by Eden Myles
He sat there in silence for a very long time, his face impassive, watching me. I didn’t know if I was getting through to him or not. I didn’t even know if he cared about what I had to say. He was a powerful man. I was no one of consequence. I was no one but his courtesan, his lover. But after what seemed an eternity, the life started filtering back into his cold, hard face. It struggled to animate the muscles around his eyes and mouth as if he were fighting to come back from the dead. Finally, he looked at me in that way he had. It was a hungry look. A very male look. He licked his lips and said, “Too forward, Evelyn.”
“I can be a very forward girl,” I told him.
An impulse seized me. It wasn’t an impulse that good girls have, but often enough, good girls finished last. I looked at my lover a long moment. I took in his beauty and his rage. I didn’t care if he blew fire and smoke at me, if he tried to burn me up. I wasn’t afraid of him anyone. I took a deep, shuddering breath to steady myself and stalked across the room in my heels. I swayed my hips a little as I approached him, trying to be as aware of my body as Devon was of his. I knew I was pretty from the pictures on the walls. Maybe not beautiful, maybe never that, but I was pretty, and I was what he wanted. I was what he needed.
Along the way, I stumbled over the damned glass chair again, but I caught myself on the edge of Mr. Sterling’s desk. I stood up straighter, recovering myself. I would not be deterred. Not by Brian. Not by dragons. Not by glass furniture.
Mr. Sterling watched me approach. I could see the hunger building in his eyes, the way he tracked me like some hunting animal scenting prey. As I reached him, he turned in his seat to meet me. His big hand closed over the side of my neck, frantic to touch, to hold me, to subjugate me to his hungers, but I was faster than he. I climbed into his lap, straddled him, gripped the back of his neck, and kissed him, hard. I kissed him like I meant to consume him. Like I meant to breathe into him, to give him life from my life, breath from my breath. I licked the seam of his lips, then kissed him again, driving my tongue deep into the wet velvet heaven of his mouth. I controlled the kiss, flickering my tongue in and out of his mouth and over his teeth until I could hear a low, throaty noise vibrating in his chest.
His hand went to the back of my head. He gripped huge fistfuls of my hair in his almost painfully powerful grip. He tried to drag me back so he had access to my throat, my breasts, all of me, but I refused to let him have his way this time. He needed to learn that he couldn’t always be in control of everything around him, including me.
I bit his bottom lip and he grunted, his grip loosening on my hair. I looked him in the eye, not a friendly look. Not a very submissive one, either.
“Evelyn…”
“Hush.” I attacked the side of his neck, kissing him but also biting him there, hard. Hard enough that I felt him lurch in surprise and heard the low groans of pleasure building in his voice. I kept my one hand on the back of his neck to hold him in place while the other moved down the central line of his body until I’d reached the front of him. He was huge against me, hard and hot, and so very alive. I gripped him through his trousers until I felt his sharp intake of breath and the delight of his shock. Then I went to work attacking the front of his trousers until his heat and strength poured into my hand.
I gripped his cock, both hard and soft in my hand, and stroked the familiar length of him. He trembled in my grip. He responded deliciously, leaning back in his seat so I had room to wriggle upward in his lap and slide the skirt of my dress up to my waist. He moved his hands down my body to my hips to steady me. He helped me guide myself down upon him. He was so big I knew it would hurt a little, but I was wet, and the nagging ache inside me hurt more.
I looked him straight in the eye as I took him inside me. I slid down a couple of inches, impaling myself on his cock, before moving upward again. I repeated the action. I slid down the length of him and let him feel my inner muscles gripping him tight before sliding to the top of him again, almost but not quite letting him go. I moved with deliberate slowness, controlling his rhythm and my own. His fingers gripped me fiercely and his eyes sparked like chips of blue ice as he arched his hips upward, trying to reach deep inside me. But I only lifted myself up higher. I rested my hands on his shoulders and held him down while I made that up and down movement again. I fucked him slow and hard, over and over, until his breathing caught in his throat and he strained against me, his eyes rolling almost all the way up into his head.
He reached for my face. He ran his fingers over my lips. I licked them, then took them in my mouth, one by one, sucking on them while I undulated my hips, taking him deeper and deeper inside me until I’d reached the root of him. I settled against his balls, reveling in the fullness of him buried deep inside my body, and said, “Hold.”
He groaned as I kissed him. I clutched the back of his neck and started fucking him again, harder, much faster now. “Hold, my love…hold…” I murmured against his mouth even as I worked him up toward climax. I could tell when he was near his end by the way he fought his body to obey me. I could feel my own climax building at the base of my spine. I gave him one last, hard thrust and then let him go. He clutched me tight and thrust up into me as far as he could go in the seconds before we came together. I kissed him and he cried out in my mouth as he trembled and spilled himself inside me.
He sagged back in his seat and I leaned against his chest, with him still buried deep inside me. I kissed his face all over and we made out like a couple of randy teenagers before he drew back, clutched my face, and said, “Stay with me, Evelyn. Don’t leave me. Be angry with me, but don’t leave me.”
Before I could answer him, he was up and out of his seat, my legs wrapped around his waist. He carrying me effortlessly over to the sofa where he laid me down upon the cushions and tried to press me down, press into me again, trying desperately to fuck me on his own terms. I growled a warning and grabbed him by the tie. I pushed him over, so he was beneath and I was atop, where I wanted to be. He was strong. So was I. I held him down and started riding him hard while his hands reached for me, clutching at my breasts, my hair, my shoulders, anything to pull me down, to kiss me even as he thrust and thrust inside all my wetness, crying out my name. Each thrust seemed to burst inside of me, to fill me with a little more love and a lot more lust. Each thrust made me grunt from the power of his impacts, but I didn’t mind the pain. I didn’t mind pain if he was with me. Near the end, I slid my hands between us and held him down. I stopped him from coming until he snarled in frustration.
The blonde receptionist was standing over us, looking vaguely horrified by our behavior. “Mr. Sterling’s two o’clock appointment is here,” she informed us rather primly.
I looked up at her and said, “Tell Mr. Sterling’s two o’clock appointment that he is otherwise indisposed at the moment and he is to return at three o’clock.”
The blonde looked confused.
“Now!” I shouted, and she took off like the hounds of hell were snapping at her heels.
“Christ, Evelyn, she’s the best receptionist I’ve ever had,” Mr. Sterling said.
I clutched his face and kissed him to shut him up. I started moving again, fucking him hard, letting him fuck me. He dug his fingernails deep into my hips as we strained against one another and he fought me for his release. I knew he would fight me. I knew he would do anything for me. That’s why, just as I felt him nearing his release for the second time, I stopped him again. “Not yet. There are conditions,” I told him breathlessly as I looked down at him. I decided that Devon was right. The fights between courtesans and their gentlemen were more than worth it when the make-up sex was this good.
He stared up at me with feverish desperation, his hands snarled in my hair. “What conditions?”
“Firstly, you’ll have to accompany me on that vacation to France and England.”
He groaned, trying to move inside me. But I held him back. I held him st
ill inside me. “Yes, of course. And the second?”
“One day a week, on Saturdays, we do role reversal and you become my courtier for the day. You do everything I say. Everything I want. And you remember that a courtier’s place is beneath his lady.”
I didn’t know what to expect from him, if Ian Sterling would even agree to my terms or not. So I was surprised to see the fierce spark of admiration and excitement in his eyes. “Today is Saturday, my love.”
“Yes, I know,” I told him and finally let him come.
The End
Bonus Story
TEN YEARS LATER
The gallery was vast and white. A dozen L-shaped partitions broke up the empty space, and hanging from each of the gallery boards was a nude in black and white. Each of the nudes was a doll from the Dollhouse, dressed and posed to resemble a silver screen actress, the face a soft, blurry whiteness like a lily, the lips like black roses. More big, softly shining photographs covered the walls. I walked among the crop of modern-day Bette Davises and Ava Gardners and Rita Hayworths and Bette Pages and marveled at their fertile, almost touchable beauty. Ten years ago I would have guessed them all to be the result of Malcolm and Devon’s artistic eye. I would never have guessed that Ian was capable of capturing such perfectly lush beauty.
Ian stood near the end of the gallery, staring at the last picture on the wall. Despite the years, he was still tall and very trim, though there was quite a lot of silver in his hair now. I didn’t mind it at all. It made him seem even more virile, alive and real and beautiful. The photo he was looking at was mine, but not done by him. This one was from the shoot I had done with Malcolm ten years ago. I knew Ian was uncomfortable with including it in tonight’s showing, but I thought it would be a nice gesture to include the work of the artist who had inspired him to try his hand at photography in the first place.
I stalked up to Ian and said, “You aren’t going to fret about this all evening, are you?”
“I shan’t make a fuss and ruin your perfect evening, no,” he answered as drolly as possible.
“It’s not my evening,” I reminded him, playing with the silk scarf tied around my long ponytail of hair. “In fact, it’s not even your evening, technically. It’s for the Foundation. That should give you courage if nothing else.”
“Yes, of course,” he answered.
I wondered if I had to remind him that we’d only just begun the Sterling Foundation in order to benefit burn victims, and this “art party” (as Devon called it) was vitally important to our funding. It had been mostly Devon’s idea, actually. Each week, when we visited the Dollhouse, Devon and I snuck off to bounce ideas around while our husbands were off mingling. We’d finally agreed that Ian should share his private collection with a number of very moneyed friends. The hard part was in convincing Ian to agree to the party. It had taken me weeks to wear him down, and ever since real preparations had begun for tonight, I’d lived in mortal fear that Ian would get cold feet and withdraw his work.
Ian was looking skittish again, so I went up to him and took his arm and rested my head on his shoulder to calm him.
“Could we at least withdraw this one?”
“This is your favorite one,” I said. The nude didn’t bother me so much, despite the fact that no one outside the Dollhouse had ever see it. It looked like a different girl to me, some girl made of pearl and light who had fallen wet and sated from the attentions of her lover upon the furs. And when I thought of it that way, I didn’t blush. At least, not much.
“Yes, exactly,” Ian said, sounding annoyed. He moved a hand to my hip, drawing me closer against him in an unmistakably possessive gesture. “It’s a part of my personal collection, Evelyn. And that’s my courtesan on the wall.”
I liked the way he said that. I liked his righteous indignation, as if it were the most important thing in the world that he defend my honor. His words made me feel younger than my thirty-five years. And prettier, as always. And tonight, as others looked at the picture, I knew I wouldn’t just feel like the wife and private secretary to Mr. Ian Sterling. I would feel like a courtesan again. Not that being a wife or private secretary was bad, because I enjoyed those things as well.
I was so lost in my own thoughts that I didn’t even realize what was happening until Ian’s hand had slid to the hem of my dress and shoved it up to my waist. His hand found the string of my bikini underwear. “Panties, Evelyn?” he said, sounding disappointed. “I thought I broke you of that deplorable habit years ago.”
I started making excuses, but he grabbed me and pushed me back against the wall beside the photograph of me, the motion so sudden the breath went out of me in a sharp gasp. Then he was there, pressing me against the cold, bare bricks of the wall, his hands gripping my hips to hold me in place while he kissed me, his mouth rough and demanding, like he meant to eat me whole. The roughness of his cheek scraped my face and his teeth nipped my bottom lip so that in mere seconds I was writhing against the wall and whimpering like some young, untried courtesan for him. “Little dove,” he said, his voice coming hot and muffled and intimate against my skin, “present yourself to me.”
Oh God, he meant to play a game with me. Right now. Right here. With less than ten minutes before the first guests arrived. “No,” I said, fisting my hands in his jacket. “Ian, the others will be here any minute.”
“That’s correct.”
I started fighting him then, I started shouting “No!” at him, but he held me against the wall with his body, using almost no effort at all. His hardness pressed into my stomach. It seemed to grow exponentially with my struggles. I whimpered and begged him to let me go. I knew he was waiting to hear our private safe word, but when I didn’t immediately use it, he grabbed me by the chin, being careful not to smear my makeup, and said, “Evelyn, I don’t show you enough discipline, I think. You’ve grown too forward.”
“Ian, please…” I began, then saw the disapproval simmering in his eyes. I immediately slipped into my position as professional courtesan. “Mr. Sterling, please, sir, no…”
He liberated the scarf from my ponytail so my hair showered down and started binding my wrists together in front of me. My heart started thudding up somewhere near the root of my tongue. My eyes kept darting sideways, half expecting the ushers to throw open the doors of the gallery so all our friends could start pouring in. What would they find? Ian Sterling, CEO of Sterling of New York, tying up his wife. If it were the Dollhouse we were entertaining, I wouldn’t even mind very much, but these were our other friends, the men Ian worked with, the wives I lunched with. People we planned to beg money from.
When Mr. Sterling had finished with the scarf, he pulled it up so my arms were elevated above my head. I didn’t immediately understand what he was doing until I realized he was reaching for one of the industrial gauge steel hooks in the wall that supported the huge, glossy photographs hanging in the gallery. He slipped the knot over the hook so I was standing on tiptoes with my arms bound over my head. I immediately tested the fortitude of the hook, but this was equipment used for hanging enormous lithographs in dust shields that weighed as much as three hundred pounds apiece. A women of a hundred and fifty pounds like myself wouldn’t so much as even challenge it. I pulled but the silk just cut into my wrists until I stopped.
Mr. Sterling stood back and brought his fingers to his chin, looking me over thoughtfully as if he didn’t quite know what to do with me.
I couldn’t help myself. I yanked compulsively on the scarf, hoping he would hurry, hurry, whatever his plans.
“Evelyn, behave yourself,” he said. He used his other voice, the hard, metallic one that said that no amount of begging would work with him. It was his boardroom voice. It was sometimes his bedroom voice, too.
I took a few deep breaths to steady my thundering heartbeat and worked at obeying him. Fighting him wouldn’t help. When he was in this kind of mood, fighting only excited
him more. Instead, I tried to talk him down. I started promising him that he could do anything he wanted to me tonight, if only he’d let me go now, but he only looked at me with annoyance, took a handful of my grandmother’s pearls, and stuffed them in my mouth. Then he went to work on my dress. He’d asked me to wear my favorite wrap dress, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d planned all this out in advance. It wouldn’t have surprised me. He undid the red silken material so the coolness of the gallery touched me and made my skin prickle. He unhooked my push-up bra and ripped away my panties. I scuffled in my heels to escape him, but he placed his hand against my belly, holding me still against the wall until I stopped struggling.
He looked down the length of me for a moment as if he were lost in some fugue. It was a very sexual look, but it also held something else, something that went beyond sex. Possession, passion, love, greed—every emotion a man has for the women who is his courtesan, his lover, his wife, his plaything, the mother of his child.
His palmed one of my breasts. They were much larger and firmer these days. They had filled out considerably since the birth of our son. He inclined his head, flicking his tongue over my nipple, then set to suckling me, slow and hard. He worked until both my nipples were swollen and wet to his liking. Then he drew his tongue down over my belly. My whole body writhed for him. “We should have another child, Evelyn,” he finally said. I could tell from the way he said it that he had been thinking about it for some time. He growled softly against my ticklish belly button. It was a very male sound. “I want to fuck you, Evelyn. I want to watch your belly swell with my child. I want to watch you suckle him at your breasts.”
I grunted a slow response. I still loved his pillow talk. The sweetness of him.
He moved his mouth down in a slow line toward my bikini scar. We were big people. Our son had been a huge baby, almost ten pounds at the time of his birth. He was eight now, and destined to be as big as his father. Ian traced the scar, first with his fingers and then with his lips. He loved my scar. He treasured it. He went to one knee in front of me and kissed my belly so I sighed at the familiar touch of his lips. He traced my scar with his tongue. He was always so gentle there.
