I Need A Bad Boy: A Collection of Bad Boy Romances

by Sophie Brooks

  When she finished saying this, her big eyes were already meandering around the room again. She reeled back, but right when I thought she was about to turn around and walk out the door, her hands closed around my throat.

  “You’re a pretty, pretty toy,” she said.

  I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t make any sound. Vanina wasn’t putting much pressure on my throat; she was just encircling it, resting on it with her hands, as if she didn’t want to let me go. Her eyes were now shinier, betraying the tears that were starting to form.

  “How young are you?” she asked. Her hands let go of my neck and started running slowly down my chest. They stopped at the straps of my dress, closed around them, and started tugging. “HOW YOUNG?”

  “I... I’m thirty-two,” I said. My voice came out weak.

  “Oh my, you’re older than me.” She kept tugging at the straps, and I feared they would break.

  “Please. Please go.”

  Vanina ignored that. “Fifty-two cards in a deck... plus some wildcards,” she said. At first I didn’t realize what she meant. “Fifty-two floors in a building... and some extra ones. I bet you’re living in the Joker.”

  I gasped. I couldn’t help it. So this was the game? Did Theo have one or two apartments where he placed his occasional conquests (his toys, as Vanina called them) just to have them close? If so, where was the other, and who was living in there?

  Vanina smiled again, as sadly as before. She let go of me and looked down. Her dark curly hair hid her face from me. I heard a really, really faint sobbing.

  “I...” she started. Her words were barely audible. “I... I love that man.”

  “I know.”

  I reached at her face, in an attempt to draw her hair aside, but she pushed my arm away with a violent blow of her hand. When she looked at me, there were tears in her eyes, but also a fierceness that brought back the fear.

  “Don’t go I know on me,” she hissed. “You’re just a toy, too. And you’ll be crying in no time.”

  I wanted to tell her that she was wrong. That I was there to get my revenge. That I despised Theo Lambert as much as I liked him. I wanted to assure her that Theo Lambert would be punished for the way he treated everyone, including women like us. But I couldn’t find the words, and when I did, she was already gone.

  Five minutes later I made a startling discovery. I had straight dark brown hair; hers was curly and deep black in color. Otherwise, she looked almost exactly like me.

  10. THE PINK SAND

  I had a weird dream that night. Of course, Theo was in it. How could he not?

  He was sitting on a chair in the middle of some kind of desert, and there was a long line of girls waiting for him to test them somehow. They were all dressed provocatively, with short skirts and ample cleavages. I was waiting in line as well, but my clothes were more conservative, appropriate for a reputable workplace. As the line advanced, I could hear the sound of soft slaps of hand on flesh, sometimes a moan or whimper, and then it was the next girl’s turn. The rejected women walked away looking down, in defeat. None of them was accepted for whatever was he needed a girl for. As I got closer and closer to him, I got more and more nervous, and started to sweat. I could see how Theo lifted up the girls’ skirts and slapped them in the ass, making their buttocks tremble.

  When my turn came at last, he looked at me intently, in a way that he hadn’t looked at the other girls. He felt me up under my long skirt, and then, without saying a single word, he stood up and put his other hand on my breast. I sighed as I started trembling. I couldn’t control it. I closed my eyes and let the warmth of his touch irradiate all over my body.

  Then came the slap.

  Surprised, I opened my eyes, and watched him in disbelief as he reeled back and sat down on his chair again. My left buttock was aching and burning. I had been rejected too. As I walked away, I could feel hot tears pooling in my eyes. A slight breeze made the sand rise from the desert ground. It was pinkish instead of yellow or white, a very fine pinkish sand that felt like very tiny needles colliding with my legs. When I looked back, I could barely make out Theo’s chair and the long line of girls was a blurry trace.

  Looking forward again, I spied some of the previous rejections half sunken in the sand. They all were trying to walk but their feet, and then legs, were getting more and more stuck in the pinkish matter, until they ended up stopping completely. After a good while, I walked beside Vanina. She was interred up to her shoulders, and had an expression of despair. She opened her mouth and spoke to me soundlessly. I wasn’t able to read her lips.

  At that point, I woke up.

  I went to work with a feeling of dread that I couldn’t shake off.

  11. A RELUCTANT GOLFER

  The traces of that unsettling feeling still lingered on me the next morning. But when I looked out the window, I found that it was a truly cheerful day, which made it easier to push the dread to the back of my mind. When I got on the street, I was feeling good already. I arrived at Theo’s office and started working on his appointments.

  It would be a nice day for him, and thus, relaxed for me: he’d have a couple of meetings at noon and he would play golf in the afternoon. That would leave me some time to sniff into what I found more interesting. Maybe have a little chat with Vandell about acquisitions... Sandor was much older than me, but that didn’t mean he was indifferent towards me. I had noticed the way he checked me out when Theo introduced us. This was something that could make it easier for him to open up.

  Theo arrived pretty early, as usual. He seemed pretty content, and didn’t make any quips about my clothing or general appearance. He stood beside me instead of rushing into his own office, and looked me in the eye as he asked me about his appointments for the day.

  “Well, you have only two meetings” I said. “You punish Frank Mill at eleven and Randy Forth comes at twelve thirty. Then you play golf with the sharks.”

  “... oh. Do I really have to play golf?” he asked, pouting his lips.

  That surprised me. I’d figured that he liked to play golf. I’d seen it as an occasion when all the machos from the shark world (millionaires and billionaires like him, who made their living buying and selling other people’s companies, with little regard for what they meant for them) gathered together to brag and share the stories of their conquests, both in terms of businesses and women. Hell, they even called themselves “sharks”, underlining the aggressive, alpha male, winner-takes-all philosophy they lived by. But Theo didn’t want to be there. Go figure.

  “I... I guess you don’t have to go,” I answered. I could think of other ways to keep him entertained, but I had made a point of not thinking about that. “I will make up some excuse.”

  He raised a hand, thoughtful.

  “No, no. I will go. It’s something you have to do once in a while.” He sighed and made a beeline to his office. But he stopped at the door and turned around to face me. “Will you come with me?”

  “I... uh... no, thank you,” I said, giving him the fakest smile. “I’ll stay here and take care of your matters for tomorrow.”

  He seemed disappointed, but didn’t say anything. He stepped into his office and started working at his computer.

  Five minutes later, he called me into his office.

  “Frank Mill comes at eleven, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “To be punished?”

  “For botching the contract in Washington.”

  The punishing thing was a joke that was not a joke after all. Theo Lambert could be as ruthless with his own people as with the competition. Sometimes he’d ask me to set up a meeting with some manager “to be punished”. The punishment was no more than a long, concentrated dose of verbal abuse, ranging from irony to irate yelling, invariably ending in a cold dismissal. He never fired anyone, though. Not for this, at least. I knew his girls (well, his assistants) were always in rotation, but they were always the ones who decided to leave. And that was a completely different thing.<
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  “So, that’s the first meeting. At eleven,” Theo said. “What time is it now?”

  “Nine thirty,” I replied after glancing at my watch.

  “We have some time, then,” he said, and sat up.

  “For wh—?” I started to ask, but I stopped dead. I knew exactly what he was talking about. I read it in his eyes, clear blue eyes that were looking at me as eagerly as a hungry lion looks at his prey.

  Suddenly, I felt as if the room were filled with a strange energy. I wondered if Roentgen, the scientist who discovered the X rays, had felt something like that when he made his discovery. I was discovering a new ray, a form of energy emanated by men like Theo Lambert. It was overwhelming and alluring, and left me with no energy of my own except for an intense desire, the desire of being taken by him. If I had been a scientist, I would have named this energy alpha rays, but I think the name was already taken.

  “For this,” Theo said, and suddenly he was kissing me. The first thing that took over my perception was the aroma of his expensive perfume, barely covering the smell of man that was beneath it, a primal smell that put all my senses in overdrive. The second thing was the wonderful texture of his lips, pressing on mine like an animal immobilizing its victim. Then the warmth and wetness of his tongue, making its way into my mouth, exploring it, filling all the cavities, dueling with my own tongue and always winning, making me lose my breath as the kiss continued and his hands started running up and down my back.

  “Mmmmh,” is all I could say, as my arms embraced his magnificent torso through the expensive fabric of his suit and his fine shirt. Our bodies were touching each other now through the layers of clothing, trying to ignore them, to nullify them. My nipples reacted immediately to this new intimacy in which our skins were rubbing on each other even when we were still fully dressed.

  “Mmh,” he mimicked, and started undressing me. He pulled up from the rim of my tight dress, moving it up inch after inch, with his own body getting in the way and complicating the procedure. He just didn’t seem to be able to detach from my body, both of us wanted to keep the intense contact of man on woman, woman on man, as the kiss went on and on.

  “This is... ooooh,” I started and stopped again, because he had pulled up my dress up to my waist now, and my ass and crotch were fully exposed except for the area covered by my slim panties. His hands had stopped messing with the dress and were firmly grabbing my buttocks now; as I had interrupted the kiss to be able to talk, his lips were now running up and down my neck, rising goosebumps all over my face and chest.

  “Wrong. This is wrong,” he said, and he somehow made it better, turning me on even more. I thought of how wrong it was (even more wrong than he realized), and felt incredibly dirty. I was such a bad girl! I was lying and betraying everyone all the time. And I wanted to be punished so much. He would be the one to punish me. Right there. Right then. With his manhood. He would push inside me with such force that he would make me scream.

  And of course, he did. He didn’t even try to rid me of my panties. He just set them aside with one of his big hands, unbuttoned his tailored trousers with the other, and slid his member inside me without so much as a warning. I gasped, but his mouth covered mine and the gasp died in a new hot, wet kiss. He grabbed my legs and held me in the air, keeping me impaled in his cock. I held myself putting one arm behind his neck and tugging at his tie with the other. It was a fine tie, voluptuously silky, but strong as all hell.

  “Damn,” he said, and he turned around until my ass touched the edge of his desk. He passed his arm over the surface, throwing papers and other things to the floor. I felt the touch of the cold glass in my buttocks as the warm mass of his virile member irradiated heat all inside me. My arm started sliding down his neck as I drifted back, then I let go and tugged at the tie with both hands, like a rider who mounted a horse from below instead of above. I hung from his tie as I started moaning and screaming in pleasure, contemplating Theo’s body against the sun that bathed the city through the glass, Theo still dressed, Theo looking more a bad boy and an alpha leader than ever, Theo pushing, pounding, time and time and time again, until I had to let go with a scream that must have been heard in all the fifty-two floors of the Lambert Tower. I lay there on the cold glass, feeling the delightful weight of his privileged body over mine, and fell asleep as I caressed the hair in the back of his head, as I felt the tender kiss of his lips going up and down my neck, marking it with his saliva as any savage beast would do.

  I was asleep on Theo’s desk, my dress rolled up to my waist, when he went to play golf with the sharks. Fortunately, he had remembered to cancel his previous appointments.

  12. BOUGHT

  When the cold comes, it all ends.

  I had got used to blushing and flushing as Theo unfolded his constant surprises. I’d grown accustomed to the heat: the burning sensation in my cheeks and my ears when I realized I liked being used, and sometimes in my buttocks, when he decided to apply some sweet punishment. The cold was different. The cold takes you completely by surprise, freezing your cheeks and lips as words refuse to take shape in your brain. It’s the chilly sensation when you realize you fucked up, or someone has blown your cover. I felt my whole body giving in to the freeze when I opened the Internet browser in Theo’s computer and tried to navigate to the Lambert Group website.

  As soon as I pressed the "L" for Lambert, a cascade of suggestions popped down from the address bar. The first one was lambert group. The second one was my name.

  There it was, in all its bolded, black-on-white, incandescent glory: lara everwood, one of the strings Theo had searched for in his browser. Not lara bold, but lara everwood: my real name.

  How long had he known? Why hadn’t he done anything? Had he put me in charge of the computer so that I’d learn about it?

  I knew him enough to know that this was the case. I realized now that Theo giving me access to his computer had not been an innocent gesture. Like everything he did, there was an ulterior motive to it. He wanted me to discover that I’d been discovered. He was manipulating me once more.

  As always, Theo was two steps ahead of me, and this time I felt the danger, physically. My whole body felt it: it wanted to flee, run, jump, fly, go to the other side of the world or sink into the earth. I was alone in his property, it was late at night, nobody was waiting for me anywhere, and my enemy had discovered my secret.

  And that was not all. Not by any stretch. There was this other thing.

  When I was a little child, I was afraid of spiders. I mean I’m still afraid of them, but as a child spiders provoked a deep terror in me. We lived in a wooden house where spider appearances were unfortunately pretty common, so my childhood happened against a faint, subconscious backdrop of danger: the idea that I’d be living my life normally until one day, at any moment, one of those ugly monsters would appear and make me freeze in terror. And whenever it happened, it was every bit as bad as my anticipation had painted it. I’d get scared to death at finding that horrible creature climbing up a wall or running across the floor, and all my senses would tingle for long minutes or even hours, way past the moment when the spider ran from me. I never killed any of those spiders. Not once. Not ever. I was too terrified of them. The mere thought of getting close to them to be able to hit them with something, the very idea of touching them by means of a shoe or a folded newspaper, filled me with dread and gave me nightmares. So I never even tried to harm those spiders. I just stood there, avoiding direct eye contact with the little monster but keeping it inside my field of vision, to verify that it wouldn’t appear by surprise again, crawling over my bare feet or falling on my curly hair. I purposefully prolonged my awareness of the spider as I tried to keep a passive control on it, not letting it get away from my peripheral gaze, but not trying to kill it either. After a while, the fear and the chill remained, but the horror subsided. The spider became a bit like any other object, something that was just there, as long as it was not moving or threatening me in any way. I
blocked my terror by satiation, by overdose. And then it became numb. It was as if I was just looking, keeping something on check, without thinking about how horrifying it was, how bad it would be if it attacked me. After a while, I was even able to tune it out. The spider would run and hide in its little cave or something, and life would go on. Until the next one.

  Some of this weirdness remained a part of me as I gradually became an adult. I had a way of blocking fear, horror and depression by overexposure, detaching myself from it instead of hiding from it or facing it directly.

  I remembered Vanina’s eyes. The look of despair that she tried to hide behind her anger. I was feeling that despair, then and there. Until that moment, I had reacted like I always do, since I was a little child and something scared me. I had tried to be cautious and not open up to that feeling too much. I was certain that if I paid attention to it, I would feel it enlarging, trying to swallow me whole.

  I had told Callie about it once. She thought it was the wrong thing to do. “You should open up to your own feelings and fears instead of building a wall around you,” she said. She really had no clue. She should be here in front of Theo’s computer, press Enter and stare at a page of results for her own name, I thought.

  Or maybe she was right. What was it I was feeling exactly? I’d become a good wall builder. Too good, perhaps. Was I scared or ashamed? Did I fear Theo’s revenge... or Theo’s disappointment? Maybe I was terrified of not pleasing him. Did I want to please the man I had set out to destroy?

  Look into your heart and you’ll find the truth, people say. But my heart is too well guarded. I can’t see clearly.

  Maybe I don’t want to see.

  * * *

  The following day, we both knew my charade was over.

  He arrived at the King of Hearts, greeted me like every other day, asked me about his appointments for the day, and disappeared behind his desk. A couple minutes later, he told me to cancel all his morning meetings and called me into his office. When I entered, I found him examining a folder that I recognized as my own file.