by EM BROWN
“How much for her?” Ben asked. The words were out of his mouth before he could think on them.
“What’s that?”
“How much? I want to buy her.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Kimani blinked in disbelief. She wasn’t sure if she should be glad or not that the tall guy who didn’t like to be called Benji wanted her. If it had been a different place, a different situation, she would have found the guy hella good-looking with his wide brow, piercing black eyes, and strong jawline. But since he was a friend or associate of Master Asshole, she wasn’t about to give him credit for anything.
“She’s not for sale,” replied Jake.
She had heard him introduce himself on the call to Tyrell. Now that she had a first name and knew that he was involved in the sports profession, she could probably figure out who he really was. But she didn’t just want to embarrass him by writing an expose. Even with the #MeToo movement happening, a guy like him would probably just get off with a slap on the hand.
“You had your chance,” Jake continued. “You chose not to go to the auction.”
“I’ll pay double. Take her off your hands.”
“I can handle two.”
Benji didn’t say anything, but Kimani sensed he questioned Jake’s ability.
“Besides, I want to see what jungle fever is all about,” Jake drawled. “I’ve never fucked black pussy before.”
“Two hundred thousand.”
Kimani felt her eyes pop out of her head. How did these people throw money around like this? There were hard-working people who would never come close to having that kind of money to spend on frivolous things like a week with a sex slave.
“Be a good host,” Benji coaxed as if talking to a child. “Give me the girl for two hundred thousand.”
Jake narrowed his eyes. “Why you want her so bad?”
“Why do you? Sounds like she’s not a well-behaved slut.”
“She just needs some disciplining.”
“I can handle that. Two hundred is my last offer.”
Jake pursed his lips and scratched his chin. “Fine. You can have her. Even though it was your choice to come stag, I’d feel bad if you didn’t have any pussy like the rest of us. Have the money wired to my account.”
A long silence ensued.
“Fuck lunch,” Jake said at last. “I’m going on the boat. You wanna go on the boat, Slut #1?”
Claire gave a timid nod. Grabbing her hand, he stomped off with her, leaving Kimani alone with Benji.
Her pulse quickened as they stared at one another. As much of an asshole as Jake was, was this man the lesser evil? She was comforted a little by the fact Benji was nice enough to request food on their behalf, and as she found herself pulled into the ebony pools of his eyes, an odd and kindred sensation wound around her heart. Maybe it was their shared dislike of Jake.
The man was taller than most Asians she knew, and when he removed his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves, her breath faltered. He had looked model-perfect in his suit, but with his jacket off, she could see he had a really nice build.
His gaze traveled her body, taking in every naked inch. She flushed beneath his study. She had convinced herself not to care about being undressed before Jake. The asshole was deliberately trying to make her feel exposed, vulnerable and degraded. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. But with the current pair of intense, clear eyes staring at her, she felt self-conscious.
Her stomach grumbled, and she glanced at the pickle jar. Normally she wasn’t a fan of pickles, but she was pretty hungry at the moment.
Seeing the focus of her gaze, he said, “Go on, have some.”
She reached into the jar and pulled out a slice but kept him in her line of sight in case he made any sudden movement.
After laying his jacket over the back of the sofa, he walked over to the kitchen. She watched him assemble a bag of ice, which he brought to her.
“For your cheek,” he explained.
Finishing the pickle slice, she accepted the ice and pressed it to her face.
“Thank you...” He hadn’t said how she should address him, so she used what the Scarlet Auction staff had recommended. “Master.”
“Where’d you get the bruise?”
She didn’t respond. She was pretty sure he and Jake weren’t the best of friends, but she didn’t want to assume too much. What if he told Jake? What if Jake called off the deal and punished her for contravening what he had said? She had already decided she was going to gather as much evidence as possible so that she could nail Jake’s ass to the wall.
When she didn’t answer, Benji didn’t press. Instead, he went back to the kitchen and made tea using some fancy coffee machine. He brought over two steaming mugs.
“I’m not much of a tea drinker,” she said.
“Drink it anyway.”
Setting down the ice, she took the mug he held out for her. Ugh. Green tea. Her least favorite.
“Sit down,” he said as he took a seat on the sofa opposite her.
Sitting down had never felt so good. She had taken to shifting her weight from one side to the other to provide some relief for her poor aching knees.
“On the sofa,” he added when she plopped down on the floor.
She crawled onto the sofa and pulled up her knees to provide some coverage for her nakedness.
“What’s your name?” he asked after taking a sip of his tea.
She didn’t see many guys his age drink tea, especially when there was expensive alcohol around as an option. She noticed he had barely touched his bourbon. Jake had also mentioned he’d opted out of the Scarlet Auction. Why was that?
“Your real name,” he clarified.
Did that mean he wasn’t going to call her Slut #2?
“Montana.”
He raised his brows. “Don’t know many black women named Montana.”
She almost retorted that she doubted he knew many black people at all. To keep herself from saying anything, she sipped her tea and grimaced at the flavor. For a spell, he did nothing but drink his tea and watch her.
“There any coffee?” she ventured to ask finally, hoping to make him go into the kitchen.
“Tea’s better for you.”
Patronizing bastard. His gaze was at her tits. Looking away, he shifted on the sofa and cleared his throat.
“You mind if I get dressed?” she decided to ask, hoping that he wasn’t as big an asshole as Jake. “It’s a little cold in here.”
He deliberated for a moment before answering, “I’d prefer you didn’t.”
She clenched her jaw in disappointment. So much for him being the nice guy. When she met his gaze, she had the strange feeling he was testing her.
“You went to Nerd Nation,” he commented, eying her class ring.
She looked at him, startled. Most people didn’t know Stanford by that moniker.
“I was there, too,” he added. “For my MBA.”
That doesn’t mean we have anything in common she wanted to say. The people in the graduate school of business were a world apart from the activists and liberal arts undergraduates she’d hung out with.
“What did you study?” he asked.
“Communications.”
“No wonder you need money.”
She sucked in her breath, wanting to tell him she didn’t need the money, especially his. Well, not that she couldn’t use more—a lot more—to pay off her student loans, but it wasn’t like she was destitute. Especially not after she got hired at the Tribune.
“How much do you get from the Scarlet Auction?” he asked next.
“Forty percent.”
Out of two hundred thousand, that would be eighty thousand dollars. She could do a lot with eighty thousand dollars. But his transaction was directly with Jake, so she wouldn’t see any of it.
Vince walked in carrying bags of what was probably lunch. He leered at her as he walked by before placing the bags on the table.
“Wh
ere’s Jake?” Vince asked.
“On the water,” Benji replied.
Vince helped himself to some bourbon, then sat down at the table and unpacked a sandwich for himself. Benji’s cellphone rang and Kimani heard a guy on the line say, “Hey, Ben.”
So his name was Ben. Might even be short for Benjamin. She stored the information in her mind to look up a guy named Ben or Benjamin that was associated with the Chinese Basketball Association and went to Stanford’s business school. She was pretty sure she could come up with his full identity.
She couldn’t make out everything the man calling Ben said, but she heard something about his date having a cousin willing to come to the lake.
“Don’t bother. I got my own,” Ben replied.
“Yeah? Cool,” said the other guy “I mean, I’d share mine if I had to, but I’m not really into the threesome thing—unless it’s two girls on one of me, of course. See you soon.”
Kimani stayed the impulse to toss her tea at Vince, who blatantly ogled her as he chomped on his potato chips. Ben hung up his cell, glanced at Vince, then removed his jacket from the back of the sofa.
Rising to his feet, he held out his jacket to her. “You said you were cold.”
She looked up at him first in surprise, then gratitude. Taking the jacket, she quickly shrugged it on. The material was amazing. She had never worn anything so silken before.
“What’s here?” he asked Vince, peering into the bags on the table.
“Tri-tip, pulled pork and turkey,” Vince answered. Finishing, he wiped his crumbs off the table, threw the wrapper and potato chip bag in the wastebasket, and went off to do whatever it was he did. Before leaving, he spared Kimani only a brief glance, less interested now that she was covered.
“What’s your preference?” Ben asked her.
“Um, turkey,” she answered. He was being nice to her, but at some point, he was probably going to want a blow job just like Jake. Could she bring herself to do it for the sake of a story?
“Chips or potato salad?”
She shook her head. She hoped Claire was getting something better to eat than pickles, but she rather doubted it. They ate in silence at first, but she had too many questions to keep quiet. She wanted to know him better, for the story and so she could prepare herself for what might come.
“Can I ask a question?” she ventured.
“I don’t have anything against you talking,” he replied.
“Why weren’t you at the Scarlet Auction last night?”
He propped his feet over the edge of the coffee table. “Why do you care?”
She shrugged her shoulders in feigned nonchalance. “Just making conversation. Jake only paid thirty thousand for me.”
“Yeah?”
He sounded disinterested. She found herself unexpectedly staring at his mouth when he brushed away a dab of mayonnaise. He had sensuous lips. Almost as full as a brother’s.
He turned the question on her. “What made you decide to do the Scarlet Auction? You that hard up for money?”
She was taken aback. Because Jake had shown no interest in learning about the women he had purchased, she had expected the same from Ben.
“Why do you care?” she threw back at him.
He stared at her, his eyes ever appraising. “Just making conversation.”
She was irritated and amused all at once. “Sure, the money’s good. Pretty damn good if you break it down to a per-hour wage.”
“You don’t have a problem prostituting yourself?”
She bristled. Was he trying to make a moral judgment? He was the one shelling out a ridiculous amount of money.
“If men don’t have a problem paying for sex, why should women have a problem selling it?” she returned.
“They shouldn’t. Your body, your choice.”
She was stunned. He made prostitution sound like a progressive value. He wadded up the sandwich wrapper and tossed it into the wastebasket like he was making a jump shot. From the soft flick of his wrist, she could tell he had some shooting skills.
“You play,” she commented.
“Do you?”
“In high school. I wasn’t good enough to play for Tara, however.”
“Very few people are.”
She couldn’t help but like that he knew a little about Stanford women’s basketball and the name of the coach. Most men knew next to nothing about women’s team sports. Having eaten half her sandwich, she wrapped the other half to save for Claire.
“You ever watch the team play?” she asked.
“I took my younger sister to a few games. She thought about playing for VanDerveer.”
“What position?”
“Small forward.”
“That’s the position I played—in high school. Did your sister go to Stanford?”
“UCLA.”
“She must be really good.”
“She is.”
Kimani looked down. This was surreal. She was having a conversation about basketball while half-naked in a remote cabin with a stranger who had paid two hundred thousand dollars for sex without batting an eye.
He paid to own you for a week, she reminded herself, and reasoned that she was getting chummy with him so that she could learn more for her story.
“You look like you could use a nap.”
Her gaze snapped up. Was “nap” a code word for some kind of kinky sex?
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing. I...”
“You look tired.”
Even if nap didn’t mean anything else, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back down into that depressing basement.
“Go wash up and rest,” he said. “I’ve got calls to make.”
At her hesitation, he asked again, “What?”
“Wash up where?”
He gave her a puzzled look. “The bathroom.”
“I don’t think there’s a sink in the basement.”
He narrowed his eyes. “The basement? Show me.”
Taking the sandwich, she got off the sofa and headed toward the staircase that would lead to the room she shared with Claire. Ben followed behind. She opened the door to the room and went to put the sandwich in her handbag. Ben looked around the room with a frown.
“Come with me. You can use my room. Grab your stuff.”
She scooped up her bag and clothing.
“That’s it? You don’t have a suitcase or anything?”
“We came straight here from the auction.”
He let out a long breath but only motioned for her to follow him.
Ben’s room was the antithesis of the basement, with more floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the lake and sliding glass doors that led to the balcony, a leather settee and chaise before a fireplace, and a gorgeous mahogany, king-size, four-post bed. This was the opulence that Claire was expecting.
Ben opened his suitcase and pulled out a white t-shirt and sweats, which he tossed to her.
“You can have those for now,” he said. “The bathroom’s over there.”
Leaving the room, he closed the bedroom door behind him.
Alone, Kimani breathed in her first deep breath since arriving. The room was better than the basement. Ben was better than Jake. But she couldn’t relax completely. There was an edge to Ben, and a temper could easily lie behind his cool exterior. But so far, it seemed that things were looking up for her.
The bathroom was equally as luxurious as the bedroom with its granite counters, porcelain-tiled flooring, shower with stone tiles, and a Jacuzzi bathtub. Seeing her reflection in the mirror, Kimani was surprised at how bad she looked. There was a definite bruise on her cheek, and her hair couldn’t look worse.
Why had Ben paid two hundred thousand dollars for her? Because he hadn’t brought a sex partner of his own?
After taking one of the longest showers of her life, she pulled on his t-shirt.
“Oh my God,” she whispered at the softness of the fabric.
Passing by th
e bedroom door, she checked to see if it was locked. It opened. Unlike the basement door, she could lock this one from the inside. Should she lock it? Well, it would be safer if she was really going to take a nap. She didn’t want to let down her guard in a cabin full of strangers, but she needed rest if she was going to be on her toes.
After locking the door, she drew the blinds and crawled into the bed. When she closed her eyes, she kept seeing Ben. At some point, he was going to want sex. There wasn’t any other reason he would have paid a crapload of money for her. The question she had to decide was: how far was she willing to go for her story?
CHAPTER EIGHT
She had locked the bedroom door, so Ben couldn’t get in the room to change, but he didn’t let it bother him. It was probably better he had some distance from her. She had looked way too hot in his jacket, and his hands kept itching to slide under it and feel her up. Even with her stale makeup, she was pretty with those large brown eyes, thick lashes, and high cheekbones. But there was something else that drew him to her. Maybe it was the way her look shot daggers at Jake. Or maybe it was the defiant flare in her eyes.
Offering to buy her from Jake had not been in Ben’s plan. He had been prepared to suck it up and be the odd wheel with no date. But she—Slut #2, Montana, or whatever her name was—had changed everything.
He had to have her. Or, he didn’t want Jake to have her. Ben was pretty sure Jake had given her the bruise.
But now that she was his, what was he going to do with her?
Supposedly, she had signed up for a week of sex with a stranger. The logical thing would be to have sex with her, but he could tell she wasn’t comfortable with her surroundings yet. And something was off. He couldn’t tell what or why.
Heading back downstairs, he found that Jake hadn’t yet returned, so he made the calls he needed to make, including one to his uncle Gordon Lee, who was in a tight race for mayor of Oakland. Just as Ben finished up his third call, he heard the voices of men and women. Vince must have opened the door because seconds later, Derek and Jason spilled into the room. They must have been drinking on the ride up because they appeared off balance. Two giggling women followed behind them.
“Cuz, you beat us,” said Jason.
