by Thea Devine
“He’s not real,” she said instantly. “How could something plastic ever be as good as real? Or any penis be better than yours?”
“The stupid thing can’t fuck you. It can’t feel you up inside with its fingers, the fucking stupid thing.”
God, he was angry, like she’d been enjoying it too much. Which she had—stupid stupid stupid.
He pulled the dildo from her body and thrust his fingers inside her, deep, deep inside, as if he wanted to come out the other side.
And suddenly it was over. His anger wound down, and he carried her to the bed and set her down—well, not gently—and joined her, covering his face wearily with his arm. “Don’t talk.”
Dumb dumb dumb, loving that thing too much. Loving his thing too much. Do not not not fall in love, even with his manhood. Brooke should add that to the Mistress Code…
MJ didn’t move a muscle, holding herself so tensely that she began to tremble. And she had to go to the bathroom. Maybe he was asleep? Pretending to be asleep? Nothing would surprise her, given his mercurial reaction to her following his express command.
Well, she wasn’t going to pee in bed. She swung her legs over the side, then carefully padded around the bed, the chair, and his discarded jacket on the floor.
She picked it up to place it on the chair. There was a curious weight to it, like there was something in one of the pockets. Normally, she wouldn’t have cared.
But today—shit. This was too tempting. She didn’t know him—not at all, not after tonight’s jealous display over a dildo. So if there was anything there…
She inserted her fingers into the right-hand pocket. Bingo. There was something tucked in there, like a pocket diary or a superthin wallet.
She thought men like him used the latest electronic gizmos. Maybe when you were juggling a mistress, a business, a married life, and a community life, you couldn’t afford to be electronically tracked. And you probably couldn’t afford to put anything in writing, either.
There was something else there. She picked it out carefully and slipped into the bathroom.
What was this?
Tiny photographs, maybe one inch by one inch square. But not a person.
A nipple?
Whose nipple?
Two, three pictures of someone’s nipples in close-up, one with something surrounding the nipple, one with some slick residue on it.
She felt sick. These are not me. Whose nipples are they? I can’t ask. I can’t tell. I can’t stand it.
I’d flush these down the toilet, but he’d know I found them. But how can I go on from this moment, knowing about them?
I want to kill her. Who is she? Don’t tell me; I just want to kill her.
She wanted to tear the photographs to microscopic pieces and make them not exist.
How I can live with this? I thought, I thought—
Stupid, what did you think? A man with his appetites…
You don’t even know those pictures aren’t his wife.
Okay, it’s his wife; I can live with that.
But they’re so erotic, so tiny and clandestine…
She tiptoed back into the bedroom and slipped the pictures back into the jacket pocket, shielding the maneuver with her body.
It’s his wife…
But if he adores her nipples so much, why does he need me?
She slipped into bed, trembling with uncertainty.
Because you do things with him she never would.
Really, it’s his wife.
“You take the best care of me,” Sonny whispered to Delia one evening shortly before Christmas, while they wallowed in afterglow.
“I should hope so.” She trailed the little heart charm across his hairy chest—she liked a man with lots of hair on his chest—and looped it around his nipple and licked and sucked it. His body shivered, sapped as he was, and she smiled that infuriating little smile that intrigued and annoyed him.
The second charm she squeezed onto his penis head. The slit barely showed through, just enough so she could lick and nip at it, just enough so that all that attention made him stiff and pulsing all over again.
She knew he liked her, liked her nurturing, her imagination, and their sex. She liked him and their sex. It was a perfect symbiotic relationship. Lots of sex, no regrets. She couldn’t imagine what Brooke was worrying about.
But as Christmas approached, she also knew that he’d be spending a fair amount of time with his family and his various community obligations.
So what she needed to do, she thought idly, was to slip a little reminder of her in a jacket pocket, where a man invariably reached for his keys or some change, so that he wouldn’t forget her. Some little Delia thing, just to remind him…
Like maybe one of the nipple rings.
“Good God, Delia, you could make a snowman hot and hard.”
While he showered, she slipped the ring charm into the pocket of his Armani suit. Oops, there was something there. A pocket diary…and little pictures. Of…nipples?
Three little pictures of some exhibitionistic whore’s distended and adorned nipples. Nipples that were not hers. Hard, pointy nipples, looped and chained in one picture, naked in another, and in the third, coated with some slick substance. Goddamn him, she knew what that was.
“Delia!”
She started. God, if he came out and saw her with these…She slipped them back into his pocket and opened the bathroom door.
“Yes, Sonny?” in her most sugary tone.
“I need a fuck now.”
She took a deep, quelling breath. “That’s what I’m here for.”
But not for nipple pictures, she thought furiously.
Now what do I do? But there was no question. She slipped into the slower, closed the door, and fucked him.
Thane was swimming in her: He didn’t have one drop of semen left, but he was still hard and didn’t want to waste the erection.
“Christmas vacation is coming,” he reminded her.
“I’m aware.” Brooke hadn’t wanted to think about his family and that he might have to allocate time to them during the holidays.
“Good. It might be two weeks until I come again.”
“If you can take it,” she said lightly. “Not coming, I mean.”
He shimmied himself deeper. “Right now, I don’t think so.”
“I’ll be here.” What else could she say? To personalize it more would be to risk pushing him away, she was sure of it.
How did mistresses do this?
There was nothing in the Mistress Code about holidays or hormones. And it wasn’t as if she didn’t know about his wife and family. Googling him had provided minimal details. He had a socialite wife, scads of money, lived in a nearby suburban town, had two grown children, and was a pillar of the community—facts couched in fuzzy terms so no idle surfer could home in on specifics.
She’d been content with that before, but home for Christmas was so Norman Rockwell. Normal and familial and exclusive. It excluded her.
How could he go off and leave her for two weeks when he could barely contain himself the two days he gave her?
Don’t think about it. Give him something to remind him of you. Something small…The nipple loop chain. It fit in the palm of her hand, it would take up no space in his jacket pocket, and when he found it, maybe—
“Brooke! Come back, I’m feeling creamy.”
“Then let me have it, to sustain me for the time you’ll be gone.”
And he did, a riptide of an orgasm. He’d barely squeezed out the last drop when he said, “I have to go,” and headed for the shower.
This was her chance. She eased out of bed, removed the loops and chain, and slipped them into his jacket pocket.
But wait—there was something in there—his day calendar, yes, but, oh, God—her nipple pictures were right in his jacket pocket—and—three thin interlocking wires with a charm suspended from them. What on earth would you do with—
She looked at her nipples, placed
it on her right nipple, and looked at herself in the mirror. A nipple charm? For whom?
It hung, gently suspended from her nipple tip. Don’t forget me…
No. She shook her head. No, he was too consumed with her. Her sex, her nipples, her—
Wasn’t he?
The thing glittered and glistened as she moved; it would entice any lover to focus there.
Damn him to hell.
No, I won’t believe it. He got it for me. He’s going to give it to me, something to remember him by for these two weeks—
“Nipples!”
The bastard, calling me that when—“Yes, Thane?”
“I need a fuck.”
She wanted to kill him. She wanted to drown him in the shower, him and his heartless, insatiable manhood. She slipped the pictures and the nipple ring back into his pocket, and did the only thing she could: She went into the bathroom and let him have his way with her.
Chapter Sixteen
He lived in a nine-bedroom mansion in Pelham Manor that overlooked Long Island Sound. It had two parlors, an estate-sized dining room, a family dining room, a restaurant-sized kitchen with the most up-to-the-moment professional appliances, and two family rooms—one was his office, and a smaller one his wife, Rae, used as her office and to entertain friends.
There was stone loggia the width of the house that stepped down to the now snow-covered lawn, which swooped right to the water and to his rarely used private dock.
He loved his house. It was the symbol of everything the name Thane Bohansson meant, everything he’d accomplished.
He was a man of brazen appetites. He hadn’t gotten where he was by being namby-pamby; his wealth was secured in covert accounts under numerous company names and corporate aliases, Sonny Hanes and Harold Hanson among them. Naturally he’d placed his alter egos’ biographies on the internet as CEOs of two of those dummy corporations. That was what the damned thing was for—to aid and abet sharp businessmen who knew how to work the system.
And to deflect nosy women. Of course they all checked on him; he knew that from experience. But he loved nosy young women. He loved them fresh, firm fleshed, beautiful, and still untouched by the exigencies of trying to make it in the city. While they were still sexually voracious. He couldn’t take those experienced, emotionally needy, snotty-assed models and would-be actresses anymore. God, what luck that Brooke had mentioned to Vanessa that she had two friends and that they were as young, untried, and hot as she was.
Of course he had to have them. It was so simple to set up an alias with each: apartments on opposite sides of the city, the demand they give up their jobs to be always available for him. That subterfuge was the cost of doing business, a mere entertainment expense for his proud and rigorous penis.
It was so simple for Vanessa to set it up, as she always did in return for his generous remuneration, so that he could preempt them before they were seen or touched by another man’s hands.
MJ—an absolute dream of a submissive. And Delia—he rather liked that faint elusiveness in her, and that combination of sexpot and earth mother. And Brooke—where could a man find a more delicious hole than one that loved being fucked solely for the sake of being fucked?
He had been in orgasmic heaven for the past six months. Three gorgeous, nubile penis pumps. Hot, smooth flesh, tight, wet pussies…it occupied his mind all the time.
He didn’t know how he was going to contain his lust while he was home. Maybe he’d sneak off and surprise them all as a Christmas treat.
No, he couldn’t wait that long. Well, he’d just have to find a whore in town. Home for the holidays and blasting off already—he stripped, changed, and went to find a fast fuck.
An hour later, Rae entered their bedroom.
Ah, my ghost has been here.
She caught glimpses of him now and then, drifting in and out of her life. She’d been married to him for thirty years now, and she was well aware that she had bartered her body and her family name for big bucks and ultrarespectability. She had her showcase house and all the other trappings, the trade-offs women of her social status made in order to stay married to high-powered men. She just didn’t have him.
But it was a nice life. She knew nothing; didn’t want to know anything. It would be much more difficult if she did know, and not having to deal with that merciless sex was a blessing.
And it wasn’t that she wasn’t attractive or sexual. It was just that Thane was Thane, and he couldn’t be controlled by a hundred of her. He needed a harem. He was a pasha under the skin, who lived to be serviced by a long line of different young women salivating for the chance.
So she let it all slide, because it never intruded here, in her Shangri-la.
The kids were grown now. Egan and Alaina were nice kids, in spite of their father, polite, successful, and devoted to her. She didn’t need to protect them anymore; she was free to do anything she wanted now.
She could throw extravagant parties, shop the Paris runways, take the corporate jet anywhere in the world, or sail their lavish yacht to Monaco. She had personal shoppers, the current trendy decorator, and houses in Biarritz and Tuscany if she was bored in Pelham.
She had lots of friends, she’d had several particular male friends, and Thane didn’t care because it never intruded in his life.
But here he was for his mandatory Christmas appearance, because she yearned for some small degree of normalcy. But, as ever, there was no normalcy. He’d come and gone, leaving his semen-soaked clothes on the floor like a naughty little boy thumbing his nose at her.
Moments like these, she hated him and she hated her life.
She picked up his trousers, went through the pockets, and stuffed the pants in the cleaning bag; picked up his jacket, delved in the pockets, and—took out the day calendar, the little photographs, the looped chain, the triple-wire heart charm. Rae sank onto the bed, her hand shaking, every alarm bell clanging in her head: intrusion, intrusion. After carefully placing the items on the white duvet, she girded herself to open the calendar.
It was one of those wallet-sized books that had a week’s worth of notations every two facing pages.
Thane’s handwriting was like hieroglyphics, but she was used to it and easily deciphered three sets of initials plotted out each week for the last six months: npls on Tuesday and Thursday; srdr on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday; d’a on Friday and Sunday. Next to each set of initials was a number and sometimes a notation.
Wednesday: srdr 5 hrs. Tuesday: npls 4 fd. It looked like he was keeping a cryptic diary of…what? She didn’t want to think of what it was.
She tossed the diary onto the bed and picked up the wire. Not an earring. She dangled it from her fingers. Maybe the post was broken?
But the gold chain was something else; it was like an eyeglass holder, of a length that could only dangle uselessly down around the groin…
Was everything to do with Thane so overtly sexual?
She picked up the little pictures and her heart stopped. Nipples. Some fucking slut’s naked nipples, close up, pointed and hard. They posed with the stretchy loops of the chain around them in one picture and were coated with…Damn his evil soul!
He couldn’t.
He didn’t—
She took the photographs to the window. The sick son of a bitch bastard, carrying pictures of some whore’s naked nipples where anyone could find them—npls…now she understood the diary entry.
A sex diary, a nipple necklace, pictures—this was obscenely intruding in her life, even if she’d found the items by accident.
She didn’t know what to do.
She wanted to castrate him, to hang him by his hairy balls until he screamed for mercy. But that was illegal.
She burned to make his sex life miserable. Maybe she could find out who these damned whores were and destroy them, personally and professionally.
There had to be something she could legally do to punish Thane. Their son Egan was a lawyer—he’d know what to do.
MJ gave in to temptation and went back to her old neighborhood, back, in her heart, to a time when things were simpler and she hadn’t been betrayed like that.
She just couldn’t get it out of her mind or heart: There was someone else in Harold’s life. Even though he’d treated her like she was the special one—damn it, she was the special one.
She felt cold and dead inside. She’d thought Harold was…but what was he? He was a man who loved dominating her as much as she loved being controlled, and he’d given her a gorgeous apartment and three days a week of his time. So what was her problem? Having the perfect man in her life?
Could the perfect man want a submissive little nobody seven days a week? His need for sex was so off the charts that one single woman couldn’t hold him. Still, it was a knife in the heart to know that Harold had other relations with other women that didn’t include bondage. Maybe she’d thought it would go on forever because he was so perfect for her.
She had no idea what she would do. Would she even tell him she’d found the photographs, accuse him of—of what?
He was her master for now, not forever. By the nature of it, her time as his mistress was limited. He might grow tired of her, or she’d grow bored with him—something would ease the high-voltage sexual tension.
Without those photographs, she would never have known about this. So forget them. Forget those nipples that were so extraordinarily hard. Think of them as erotic pictures for a supersexed man who needed to be in charge. She should be grateful he was still with her.
She walked around the block where her apartment had been. Everything looked smaller, as if Harold’s world had so enlarged hers that by comparison everything had shrunk.
Then the door of the building opened, and a familiar figure stepped out.
“Dallan?”
He whipped around. “MJ?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I rented your old apartment for…business purposes.”
There was something in his eyes. This was too odd, him taking her apartment. Unless he had a mistress stashed up there. She didn’t feel a pang at the thought. “I see. Well…” She turned away.
