by Sam Mariano
Her hand drifts down my chest now. She runs it up under my charcoal gray suit jacket, then drags it down the crisp white fabric of my dress shirt. She does it over again more slowly, her eyes on the movement, on my chest, like she’s studying it.
“Lower,” I direct.
I see the breath whoosh out of her, but she drops her hand lower, running it over the ridges of my abdomen. She runs her fingers down over my stomach, but stops at my belt. Her brown eyes dart to mine, vulnerability in their depths, and it goes straight into my veins like fucking heroin.
“Lower.”
“Rafe…”
“We’re just dancing,” I assure her.
Before I can find out whether or not she’ll obey me, there’s a tap on my shoulder. If it’s another fucking girl, she’s about to see me get mean. What a fucking thing to interrupt.
I turn my head, prepared to rip someone a new asshole, but it’s not some girl I’ve fucked—it’s the club manager. She beams at me like I’ll be pleased by her interruption. “Your booth is ready, Mr. Morelli.”
Virginia drops her hands and takes a step back.
The moment has passed, so I let it go. Grabbing Virginia’s hand so she doesn’t get lost, I tug her back through the crowd toward the VIP section surrounding the dance floor. I know the upholstered booths are a shade of purple in the light of day, but right now everything glows red from the light in the club. The u-shaped booth could fit a lot more than just the two of us, but since it’s just us, we slide to the middle. Virginia tucks her dark hair behind her ears and looks up at the manager.
“Someone will be right over to take your drink order,” she assures me.
I nod in acknowledgement and look over at Virginia. “You want anything specific?”
“I’m driving,” she says, shaking her head.
“I can have someone pick us up if we can’t drive home, Virginia. It’s not a big deal.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she insists. “I’ll just have a bottle of water.”
Like hell, she’ll just have a bottle of water. I don’t bother telling that, though. I slide my arm behind her and rest it on the back of the booth, shoot her a harmless smile, and wait for the server to approach so I can order Virginia a drink.
5
Rafe
Virginia is tipsy as hell, but I’m about to order her another drink. Ordinarily, I might hesitate to get drunk with the one woman I don’t want to lose—especially when she’s wearing this damned, cursed, miserable dress—but alcohol makes her giggly, and I fucking love her laugh.
She laughs at even the lamest joke—I’ve thrown her some doozies to test this theory—like I’m performing for a full house at Madison Square Garden and killing it. I’m excellent at detecting bullshit, and I know Virginia, so even when my more cynical side points out that all women smart enough to know the score laugh at my jokes, I know Virginia means it. There’s not a conniving bone in her body—or if there is, I’ve yet to notice it.
“Tell me something bad that you’ve done.”
Virginia is relaxed even though my arm is draped around her shoulders. Her body is so near mine, I can feel her warmth, and that’s just the way I like it. Tapping her chin, she considers my request. “How bad?”
“Terrible.”
“Knowing who you are, I don’t really think I’ve ever done anything you would consider terrible. When I was 13, I really wanted to get my mom this personalized ornament from the mall for Christmas. They had them at those kiosks—you know those little kiosks in the mall? It was one of those, not even a store, it was out in the open. But they cost like $15, and I didn’t have it.”
“I’m gonna stop you right there. Shoplifting a Christmas present when you were 13?” I demand, lifting an eye brow. “That’s what you’re going to give me?”
Grinning, she says, “I’m sorry, not all of us have body counts.”
It doesn’t feel like she’s holding back, but it won’t stop me from digging around to make sure. “There has to be something worse than that.”
“Well,” she says slyly, fingering the lapel of my jacket. “There was this one time I sent a badass Vegas gangster to punch my cheating boyfriend in the face. I wasn’t a bit remorseful about doing it, either. Is that terrible?”
My blood warms and a fond smile finds its way across my lips. “Definitely not. That guy deserved what he got. Fucking idiot.”
She nods her agreement, grabbing her drink and taking a sip as she looks up at me. “What about you? What’s a terrible thing you’ve done? Since I assume your list is longer than mine, we can narrow it down to ‘recently.’”
“Bought you this dress,” I tell her dryly, my gaze drifting to the lace panel that barely conceals her breasts.
Half-laughing, she asks, “How is that terrible? I like this dress.”
I let my hand drift down to finger the lace, watching the way her chest moves as she breathes. “So do I,” I tell her, sliding a wry look her way. “That’s the problem.”
“That does sound like a problem,” she admits, her tone verging on coy.
Since her tone is still permissive, despite her words and the unspoken rules we both know we have to abide by tonight, I let my hand fall to the inside of her bare thigh. She swallows as I drag the tips of my fingers along the sensitive skin. “This smooth skin right here? I want to bite it. I want to leave my mark all over these pretty thighs, Virginia.” Leaning in so I’m closer to her ear, I slide my hand up under her dress.
“Rafe,” she says, keeping her hands to herself, but her tone wary enough that I know she can feel the danger in the air. “This is not a good idea. I think maybe—”
“No,” I interrupt, faintly shaking my head. “No thinking. Just feel.”
“That’s not really how I operate,” she says, reaching down to my hand on her thigh and grabbing it. Trying, anyway. All she succeeds in doing is pushing my palm against her thigh, but I already made it high enough that my fingertips brush her panties. I can feel the heat between her legs, and I’m too damn close to stop now.
“Try it,” I tell her.
“Rafe, I can’t. This isn’t—I have to—I think maybe it’s time to leave.”
“Stop thinking so much,” I advise her. “Tell me you don’t want me to touch you. Tell me you hate it and I’ll stop.”
Sighing, she tells me, “That’s not fair.”
“It’s the only excuse I’ll accept.”
“Being alone with you when you’re drunk is a bad idea,” she states. “You need your inhibitions. Chasing them away is a mistake.”
“You’ve been around me drunk before.”
“Yes, and you tried to fuck me then, too,” she reminds me.
Grinning, I tell her, “Hey, at least I’m consistent.”
Pushing against my chest, she says, “That’s precisely the problem. I know who you are. I know where this road leads, and I’m not going there. I’ve built my whole life around being a part of yours, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to throw it away for one night of drunken, bad-idea sex.”
“Why do you have to throw anything away? I don’t want to ruin you, I just want to make you come.” My hand easily moves under hers and I slip my hand between her legs, cupping her covered pussy in my palm. Virginia inhales and exhales quickly, her body stiffening as I hold my hand against her. “When’s the last time a man made you come, Virginia?”
I don’t wait for her answer. Sliding my index finger underneath her panties, I graze her entrance. She jumps, one hand flying to my shoulder like she needs to hold on. Her gaze darts around the room. “Rafe, we’re in public.”
“I know. That makes it more fun.”
Her face is flushed. “Oh, my God.”
Since she’s not saying the magic words to stop me, I let my finger broach her entrance. Her fingers dig into my shoulder and her eyes close, but she opens them again immediately, not giving over to her baser impulses. “Rafe…”
“You like saying m
y name, don’t you, sweetheart? Imagine how much you’d like saying it with me inside you.”
Sighing with something close to defeat, she says, “Why? Don’t you know how hard this is without you infesting my head with—?” She gasps as my finger brushes her clit. “I’m a visual thinker,” she tells me, mildly reprimanding even as I finger her. She is fucking adorable.
“Yeah? Then imagine this. First, I keep touching you here in this booth, get you off right here in public with all these oblivious people dancing around us. Orgasm number one.”
“Oh, God,” she mutters hopelessly.
“And you know what? I love the way you feel so much, I’ve got to have a taste,” I tell her, withdrawing my finger from between her legs and holding her gaze.
“Don’t do it,” she pleads.
I bring the finger that was just inside her to my lips. Her lusty gaze drops and she watches as I taste her on my fingertip. Shaking my head slowly, I tell her, “Better than any dessert you’ve ever brought me.”
“Heaven help me,” she says so quietly, I barely hear her.
With a devilish grin, I tell her, “Heaven can’t help you tonight, Virginia.”
Before she can come to her senses, I remove my arm from around her shoulders, using that hand to catch the back of her neck instead. I draw her closer, waiting for her to object, but she doesn’t this time. Her eyes close and her lips part, and me? I know an invitation when I see one.
6
Virginia
My heart beats so fast, I can hardly contain it. Any moment I expect it to execute its escape and gallop right out of my body.
I keep my eyes closed out of a sense of self-preservation. I need some level of anonymity to this encounter. I need there to be less to remember. Already my senses are on overload. He’s right on top of me in this booth so I can’t help breathing in the scent of his cologne. I feel his heat, the hardness of his body, his overwhelming power as he uses it to commit an unspeakable crime—to rob me of my better judgment.
In a moment, his lips will meet mine, and when that happens, I need at least one sense to be free of him. Not looking at him may be my only saving grace.
Only, it feels like I’ve been waiting half a lifetime, and his lips don’t touch mine. For a horrified moment, I wonder if he didn’t intend to kiss me at all. I replay the moment in my mind, but no, he was definitely leaning in for a kiss. Why did he stop?
When I open my eyes, he’s watching me. His face is so close to mine. God, I love that face. Without thought, I reach my hand out and touch him. This is bad, so bad. I’m adding moments to this memory, adding fuel to this fire. It’s already impossible to tell him no, and I’ve done the impossible before, but not like this. When he’s spinning out of control and he just needs steadying it’s one thing, but tonight he isn’t in need. Tonight he is just fine, and that makes him wanting to pounce on me much scarier.
I shouldn’t be here. I should be on the fringes of his life, like always, only surfacing when he has a need I can meet for him. Something simple and less scarring, like an empty stomach or a dry throat, on the rarest of occasion, a crackwhore he needs kicked out of his house, but never this. This is not the need I’m supposed to meet for Rafe.
My presence here is cracking open a need in me, and that’s the real problem. That’s the Pandora’s box, and if I let him break the seal, all kinds of trouble is bound to come spilling out.
Well, jar. It was a jar of curses, not a box. That’s always bothered me.
It’s a stupid thing to be bothered about, an even stupider thing to bring up right now, but when my mouth opens, nervous words spill out.
“Did you know that Pandora’s box was actually a jar? In the original poem, Pandora was given a large jar of curses, not a box, but the myth was mistranslated, and the mistranslation is what stuck. I guess opening Pandora’s jar doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?”
Rafe stares at me for a moment, then a slow smile spreads across his face and he starts laughing.
I flush, letting my hand fall from his face. He grabs it immediately and puts it back, his hand lingering on my wrist.
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t laughing at you,” he assures me, his eyes dancing with affection. “I was laughing at me.”
“Why were you laughing at yourself?” I question, not entirely believing him.
“Well, because it seems I have a type, and I can’t believe I’m past 30 and just now learning that about myself.”
I frown faintly, running through a catalog of female faces. He probably means more recently, so I run through Laurel, Marlena, Jayla, and Cassandra. It’s a smaller sample this time, given his abstinence streak. None of those women have anything in common beyond the painfully obvious. “What type is that?” I ask.
His brown eyes twinkle with amusement. “Nerds.”
I roll my eyes. “Having knowledge doesn’t make me a nerd. I’m cursed with it, actually. Well, not the knowledge, but the—never mind. Are you talking about Laurel?” Marlena certainly wasn’t a nerd. That chick didn’t possess half an ounce of intelligence in the soft-boiled egg that served as her mind.
Nodding his head, he says, “If you start telling me about the sexual deviance of ducks, this is going to get spooky.”
My brow furrows. “The sexual deviance of ducks? What, like they blindfold and flog each other to get off?”
His eyes light up with interest and he settles back in his seat, while running the tips of his fingers along the sensitive inside of my thigh. Tingles spread everywhere and it becomes hard to focus on his words. I follow his voice, his low, steady tone soothing my senses even as his hand excites them. “Floggers, huh? What do you know about those?”
It’s hard to concentrate on what I know about floggers with the untouched synapses in my brain going haywire, alerting me to the proximity of the man of all my fantasies, and the risky location of his fingers. “Um… that you should never use one on the kidney regions. It can be dangerous.”
Nodding easily, he continues to caress my thigh. “That’s right. It’s an incredibly vulnerable part of the body. A good place to strike someone you want to hurt, a good place to stab if you want to go for the kill, but a definitive no-no area for sexual impact play. Have you played with a flogger before?”
My mind blanks at the ease with which he switches from the topic of sex to violence. It should be more horrifying, but it only pulls me deeper into a Rafe-fog.
Trying to focus on his question, I recall the night I walked into his sex room and didn’t know it was a sex room until I saw the floggers. “No. I saw them in your… in your play room. I was curious; I didn’t know what most of that stuff was, so I looked it up.”
“See anything that made you curious?”
His hand continues to trace my thigh and I shift, my body heating up at the memory of all that research. Wondering what he liked. Picturing him in that dominant role, and inserting myself as his playmate. I couldn’t ask about his sexual appetites, so my imagination had no limits. “I saw that you had a cane,” I state.
“Mm hmm,” he murmurs casually.
“And I guess you’re supposed to be—I guess those can be—” I don’t know what I’m saying. My normally neat, fluid thoughts tangle into messy knots as his hand creeps up my thigh, dangerously close to my panties. I’m tempted to visualize his hand under the fabric of my dress, his rough fingers on my soft thigh, but I don’t need to imagine it this time. It’s really happening. I need only look down.
He finishes my thought for me, even though I’ve half-forgotten it already, too distracted by the current location of his hand. “Caning isn’t for everyone,” he says simply. “Many have a bad first experience with it, a top who doesn’t know what he’s doing, turns them off it altogether.”
“Right. Yes, that’s what I was saying. Not everyone is good at it.” I bring my gaze back to his. “I guess you are?”
With a nonchalant nod, as if we aren’t discussing his sexual appetites, he says, “
It’s not difficult, you just have to possess control over yourself and knowledge of the technique. Anyone who cares to learn could do it, but some men don’t. Some Doms are abusive, and some sadists just don’t care.”
I swallow. “So, which are you? Dom or sadist?”
“Dom,” he says easily, almost as if reassuring me. “I’m not a sadist. I don’t even use the cane much, to be honest. Cassandra liked it—or pretended to,” he says, his lips curving up faintly, but there’s no amusement there. “I’m not sure if anything I knew about her was real.”
I hate the mention of Cassandra. I hate it more because just saying her name brings a cloud of sadness to the table, like it follows him. Like she still follows him, and I won’t have that.
Without consideration, I rest my head on his shoulder. It works extremely effectively to bring him back to me, back to the present. His brown eyes glow with warmth and his hand on my thigh halts, resting there.
“Do you still think about Nate?” he asks.
“Never,” I answer honestly.
“No, he wasn’t worth thinking about, was he?” he murmurs. “Do you have another ghost from your past?”
My only ghost is him, and he never even appropriately haunted me. Pressing my lips together, I shake my head. “No specters worth mentioning.”
“I can’t decide if I find that sad, or I think you’re lucky.”
“It’s not sad,” I tell him, shaking my head. “It’s not like I don’t know what love feels like; I do. I know the rush and excitement, the sinking in your stomach every time they walk into a room, and I know the less intense, steadier version that comes after that. It’s just… I put my heart on a shelf a long time ago, so I haven’t given it away in a while. Last time I did it was to Nate, and, well, you made that break-up a lot easier.”
He smiles faintly. “You put your heart on a shelf, huh? In a jar, or a box?”
