by Allyn Lesley
My arms automatically cross over my stomach, self-conscious about my state of undress, while he’s fully clothed in a dark suit, pale blue shirt, tie, and dress shoes. Plus, I need to lose a few pounds.
He stands up, and I’m forced to take a step back. “You should be proud of your body.” His hands encourage mine to release their death grip from my body. “It’s spectacular,” he tells me, circling, then stopping behind me. His fingers are under my chin, pushing it up. “And walk with your head held high. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.” His free hand is at my waist, and he’s much closer behind me. He kisses one shoulder, then the next, and then he sits in the chair again.
No one’s ever told me there is anything about me to be proud of.
“It seems I have a problem.” He runs a hand through his hair making it riotous but sexy as hell. “I’ve stayed away for as long as I could stand. But I need you. I hate to admit that, but I need you, Katie.”
The last piece of distrust and fight is sucked right out of me.
“Kneel.”
“I can’t.”
His green eyes are hard like cut emeralds. “Can’t or won’t?”
I point down to my reddened knees from the hours I spent cleaning Monica’s bathroom with a toothbrush to get it spotless.
The backs of his hands graze my sensitive knees. “What the fuck happened?”
Shouldn’t he know what takes place under his roof? He speaks with Monica daily, so obviously he’s cosigned all of her methods to debase me. Right? I shrug my shoulders.
“Is that supposed to be an answer?” he whisper-yells, leaning forward.
His tone, the ire in it, makes me pause. He sounds clueless about how I’ve spent my six weeks. “I got it while cleaning.” It really wasn’t a big deal. I’ve survived worse like ridicule and isolation.
“Cleaning!” he yells, sounding frustrated, which I don’t get. His next words push down the resentfulness I’ve chewed on all this time. “You have no business cleaning. There are maids for that shit.” He stares up at me, waiting for me to say something.
All I have is leftover aggression about being dropped off in Monica’s hellish hands. “Well no one delivered that memo. So, yeah, I’ve been cleaning. Cleaning your damn bathroom. And every other square inch of this house for the last forty-two days!” I yell right back at him, hands on my hips.
He chuckles.
“Stop it.” Humiliation pitches my voice higher. “Stop laughing at me.”
The smile disappears. “I’d never laugh at you.” The intensity in his voice pulls my head down to him. “That fire in you, those hands on your sexy hips ... that shit turns me on,” he says with a dangerous edge in his tone. “Show me that spark again, baby girl.”
I swallow, unprepared for this turn of events. I take a couple steps back as he continues coming toward me, loosening his tie, shrugging off his coat—all the while forcing me backward. With the bed at the back of my knees, there’s nowhere else to go.
“Fuck,” I mutter. The curse slips from my mouth before I have time to muffle it.
“That’s a start. Now, say it louder.” Pure, unmasked lust rolls off his tongue, and his unabashed cockiness pushes me toward submission.
“Fuck,” I repeat low, aware that he’s watching my mouth like he’s hungry for it.
“No. Like this ... fuck.”
“Fuck.” My tone and volume match his. There’s a raging fire in the pit of my belly at his pleased grin. And that’s when I admit it to myself. I want him. I shouldn’t, but I do. The bad boy in him who admits he needs me.
“And now I’m going to fuck you.” I’m tongued-tied and wet. Soaking wet. “Have you ever given a blow job?”
“No.” I’m too caught up in Drazen to be embarrassed by my body’s reaction to his brazen question.
“Good.” He trails a finger over the scalloped edge of my T-shirt. “Ever had your pussy eaten?”
“N-no.”
He rewards me with another half grin, which I’m starting to like seeing on his lips. I’m too enraptured by the tilt of his lips to realize I’m only standing in front of him in my underwear.
“Gorgeous.”
My breasts rise and fall with my nervous breathing. I moan when his fingers disappear down the front of my panties. His fingers are dangerous, rubbing against me through the lace of my underwear.
“I’ve dreamed of this. Touching you like this again.” I groan at the ripping sound. “I’ve wanted another taste of your pussy, baby girl.” A finger slips inside me.
My groan is more of a moan.
“I like that. I like how quickly your body tells me it wants me. Soon your lips will do the same.” A second finger joins in, stretching me. “If you’re this tight around my fingers, I can’t wait to feel you around my cock.” His fingers slip out, and I groan in desperation from the loss.
Next thing I know we’re on the bed, both naked, but I feel exposed, too open to him. I turn my head away even though there’s no place to hide.
There’s sadness in his voice when he says, “We’re going to have to work on that.”
I turn at his admiration and find him staring at me. “You’re so beautiful.” His warm hands graze up my calves, then settle on my knees, using pressure to open my legs. “I’m just the man to show you the beauty you possess.” His nose sniffs at the trimmed hair at my apex. “You smell good enough to eat.” Two of his fingers keep me open for him; then his lips lock onto the small hidden bud.
His tongue swirls around it, then enters my heated center. Wet. So warm. And so good that my head goes backward in pleasure.
“Look at me,” he demands, showing me three of his fingers.
I watch as they enter me. There’s burning, but my body adjusts quickly, too taken with the rhythm of his exacting strokes.
“Good. Now don’t look at away from me. I want to see your eyes when I make you come.” His lips cover my bud again while his fingers drive me mad.
I writhe against the pumping, needing more—a lot more. A fire builds in my lower belly, and the tingling moves throughout my body. “More. I need more,” I tell him, flattening my thighs on the bed.
I see his grin, but the intensity of his hot gaze stills me, keeps me in place. “Get ready for more then.”
We’re both panting, looking at each other as my shameless desire perfumes the air. I hunger for more, and he obliges me. He eases another finger inside and uses the base of his palm to rub against my greedy bud. Tension grips in my lower stomach, and I clench around his fingers.
“That’s it.”
I’m close, so close to wherever he’s leading me.
“Just let go, baby girl.”
Of its own accord, my hand covers his. He growls in the back of his throat as we pump in and out of my body together. I teeter on the edge until I fall over, coming unhinged with his fingers still in me.
His mouth is on me, hungrily drinking up the gushing juices.
“Look at me,” he roughly commands. “Look at me as I fuck you and take what’s mine.” The head of his manhood stretches me. “Christ,” he says, blowing warm breath on my face. “I knew we’d be good, but this is incredible, baby girl.” He slides deeper into me.
“Wait.” The burning. The fullness. The stretching. The constant desire for more, more of him.
“No.” He eases forward inside me. My fingernails sink into forearms when he pierces me. His lips ghost over mine, saying, “Look at me, Katie. There’s not a damn thing irrelevant about you.” His green eyes full of desire puncture my soul just as the rest of his hard length pierces me. “Thank you,” he says before slanting his lips over mine, marking me as his with one sweet swipe of this tongue. “That’s it. I feel you getting wetter for me.”
I bend my other knee allowing him to go deeper, but he pulls out as if he’s leaving ... leaving me. “Stay.” My hands grip his butt, giving him permission to do with me as he will.
Sweat drips from his chin onto my forehead. Moans from
him and moans from me intertwine with our passion.
“I knew you’d feel good, but fuck, not this good,” he confesses, sounding surprised by his own words.
We’re both slick with sweat. I’m speechless, in awe that I’m unraveling him like this. I clutch onto his shoulders just as he buries himself in me. Again, I’m near the edge, and I badly want to go over it.
“Give it to me,” he says against my mouth.
I grab a fistful of his sweaty hair, coming again as he empties inside of me, holding me close to him. He rolls off me, but brings me with him.
The last things I hear before I fall asleep are our harsh breathing and rapid heartbeats.
Much later, a buzzing sound comes through the intercom.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to get up. There are things I have to do,” I tell him.
“No.” He whips back the sheet, patting the empty space beside us.
I lie back on my own pillow, but he brings my stiff body into his relaxed embrace. “No?” I whisper timidly.
“That’s not what you’re here for.”
Eight
Drazen’s early morning return marked a change. Later that day, I was moved out of the mansion and into a homey two-bedroom cottage behind it. Since then, his days are spent running his company, and he ends his nights in bed with me. He’s a demanding lover, but surprisingly, so am I. Every place on my body has been thoroughly introduced to his thick cock, lean fingers, clever tongue, and the wicked toys he purchases.
“Where were we?”
Lying on top of him, I listen to the calm beating of his heart, blissed out from our frenzied love making minutes ago, so it takes a while for his question to register. In our month together, I’ve learned very few things about Drazen besides the bits and pieces of a story that I’m still trying to wrap my head around.
“Are you awake?” He shakes me, and my eyes pop open.
“I’m groggy, but I’m up,” I tell him, shaking my head at his wide grin. One of my hands goes up to my new favorite place on his body—the short copper stubble covering his square jaw.
“I’d apologize for tiring you out, but that’d be a lie,” he says low, stealing a kiss. “Now where were we?”
This story is sad and borders on depressing. He’s skipped over the “once upon a time” bit that tells me I’ll hear a “happily ever after” kind of story, jumping straight into the action about an orphan boy whose parents died when he was six. “The aunt was a maid working for one of the town’s wealthiest families,” I remind him.
“One day the boy with no name—”
“Why doesn’t he have a name?” Everyone has a name. It’s right there on the birth certificate. It’s the same question I asked when he shared the story the night of my twenty-third birthday two weeks ago.
“He just doesn’t. Now, stop interrupting. The aunt’s employer didn’t have the same level of wealth they were known for by the time the boy began to work as a stable hand for them.”
“How old was he then?” He’d already lost his parents by the age of six, being the sole survivor of a horrific car crash, and upon his release from the hospital, he was living with an aunt he didn’t know.
“He was thirteen. His aunt said he was a man and couldn’t be a burden to her any longer. For two years, the poor schmuck was getting robbed though.”
I stop stroking his jaw, rising up at the new turn of events. “Robbed?” I mean how much could happen to one little boy? “That sucks.”
“It did. The aunt drank vodka like it was water, and the boy’s small earnings paid for every bottle she guzzled on the weekends. But the real robbery was that the family’s older daughter had stolen the boy’s heart.”
“That’s sweet. He found love.” We’re both sitting upright, but I’m angled toward him. Jonathan’s a handsome man, undoubtedly. I’ve yet to see him in a suit that doesn’t accentuate his broad shoulders and long legs. But I’ve found myself wishing to see him like this more often—him like this, relaxed and laid back.
“No, not sweet,” he says, pulling me back to the story. “Since you need a name. Call the girl he loved Eve—”
Finally, a name. “Like the Eve in the Bible or like Eve that’s short for Evelyn?”
“I guess,” he says, not really answering me. “You’re focusing on the wrong thing. The name’s not really important.”
Not important? I want to shake him. For fourteen days, the story has gone on and on with not one name in sight, and he says this one like it’s no big deal. Was the teenage girl who stole the boy with no name’s heart a deceiver like the one in the Bible, or was she a tough-as-nails heroine who killed to save her husband like the one played by Angelina Jolie in Salt? “Why does she get a name but he doesn’t?”
“Because he was fucking irrelevant!” he yells.
There’s that word. The word I’ve felt all my life. The common link between the boy with no name and me is our irrelevancy.
As if his outburst didn’t happen he continues, staring up at the ceiling, “One summer, Eve noticed him. But he knew he was no good for her and tried to distance himself. Eventually she wore him down, and he thought himself the luckiest person in their town because she wanted him. But they could only be together if no one knew about their relationship.”
I frown at the secrecy, but maybe it was because of their ages and fear of how the girl’s parents would react to her dating.
“They were teens. Nothing but raging hormones and unbridled stamina for days. They were fucking like rabbits right away.” He pauses, and I wonder what he’s thinking, what he’ll say next. His features are pinched when he tells me, “Even though they were young, he wanted her to enjoy when they made love. He studied the art.”
“Studied?”
He looks over at me with a look like I should get what he’s talking about. “Pornos, magazines, whatever would teach him how to please the girl he loved. Because she deserved to be pleasured, to be worshiped. He was successful because once he set his mind on something he never failed. Close to the end of the summer, she came tearfully into the stable and told him she was pregnant. As soon as she uttered the words, he already had a plan. They would marry, of course. Sure they were young; money would be an issue, and school would have to be worked out. But, he figured love would conquer all.”
It’s hard to consider the boy in the story as being sixteen. The way he wanted to step up to the plate, accept responsibility is rare for someone his age.
“He told her his plans, reassured her, and dismissed away her stiffness in his arms as fear. But she pushed him away from her as she dried her tears and told him her plans. They were breaking up. She was having an abortion the following day, and was returning to boarding school in September.”
Tears streak my cheeks for the boy with no name.
“He begged her to reconsider. He’d graduated at the start of the summer. He was trying to decide whether to take the full four-year scholarship being offered by New York University or Harvard. He planned to tell her all this after they’d made love, and that he’d chosen NYU to be closer to her.”
I lay my head on his shoulder, needing his body heat to counteract the coldness in his tone as he tells the story.
“He told her about graduating early, said he’d call his university to work something out for her and their child. She laughed and scoffed at his supposed scholarship. Eve told him he’d never be anything but a stable hand or some other rich girl’s fuck buddy like he’d been to her. He made one last attempt to reach her and told her he’d loved her since he was thirteen.” His brings my body flush against his and speaks into my ear; his voice lowers to right above a dark whisper. “You want to know what she said next?”
I move my head side to side. This story is sick, worse than a nightmare.
“Eve told the boy with no name that he was just a summer fuck.”
His tongue sops up the tears from my cheeks even as his icy fingertips sink into my cheeks still
ing my head from moving. His frigid hands remind me of the glacial treatment the boy with no name experienced by Eve’s venomous mouth. I shiver against him, and he pulls me close, draping an arm over my naked waist.
“Humiliation blurred his vision as he left the barn. In his haste to leave the godforsaken place, he ran into the family’s younger daughter, knocking them both to the ground. As she hovered over him to help him up, all he saw was hair the color of wheat and eyes that reminded him of a morning sunrise. Even though she was kind to him, he swore vengeance on anyone connected to Eve. That was the last he saw of that place.”
“What happened to the boy with no name?” I mumble not sure I want to hear his answer. He had such a rough beginning at life; maybe his end was no different.
“We met so briefly, as two passersby a couple years ago so I’m not entirely sure. Maybe, he’s now a man with no name like Eve wished, or maybe he became a man who demands to be seen.”
His lips crash into mine, his uncompromising hands are hard on my flesh. He enters me punishingly. This isn’t the lover I’ve come to know.
I grab the sides of his face, forcing him to look down at me, to see me. “Jonathan?” His eyes are distant and glazed with unshed tears. I’m stunned by the raw pain and heartache that lives beyond the recesses of his eyes. My fingers relax on the sides of his face, attempting to nurture him, but then he moves, and I’m reminded of my own pain. Self-preservation kicks in, and I jerk his face harder. “Jonathon, it’s me.”
He finally sees me. Sorrow and regret are at the outer edges of his beautiful green eyes. He’s not fully back, but he’s not in that dark place, cowering in that pain any longer.
“Katie?” A tear from one of his eyes land on my cheek.
“Yes, Jonathon. It’s me,” I repeat. This time when he lowers his mouth to mine, it’s to give me a tender kiss. I feel his unspoken apology as his soft lips move over me. As we’re both swept away by the tide of our passion, I know I’ll never view him the same. He’ll always own a piece of me.
