by Mann, Marni
SEDUCTIVE
SECRECY
MARNI MANN
Seattle, WA 2013
COPYRIGHT 2013 MARNI MANN
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Cover Design by Greg Simanson
Edited by Steven Luna
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.
PRINT ISBN 978-1-62015-172-3
EPUB ISBN 978-1-62015-268-3
For further information regarding permissions, please contact [email protected].
Because I never could have done this without either of you, Heather Ludviksson and
Steven Luna, this book is dedicated to you.
Table of Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO BY
MARNI MANN
Where there is love,
there is no darkness.
CHAPTER ONE
AS THE ELEVATOR CLIMBED TO THE TOP FLOOR, I leaned against the back wall and tried to relax each of my muscles in sequence. My feet were sore from grinding into the pavement when I’d rushed back to my building in my three-inch stilettos, so I shifted my weight between them, giving my toes a rest from the pointy tips and thin heels. I breathed deeply; the air that filled my lungs needed to invigorate me. My meeting with Gareth, a collector who’d commissioned my art, had lasted longer than the hour I had scheduled for him and it drained every pulse of energy from my body. I had a long night of painting ahead of me. I couldn’t let the dull vibration of the elevator bring me any closer to sleep.
Gareth had recently purchased a penthouse in the financial district and wanted a piece for the main wall in his living room. He’d explained to me that he was single, a ladies man with a taste for submissive women. Not only did he want the canvas to explore those characteristics, he also wanted it to set the tone for his entire apartment. He wanted my painting to establish a mood; then, his interior designer would begin furnishing using the colors I had chosen. Because his place was naked, unpainted and unfurnished, I had to find my own inspiration.
Ordinarily, I would have sketched a few samples and reviewed them with the buyer. But Gareth wanted to help me brainstorm. We sat on the light wood floor in the middle of his living room as he described to me the things he found arousing: latex, thighs, sharp nails, the way a woman smelled after sex. With a piece of chalk and stencil paper—my tools for planning and plotting—I drew a woman who didn’t stare forward from the canvas, but tilted her head slightly to the side and gazed off into the distance. She would never look directly into her master’s eyes…during my time at the mansion, there were men who wouldn’t allow me to look directly into theirs. Her thin torso was clad in black latex and her hair was lifted high in a sleek ponytail, the strands long enough for him to wrap around his fist several times and pull tight. Leather straps belted and bound her wrists like the shackles had done to mine; her gloved knuckles pressed into her hips, her legs were spread wide, enhancing her slim thighs and the V where they met. Ebony lipstick glossed her mouth; she wanted her kisses to be as dark as shadow…and that was exactly where she wanted to leave them.
I had one week to complete it. I hoped to get a substantial piece of it finished tonight.
The elevator came to a halt and the door opened to the studio. My eyes scanned the vast, familiar space. A single light shone down from an industrial-style bulb hanging in the center of the room, glowing over the easel and canvas standing beneath it. Cameron’s new piece was due in a few days, and he’d been working on it non-stop. I’d expected him to be in front of his canvas, paint splattered on his fingers and handprints on his worn jeans. But the space was vacant. He wasn’t refilling his palette in the front of the room; I didn’t see him in the kitchen, either. I shifted several paces to the right to see past the easel entirely. A smile crossed my lips once I noticed his feet dangling over the arm of the couch. His face rested against the pillow.
He was finally asleep.
He had spent the last two days in our studio, adding to and reworking the acrylic on his canvas. He wasn’t happy with the hues; he wanted them deeper, stronger, more resonant. He couldn’t get this particular abstract to flow, to run into a fluid story of color. I knew what that kind of creative block felt like; it was similar to being on the verge of having an orgasm shoot through my entire body, only to have it disrupted by the phone or a doorbell and losing the feeling completely. I wanted the release; I craved it—my fingers clawed for it, even. But the build-up was gone and I wasn’t able to bring my body back to that place. There was nothing I could do to help him; he had to work through the obstruction himself, and that was exactly what he’d been doing. The long hours, the endless pots of coffee and the missed meals must have finally caught up with him.
Cameron’s body reclined over the entire length of the couch. One arm was bent over his bare stomach; the other hung to the floor. A hint of light from the overhead bulb trickled to this section of the room and gently spread over his cheek, and the curves of his chest. It brightened the words It’s Always Darkest Before The Dawn tattooed over his collarbone, and the long, leafless branches of ink wrapped around his shoulders, from the tree that covered his whole back. The glow and the shadows mingled on his face, emphasizing his caramel skin and the ease of his expression.
Every part of me yearned to feel his lips against mine, to take in his tongue and give him my own. I wanted my face to rest idle in the center of his, where the light met the dim, but I forced myself back. He needed sleep. But the hunger in me remained. My fingers twitched as a different need began to spread through my body.
I had hurried back to the studio so I could paint Gareth’s piece while the ideas were still fresh, grabbing tubes of acrylics stored in the back of the room. But as I squeezed dollops of paint onto my palette, I realized they were shades inspired by Cameron and his body, not the concept Gareth and I had created.
Standing at the easel that now faced in
Cameron’s direction, I mixed bronze and Naples yellow with a palette knife and loaded the tip of my brush. The outline of his body appeared on the canvas, and then the shape of the couch underneath it. After several loose, open strokes, my focus shifted to his hand and the way it hung to the floor. His knuckles rested on the wooden planks; his fingers were balancing him and bearing some of his weight. It wasn’t only his weight they held.
They’d also held mine.
I dropped the brush and grabbed a clean one, dipping it into ivory black and dragging it toward a puddle of titanium white. I beat both together. Once the dark silver was forged, I painted the floor under the outline I had drawn. It was mirrored…just like the floor of the mansion had been, made of small shards that were glued together by a thick polyurethane. But a hole appeared where Cameron’s hand had landed. The pieces of glass had broken, veining out from the center like a spider web.
The glass hadn’t simply shattered. Cameron’s fist had smashed it.
Cameron…my dawn. He had broken through the darkness—my darkness—and pulled me from its depths. I wasn’t necessarily standing under the sun yet, or even beneath a mostly-clear sky strewn with clouds, but I was here and he was one of the reasons for that.
A gust of cold air burst through my body, tightening every muscle and clenching my lungs. The feeling was always the same, and it only came when I thought of that place…when the memories were thicker than the lessons I had learned by leaving there.
I set both brushes in a jar of water, leaving The Mirror as I walked across the hall to the apartment. I wedged my jacket into the closet and placed my bag on the floor under the table in the foyer. Then I moved through the kitchen, my hands yanking at my sweater, lifting it over my head and releasing it once I got to the entryway of the bedroom. I peeled off my black skinny jeans until I reached my knee-high boots and dropped both along with my pants in front of the bathroom sinks. My panties and bra fell from me before I stepped into the shower and turned on the water.
The wall of glass that separated the shower from the rest of the bathroom began to fog, and the marble under my feet turned warm. Cameron had designed this shower himself, and like everything else he created, it was truly a work of art. It was also one of my favorite places in the apartment, a sanctuary overlooking different sections of the Back Bay from the cut-out windows that wrapped around the top, middle and bottom of the shower. Cameron and I had spent a great deal of time in here together—not just to clean the splatters of paint from our bodies, but to hear each other’s' voices echo throughout this space. When we were in here, we wouldn’t allow anything else in—no other voices, no negativity, no memories. Just us, and the present.
My skin was sweating under the shower flow. Drops of scalding water ran off my body. The places that were being hit directly by the jets had turned bright red. But none of it could warm the chill that continued to spread beneath my flesh.
Six months had passed since I’d left the mansion. I didn’t think about it as much as I used to, but when something inspired those thoughts and unexpected moments of panic—something like the mirrored floor in the painting—I had a hard time calming down. I still had a lot of darkness to deal with; I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to process what I had done there, what I had allowed to happen…or how much I had once enjoyed it. Part of me didn’t want to take it back; part of me could barely keep down the bile that threatened to rise when I remembered what it felt like to have my best friend’s father in my ass. But that time in my life had gotten me hereand I was here, unlike some of the girls I had shared that house with. And I had my painting, a form of expression that allowed me to exorcise the darkness as best I could when it arose. There were moments, though, when all it did was rouse those demons further instead of lulling them to sleep.
This was one of those moments.
I moved closer to one of the shower heads and pressed my hands against the cold marble that tiled the wall, leaning into the stream of water. It massaged the top of my head, and I could taste the product that drizzled from my hair—the spray I had used to hold my curls and the oil that gave it shine.
A spot of light broke through the shadows.
Just breathe, Charlie. Close your eyes and let the water bring you to a quiet, contented place.
The drops that filled my ears blocked any noise that was around me, but it didn’t stop Emma’s voice from entering. I heard her for the first time shortly after I had left the mansion. It didn’t happen every day; she only arrived when I needed her guidance. She was my voice of reason.
Taking her advice, I closed my eyes, inhaled the steam and tried to find a place of relaxation—a place where the terrifying images and imagined screams from those innocent girls would quiet to a dull moan. And just as I found it, just as my palms stopped kneading against the stone and my back stopped pumping and arching to find that place of complete comfort, just as I had finally acclimated to the temperature of the water, I felt Cameron’s arms wrap around my chest. His hands cupped each of my breasts, his thumbs grazing my nipples.
Another light.
“Why didn’t you wake me?” he whispered into my neck. His lips followed his words to my skin, his tongue circling the spot just to the side of my throat. It didn’t matter how often Cameron had roamed my body, or how many times. It always felt so new, so unexpected.
“You need your sleep,” I told him. As soon as he touched me, I lost my voice completely. All I had were my desires, and they consumed me.
“I need you more,” he breathed.
The wetness between my legs began to spread to the inside of my thighs as Cameron’s breath trickled over my skin. His touch became rougher and needier as it lowered to my stomach and stopped just at the bottom of my hips. His mouth moved to my back, sweeping over my shoulder blades and slowly down my spine. The combination of the water drumming against my flesh and his moist, soft lips weakened my balance.
“Next time you find me sleeping on the couch,” he whispered, his fingers dropping even farther until they landed at the very top of my clit, “I want you to wake me with this.”
I stopped breathing and held the air in my lungs as the tingles coursed through my stomach and spread to my legs, to my toes, and then back up again. My pussy had throbbed long before his hand had found it. Now it trembled even more, begging for his friction, for more rubbing, for more…Cameron.
“When I opened my eyes, I wanted you on my lips. I wanted your pussy waiting for me so I could eat it without having to wait.”
His words made my body shiver, and my legs spread on their own. I reached behind my neck and tugged on the back of his head, pulling him closer, wanting to feel his hardness, his skin, his frame against me. His arm traveled past my neck and landed on the wall; he squeezed his fingers between mine. His lips pressed short, seductive kisses on my cheeks, and his other hand circled in a slow, teasing rhythm.
“I need to hear you come,” he breathed.
I responded by turning around, meeting the face that aroused me just as much as his fingers did. His icy baby blue eyes wandered over my body. He saw me naked every day, but the expression he wore as he looked at me was the same as the first time he had stripped my clothes off. And his reactiona tantalizing tug of his lip as he sucked it into his mouth, an increase in the pressure of his hand, breath that was released in heavy spurtstold me he was still enchanted by my bareness.
His fingers left me and moved to my thighs, lifting one and wrapping it around his waist. Then he raised the other off the ground. My back pushed against the wall and my hands immediately went to his shoulders, clinging to the muscles that were too large for my palms. My grip was more out of habit; when Cameron held me in his arms, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere unless he wanted me to.
As I waited for him to fill me, my legs tightened around him. His hardness teased my cheeks and I ground against it. Cameron and I didn’t use condomsI was also on the pill, and we had both been tested after my service at the mansion to make sure
I wouldn’t expose him to anything I might have picked up from my clientsso I didn’t have any fear of his unprotected skin entering me. It was exactly what I wanted, and my desire couldn’t have been any clearer. It didn’t mean Cameron would simply give in, though. We both enjoyed the ache that built from a long, drawn-out tease. But only a few seconds had passed before he surrendered to the sound of me begging as I whispered in his ear.
The sensation that quickly consumed me wasn’t the one I had expected; it was generated from two of his fingers and the tip of his thumb circling my clit. He finally released his own bottom lip and took in mine—not as a kiss; more as a lingering presence that kept me in the moment and reminded me of the control he had over my body.
Control I gave him easily and willingly, but reclaimed whenever I wanted.
When his fingers began to pick up speed, I pulled my mouth away and leaned my neck against the wall.
“That’s it, baby,” he groaned. “Relax into me.”
I drove my nails into his shoulders and bound my legs even tighter. As I rested on the tile, I allowed his movements to take me to that familiar place.
“Not yet.” His fingers slowed. “I want you to release all of it.”
Cameron knew that even if my mind was in a different place, my body could still have an orgasm. With him, the passion was able to escalate on its own without me needing to focus on his actions. That was how completely he aroused me. He also knew I still thought about the mansion, and that this was where my brain went when it drifted away from him. Not toward the memory of my clients or their embraces; those men meant nothing to me. It drifted toward the guilt instead, for what I had given to them and the feelings I had for Cameron that had been growing simultaneously. When that happened, when those emotions worked their way in, I wasn’t able to concentrate solely on him anymore.
