His Gift (A Dark Billionaire Romance Part 3)

by Dark, Aubrey

  I dropped my gaze from the mirror. It reminded me of the mirror in the room Jake had tied me up in. What a strange place, in the middle of this luxurious penthouse. It was so different from all of the other rooms in here. My bedroom was decorated in the same old-money style as the rest of the penthouse, but secretly I preferred the concrete walls painted with art.

  That room is for sex.

  But it wasn’t. Or at least, it wasn’t for sex with me. Maybe Jake was having sex with all of his other supermodels in there, but he wasn’t having it with me. Was it that stupid idea of purity, of innocence? I hated that he only thought of me that way. I wasn’t some stupid little naive girl. And just because I was still a virgin didn’t mean I was devoid of sexual urges.

  Oof. I stepped into the water and immediately thought of Jake’s hands caressing me. Immediately my body burned hotter than the steaming water that I was sinking into.

  God, his hands. His strong hands, sliding between my thighs—

  Without thinking about it, my own hand drifted down to where he had touched me before. He hadn’t let me come to orgasm then, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t now. And the idea of masturbating alone, without Jake there to witness, was more than tempting.

  I began to slide my fingers over myself casually, as though I wasn’t doing anything at all. I closed my eyes, expecting to see Jake. But instead—

  The painting.

  In my mind the Kage painting in Jake’s gallery loomed large. I had been looking at it right before—

  Before he touched me, my body said. Before he grabbed me and kissed my neck—

  The lines of his letters, green and gold—

  Like Jake’s eyes, burning into mine. His fingers, hooking the hem of my dress and lifting it—

  My fingers moved with an ever increasing rhythm under the water.

  Back in Iowa, I’d touched myself as quietly as possible. When I came, I stuffed my face into a pillow and muffled the scream. Here, though, every little sigh of mine echoed in the bathroom. At first it startled me, but then I began to enjoy being able to be loud.

  “Ohh,” I moaned softly. My hands moved frantically between my legs, and my body ached for release. I closed my eyes, and again—

  Kage, each letter a curling line intertwined with the others—

  Jake, his lips hot on my neck, his finger thrusting into me—

  I caught myself sliding down into the tub. My toes curled, pressed into the obsidian. I twisted, needing more—

  Needing him—

  And then I came, the climax fading as soon as it had arrived. I slumped back against the tub, breathing hard, the water steaming white like I was outside in winter. Even though I’d brought myself to orgasm, it wasn’t enough. I felt like there was something missing—

  Jake, his eyes green and gold—

  And I couldn’t figure out what it was I wanted. Frustrated, I splashed water over the sides of the tub.

  “Argh!” I cried. I stood up then, letting the water drip down my body and puddle on the tile as I walked out of the bathroom. I didn’t want to look at myself. I didn’t want to ask myself questions that I couldn’t answer.

  In the privacy of my bedroom, I yanked open the dresser drawers. There was lingerie laid out for me, all in my size. I wondered idly if he kept all sizes. Maybe next week he would have to pull out the size zero dresses and the B-cup bras. The thought stabbed like a physical pain through my chest. I grabbed the plainest looking bra and panty set and slammed the drawer shut.

  Why was I doing this to myself? Before I’d talked with Steph, things had been so simple. I would go along with Jake’s orders, and that was all. Now, I was struggling to think about whether or not he wanted me, about whether he was regretting asking me to stay at all. I cringed to think about what would happen next week when I left.

  “You’re not his girlfriend,” I said through gritted teeth. “You’re not even his escort. All you are is a playtoy. A playtoy with a check for a year’s worth of rent. So don’t go messing it up by getting all emotional.”

  Steph said he was in love with you.

  I growled at myself and turned to open the closet. He had bought me clothes. Not just any kind of clothes, though. I tore through the hangers, anger bubbling up inside of me.

  Dresses.

  All dresses.

  I sighed. I would rather be naked than wear dresses. Maybe that’s what he was counting on. I opened the dresser drawers. There was nothing inside but lingerie. Back to the closet. The only other thing there was a terrycloth robe.

  “You want to give me dresses to wear?” I said, talking to myself as I pulled the robe out of the drawer and shrugged it on. “Fine. I’ll figure something else out.”

  It was definitely more comfortable than a dress. And yet, when I left the bedroom, I felt a twinge of guilt. Should I dress up for him? He had given me a selection to choose from, after all. Would he be upset if I didn’t want to wear them?

  “Oh for God’s sake,” I said, snapping myself out of my thoughts. “He can darn well order me to wear a dress, if it’s that important to him.”

  And for a brief moment, I thought that I would be happy if he gave me that order.

  Chapter Four

  By the time I got out of the bedroom, my stomach was growling. I looked forward to having another leisurely meal with Jake. Chocolate chip pancakes, maybe. We could sit and talk, and maybe I would ask him about that storage room, or about his family.

  But it wasn’t to be.

  When I ventured out into the hallway, I heard plates clinking. I wandered down the hall, following the aroma of coffee to a kitchen. I pulled the robe around me, tying it tightly. I thought that Jake might pull the tie open. He might take my robe off—

  “Shut up, Lacey,” I said. “It’s enough that he’ll be here with you. Don’t get stupid over him.”

  The breakfast table had been set out perfectly. The tablecloth was a shimmering ivory, and two plates had been laid out with napkins folded carefully on each one. A glass carafe of orange juice sat next to the silver pot of coffee. Stacks of pancakes filled a serving tray, and another tray heaped over with eggs and bacon. And in the middle of the table, a branch of orchids was arranged casually in a black ceramic vase. It was a work of art.

  I breathed in the aroma and walked into the room just as Jake walked in from the opposite side. I opened my mouth to say good morning, but he beat me to it.

  “I can’t stay,” Jake said.

  My jaw snapped shut audibly, and my mind shut down along with it. I had been preparing all of my questions for him, but now that he’d thrown me off course I couldn’t think of any response.

  “Wh…What do you mean?”

  He only raised one eyebrow. I pulled the robe tighter around me, and stammered as I leaned against the table. Come on Lacey, what are you going to do, faint?

  “I thought… I thought we were going to talk and, you know, have breakfast together.”

  “Some of us have work to do today,” Jake said, coming around the table. I waited none too hopefully for a kiss, but instead he slapped my ass and continued on to the hallway without missing a stride.

  Okay, the romantic vibe was definitely gone. I turned around, irritation flushing my cheeks.

  “Hey! What about me? You said that I couldn’t go back to work!”

  “You can paint, you can read, you can relax,” Jake said. “Nothing more.”

  “Oh, I have to stay home like an invalid while you go do important man things?” I gestured out towards the city skyline.

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s hypocritical!”

  He didn’t bother to argue with me. He only picked up his jacket from the coatrack and shrugged it on.

  “I’ll see you tonight,” he said. “Remember: paint, read, relax. You’re not allowed to leave.”

  “Maybe I’ll call the police and tell them that Jake Carville kidnapped me,” I said, crossing my arms and following him to the elevator door.r />
  “Then Officers Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee will come get you, and you can go back to painting A-line cars,” Jake said.

  I frowned. He was right. Another day of painting was well worth being held captive in a penthouse. Even if it wasn’t what I’d hoped for.

  “I’m sorry we can’t spend all morning getting to know each other,” Jake said, the sarcasm so evident in his words that I hated myself for even thinking that we would have another romantic breakfast. He wasn’t keeping me around to be a girlfriend, I reminded myself.

  “I’ll just eat all these pancakes for myself,” I said, plopping down at the head of the table with an attitude I hoped looked like I didn’t even care if he stayed or not. I loosened my robe. These pancakes were all mine, and I was taking no prisoners.

  “Good,” Jake said, smiling warmly. I could feel my heart melting under his smile, and I shook myself off to harden up. He didn’t care about me, not really. I shouldn’t care about him.

  “Will you be a good girl while I’m gone?” he said.

  “Depends on what you define as good.”

  “How about this: just keep the painting inside of the art studio and not on any of the living room walls.”

  “I’m not sure I can agree to that,” I said jokingly. “That main window looks like it would make an excellent stained glass piece.”

  “Do I need to lock you up before I go?” Jake teased.

  “No,” I said, but I tried to pout.

  He bent down to me, and before I knew it he’d hooked his finger into my bra, pulling it down. His mouth took my nipple, sucking it hard and sending electric thrills through my body. I gasped as he stood back up.

  “And if you’re a good girl, you’ll have that to look forward to tonight. Understood?”

  I breathed in sharply, unable to speak for a moment because of the insane desire that made me want to shove Jake Carville against the door instead of waiting patiently for tonight. Then I forced myself to nod.

  “Yes,” I said. “Understood.”

  ***

  Home alone. Hmm. I finished breakfast and did the dishes, even though I was pretty sure he had one servant to wash and one servant to dry. I wasn’t about to leave his place a mess.

  And what a place!

  I poked around the house for a bit to see how a billionaire lived. The rooms were all elaborately decorated with the same kind of style, and I actually got bored wandering from one perfectly styled bedroom to the next. The room where he’d tied me up was locked up securely, and none of the rooms were all that interesting, except for the art gallery.

  I spent an hour or so perusing all of the paintings there. A half hour to go through them all once, and another half hour to see if there was anything I’d missed. All of the artists I knew said that they could spend hours staring at a single painting, but I was always too impatient for that. Still, I was glad that I went back through the gallery again, because if not, I would have missed it.

  One of the smaller paintings that I hadn’t noticed that first night caught my eye. The painting was stylized, abstract enough that you couldn’t tell right away what the image was.

  I had to step closer, almost put my nose up to it, to tell what the painter was going for. It was a woman, or at least a curved body that I thought was a woman. The features of her face were blurred out so that I couldn’t see the expression. And her arms were strange, elongated, with lines extending from the ends of her hands. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was, until…

  There.

  When I saw it, I took a step back in surprise. I hadn’t recognized the shape because of the lines, but I knew now exactly what they were. The silver lines emanating from the palms, looking for all the world like energy beams coming out of a superhero’s hands—they weren’t lines at all.

  They were chains.

  The woman was tied up in the room that Jake had tied me up in. And again, I winced with jealousy. This was obviously a painting that Jake had either done himself or had commissioned, with a model who’d been in the same position I’d been in all last night. I frowned and turned away to look at another Kage painting.

  Man, there were a lot of them.

  The Kage paintings were just as prominent as ever. Indeed, the canvas that I’d been looking at the night of the party had a spotlight all to itself. It shone in the middle of the room.

  At first I’d thought it had been a reproduction of one of Kage’s pieces. A giclee print, maybe, like the kind you see hanging all over high-end galleries in the West End. But as I came closer, I realized that this wasn’t a print. It was an original.

  The paint was applied in thick strokes. I reached out to touch it. The drips were bumpy on the canvas. I squinted at the dripped paint. How had Jake managed to get this? How had he even gotten in contact with the most infamous street artist in New York City?

  I turned away from the canvas. Jake Carville was a man full of mysteries. But there was one thing I knew: he had an art studio full of blank canvases, and I meant to paint them.

  Chapter Five

  It was six o’clock in the evening when Jake came back. I was in the art studio, busy with my painting. I’d managed to finish thirteen pieces. Two others were pushed to the side, half-done. They irritated me like I was a kid with a loose tooth ready to come out. I tongued them but couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the idea in my head. They weren’t quite right.

  I was busy working on my fourteenth canvas when Jake arrived.

  “What did you eat for lunch?”

  “Lunch? Oh, right,” I said. I looked out the window, where the sky was growing darker. “Lunch. What time is it?”

  “It’s dinnertime.”

  “Oh. Dang. Well, I got distracted.” I dabbed another bit of blue onto the canvas. Not quite there, but close. I dabbed again.

  “I can see that,” Jake said.

  “I’ll be out in a sec,” I said, dabbing again with a lighter tint of blue. “I need to finish—”

  “Your painting? You’ve finished a lot of them already, I see.”

  Before I could protest, he stepped into the room. He moved among my paintings, studying them. Distracted, I swished my brush in the water to clean it. I could finish this painting later. Now…

  Now, Jake was seeing my work.

  I found myself holding my breath, hoping that he would say something about them to me. Even if he hated them… I wanted to know. I don’t know why. He had good taste, I suppose, or similar taste. I wanted to know if he approved, or if he thought I was wasting his paint and his canvases.

  I’d wasted a heck of a lot of them, after all.

  “Would you like to go out to eat?” he asked, turning abruptly on his heel.

  My shoulders slumped. The dark dread that had been building inside of me as he went from painting to painting descended on my head.

  “What is it?” he asked. He tilted his head curiously at me. I sighed and gestured toward the canvases he had just looked at.

  “Do you… I mean… what do you think?”

  “I think you should have eaten lunch six hours ago.”

  “No,” I said, hating the whining tone slipping into my voice. “I mean the paintings.”

  Jake couldn’t hide the small smile at the corner of his lips.

  “Do you care what I think about them?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t.”

  My lips parted in surprise.

  “Why… why not?”

  Jake squatted down in front of one of the canvases. He tilted it back so that the light hit it. Immediately I saw a line that I wanted to change, and winced. Seeing me, he put the canvas down. He shook his head. I didn’t know why, but I thought he looked at me with something like pity. Then it was gone as quickly as it had come. He stood up and held his arms open wide.

  “Your art is for you. What I think about your paintings has nothing to do with the paintings. What if I told you they were all garbage, that you should burn them?”

/>   My chest tightened.

  “I don’t… I mean, they’re not that bad, are they?”

  Jake stepped toward me, a smile spreading on his face.

  “What if I told you I wanted to buy them? All of them? Five thousand dollars apiece.”

  “What? That’s way too much!” I cried, gripping the paintbrush in my hands.

  “See?”

  Jake reached out to me and cradled my face in one hand. For a moment I thought he might… but no. He wouldn’t kiss me. He turned and gestured back idly at the canvases.

  “These are yours. Yours alone. Don’t ever let anyone judge them.”

  He gave me a quick kiss on the forehead.

  “Now go wash up for dinner. Get dressed in something that’s not one of these damn robes. They’re too tempting.”

  I was glad that he was still tempted by me, or at least willing to lie to me about it. But I wasn’t about to let him have the upper hand just yet.

  “All you have is dresses—”

  “Wear a dress. And no panties. Understood?”

  I stared baldly at him before giving up. If he wanted me in a dress, I’d have to wear a dress.

  “Understood,” I said. I was beginning to see a pattern here. “Your wish is my command,” I muttered.

  “That’s exactly right,” Jake said, his emerald eyes glinting with satisfaction as he smacked me on the rear.

  ***

  I changed out of the paint-flecked terrycloth robe and put on the first dress I grabbed out of the dozens in my closet. I felt a bit bad that I’d already ruined two of his robes with paint. I told myself that I’d keep this one for painting.

  Look at me. Making myself feel at home.

  I shrugged off the faint feeling of jealousy and longing. This was my home for the week, at least, and I should enjoy it while I had the chance to. When I came out of the bedroom to the kitchen, Jake was putting away his cell phone. He whistled a low whistle when he saw me, then lifted his phone in the air.

  “I thought that we could order in,” Jake said, waving the phone in his hand. “So that you don’t die of starvation in the middle of New York City. How does that sound?”