“After you come, I’ll remove the blindfold.”
The truth of the matter was that Corbin was the one who decided if I would orgasm or not. He knew how to work my body like he had been studying the owner’s manual. If Corbin wanted to watch me come, all he had to do was…
My desperate cries filled the room as his thumb worked my clit in tight, controlled circles. Sweet agony set my body shuddering, my wrists and ankles chafing against the restraints. He made me come so quickly that it was embarrassing.
The sharp joy settled into a warm bliss. Corbin’s hands caressed down my thighs, stopping just above my trembling knees. Then he stopped touching me completely, but I still sensed him there, kneeling between my spread legs, watching the light tremors ease their hold on me. Of course he watched. I imagined clearly his transfixed expression as he watched his seed slowly leak out.
Now he would remove the blindfold… except he didn’t. Still, I didn’t panic. I was too relaxed for that.
I sighed, contented for the moment, and wondered how long before he would be ready for a second romp. Not long, I guessed. We rarely went several rounds in quick succession, but that was because Corbin tended to wring every last drop of pleasure from my body long before he finally took his own release. But I’d seen him getting hard in the shower not long after, and with little provocation. The man had a strong sexual appetite.
He wanted me to wait, tied up, at the whims of his insatiable lust, and so I did. Heat gathered between my legs. I wished he would touch me again. I craved him more than ever.
Like so many of the things that Corbin had introduced me to, it wasn’t my fantasy… until it was.
“That was fifteen minutes,” Corbin said finally. There was a measure of pride beneath the matter-of-fact way he’d said it.
I frowned, and the silky blindfold caressed my brow. “It was? Would have thought a minute, tops. I… don’t feel stressed at all.”
“Your heart rate is still a little elevated,” Corbin said. “But all that matters is how you feel.” He worked the blindfold off of my head, and I blinked despite how dim the light was.
I felt renewed, and inordinately proud, even though all I’d done was lie there. I felt like I’d been reborn… and decided to keep that to myself. “You enjoying staring at me?”
“I am.” His voice was a little rough, and when I craned my neck and looked down, I saw just how entertained he was. His thick cock stood at attention, the length curving toward his sculpted abs.
Corbin used a finger to trace a wet path from my buttocks up toward my slit. “Still dripping,” he said. “Still plenty inside you, but I think you can take some more.” There was a flush in his cheeks as he stared down at me.
It really turned him on. It was kind of unbelievable that a man could be so attracted to the sight of his lover leaking semen everywhere.
“Why does this make you so horny?” I wanted to know. I knew why it aroused me: because it got him worked up. I regretted not having seen the wildness in his face when he’d taken me before, but at least I wouldn’t miss it this time.
His half-lidded eyes took the long path toward mine, and I could practically feel his touch, as if his gaze itself caressed me. “Because,” he said. “It means you’re mine.”
The sound of my sudden inhalation was nearly hidden by Corbin’s next words. “Restrained like this, it’s a male fantasy. If I could keep you tied to the bed for months, I would. Come home, fuck you, fuck you again, feed you, fuck you some more. I would provide everything you’d ever need, keep you safe and happy. You’d be there when I fell asleep, you’d be there when I stirred in the middle of the night. I could roll over on you, come in your tight pussy, then go back to sleep. Wake up in the morning and see the pool of wetness underneath you.” He had started to stroke his cock as he spoke, and I suspected he didn’t even fully realize it. “Take you again in the morning. Make you raw. Make you come. Drive you out of your mind with ecstasy. You would crave nothing more than the feeling of my cock pounding you.”
“I want you,” I whispered. I felt the thump of my pulse in my swollen sex.
He stretched his long body out over mine, and with a quick swing of his hips, he drove his cock deep inside me, forcing me into the mattress.
Sticky wetness had spilled out when he entered me, and it gushed down my buttocks and over my ass.
He turned my head, exposing my neck to him, and raked his teeth down my throat, then kissed his way back up to my jaw. “I don’t want you to ever be afraid of anything,” he said. “Not the dark. Not the future. Not anything.” He clamped his hand over my mouth. “Now I’m gonna fuck you hard, but it’ll be over fast.”
He pummeled me with that fat, throbbing cock of his, and a scream rose in my throat. His fucking actually hurt a little, and I loved that I couldn’t get away from him.
I flexed and clenched my fingers clumsily, half out of my mind with insanity from his forceful rutting. Before Corbin, I had thought I knew everything about sex, about pleasing a man, about what it took to please me.
But there wasn’t any bliss like the one that came from surrendering completely.
~~~
There was a very quiet, soft sound. I furrowed my brow and inclined my head, trying to pinpoint the location. If there were mice in the closet with me, it was over.
Wrong thought. The panic had subsided completely as I replayed that night. Corbin had proved that my mind was stronger than my fear—though I later argued it had more to do with how much I trusted him. But now the panic saw its way back into the driver’s seat, and it had grabbed the wheel and was pressing on the gas pedal.
But no, not a mouse… human footsteps… someone moving quietly in the dark—don’t think about the dark about the closet about being stuck—but cautiously.
I heard a quick beeping… four times, fast. The alarm. Either it was Rob, or Henry’s date was sneaking out.
“Help,” I called out in a loud whisper.
But I heard the quietest of squeaks as the back door eased open.
“Help!”
The squeaking paused.
“In the closet,” I hissed.
Footsteps scuffed across the floor, and then the door opened. Rob stood there, his eyes nearly as wide as the lenses in his glasses. “Did Henry lock you in here?” he asked, aghast.
Before I could answer, he looked up. Then he grabbed me, pulling me out of the closet. Not that it was much work on his part; despite the pins and needles, my legs were already making an admirable attempt to propel me out of my cell.
I closed the pantry door and discovered the source of my trouble—a metal latch that must have slipped down when Henry slammed the door.
Rob looked up again, then I heard what was catching his attention: the squealing of bedsprings being given a thorough workout, the sound loud and fast… like Henry had briefly paused, perhaps listening to determine if he’d heard someone shouting from inside his pantry, and now he was focused again on the task at hand. I felt a hysterical laugh welling up in my throat.
“Come on,” Rob whispered hoarsely.
“Like I was planning to hang out here all night.”
They were the last words we spoke to each other until we had crept back into Rob’s condo.
Only when the door was firmly closed and locked did the tension begin to leach out of my shoulders.
“Why were you in the closet?” Rob demanded. I could tell that he was more freaked out about how things had turned out than angry. I felt the same way.
“I was hiding. It locked after me.”
“Why didn’t you use a credit card to undo the latch?”
“First, I don’t have any credit cards—”
“Debit card. Driver’s license. What happened?”
“I didn’t see the lock,” I said. “It wasn’t like I took the time to get acquainted with the intricacies of the door before I jumped in there.”
“If I had known, I would have been sick,” he said. “I assumed you
were long gone. You didn’t freak out?”
Better not to answer that. “Where were you? Why didn’t you leave?”
“Leave? I didn’t know he was back until I heard them talking downstairs.”
“You didn’t?”
He shook his head. “You had the alert.”
“But his pickup was loud. They were loud.”
He shrugged. “I was on the other side of the house.”
I slumped onto the couch and dragged my thumb and index finger across my eyes, ending in a pinch on the bridge of my nose. “All that stress and all that risk. For nothing! Corbin was right. I take unnecessary risks. You were right. We should have waited for the weekend.”
“It wasn’t a total waste of time.”
I nodded, sighed, sat back, my hand sagging onto the sofa cushion. “True. I put the second camera above the dining room table. Not ideal, but we might get something. Not that I’m looking forward to returning to collect it.” A light shudder passed through me before I could stifle it.
Rob grinned. That cocky grin I knew all too well. It was the one he used on unsuspecting waitresses, on single mothers in line at the post office, on, basically, any person he wanted to impress.
“What?”
He pulled up his shirt a few inches revealing an orange envelope stuffed into his waistband. He pulled it out. Rather than hand it to me like a civilized person, or drop it on the table like our father would have done, he waggled it in front of my eyes, taunting me.
“Who’s the shit?” he asked, grinning, eyes gleaming.
“You’re a shit,” I growled, lunging for the envelope. He relinquished it without protest and went into the kitchen.
By the time he’d returned with two open beers, I’d spread the contents of the folder on the coffee table and was examining them. He’d swiped about three dozen pages, many of them bank statements.
“Holy moly,” I said, staring at the numbers. “A lot of money flowing through his account.”
“Yup. I had a chance to take a good look while I was under the desk.”
I looked up. “That was dangerous.”
“Not really. Where I was, I could hear every word of their boring little conversation downstairs. I turned off the light whenever they stopped talking.”
I turned my attention back to the papers spread out on the table. “What do you make of this?”
Rob took a long swallow of his beer, then belched lightly. “On its own, it means nothing. But given that we know how much he likes bribes, it’s obvious what he’s doing. Frankly, I’m relieved. He’s not running all that dirty money through Stroop Finders.”
“You’d think he’d deal in cash. But then where would he keep it?”
“There’s more,” Rob said, beaming again. “Guess who has an enormous safe under his desk?” He set down the beer and leaned forward. “Let’s discuss my role and salary in the new business.”
I rolled my eyes. “This is good, don’t get me wrong…”
Rob clicked his tongue chidingly, his eyes dancing with a secret that I knew he couldn’t wait to share.
“What? Did you crack the safe? Do you know the code?”
“Answer my question.”
“Partners,” I said. Like there was ever any doubt.
“That’s all I wanted,” he said easily. “I took a moment to relocate your video camera. If we get lucky, we might get the combination without any trouble at all.”
I stared at Rob. “You are a fucking genius.”
“I know,” he said. “About time someone recognized it.”
I would have preferred to have been the one who had found the documents, rearranged the camera… but spending time with Corbin had been a good lesson in not trying to do everything myself. So rather than upbraid myself for getting locked in the closet… well, there was bound to be a bit of self-flagellation because it was humiliating… I got down to work.
I scanned the documents and backed them up to an email address no one else knew of. Just in case. Then I printed out copies and pored over them, looking for patterns.
Henry was making large cash deposits at the beginning of the month, and he was taking half that money out again in cash two weeks later. With each deposit being over $40,000, he was well in excess of the limit that would trigger an automatic IRS notification from the bank.
So why bother? And then why take it out again? I frowned. Bribes and payments. Rob was surely right.
Corbin’s organization must have known about all of this and hadn’t deemed it worth pursuing. But I didn’t need to come up with bulletproof evidence to put Henry in prison for messing with FBI business; I just needed enough to make him leave us alone.
My phone buzzed. It was Veronica: In town with neighbor boy tomorrow night. Be free or else.
I smiled and texted back: Guess I’m free, then.
“Did you see Dad?” Rob asked. “You owe me, after all.” He was surfing the web on his phone and looked surprisingly nonchalant for a guy who was pushing his luck.
“Tomorrow,” I sighed. “Right after work.”
~~~
I pressed the button for the doorbell, fidgeted with the small white paper bag that was turning soggy under my damp palms. Gross.
Martha opened the door. She wore a long, flowing white dress that made her face look ruddier than usual. Her round blue eyes stared without blinking for a moment, then a cautious smile lit her face.
“Good to see you,” she said, opening the door so I could enter. The house smelled faintly of eucalyptus. When she didn’t have fresh flowers, Martha liked to put a few sprigs in the bathrooms and in some of the vases.
I mumbled some niceties and handed her the bag. “Bran raisin,” I said.
She nodded, but by the flare of her nostrils, I realized I’d chosen poorly. Apparently she’d taken it as an indictment of her cooking, of her care of my father.
So be it. She had been feeding him all sorts of crap since they’d married. Not that the fault didn’t rest squarely on Dad’s shoulders, but she had been his enabler.
“Dad around?”
“Of course he is,” she said, closing the door behind me. “He’s on the back porch. I’m going to put these on a plate, and we can all share them. Don’t forget to remove your boots.”
It hadn’t been so long since my last visit that I’d forgotten the house rules, but I didn’t defend myself. It wasn’t worth it.
Of all Dad’s wives, Martha was my least favorite. The others had been nicer. Sometimes they were too nice, and he’d taken advantage of them. Dad could be a bit of a bully, and as much as I disliked Martha, the woman stuck admirably to her agenda. She’d wanted to hook Dad, and she had. She’d wanted him to retire, and he’d brought in Henry so that he could retire.
I should have been taking lessons from Martha, because, well, my love life. I shoved my feet into plaid slippers and made my way through the house. As usual, it looked ready for a real estate showing.
Someone had dragged Dad’s favorite recliner onto the back porch. It was more of a patio and deck area, furnished with white wrought iron tables and chairs with blue and white striped cushions that always seemed damp. There was a sliding glass partition that was often retracted during barbecues. It wasn’t nearly warm enough for that yet, but Dad had one of the doors open, letting in cool air.
He was reading a newspaper, glasses perched on his nose. He’d had a haircut recently, and his curly hair was definitely more gray than dark. There was gray in his eyebrows, too.
“Hi,” I said, stepping onto the brick.
Dad actually smiled when he saw me. I decided to enjoy it, knowing it wouldn’t be on his face for very long; I gave us ten minutes before we were squabbling about something.
He studied me for a long time, like he was trying to memorize this moment. “Audrey. How’ve you been?” he asked, his brown eyes, the exact same shade as Rob’s, sincerely probing mine.
The question, and its naked vulnerability, brought me to a full s
top. I wasn’t sure my father had ever said those words to me before—not even as a vague and dismissive greeting.
“Fine,” I mumbled.
“Glad to see you,” he said. “Thank you for coming by. It means a lot.”
“Uh… thank you.” This was new territory for Dad. For us. Maybe he wanted something. Or was on some powerful drugs. “How are you feeling?” I asked.
He snorted, and his gaze darted toward the door. “Can’t wait to get back on my feet,” he said. “Sitting around on my ass all day…” He scoffed and shook his head.
Martha came shuffling out, and I took a seat next to Dad. She placed a silver platter on the white table. She had cut the muffins in half and toasted them.
“Look what Audrey brought,” she said as she arranged the muffins onto plates. Those round blue eyes came to mine. “I nibbled one of the crumbs in the kitchen, and it’s divine. Did you get them from the diner where you work?”
“Yeah.”
“We should come by and visit while you’re working. Wouldn’t that be nice, Bobby?”
I couldn’t think of anything worse. I changed the subject to the first thing I could think of. “Henry is giving Rob a hard time.” Dad didn’t need to know that it was personal, that Henry was attacking Rob to get at me.
Martha’s red-tipped nails fluttered near her throat, and she looked nervously at my dad. “Now, that doesn’t mean you need to rush back in there willy-nilly,” she said.
“I’m going to meet with the lawyers again on Monday,” Dad said. “We discussed this already.”
With a martyr’s sigh, Martha handed him a plate. There was a dark purple smear of jelly along the muffin.
“You’re going back?” I asked him. I wasn’t doing it to antagonize Martha, but she crossed her arms and looked away. I didn’t see why Dad would return at all. He had been on his way out even before the heart attack that nearly killed him.
He nodded as he took a bite. “Rob’s been complaining since the beginning. At first I thought—hoped—it just needed time, but that’s clearly not the case—”
“Audrey, you talk some sense into him,” Martha said, and walked away, the door banging shut behind her.
Seduced by a Dangerous Man Page 8
