Reckless Games

by M. J. Lowell

  My head was spinning with a mix of panic and desire, but I calmed slightly when I realized he was leading me inside Veniero’s. I’d be okay there, I told myself.

  Except Rhys didn’t let go of my wrist, and he didn’t stop before any of the glass-domed cases crowded with chocolate-dipped macaroons and pastel petits fours. Weaving between tables of customers busy with their cappuccinos and pastries, he steered me toward the back of the restaurant, down a hallway to a door marked “Private.” He opened it without knocking, pulled me through, and shut the door behind us.

  We were in a small much-used office, with a desk, a chair, and a large mirror hanging on one wall. Every other inch of wall space from the wainscoting to the ceiling was crammed with framed black-and-white celebrity photographs, all autographed to the café’s owner.

  Rhys glanced around and nodded in satisfaction. “This will do.” He released my wrist and turned the lock, then leaned back against the door, crossing his arms over his chest. “Take off all your clothes and stand in front of the mirror.”

  “Here—?” I started to ask, but one look at his face silenced me before any sound escaped. Instead I did as he said, but my fingers were shaking as I pulled my top over my head and unhooked my bra, my knees unsteady as I kicked off my shoes and slid my jeans down to the floor.

  Rhys was watching me, still expressionless. “I wouldn’t have imagined someone with as many dates as you would be this shy,” he said dryly.

  Keep it together, I told myself. You’re supposed to be sophisticated, experienced. But I felt dizzy, and when I’d finished undressing and turned to the mirror, I saw my face was pale.

  “I’m just cold,” I lied, but the voices were filling my head. Look at yourself maybe if you played harder to get kitt—

  Rhys came and stood behind me, his eyes meeting mine in the mirror, and the voices vanished. His arms reached around to cradle one breast in each hand. “In this level, you will demonstrate complete obedience and submit entirely to me. Your actions. Your thoughts. Everything.”

  He began softly stroking my nipples with his thumbs, a ticklish ripple that spread across my chest. I stifled a gasp.

  “I'm going to explore your body, learn its secrets,” Rhys said, his mouth at my ear, the warmth of his breath caressing my neck. “Every impulse you’ve ever repressed, every hidden desire, I will coax out of you. I’ll unmask every defense mechanism, every secret.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off his hands. Each flick of his thumbs tightened the spiral of warmth and pleasure running from my breasts to the hot wetness between my legs.

  Nothing, no one, had ever touched me like this. Had ever drawn anything like the sweet, sharp delight that pirouetted through me, growing more and more intense every time Rhys’s thumbs moved.

  “You are not to speak or move or come except at my command,” he told me. “Your body and your pleasure are completely in my control. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said, but there was no need. I’d already submitted to him entirely.

  Rhys watched me watching him. “Now it’s your turn.” He took his hands from my breasts, and I almost moaned at the agonizing loss of his touch. “Show me how you pleasure yourself.”

  A fresh wave of panic assailed me. I couldn’t imagine doing what he said, but under his silent gaze my hand moved of its own volition. I felt self-conscious and clumsy, embarrassed as I reached between my legs. You’re making a fool of yourself, I thought. And I heard the words in my head. Disgusting what do you—

  “Look at me,” Rhys said, and I raised my eyes to his. But instead of the condemnation or mockery I expected to find there, I saw pure admiration. “Lovely,” he said, pulling me back toward him, and I felt his hard arousal pressing against me through the denim of his jeans.

  I flushed and he grew harder. There was power in obedience, I realized.

  “Spread yourself open,” he whispered in my ear. “I want to see you.”

  Still self-conscious, I used my right hand to gently smooth myself open. My unpainted nails framed the throbbing pink kernel between them.

  “Look at your clit,” he said.

  I glanced down quickly then back to his eyes in the mirror.

  “That’s not fair,” he told me. “It’s beautiful. You must know that. Your other lovers must tell you.”

  I was glad not to have to answer.

  “Do you want me to touch you?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Tell me where.”

  I took his hand and moved it between my legs. “Here.”

  “On your clit?” he asked.

  I nodded again.

  “Say it.”

  I took a deep breath. “Please touch my clit.”

  His smile was slow and sensual. “Say it again.”

  “Please touch my clit,” I repeated. Clit. The word was strange, salty in my mouth.

  “Very good,” he said, and I felt myself flush with the pleasure of his praise. Of pleasing him. His hand slid down until the pad of his thumb rested on the hood over the small pink kernel. “Like this?”

  I nodded and tipped my head back, savoring the exquisite touch.

  “No,” he growled. “Look at me. You wanted this. Now you are going to watch.”

  I dragged my gaze back to meet his in the mirror. My breathing was shallow and I had to fight the temptation to close my eyes, lose myself to the sensation. “Yes.” I licked my lips.

  He stroked me, his thumb gently rubbing over the sensitive hood, his eyes never leaving mine in the mirror.

  “Harder,” I pled.

  His hand came off. “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.” His tone was icy, his eyes cold blue glass. My body went rigid, my nipples hard, petrified in a state of complete arousal. What had I done?

  He shook his head. “You will have to be punished. Now let’s try this again. What do you want?”

  “For you to touch me.” I was trembling. “On my clit. Harder. Please.”

  I felt the heat of his fingers in front of the throbbing lips that covered my slit, but he wasn’t touching me, not yet. I thought of what he’d said about shoving his fist into me and ramming it until I came. Was that my punishment, I wondered? My breathing became shallow as my chest filled with a heady mixture of fear and desire.

  The tips of all five of his fingers closed around my swollen clit at once, making me buck. He raked them toward him, pulling my clit along, stretching it, stretching the sensation. “Keep looking at me.”

  I didn’t know which was more intense, my awareness of him seeing me, seeing into me, and the sense of utter vulnerability, or the feeling of his fingers on my body. Like he was reading my mind, he said, “That’s right. You can’t hide. You can’t hide anything from me, sweetheart.” And he slid a finger inside me.

  Surprise and exquisite delight merged in me, then deepened when I saw his eyes go wide, his breath catch. “My god, what a treasure you are, Tuesday. What a tight velvety little cunt you have. I can’t wait to shove my cock inside and rip it to pieces.”

  His words sent a shockwave through me. I wanted it, him, desperately. “I’m going to come,” I breathed.

  He pressed his thumbnail against my sensitive pink bud until I yelped. “What did I say about speaking unless spoken to?” He was glaring, holding me at attention. “You knew what would happen. And yet you did it anyway.” His thumb came off but I could feel it, hovering there. “Because you like it. You want to be punished.” In that moment I realized he was right. I did. Part of me ached for it. “You lock yourself up, play the good girl because you’re afraid of the power you could wield if you let go. Let yourself give in to what you really want. You’re afraid that will make you bad.”

  There was nothing I could say. He was right. I wanted to protest, shout, tell him he was an arrogant bastard, but I couldn’t.

  “You want me to make you go there,” he said. He rolled me between his fingers like a magician caressing a charmed coin. He made slow, firm circles, creat
ing a vortex of sensation that seemed to pull every nerve and sinew into it. “You want me to push you. To show you the very bottom of yourself” – he massaged harder as his pinkie teased the wet opening below – “and take you as deep as you’ve ever been. You want permission to want this. Isn’t that why you agreed?”

  I had to struggle not to close my eyes, struggle to hold onto the last threads of control. Nothing existed but his touch on my body, his eyes on mine. He kept stroking, unrelenting, his fingers massaging my slick nub so expertly, owning it, controlling it, playing it for every nuance.

  I gasped. I couldn’t hold on much longer. I was long past anything I’d ever experienced, long past the boundaries of control.

  Rhys’s eyes held mine. He gave a mischievous smile. “Ask me,” he coaxed.

  “May I come?”

  “No, sweetheart.” He shoved his fingers into me harder, spreading me wide and making me cry out with the sharp piercing pleasure that threatened to blaze through my last remaining shred of restraint.

  “Look at me,” he ordered again. My vision was blurred with the intensity of sensation, but I tried to focus on him.

  His hand pressed into me, his thumb plied my smooth little bud. “When you come, I’m going to watch as all your defenses dissolve and you show yourself to me completely. Is that what you want? Are you prepared for that?”

  “Yes,” I moaned. I felt like a hundred fingers were dancing over and around and in my body, carrying me to a pinnacle of intensity I’d never even dreamed of before. I was on fire. “Please,” I begged.

  His lips parted. He said, “Now,” and shoved a finger in my bottom and every sensation multiplied a hundred times and I exploded violently, fraying from the inside as electric ribbons danced through my entire body, convulsing me in a hot wave of pleasure.

  He cupped his palm over my throbbing crotch, letting my spent body rest against his palm. There was something both proprietary and intimate about the gesture and as I found his eyes I could tell it wasn’t just me feeling it, it was both of us.

  Then he stiffened and pulled his hand from me. He tugged a Kleenex from a box on the desk and began, one by one, to wipe his fingers.

  I stood in the middle of the room, pink and embarrassed and awkward. Not knowing what else to do, I bent to retrieve my underwear.

  “Did I tell you that you could get dressed?” he said.

  “I—”

  “Or talk?”

  I shook my head.

  Rhys dropped the Kleenex in the trash. “I have an appointment,” he said, glancing at his watch. He looked up at me, his features expressionless. “And I imagine you have commitments of your own. You may dress after I leave. You’ll find Davies waiting for you outside.”

  He disappeared through the door.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I dressed quickly, avoiding my reflection in the mirror. I don’t know what I expected – Rhys had made it clear there wouldn’t be any lingering lover’s kiss good-bye – but I still felt a pang of disappointment even as I throbbed everywhere he’d caressed and teased and possessed me. Had I done something wrong? Was that why he’d left so abruptly? Or was this simply how the game was played?

  My cheeks were burning as I made my way back through the café, wondering if any of the patrons or waiters could tell what we’d been doing, but no one even glanced up as I passed.

  The Bentley was idling at the curb, and Davies was moving to open the back door when I stopped him.

  “Could I sit in front? With you?” I asked. I told myself I only wanted to be able to speak to him more easily, but the truth was that I didn’t want to be alone. I felt like I’d just crossed a point of no return, and I wanted the comfort of another person nearby.

  Davies hesitated. “Are you sure, miss?”

  “It’s a bit lonely back there,” I said. “And I like talking to you.”

  “As you wish,” Davies said, but I could have sworn he blushed.

  He opened the passenger-side door and pushed aside a tablet that had been resting on the seat. I slid inside and he shut the door after me before walking around the front of the car and taking his own place behind the wheel.

  “Where to, miss?” he asked.

  It took me a moment to get my bearings, to remember where I’d left my Vespa. That felt like it had been a decade ago. “The Plaza, please,” I told him.

  I leaned back against the smooth leather, my head spinning as Davies pulled into traffic, tiny bonfires still burning within me. Had it really been me in that room? Could my body do those things? Feel those things? With a shock I realized Rhys had been dressed the entire time. He hadn’t even taken off his coat.

  What would it be like when we were both naked?

  I swallowed hard at the thought and crossed my legs.

  Dragging my mind back to the present took a tremendous effort, but I knew I needed to use this opportunity to dig for information, needed to use every opportunity that presented itself. That’s why you’re playing Rhys’s game, I reminded myself. The only reason.

  “Rhys showed me the way the Tesla’s windshield could turn into a monitor,” I said to Davies, striving for a conversational tone. “Does this one do it, too?”

  I caught a quick surprised look from Davies before he shook his head. “No, miss. All those fancy gadgets are his thing, not mine.” He tapped the tablet resting on the seat between us. “This is more than enough for me.”

  At that moment, the tablet chimed and an incoming message flashed on the screen, the font so large I couldn’t help seeing it: “GamesCxn89 Your Bid Was Accepted.”

  Davies glanced down. He chortled in satisfaction and patted the tablet like a well-behaved pet. “That’s Mr. Carlyle’s Christmas present right there.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He looked over at me. “Can I count on you to keep a secret?”

  “Absolutely,” I assured him. If he only knew how many secrets I was keeping already.

  “It’s an 1850 edition of David Copperfield,” Davies announced proudly.

  “You bought him a first-edition Dickens?” I said, stunned.

  “You might be thinking that’s not much, those are to be had at any decent bookshop, but this one’s signed by Charlie Dickens himself. That’s why it was so tricky to track down.”

  “What a lovely gift,” I said, trying to take in both the idea of Rhys wanting a signed copy of Dickens and of Davies being able to afford it. A first edition probably cost more than the violin Rhys had wanted to buy me, and the signature undoubtedly added at least a zero to the price. Davies must have done a lot more than “all right” with his stock in Rhys’s company.

  “Will be all I can do to make sure he doesn’t try to give it back to me,” Davies added ruefully. “Christmas is never easy for him. Not that he’s one for presents at the best of times. Hates them, you could say.”

  “How can anyone hate presents?” I asked.

  “My therapist, she says it’s because he doesn’t like to show neediness. Wants to be needed, not needy.”

  Davies had a therapist? “Do you think that’s true?”

  “I think it’s poppycock,” he said with a chuckle. “’Course, I’m the one paying four hundred dollars an hour to gabber about my feelings.”

  I was still absorbing this when the tablet chimed again. I couldn’t help glancing down at the screen. “Calendar Reminder from Candice Leaner: Wed, 9AM, Dentist, 393 Lexington Ave. DON’T LET HIM MISS THIS. THE LONGER HE PUTS IT OFF, THE WORSE IT WILL BE.”

  I almost laughed thinking of Rhys avoiding the dentist even as I wondered if my appointments with Rhys appeared like that, as a Calendar Reminder from Candice Leaner: 4PM, T. Granite, Plaza. Not that there’d been so many appointments, nor were there any planned, I realized. The thought was unsettling.

  Davies tapped the screen and the message disappeared. “David Copperfield is Mr. Carlyle’s favorite,” he said, going back to Dickens. “Me, I’m partial to Dombey and Sons on account of the b
oxing. And if you’re talking movies, it has to be The Christmas Carol. That’s on this weekend, by the way. A fine film.”

  “I don’t think I’ve seen it since I was little.”

  “Worth watching again,” Davies said, nodding eagerly as the tablet chimed for a third time.

  “Calendar Reminder from Candice Leaner: Reservation confirmed for Sat, 4PM, Dr. J. Eriksson at Cipriani Dolci” flashed across the screen.

  I felt a stab of jealousy. Eriksson sounded Scandinavian – one of Rhys’s voluptuous blondes, no doubt, just like Marina Essex-Jones and Mrs. G – and this one was a doctor, to boot. Probably a brilliant PhD., brainy as well as beautiful. How many other curvaceous Calendar Reminders crowded Rhys’s days?

  Stop it, I ordered myself. You are involved with Rhys to learn about your father. That’s all.

  And then I remembered the call I’d heard the other day, when Rhys had been talking about meeting with his expert this weekend. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions. Maybe Dr. J. Eriksson was the expert. After all, a mid-afternoon appointment at a restaurant in Grand Central seemed more appropriate for a business meeting than a tryst.

  Of course, she was probably still a voluptuous blonde.

  And you met Rhys in the middle of the afternoon, I reminded myself.

  By the time I’d retrieved my Vespa and fought the traffic back to Brooklyn, I’d planned Rhys’s wedding to Dr. Eriksson and was imagining the spread in People introducing their firstborn to the world. And as I moved about the apartment, getting ready for work, the flash of disappointment I’d felt when Rhys had left so abruptly began to grow into something heavier, darker.

  Now that both he and Davies knew what I looked like, I couldn’t risk following him and being spotted. And it was Friday, which meant there was no chance of Rhys leaving a message at Val’s office for another two days – assuming he could tear himself away from Dr. Eriksson.

  Assuming he wants to see you again.

  The weekend stretched before me like a vast wasteland of Rhys-less inaction. I told myself it was the inaction that bothered me, not the lack of Rhys, but deep down I knew that wasn’t entirely true. What had begun as a mild uncertainty about when I’d see him again was metastasizing into a sharply biting if.