by Chloe Cox
It was fucking beautiful.
Down, boy.
She was upset. He could tell from her expression; she looked almost pained. Her eyes were closed. She thought she was alone.
“Adra,” he said.
She didn’t seem surprised. Just smiled, laughed softly. “Hi, Ford,” she said.
“What’s going on?” he asked, joining her in her wall leaning. It reminded him of high school, leaning against rows of lockers, talking to a girl. He smiled.
“Nothin’,” she said, smirking up at him. “What’s going on with you?”
“Adra,” he said, laughing. “Come on.”
She bit her lip and looked down at her feet.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I’m just… God, that was so overwhelming.”
“Dinner?”
“Dinner with you,” she said. “And the rest of them. I mean, we’re keeping it secret right? Not that I’m ashamed or anything. Oh God, I didn’t mean…shit.”
Ford tried not to smile too hard.
“It might be better if we kept it to ourselves until we were more sure of its shape,” he said carefully. “If that’s important to you, I have no problem with it.”
“I didn’t mean…”
“I know you didn’t, Adra,” he said, pushing off the wall and turning to face her. He planted his hands on either side of her body and looked her over. The charge between them was immediate.
“I’m just… I mean, I keep learning all these things, and my family, and…oh God, you don’t even really know about Charlie, or my Dad,” she said, her eyes getting bigger, the words tumbling out in a rush. “And I don’t know anything about your ex-wife! I have no idea what’s going through your head, except that I think I do, and that makes no sense at all. And isn’t that already more complicated than this is supposed to be? Like, by hour three? I mean, are we doing this wrong? And the whole time, the whole time, all I can think about, all I can even…breathe…is—”
Adra stopped talking when Ford kissed her.
He took her mouth in his again, the way he had back in his office, the way he’d been wanting to all damn night. He kissed her until her body started to go slack and then pressed into his, until her hands came out and around his neck, on his chest, his back. Until he was sure she’d forgotten she was freaking out.
“You’re thinking too much,” he said as he pulled away. She reached for him, and he pushed her back against the wall, just hard enough to make her squirm.
She was breathing hard.
“I’ll tell you whatever it is you need to know,” he said, and realized, as he said it, that it was completely true. He wouldn’t hide anything from her. There wasn’t anything worth protecting more than her.
He held her face in his hand.
“No secrets,” he said.
He slipped his hand down her neck.
“No games,” he said.
His slid his hand over her breast and savored the noise she made.
“No pressure,” he said.
His hand crossed her abdomen, leaving fluttering waves of contractions in its wake.
“And I can tell you right now,” he said, slipping his hand beneath her second skirt of the day, between her legs, and under the fabric of her underwear where he could feel her wetness. “We’re not doing this wrong.”
She moaned.
Ford watched her face, watched the change in her. She’d gone from overwhelmed and vaguely panicked to the kind of calm that only a submissive seemed to achieve, and he knew that he’d been right: she needed order imposed on the chaos. So did he. This was something he could do for her.
He removed his hand, and licked her juices from his fingers. Then he leaned forward, and whispered into her ear.
“Right now you’re going to go home,” he said. “Immediately. You’re not saying goodbye, you’re not bothering with anyone else. You’re getting away. You’re going to run yourself a bath, and you are going to soak until you start to relax. And then you are going to touch yourself. And you’re not going to come until I call and tell you to. Understood?”
Adra let out a long, soft sigh, her hands digging into his shoulders.
“Yes, sir,” she said. She looked relieved. Happy.
She looked perfect.
“Don’t forget your phone,” he told her.
chapter 11
Adra drove home in a kind of daze. In fact, she’d been doing everything in a kind of daze since it had happened.
Holy mother of God, they had really done it, hadn’t they?
It was like she had moments of lucidity when she was sure that, the rest of the time—the rest of the unbelievable, blissful time—she must be hallucinating. Or drunk. Or some combination of the two.
Ford was her Dom now.
And he was perfect. He was better than perfect. She hadn’t even let herself imagine him like this; she was one of those people that had to fantasize realistically, for some annoying reason, with flaws and plausible situations and the whole thing. And she’d always given Ford plenty of flaws, because maybe it felt safer to think about him that way.
She’d been wrong.
Well, so far she’d been wrong. Fingers crossed that there was something wrong with him, because otherwise…
Adra shook her head again, trying not to feel dizzy remembering how he’d “checked” her in the hallway. She was driving at the moment. Not a good time to be overcome by…
Whatever this was.
And whatever it was, it had worked. She’d been mildly freaking out, just overwhelmed by all of these things happening all at once. Now? No more freaking out. Now she was just horny as hell and wanting to get home so she could obey Ford’s orders.
She grinned into the pale blue light coming off the streetlights as she sped down Santa Monica Boulevard. Maybe there were some benefits to being dominated by your best friend after all. Ford couldn’t possibly know all the different things Adra had to freak out about—like, for a very stress-inducing example, that she was terrified of falling in love with him—but he had known that she was stressed. And he’d done something about it.
He was still doing something about it, in fact. Adra could barely wait to get home and take that bath. And get his phone call.
Which is why she was more than a little thrown off when she turned the corner onto her street and was confronted with a throng of photographers.
Not just photographers. Photographers who were waiting for her. Photographers who already knew her car. Photographers who swarmed around as she slowed down to enter her building’s garage, blocking her view, forcing her to stop, blinding her with flashes.
It was like a zombie movie, only the zombies were armed with digital cameras.
“Are these people serious?” she said to herself, not really believing it. Then someone jumped across the hood of her car and a flash went off in her eyes. Instinctively Adra slammed on the brake and put her hands up over her face. “What are you doing?” she yelled.
And then, stupidly, oh so stupidly, she lowered her window. As if the problem was that they hadn’t heard her. It was just a reflex. A stupid, human reflex, because she was worried.
“Get away from my car!” she shouted, and she heard the fear in her own voice. What if that guy had slid off the hood, under the wheels? What was wrong with them? “Someone could get hurt!”
“Adra! What’s it like working on the movie with your ex?”
“Adra, tell us about Club Volare!”
“Adra, are the rumors about you and Derrick Duvall true?”
Adra had never been on this side of it before. She’d always just tried to comfort clients when they’d done something stupid and the tabloids picked up the scent. She always told them to hang tough, that it would blow over.
She’d had no idea.
She was trapped. Completely, utterly trapped under this assault.
And for a moment, she was frozen with fear.
Then she said, “Oh, screw this,” turned off the car
in the middle of the garage entrance, opened her door, and hurled herself through the scrum of photographers.
She ran all the way to her building’s entrance with the pack in tow, somehow outrunning a bunch of grown men who were wearing comfortable shoes—it was the adrenaline, maybe? Or maybe the photographers were just soft; you couldn’t be a wimp and wear Adra’s kind of shoes—and slipped inside the door held open by Greg, her building’s lone doorman.
Greg locked it behind her.
That didn’t stop them from shooting pictures through the glass.
“Ms. Davis, get to the elevators,” he said. “I called the police, but they weren’t breaking any laws. If I’d known they were here for you, I would have called you. Come on, get away from the glass.”
Adra didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing her run away. Well, anymore than she already had, anyway. That first sprint was kind of unavoidable. But now? She’d conduct herself with dignity, damn it.
She smoothed down her hair, her back to the glass doors behind her, pretending there weren’t any men outside, screaming lies about her framed as questions.
“Greg, I left my car in, like, the exact middle of the garage entrance,” she said. “Do you think you could…?”
“No problem,” Greg said, taking Adra’s keys. “I’d be happy to do it.”
“Thanks,” she said.
The relief was almost palpable. It felt…it felt weak. Like the moment she stopped to rest, she might be pretty upset about this whole thing. And she didn’t want to be upset. She didn’t want this to be a big deal.
Really, she just didn’t want it to be true.
“Ms. Davis, you know they’re not going to go away right away,” Greg said. He’d come with her to the elevator bank, and was standing between her and the doors, obstructing any view the photographers might have had.
Greg was a good man.
“I just hate the idea of letting them get to me,” Adra said. “I don’t even know what the story is yet.”
But right as she said that, she realized it was a lie. Of course she knew. She’d been in this industry a while; she knew, suddenly, exactly what had happened. That photographer who’d broken into the Volare grounds and snapped pictures of her—he hadn’t been checking his camera for damage before Ford knocked it into the koi pond. He’d been removing the memory card.
And once he had pictures, it probably took all of ten minutes to find out that Adra and Derrick used to live together. Every gossip rag in the city kept a file on stars like Derrick; Adra had probably been just a single line in a long biography.
Well, not anymore. She might have her own file now. The story practically wrote itself. Kinky ex-girlfriend and movie star on kinky film set—what could possibly happen?
Adra grit her teeth.
“You sure you don’t want to go somewhere else?” Greg said, gently.
“And go through that again?” Adra said, looking back at the photographers gathered outside. “They know my car, so they’d just follow me. I just…I just need to get upstairs.”
“Call down if you need anything, all right?”
Adra smiled. She’d stayed in this building for years, even buying the unit next door to hers when it became available rather than move to a bigger place, because somehow it felt like a big enclosed neighborhood and not an impersonal apartment building. Greg was a big part of the reason why. He’d been there over twenty years.
“Thanks, Greg,” she said, beginning to feel a little better about the whole thing. “They’ll probably lose interest.”
Greg waved as the doors started to close.
“I’m sure you’re right,” he said.
Well, except that she wasn’t, and she knew it. It was wishful thinking. Derrick Duvall had become a huge star, and now that they thought Adra was sleeping with him, they’d look into his private life and discover that Derrick had a long term girlfriend, and that he’d actually left Adra for Ellen way back when. Now that she thought about it, one of the only decent things Derrick had done once he got famous was keep his private life private. It wasn’t an option for everyone, but Derrick had definitely tried to protect Ellen, as far as Adra could tell.
And now that was all coming to an end.
“Shit,” Adra said as the doors opened.
She was exhausted. She had no idea how she was going to handle this. How she was going to handle getting out of her freaking apartment and over to Volare in the morning, how she was going to handle the inevitable horrible story that would run on the blogs starting any second now, how she was going to handle Derrick on the set when he caught wind of the whole thing.
All she wanted was the privacy of her own home. For the safety. For the comfort.
For the bathtub.
Adra laughed out loud, letting herself into her apartment. She was still, still, thinking about Ford and his orders. Her mind clung to it like a life raft. Somehow it was like having him with her, and she felt…safe.
Not just safe. Wanted. And wanting.
Which was a whole lot better than terrified. She decided to go with it.
She ran the bath first thing, wondering how much time had elapsed, wondering when he’d call. And she was smiling. Smiling as she undressed, as she tested the water, as she poured her favorite bubble bath. And definitely as she carefully set her phone on the edge of the tub.
And then her doorbell rang.
Adra jumped. But she tried to be rational, she really did. It was probably Greg, checking on her, or her neighbor, Theresa, trying to find out what had happened. There was absolutely no reason to freak out. There was no reason to ruin the mood.
She put on a robe, and went to the door.
“Who is it?” she said.
“Delivery came downstairs,” the muffled voice said.
Adra frowned; normally Greg called up. Maybe he was just trying to be nice.
She opened the door.
The flash was immediate and blinding.
“Adra, what—”
She slammed the door in the photographer’s face, lights dancing in front of her eyes as she leaned against the door and tried to block out his shouted questions. How? How had they gotten in?
How could this be happening?
What was she going to do?
Adra had fought all day to keep from panicking. No, she’d been fighting for longer than that; it had been creeping up on her since she’d screwed things up with Ford, since Charlie had started to let his marriage unravel, and then with the movie…
There had been a lot of things. And she’d managed to keep it together, for the most part.
Until now.
She couldn’t breathe. No, she could breathe, she was breathing, but no matter how fast she inhaled it felt like she couldn’t get enough air. She was starting to sweat, and she felt hot, too hot, so hot that she actually took off her robe, standing there next to her front door buck naked, trying not to listen to the jerk shouting questions on the other side of it.
She was having an actual panic attack. And then her phone rang.
~ * ~ * ~
Adra could tell that Ford had known right away that something was wrong. He’d spoken calmly, his deep voice enough to drag Adra out of the panic attack, and he’d asked for only the barest facts. He didn’t tell her what he was going to do; he’d only told her that he’d handle it, and to pack a bag.
She’d thrown one together in about thirty seconds flat. She suddenly didn’t want to be anywhere near this building that had been her home. Even Greg could tell she was upset when she called down to tell him about the photographer; she’d never heard the poor guy sound so upset, himself. She bet that photographer was going to have a bad night after this.
And then she’d only had to wait about five more minutes. Ford must have set a new land speed record.
“Ms. Davis, there’s a Ford Colson asking to see you,” Greg said over the phone. He sounded suspicious. Good man.
“I’ll come down,” Adra said.
And then, not for the first time, she took a moment. She’d dressed herself well, in a simple, beautifully cut black dress and a white shawl, for the same reason she’d stopped in front of the doors downstairs. She wanted her dignity back. As soon as she’d gotten off the phone with Ford, she’d felt embarrassed about the whole thing. She really had gone straight from the verge of a panic attack to being embarrassed about said panic attack in about a minute.
She hated that other people could make her feel like that.
She hated even more that, for the second time—for the third time?—Ford was coming to her rescue.
No, that wasn’t accurate. She didn’t hate it. She secretly loved it, loved that he didn’t demand to know anything other than how to fix it, loved that it was his first thought—but it scared her. So she’d dressed in what, for her, was battle armor. Pity she didn’t have time to properly do her makeup.
The elevator doors opened, and she held her head high, prepared to step out and face the whole thing all over again.
And then there was Ford. Holding the doors open, his big, muscular body dressed perfectly in that suit, his dirty blond hair tousled across his forehead, his worried blue eyes searching her face for anything, anything at all…
She couldn’t look away.
He stepped in, and she stepped back.
The doors closed.
Gently, he touched her face. “Are you ok?” he asked.
Why couldn’t she speak? She opened her mouth, she tried, she just…
“I don’t know,” she said finally. It was the truth. He always got the truth out of her, in the end.
Ford smoothed his thumb across her cheek and Adra turned into it, unable to help herself, her body just…it had a mind of it’s own, when it came to Ford. She could feel her shoulders begin to relax with just that touch.
He dipped down and kissed her lightly, gently, just once. And then he wrapped his arms around her.
And Adra gave in.
“I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” Ford said, as she cried softly into his chest. “Ever.”
Adra pulled herself together, and raised her head, trying not to think about what she must look like. She had just needed a good cry. That was all.
