by Cherry Kay
Thomas reached up and pulled her down towards him, thrusting into her as he kissed her passionately. One of his hands held her by the back of the neck while the other rested on her hip, guiding her motion as he increased the intensity of his thrusts. Shifting her further forward, he took a nipple in his mouth, sucking it and pinching it between his lips.
“I want to feel you behind me,” she said in a breathless voice.
Thomas responded immediately, pulling himself down out of her and releasing her from his grip so that she could climb off him. He then stood beside her and bent her forward at the waist until her chest rested against the back of the couch. Gripping his cock and rubbing the tip of it up and down the length of her pussy once to lubricate it with her wetness, he pushed his head into her, sinking himself all the way inside before grasping her hips and thrusting away.
“Oh yeah,” she moaned. “Fuck me.”
Spurred on by her words, Thomas moved one hand to her back, pushing down between her shoulder blades while his other hand slapped onto her butt cheek and dug in to hold her solidly. He worked his hips furiously, the sound of his body slapping against hers, ringing out into the room in time to his steady grunting from the exertion.
Craving another orgasm that felt so close she could almost taste it, Tiffany reached down between her legs and fingered her clit, rubbing it in rapid circles while Thomas pounded into her from behind. She moaned and told him how good he felt, all the while inching closer to the wild explosion building up inside of her.
When she finally came, it started as a soundless gasp and quickly became a shuddering cry of pleasure. Her pussy clenched on Thomas’s cock and she squirmed beneath the pressure of his grip on her. She heard his grunting become a passionate cry of his own, and his rhythmic thrusting became uneven as he pushed into her with long powerful strokes that sent surge after surge of his cum inside her.
After both of them had come down from the initial high, Thomas leaned forward and kissed Tiffany on the back, warning her before he pulled out of her. She cupped her hand over herself and caught his sticky mess before it could spill on the couch and floor, blushing and running off to the bathroom to clean up.
Sitting on the toilet and basking in the warm afterglow of sex, Tiffany wondered what she’d gotten herself into. Thomas could have any girl he wanted, and it seemed he wanted her. It was a powerful aphrodisiac, and after rinsing herself off at the sink, she reappeared in the living room where she knelt before her lover to coax his manhood into another bout of action.
Chapter4
Following the revelation that Thomas was one of the wealthiest men in America, Tiffany exerted more control over her schedule and forced herself to take a bit more time alone so she could keep everything in perspective. She’d developed strong feelings for Thomas in the short time she’d known him, but if she was being honest with herself, which was very hard to do in light of how magical those weeks had been. She had to admit to the temptation of getting caught up in the romance of it all. Thomas had wined, dined, and gifted things to her in the way she’d only ever seen happen in movies until now. What she needed was time to keep from losing focus on who she was as a person in the face of being swept up in the kind of lifestyle being with Thomas could offer.
The truth of it was that knowing what she knew about Thomas had changed things. She wanted to believe that he’d had only the best intentions when he’d lied to her, and her heart told her to accept him and go along with it because it felt so wonderful being around him, but her more rational brain reminded her that she couldn’t lose sight of who she was and who she wanted to someday be.
Tiffany had never thought of herself as the kind of girl who would marry rich and sit around with no career and a household staff to do everything for her. She liked the idea of being cared for, far more than being taken care of, and what she needed now was space to get the perspective she needed. She did not want to rush into anything foolish.
Tiffany clicked on the TV and found a show to watch, but her mind was still on Thomas. She could not yet admit out loud to having fallen in love with the man, but she knew she couldn’t stop thinking about him. She really didn’t care about the money, and if anything, it only made her hesitate more. What she wanted was to be near him. She wanted to talk to him and to feel the comfort of his embrace. Eating dinner and watching TV alone felt boring and empty without him.
But no, she told herself that she needed to be strong. It wasn’t as though she’d cut Thomas back to only one night a week, but rather she’d chosen to spend a single night in her own apartment after which she’d crawl into her own bed without him by her side. They had plans to meet tomorrow, and he’d promised to take her to his real home instead of the one he kept when he needed some place more low key to get away from the stress of his regular life.
The ringing of her phone pulled Tiffany away from her thoughts. She muted the television and looked at the caller ID, secretly hoping that the blocked number belonged to Thomas.
“Hello?”
“Is this Tiffany Norman?” asked the woman on the other end of the line.
“This is she.”
There was a pause on the line. Just as Tiffany was about to ask what the call was about, the woman began speaking again.
“There are some things you need to know about Thomas Belmont. The man is a pathological liar who will say or do anything it takes to get what he wants. You’re just the latest in a long string of acquisitions, and you should think twice before having anything more to do with him.”
“Who is this?” asked Tiffany; blown away that someone had tracked down her personal cell phone number. “What proof do you have that any of this is true?”
“Who I am is not important,” replied the woman. “I’m not asking you to take my word for it. If you don’t have the ability to see what a lying snake Thomas is, then I suggest you do a little research into who owns that dating site where you met. You did meet on Matchr, right?”
“How did you know that?” asked Tiffany, feeling more creeped out by the second. “How did you get this number? Who are you?”
“Look into it, and then decide what kind of man you’re getting into bed with.”
The end of the line went dead, leaving Tiffany dumbfounded and confused. Her number was unlisted and shouldn’t have been accessible to any random stranger, but here she was getting calls late at night warning her away from Thomas. It was far too crazy to believe yet there it was, the proof of it right in her call history log.
Tiffany set down the phone and went to her computer. She powered it up and went to the Matchr site. There was little information on the About page that might tell her exactly who owned the website, and so she did a bit of searching until she found the name of a company called Phase Nine Entertainment. The woman on the phone had implied that Thomas owned the dating site, and so Tiffany typed ‘Thomas Belmont’ and ‘Phase Nine Entertainment’ into the search bar.
This returned no results matching Thomas Belmont, but it did bring up a string of results for Phase Nine. The company owned a number of dating sites, but there was practically no information about them anywhere on the internet. Their website was just a splash page with links to their dating sites, and a search result turned up nothing but a series of press releases for new acquisitions or services offered by the company.
It was on the fourth page of search results that she saw something interesting. A short tech article that wasn’t much more than a regurgitation of one of the press releases for Matchr’s latest matching algorithm, mentioned that they were a subsidiary of a parent company called GlobalTech Consulting.
Again, Tiffany went to her search bar, this time entering ‘Thomas Belmont’ and ‘GlobalTech Consulting’.
There, in the first result, was an article about Thomas that listed GlobalTech Consulting as one of the personal business ventures he launched after taking over the business from his father. The primary aim of GlobalTech was the building of a diverse portfolio of tech co
mpanies along the lines of what she’d read in the magazine article about him. The website also claimed that Thomas Belmont was a strong hands-on owner who liked to have input on many of the projects he had acquired over the years.
On the one hand, this was thin evidence to support the woman’s implication that Thomas had some nefarious access to the Matchr results, but on the other hand, it was too much of a coincidence to ignore completely.
Tiffany shut down her computer and went back to the couch. She turned off the mute on the TV, but she wasn’t listening. Her mind raced to understand the connection. Why did this woman call her on her private line to warn her about Thomas Belmont, unless she had been burned in the past by exactly this sort of thing. Tiffany didn’t want to believe it, but the more she thought about it, the more she became convinced that it wasn’t random chance and a good profile match that had brought her into contact with Thomas.
Around the time of her date with Luke, she’d stopped receiving messages from normal people and had experienced a flood of weirdoes trying to contact her.
Losing sight of her ability to think rationally, Tiffany began to question why Luke had stopped messaging her. She had been so taken aback by the sudden lack of contact that she never thought to follow up with him, but now she had to know why he had seemingly disappeared from the site.
Tiffany scrolled through her contact list and found Luke’s information. She had a text message thread going with him so they could arrange their first meeting, but she deleted it shortly after accepting that he wasn’t going to contact her again. Pressing the icon to open up a new message, she typed out a quick message:
Sorry for the awkward question, but why did you never message me after our date?
Her thumb hovered over the Send button for a moment before deciding it was worth knowing.
A reply came back minutes later:
I tried, but I got an error saying your profile was inaccessible. I thought you’d blocked me or something!
Tiffany read the message several times over. It just didn’t make sense. There was no way all of these things could be sheer coincidence. Yes, the site could have bugged out and caused problems with allowing Tiffany and Luke to connect. And of course, it wasn’t unusual for a good-looking young woman to get many messages from creepy guys on a dating site.
But somehow, in the middle of all that, she managed to receive a message from a secret billionaire who just happened to own the site through a series of parent companies. The odds were just too far out of favor for it to be random chance. Those things had to be connected.
Punching the power button on her remote control, Tiffany then tossed it down on the coffee table, picked up a pillow, pressed it to her face, and screamed her frustration into it. She had already caught Thomas in a lie about who he really was, and now she learned that the lies went far deeper than she wanted to believe.
This new information put all of his gifts and lavish spending into a whole new light, and she couldn’t help but see herself as the latest dumb girl in a long line of innocent young women falling prey to Thomas Belmont.
Tiffany’s phone chirped with a new notification, and she checked it to find that Luke had written again.
I know it’s been a few weeks, but do you want to reconnect? I would love to see you again.
Unsure of what to do, Tiffany left the message unanswered and turned off her phone. Even if she was done with Thomas, she wasn’t sure if Luke was the right sort of guy for her. The most unfortunate thing about all of this was that she’d lost what she’d thought was a very real connection with someone who valued the same things as she did, and who she could be completely comfortable with.
Now this made her even more furious for believing his lies and taking him at his word. He probably had an elaborate system for researching women so he could build himself up to become the kind of man some would find to be the most attractive to them.
Tiffany got up and went to the kitchen. She was so angry and upset that she wasn’t sure if
She’d be able to fall asleep any time soon, and so she opened a bottle of wine and poured herself a rather large glass. In that moment, she just wanted to forget any of this had ever happened to her, and if it took a bottle of wine to make it happen, then she wanted to get started as soon as possible.
*
It began with an email. Thomas had sent her a short message that morning, and the first thing she did was to delete it without reading it. Deep into the previous night’s bottle of wine, she would indulge in fantasies of confronting him and telling him what an asshole he was, but in the stark light of day, those ideas seemed far less practical.
Nursing a terrible headache and a gut-churning hangover, she decided that she’d do best to stay away from him completely, as she should have done that to that second bottle of wine that now caused her so much discomfort.
Going to work helped considerably. There was a lot to be done with several project deadlines converging and rapidly approaching. Her manager was on the warpath ensuring that no one fell behind, and the whole team pulled extra hours in order to stay on top of everything. It was easy enough to turn her phone off and ignore the incoming calls and messages from Thomas while at the office, but she still dreaded going home.
Thankfully, one of her coworkers suggested they all go out for dinner and drinks at one of the nearby bistros, and although she’d been begging off such social engagements since meeting Thomas, she gladly accepted the distraction and went along with them.
The restaurant was loud and busy, and Tiffany ordered a mojito when the waiter came to take their drink orders. She tried not to think about Thomas and all the restaurants he’d taken her to, instead, focusing on her coworkers and the conversation flowing around the table.
She had no idea that two of her coworkers had started dating, and it was a shock to see them openly making out after a few rounds of drinks. Everyone had teased her for being surprised, and this had of course prompted her being made to order a round of tequila shots for everyone.
Tiffany grimaced and slammed the shot glass upside down on the table. She was quickly approaching the sort of drunk that would leave her body feeling even worse than it had that morning, but she did not care. Everyone was letting off steam after a rough week of work, and it felt great to be out with people who she had grown quite close to over the years.
She would never have wanted to leave this had she stayed with Thomas and had him offer to swoop her up into his world of money and power. Even if he was the richest man in the entire world, she thought she’d still want to come to work each day where she was valued and challenged to do her best.
Declining another drink, Tiffany asked for some water and sat back in her chair to catch her breath from laughing at a joke someone had told. She felt drunk and physically tired, but at the same time, she felt free from all the bullshit that seemed to follow Thomas Belmont around.
True, she would probably never wear such fancy clothes or eat in places like The Silver Hare again, but that wasn’t her, anyway. These people were more her speed, and this part of town was more her style. Besides, there were plenty of attractive men around, and maybe meeting someone the old-fashioned way was better than trying to find a perfect match through a series of random questions on some dating website. It had worked this way for generations of young people, so why change it now.
Feeling like she needed to break the ties between her and Thomas with as much finality as possible, Tiffany made a choice to be uncharacteristically bold that night. A man sitting alone at the bar had been eyeing her all night, quickly looking away whenever she glanced his direction.
At first she’d been a little annoyed by it, but the more she drank, and the more pissed she was at having to feel shitty because Thomas had lied to her, the more she began to think it might be fun to go home with a stranger for once in her life.
Daring to make the first move, Tiffany rose from her seat and was hit with the rush of several alcoholic drinks reminding her
of just how strong they’d been. The room swayed for a moment, and she used the back of her chair to steady herself before regaining her composure and feeling steady enough to cross the gap between her and the gorgeous man who’d been playing eye tag with her all night.
“Hi,” she said, leaning on the bar next to him. “I’m Tiffany.”
“Do we know each other?” he asked, his eyebrows scrunching in mild confusion.
“No, but I noticed you watching me all night.” Tiffany felt a moment of self-doubt and tried to ignore it. She’d already put herself out there, and she’d come across as far drunker than she was if she backed out now. “I think I’ve already had enough to drink, but maybe you want to go for a walk and get some fresh air?”
“I’m sorry, I think you’re a bit confused.” said the man.
He pulled his wallet from his pocket and removed a twenty-dollar bill that he slipped under the drink he barely touched. Shrugging his shoulders in a silent apology, he shook his head and walked out of the restaurant, leaving Tiffany standing there alone.
