Fierce (Not Quite a Billionaire)

by Rosalind James

  I looked at him in shock. “I can’t wear that little sweater with no bra. It’s…thin. And my skirt is…” I swallowed. “Short.”

  “And quite nice, too. Put the bra away. You’ve got such pretty little breasts, and I want to see them.”

  I looked at him, at the mouth that wasn’t smiling a bit now, and slowly complied. “But if I do this…” I started to say.

  “Yeh?” he prompted when I didn’t go on. “What?”

  “I’m…” I looked around, and whispered it. “Wet. I’ll…”

  It was the real reason I hadn’t wanted to put the black thong on. The throb had started as soon as he’d sat down on that stool, had only increased since. I’d seen my face in the mirror as we’d gone on. I knew my cheeks had grown increasingly flushed, my eyes ever brighter, and I was pretty sure he’d noticed, too.

  “Yeh?” he asked. “You’ll what?” He reached out a hand and was tracing down again, all the way to where I was swollen and aching for him. He rubbed a few times, and I squirmed and tried so hard not to moan.

  “Hm,” he said. “You just may. And I want to watch that, too.” And then he took his hand away. “When it happens.”

  “Hemi. I can’t.” I could barely get the words out, because I was having all I could do not to pant.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “You’re not thinking positively enough. There’s no such word as can’t.”

  He handed me my skirt, and I pulled it up helplessly and fastened the zipper as he watched. He was still watching while I pulled the sweater over my head and looked in the mirror at my nipples pebbling under the thin fabric.

  “Cold outside,” he said. “You’ll be wearing a jacket. I know your legs will be a bit chilly, but we’ll walk fast, eh. We’re not going far.”

  “Oh.” I felt foolish again. Nobody was going to see. He was trying to make me feel sexy, that was all. And it was working. “Right.”

  Lessons

  During lunch, though, I had my doubts. Because as Hemi sat with me in Le Regelade and focused on his duck confit, I could have sworn that he’d completely forgotten that my bra and underwear were in my purse. His eyes didn’t drop, even though I was so aware, every time I raised my wineglass to my lips, that my breasts were rising along with it, and that my nipples kept insisting on reacting to every wayward thought. And I’d had a lot of wayward thoughts. He must have seen, but he gave no sign of it, just kept up a flow of conversation about the city and didn’t seem to notice when I faltered in my answers.

  Had he just been teasing, then? Trying to affect me, but able to stay unaffected himself? Did he have that much self-control?

  Finally, when I thought we’d sit there all afternoon, he called for the bill, helped me on with my jacket with impersonal courtesy, held the door for me, and said, “Right. Notre Dame.”

  “Hemi,” I said. “I can’t.”

  He turned and stared at me as if he really had forgotten my…situation. “Pardon?”

  “I can’t go to a…to a church,” I tried to explain. “Not like this. I could hardly go to lunch. How could I go into a church? People will be able to tell.”

  He still looked bemused. “It’s just a building. I got you feeling a bit too naughty for that, though, eh.”

  “You know you did.” I was beginning to feel downright annoyed. “You’ve been teasing me all day long, and I’m not going into a church like this.”

  “No? The Louvre after all, then?”

  “No. I need to go…” I swallowed, and said it. “I need to go back to the hotel. I need to…I need…”

  “Ah,” he sighed, beginning to walk back in the direction we’d come. “Right. No art for me after all, then. I thought, when you said no, that I should wait. Thought you wanted to do the tourist bit.”

  “And that would be why you wouldn’t let me wear my underwear.” I was more than annoyed now.

  “Nah. I wouldn’t let you wear your underwear because I wanted you excited. Because you’ve reminded me exactly how choice anticipation can be, and I wanted to give you the same chance to enjoy it that you gave me.”

  “All right,” I said. “I enjoyed it. And now I want it.”

  He looked down at me, his expression impossible to read. “You’re a pretty demanding girl. That’s not what our arrangement is, is it? Didn’t I tell you that the spider decides?”

  “Not if you’re never going to do it,” I muttered. “And I told you. I don’t do arrangements.”

  He tried to hide it, but I saw the twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Something else you said as well,” he mused. “What was that? Hmm. I thought there was something wrong with it at the time. Can’t think what now, though.”

  “What?” I asked. Something wrong?

  We’d made it back to the hotel at last, and he didn’t answer until we were in the elevator again, and he’d pushed the button for the fourth floor. I reached over to punch 3, but he shot a hand out and grabbed my wrist.

  “Oh, yeh,” he said. “I remember now. You wanted a lesson, thought you might go get it from somebody else. And that’s not part of our arrange— er, relationship. Think I may have to remind you of that. And to give you that lesson, too.”

  My legs wanted to get a little wobbly at that, but the doors had opened, and he stood back and let me walk out first, then walked by my side to the end of the corridor, pulled out his keycard, and held the door for me.

  Another suite, in rich blues this time, but I wasn’t looking at the décor.

  Hemi set the bag containing my lingerie down on the table near the door, took my purse off my shoulder, and added it as well.

  “Take off your coat,” he told me, and when I did, he took it from me and hung it in the closet together with his own suit coat while I tried not to shift from foot to foot.

  He looked at me and sighed, unbuttoned his shirt cuffs, and began to roll up his sleeves a few turns. “Rough, eh.”

  “Rough?” I asked, startled. He’d seemed to understand that I didn’t want pain. Now he was talking about it being rough? No.

  “Deciding which to do first,” he said, and I relaxed a tiny bit. “So many lessons you need today. But you’re still sore, I know, which makes it a bit fraught. I think I’m getting an idea, though.” He walked to the couch that sat against one wall, pulled the coffee table out a couple of feet, then sat down while I stood and watched him. “I think you’d better come over here.”

  I swallowed hard, the nerves and the arousal fluttering low in my belly, and moved toward him, but when I got there, he didn’t let me sit. Instead, he said, “Saucy girls who tease and don’t do what they’re told? Girls who go out without their undies? What do you think happens to them?”

  Surely there wasn’t enough air in here. “Um…” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you lie down across my lap,” he said, “and I’ll show you.”

  I could hardly breathe, and I really couldn’t believe I would do this. Did I trust Hemi this much?

  Apparently I did, because I was doing it. I knelt beside him, bracing my hands against the back of the couch, then slowly turned, bent over, and set my hands on the cushion on his other side. He could have helped me, but he didn’t. He just sat and waited while I did it, while I settled myself over him, my ankles propped over one end of the couch, my head pressed into the arm at the other side.

  Finally, he put a hand out and brushed my hair back from my face. “Keep your head turned to the side,” he told me. “I want to see your face.”

  It was too much. Too vulnerable. And I did it anyway. My mouth was open a little already, and when he reached for the hem of my skirt and flipped it up and I felt the cold air on my skin, then his hand smoothing over my cheeks, the tops of my thighs, I squirmed.

  “Ah,” he sighed. “Oh, I’m going to enjoy this.”

  When he slapped me, I jumped, although it didn’t hurt. It just…tingled.

  He spanked me lightly at first, his broad hand moving all the way down to the tops of
my thighs, then up, around, until every inch of me was sensitized, until every nerve ending was awake and insistent. And when my eyes closed against the power of it, he stopped and told me, “Open your eyes. I want to see you.”

  I whimpered and obeyed, and then the slaps got a little harder, a little more fierce, and I was jumping a bit with each one.

  Just when it started to burn, he stopped, and his hand was smoothing over me again, soothing away the sweet sting while my sobbing breath sounded loud in my ears.

  It wasn’t anything like pain. It was nothing but tingling, humming pleasure, but I was so close, and I needed to get there more than I ever had in my life. I was shifting over him, trying to rub myself against him, to get what my body craved.

  “So we’re clear,” he told me. He was shifting me, pushing my bottom higher with his knees, reaching beneath me where I’d been so wet and aching all day, and, finally, beginning to explore my swollen, tormented flesh, and I was wriggling, moaning.

  “So we’re clear,” he said again. “Nobody else is giving you lessons. Nobody is teaching you anything. Nobody but me.”

  I was barely listening, because he was rubbing hard, and I was rocking back and forth on his hand. The delicious warmth, the burn spreading everywhere, and I needed it.

  And then he took his hand away, and I cried out. “No. Don’t.”

  “You aren’t answering.” His voice was so severe.

  “I don’t…remember what you said,” I moaned. “Please, Hemi. Touch me. Please.”

  “Nobody but me,” he said.

  “Nobody but you,” I said, because I would have said anything. “Please. Please.” And, finally, he gave me what I needed, and I was bucking over him, crying out, spasming again and again, finishing and starting up again until I lost count, until I was limp. And just when I was starting to get my breath back—that was when he lifted me and put me on the floor. Put me on my knees.

  “Now,” he said, “this next bit is your turn. This is the rest of your lesson. We’re going to start with you unbuckling my belt. Slowly.”

  I’d been aching for her since I’d pulled the curtain closed in that dressing room and seen her standing there, so hesitant, and so saucy. And when she’d dropped that little red skirt and showed me those undies, I’d known exactly how this day would end. I’d held out as long as I could, and now, I needed this. I needed it all.

  Sitting opposite her in that bistro and watching her perky little breasts rising and falling in her thin sweater had been nothing but torture. Seeing other blokes’ eyes linger there, then slide hastily away when I turned to look at them. Watching the flush mount in her cheeks, the uncertainty in her eyes.

  She wasn’t uncertain now. Still wearing her little sweater and skirt, still trembling with the aftershocks of her own violent release, but her hands, her eager mouth so deliciously willing, so devastatingly inexpert. I told her what I wanted, and she did it all, and she was a bloody fast learner.

  I’d told myself I’d be easy with her today, and I wasn’t. I might be letting her rest her tender bits, but I wasn’t one bit easy. She wasn’t asking me to be. She didn’t want it easy.

  “Now,” I managed to say at last, dragging my head off the back of the couch. “Now. Open…up. Deep as…you can. Take it…take it all.”

  It was what I’d imagined that first day when I’d met her. When I’d seen her on her knees in the photographer’s studio. Her eyes fluttering open to watch, her pretty mouth working so hard, her startled inhalation of breath as I got closer, got harder, bigger, her struggle to hold it all and take me in. And then I wasn’t watching anymore, because my head was back, and I was groaning, jerking against her, and she was taking that, too. All the way down.

  She stayed with me for all of it, and then, after a minute, she leaned against my legs, rubbed her cheek over my thigh, and smoothed her hands over me. “How was that?” she whispered.

  “I think…” I could hardly get the words out. “We’d call that...brilliant. Though I’ve lost the plot a bit here.”

  “Mm.” She was zipping me again, buckling my belt, and I looked down to see a satisfied smile on her face. She stood up, climbed over me where I lay sprawled on the couch, took my head in her hands, and kissed me, her sweet tongue coming out to lick into me. I tasted myself on her, and she pulled back and smiled into my eyes.

  “I loved that,” she told me. “I want to do that some more. I want to get better at it, as good as you. I’ll bet I can.”

  I had to laugh from sheer surprise. “Right. But maybe not today.”

  She laughed softly herself, then gave me another kiss. “I’m going to get a drink of water. And I’m going to get you one, too.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “And then,” she said, “a bath. Together. Exactly what I wanted yesterday. Because I’m not that sore anymore, and I want you inside me. You can’t torture me all day like that and not follow through with the whole thing. Besides, I need you to teach me some more. Don’t you think?”

  “Yeh. I do.”

  Once again, she’d turned the tables on me. And once again, I wasn’t minding one bit.

  A Weak Moment

  I did show Hope Notre Dame before we left Paris. But I showed it to her from a boat.

  From a table next to the glass-enclosed sides of an excursion boat, to be exact, on a four-hour dinner cruise that I’d never in my life have considered wasting time on in the past. And, of course, she loved it.

  We hadn’t made it out of the hotel that afternoon. It had been that bath.

  Now, I watched her, the low light of candles illuminating her animated heart-shaped face as she smiled and talked, drank wine and ate more fish, as the light caught the sparkle from the silver beads on her blue dress, and I remembered.

  Hope, lying over me in the bath and sighing as I ran slow, slippery hands over her, then turning the tables again once we’d pulled back the duvet on the big white bed. Hope exploring my body and my tattoo, giving everything she had to this new experience, just as I’d known she would.

  “It really does go all the way,” she’d said, running languid hands over my chest, my shoulders, all the way down my arms, as if she were memorizing me. “I remember you saying that in the car.” She leaned down to kiss her way over the whorls decorating my chest, and I sighed and closed my eyes, and then opened them, because I wanted to look at her.

  She should have looked fragile, perched over my body like that, but she didn’t. Hope was lit from within, and today, that light burned so strongly. So fiercely.

  “It’s private,” she said, her fingers brushing lightly over my shoulder, tracing the intricate pattern that covered my skin from pectoral to forearm. “I remember that, too.”

  “Mm.” She had me on such a buzz, I didn’t want to talk much. I just wanted to feel her. “Not a secret. It’s my whakapapa. My genealogy. My ancestors, my iwi, my whanau—my tribe and my family, the parts of it I want to think about—and my own journey. It’s a…” I smiled slowly, and she smiled back. Her light burned a little brighter, and something in my chest tightened, then released, the same way it had when she’d told me her swan story. “A Maori thing. A tribal thing.”

  “The parts you want to think about,” she said quietly.

  Not asking, and because she didn’t ask, I told her. “Not my small whanau. That isn’t so good. My big whanau. My grandparents. My cousins.”

  “Ah.” It was a sigh, and her lips were over my heart now. “Yeah.”

  I couldn’t help tensing as I waited for the next question, but she didn’t ask it. Instead, her fingers went to my pendant, suspended from its braided black cord and resting between my collarbones. I hadn’t taken it off before our bath, and now, she stroked the greenstone that lay cool against my skin and asked, “And this?”

  “Yeh,” I said. “A tribal thing as well. Personal.”

  “Does it mean something?”

  “Mm. A hei toki’s the adze. For strength. Determination. Courage as well.
It’s a reminder.”

  She hummed at that, moved her mouth up to kiss my neck, her teeth teasing the sensitized nerve endings as her hand continued its leisurely journey down my arm. “I’d say you’ve got all of those,” she said, breathing the words into my ear, then sinking her teeth delicately into the lobe, making me jerk a little. “And that you don’t have to use any of them right now.”

  I didn’t enjoy letting a woman take the reins, didn’t like having my body at the mercy of another person. But this was better for today, I thought hazily as she continued to kiss me, to stroke me. I lifted my hands to her small breasts, felt her instant response, her indrawn breath. I pulled her higher so I could taste her there, and she didn’t have all the control after all, not then. So we kept on that way, because the position allowed her to control the angle and depth of my penetration, and let me relax, too, knowing I wouldn’t be too much for her tender insides. I could touch her so easily as well, could take her along with me, could watch her head going back, her soft lower lip being caught between her teeth, and that was even better.

  And the sight of Hope’s slim torso bent like a bow, one of my hands covering her breast, the other pleasuring her as she rocked her way to sweet, slow fulfillment in the golden light of an autumn afternoon…surely Paris didn’t offer anything more beautiful than that.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked now, turning from the view of Notre Dame standing in Gothic splendor in the midst of the Ile de la Cité.

  “Thinking that you’re beautiful,” I said before I could stop myself.

  I saw the softening in her eyes and thought, Shit. This was why I didn’t do relationships. Now I’d given her the wrong impression, had aroused expectations in her that I couldn’t fulfill.

  All she said, though, was, “Hmm. You’re not so bad yourself, you know?” before turning back to the window. Letting me off the hook, and I couldn’t have said whether that was what I’d wanted or not.

  The moment passed, the soft chamber music provided by the onboard orchestra continued to provide its discreet accompaniment, and the wine in the bottle dipped a little lower. I could see Hope starting to droop, so I scooted my chair over so I could put an arm around her and watched the floodlit monuments of Paris drift slowly by. And the next time I looked down at her, her head was on my shoulder, her lips had parted, and she was asleep.