he said, “I could fall in love with a girl like you.”
All of Lizzy’s life, she had an echo in her head, and the echo spoke Russian. Everything that everyone said to her, the echo translated and fed it back to her in her father’s voice.
When the echo got to the word love, it stuttered and phased into white noise.
Lizzy didn’t know the Russian word for love.
She slipped her arms around his waist and laid her head on his thighs. The silk of his black pajama pants were smooth under her cheek.
He stroked her hair, his breathing still ragged.
An Offer Mannix Can’t Refuse
Sunday just before noon, while Lizzy lay limp over the back of the sectional in front of the television area after he fucked her until the pain went away again, Mannix answered his blaring phone that was displaying a long, unknown phone number. Odd. “Hello?”
A very deep, dark male voice asked, “Mannix Bonfils?”
The caller must be someone connected to his father because he had pronounced Mannix’s last name the French way, but even as Mannix’s chest pounded, he knew that it wasn’t the estate executor. That guy’s pinched voice irritated the crap out of him.
“Yes. This is?” Mannix stretched, free from pain in his leg and back again. He felt like a new man.
On the phone, the man said, “The Dom of The Devilhouse.”
Mannix dropped his arm to his side. “This is a surprise.”
“I have decided to divest myself of The Devilhouse. Are you still interested?”
Mannix took half a step backward. Yesterday, he would have never guessed that The Dom’s possibility of selling The Devilhouse someday would turn out to be the next afternoon. “I would consider it. When you say The Devilhouse, what does that encompass?”
“The business, the building, the books, the real estate. Everything. There are legal firewalls, but I hold all the stock. There is no debt.”
Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1) Page 16
